Blue Highways: Portal, Arizona

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapAs we cross into another state, Arizona, we peruse on portals, gateways and doorways and where they may lead us.  William Least Heat-Moon hopes it might be Paradise, but we'll see.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to see where Portal, Arizona is located.

Book Quote

"I crossed into Arizona and followed a numberless, broken road.  A small wooden sign with an arrow pointing west:

PORTAL

PARADISE

"The pavement made yet another right-angle turn, and a deep rift in the vertical face of the Chiricahuas opened, hidden until the last moment.  How could this place be?  The desert always seems to hold something aside....

"...Portal consisted of a few rock buildings, and not a human anywhere."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 12

Portal Store, Portal, New Mexico. Photo by Al & Kelly Bossence at the Travel with the Bayfield Bunch blog. Click on photo to go to site.

Portal, Arizona

In an earlier post along another journey, when we were traveling through St. Louis with Jack Kerouac, I wrote about a gateway.  America is full of gateways.  In that post, I spoke of gateways being portals to someplace different.  In this quote, I like how LHM enhances the directional sign to Portal and Paradise with a passage about how the place he is entering is so different than anything he's ever experienced.  You wonder if he'll find Paradise.  Instead, he first doubts he'll find anything, then he sees an opening in the mountains, and finally encounters Portal as a small empty settlement.

Have you ever had that kind of "oh my God!" moment when you're traveling?  A moment when you turn a corner, travel through a mountain pass, or emerge from a forest or fog and experience a sense of wonder at what lies in front of you?  I have had those types of moments every so often in my journeys around the U.S. and abroad and when they come, they have stayed with me.  When I was 15, my family made our only really big family trip.  We took a cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia to Alaska.  The ship was a Soviet cruise ship, hammer and sickle proudly emblazoned on the smokestack, called the MV Odessa.  It had screws on the sides of the ship, so it could turn around in one place.  That meant that we could go into narrow fjords, right up to the sides of glaciers, and then turn around and go out.  Just being able to go between those high cliffs through still fjord waters was an amazing experience, and the wildlife - bear, eagles, orcas, seals were just the lagniappe.

My first and only trip to Yosemite National Park was also amazingly breathtaking.  I drove through a gap in the Sierras, a true portal, into the most magnificent landscape that I've ever seen.  El Capitan, Half Dome, all the landmarks made famous by Ansel Adams in black and white were there in front of me, towering over a gorgeous valley in full color.

I once drove through West Virginia.  I didn't know much about the state, but I had decided to take blue highways of my own.  Coming around a turn, I suddenly found myself at an impressive overlook.  It was the New River Gorge providing me with another magnificent travel portal.  I was inspired deeply, and wrote a poem for my girlfriend based on the fall colors of the vegetation around the gorge.

Standing on top of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, looking out over the border into the Mexican Chihuahuan Desert, I had another moment of wonder and a feeling of joy that I was alive and able to experience such a view.

There have been many others.  Standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Looking out toward a live volcano in El Salvador, and later walking on the side of one with steam coming out of small vents along the trail.  Standing on the edge of the Jamuna River, huge in width, in Bangladesh watching a rainstorm on the river in late afternoon light during the monsoon season.  Walking through the forest to stand where Hildegard von Bingen entered the convent in the early part of the last millenium.  Standing at the edge of the Roman Colosseum.  Seeing Lake Michigan for the first time and being amazed at the immensity of this inland sea that they call a "lake."  Seeing the Mackinac Bridge - the third longest suspension bridge in the world - in the middle of nowhere in northern Michigan.  Gazing on the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the twilight.  I'm sure there are others I can think of.  I know there are others who have traveled more extensively than I, and therefore have enjoyed more wonder-filled moments, but i treasure the ones I have experienced.

