We had the best part of a day to kill in Phoenix before Ash’s flight home, and having stayed in a reasonably priced hotel in the posh suburb of Scottsdale, we decided on a low-pressure day of pottering around our immediate environs rather than chasing any particular tourist attractions. Admittedly, this decision was motivated as much by the fact that Phoenix doesn’t have any tourist attractions as it was by our desire for a quiet day. For a couple of civilised hours in the afternoon, then, Ash shopped for clothes while I sat in a Borders coffee shop with my laptop and tried to pull my notes on the trip into a reasonable shape so I could start to write about it in earnest. (You may judge my success or otherwise in this endeavour by noting that this entry, the last one about the trip, is being posted a scant four months after it ended.)

We drove to Phoenix airport a few hours before Ash’s flight, orbiting its confusing one-way system twice before finally finding the entrance to the car park. We had time for a coffee together before Ash had to pass through security; we waved to each other as she passed out of sight into the airside area, and then I was on my own.

It was a novel feeling. Even now, at the tender age of thirty-one, I couldn’t think of a time before when I’d been genuinely alone in a foreign country, neither waiting for a friendly face to show up nor stopping over en route to some other final destination. I mean, I feel weird enough going for a pint on my own, so God knows how I was going to deal with a solo road trip covering five hundred miles of desert. I pulled myself together and wandered slowly back to the car, mulling over my planned route in my head. My rude approximation of an itinerary was to drive that night from Phoenix to Gila Bend, on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, before hauling ass to Yuma near the Mexican border the next day and then on to San Diego the day after that. I’d arrive in LA with a day to spare.

The light slanting into the open-air parking level was starting to redden as I reached the car. It was four hundred and seventy-eight miles to Los Angeles, I had a full tank of gas, it was dusk and I was wearing sunglasses. “Hit it,” I grinned to myself.

Then I thought, “fuck, where are the car keys?”

I patted my pockets frantically. Thank Christ. I’d put the keys in my left-hand pocket instead of the usual right-hand one. Shaking my head, I cleared the detritus of two weeks’ motoring into the boot and dropped the hood. I started her up and rolled slowly out of the garage, blipping the throttle as I cleared the raised exit barrier, and drove off into the sunset.

It was murder. I was driving directly into the rays of the setting sun, able to gauge the road’s rough direction only by the actions of the car in front. I’d occasionally take refuge from the blinding light behind a semi-truck but with the hood down I was subjected to the constant drone of its exhaust and the tyre roar of eighteen wheels. After forty punishing miles I turned south towards Gila Bend, onto a much quieter road. I’d have jumped for joy, only the sun chose that moment to drop below the horizon, so instead I had to stop to raise the hood as the temperature dropped with it.

Space Age Lodge, Gila Bend, AZ

I was looking forward to Gila Bend, a tiny place of only two thousand people, but then I’d chosen it for a reason. I had one particular motel in mind for that night: the gloriously mental Space Age Lodge, a ’60s throwback to the days when the desert was awash with test pilots and rocket scientists. I rolled up after dark and strolled into the lobby, gawked at the murals of astronauts, satellites and shuttles, haggled the receptionist down from $110 to $60 for the night and conked out in my disappointingly non-space-themed room.

* * *

The next day was a designated ‘only in America’ day. With the prospect of two hours of undeviating desert highway between me and Yuma and no-one else to leaven the boredom on the way there, I’d trawled RoadsideAmerica.com looking for distractions I might check out en route. With the resulting a hit list of weirdness in my pocket, I took a walk around town the next day to get the ball rolling.

Gila Bend itself was a gratifyingly bizarre little place. The municipal airport, a dusty little strip of tarmac serving microlights and Cessnas, had a couple of deactivated ‘Nam-era fighter jets parked casually by the access road. A Shell station near the motel was guarded by junkyard statues of a diplodocus, a striking rattlesnake and a Saguaro cactus. And then, of course, there was the Space Age Lodge again, revealed by day in all its UFO-topped glory.

I filled up at the monstrous gas station and and left town around 11. My next destination was the ghost town of Agua Caliente, thirty miles down the road. Halfway there, though, I passed a road sign for a “Painted Rock Petroglyph Site”. Intrigued, I counted down to the relevant exit and turned off the highway, following the signs north for a quarter hour and growing distinctly nervous as I found myself further and further from the main road. My mind ran riot thinking about the relative probabilities of freak mechanical breakdowns, punctures and encountering gun-toting survivalists. Eventually, though, I hit the signposted turn-off and trundled a further half-mile along a gravel road to arrive at the site itself.

I got out to look around and slammed the door behind me. Before it had even clicked home, I involuntarily yelped “No!” and grabbed at it — too late! — to stop it closing. I didn’t know if I had the keys on me. A rummage in my right-hand pocket yielded a few coins but no keys, and a glance through the window told me that the ignition was empty. Where the hell were they?

I looked around. I was ten miles from the interstate, I hadn’t passed a single car on the way here, the car park was empty and I had precisely zero items of any use on me. No water, no phone, and no money. I stood there for a moment, thunderstruck. I was well and truly shafted.

Then, with a sheepish feeling of déjà vu, I patted my left-hand pocket to produce the telltale jingle of a set of keys. I couldn’t believe it. Twice in two days.

Painted Rock Petroglyphs near Gila Bend, AZ

Sadly, against the high drama of that emotional battering the petroglyphs themselves were as a candle to the sun. I followed the path around a sandy mound covered in black rocks on which a myriad of shapes had been carved — animals, people and other stylised glyphs — and was rather disappointed by the noncommittal explanations given for them on the nearby information boards. Any one of three separate peoples could have made these, they said, and basically we’re not even going to guess which.

The heat was getting oppressive, so after leaving a scrawled signature in the guest book and feeding a couple of bucks in change into the honesty box I plodded back to the car. I got in, started her up, put the ‘box into reverse and gently depressed the accelerator.

There was an immediate cracking noise. Shocked, I jumped on the brake, turned off the ignition and got out.

I’d broken part of the bumper.

The end of each parking space was demarcated by an old railway sleeper, and as I’d pulled up the lowest part of the bumper, a bit of flexible black plastic trim, had slid over it. As I reversed it had caught on the sleeper, flexed back beyond its breaking point and shattered in the middle. As far as I could tell there was no other damage, so I twisted off the most obviously dangly bits of the broken trim, dropped them into a litter bin and drove back to the highway, fretting all the way. It had been an emotionally trying visit.

I tried to put it to the back of my mind — there was nothing I could do about it, really — and to get back into the swing of things. I still had almost two hours of interstate ahead of me so I put the radio on and my foot down, and the drive to Agua Caliente went by mercifully quickly.

Unfortunately, so did Agua Caliente itself. It was, to all intents and purposes, a small ruined building near to a depressing little pocket of trailers in the middle of the desert. To call it a ghost town seemed faintly ridiculous, investing it with an unwarranted importance which dragged curious onlookers like me into the midst of this dead-end settlement in the middle of nowhere. I felt embarrassed for intruding on the quiet misery of its inhabitants and headed back to the highway once again. I had nothing else to distract me until Yuma, so it was radio on and foot down once more for the rest of the afternoon.

* * *

Atomic cannon at Yuma Proving Grounds

Yuma offered up one more ludicrous spectacle, bizarre and troubling in equal measure, before I stopped for the day. Just outside of the city lies Yuma Proving Ground, a vast military testing range, and just outside of that I found my objective: the Bond villain-esque atomic cannon! This gigantic gun was a product of the same era as the Space Age Lodge, that period when nuclear power promised to revolutionise modern living and nuclear bombs threatened to extinguish it altogether. The USA and the USSR competed to bolt atomic bombs onto and into just about anything which could be fired at, lobbed at or even buried under the enemy*, and incredibly, this decommissioned artillery piece sitting out in the desert represented the more conventional end of the spectrum.

I furtively snapped a couple of photographs, half expecting men in black to drag me off to be waterboarded for daring to photograph this footnote of the atomic era. A signpost showed the way to a heritage centre within the proving ground itself, but I already felt ghoulish enough for having made this detour in the first place, so instead I spun the car round to take the road back to Yuma. I found a motel just off the highway and had an early night.

* * *

I spent the next day in San Diego, and my visit was low-key to the point that the most interesting thing I can relate about it was that the downtown Motel 6 is really nice. Seriously, it was newly decorated in a sort of Ikea/2001: A Space Odyssey manner, simple and cheerful with lots of bright colours and minimalist trappings, and as I slumped on the bed to watch an online Arrested Development marathon I was so worn out by hours of monotonous desert driving that I didn’t even feel guilty about missing out on anything more edifying that the city might have had to offer.

I drove to LA the next day and my two days there passed in a soporific blur too, enlivened only by the nerve-wracking return of my slightly broken rental Mustang to Budget Beverly Hills. When the receptionist returned from inspecting the car with nary a mention of scraped bumpers or broken trim and returned my credit card deposit I answered with a robotic “Why thank you. Have a pleasant day,” and left as nonchalantly as possible. Drive it like you rented it, indeed.

I spent that evening watching airliners cruise in to land at LAX from my hotel window, silhouetted against the backdrop of a cinematic sunset. My own plane left the next day. I needed a holiday to recover from this one.

fin

* Torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, ground-to-air missiles, landmines, depth charges and, of course, the atomic cannon all got the our-friend-the-atom treatment at one point or another in an attempt to one-up (or rather, blow up) their Cold War rivals.