However, my favorite portal is always the one closest to my heart.  When I drive Highway 20 in California west from Willits and toward my hometown, and the forest opens onto the ocean, I know that I'm back to the familiar.  The gateways we travel through to get to paradise or to places of trial are also the ones that bring us back home.  As we'll see in the next couple of posts, the portal that LHM travels through, slightly hoping for paradise, will give him cause to wonder, and worry.  But he's traveling and moving through life, he will eventually find home, and that's all that matters.

Musical Interlude

I was looking through my music and found the song that perfectly fits this post.  Tish Hinojosa is a Texas singer-songwriter who I saw many times when I lived in San Antonio.  This song, Destiny's Gate, has a lyric in the refrain that reads:

You find a road and you pave it
A long lost love and you save it
So much of the past sees tomorrow at destiny's gate

Enjoy Tish, and enjoy whatever places your portals lead you!

Share Destiny's Gate by Tish Hinojosa

If you want to know more about Portal

Arizona Sky Village
Cave Creek Ranch
DowntheRoad.org
PortalArizona.com

Next up: On the Cave Creek near Portal, Arizona

On the Road: Flagstaff, Arizona

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

I'm back.  After a year and a half since the last post, I'm finally set about finishing this trip and making this blog a regular occurrence.  First, it's exciting to be on Squarespace where I can host my maps as well as the blog.  Second, I'm excited about what this blog will be.  Littourati is not supposed to be academic criticism.  The blog's subtitle is "Life, literature and maps."  That's what it is.  The life is mine; it is what the literature evokes in me.  It is my points of reference on my own inner map, revealed by the physical map that is referenced in the work I'm reading.  You are all free to add your own points of reference; in fact I encourage it.  It is my hope that the melding of all of our inner and geographical points of reference will enrich our understanding of the literature we read.  After all, what is literature unless we can connect and relate it to our experiences?

So, strap in for the bus ride back to Paterson, New Jersey, and to whatever literary works, points in our imagination and points on the map this blog takes us!  And if you haven't figured it out by now, click on the map to see where we've been and where we are.

Book Quote

"Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Postcard of 1940s FlagstaffFlagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff lies at the base of the San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona.  When I think of it, I think of it in an alpine setting, surrounded by mountain meadows in the midst of pine woods.  At least, that's how I remember Flagstaff on my four or so times visiting or passing through the area.

My first visit was when I met my wife in Sedona after a conference she was attending.  I drove past the outskirts of Flagstaff on I-40 and picked up my wife.  We wandered around the vortices and red rocks, and then camped in Slide Rock State Park in Oak Creek Canyon.  We visited Flagstaff, and then made a stop at some of the cliff dwellings that Jack speaks of in the quote at Walnut Canyon National Monument.  The other times I've been to Flagstaff, it has been mostly passing through.

Flagstaff is, I believe (but I don't know for sure), the highest point along I-40.  Route 66 traveled through here - the route that Jack's (and Sal's) bus probably traveled as it made it's way east.  To the north, past the mountains, lies the Grand Canyon and this juxtaposition of high points and deep chasms offers an interesting landscape of contrasts.  To the south, one descends toward Phoenix and its present air-conditioned, rip-away-the-desert life.  To the east, one marches along a plateau through Albuquerque until making a long, slow descent into Texas.  To the west, the road descends into California and eventually, the LA area.

Flagstaff is also a city of trains.  Sal does not mention the trains, but Flagstaff is a major railroad crossing point, with anywhere from 75-85 trains a day passing through.  When we got a motel room there, we made sure to stay away from the railroad tracks so that we could get some sleep.  I'm sure that when Jack passed through, the trains paralleling his bus had the assortment of down-and-outs hiding in boxcars, ready to jump off before they hit the Flagstaff railyards so they wouldn't get beaten and arrested by the railroad bulls.  I wonder if Jack ever rode the rails?  When I lived in Milwaukee in the 80s, I knew a modern day hobo, who would hop freight trains every so often to get to another place, and once I saw, standing on an overpass while a freight train passed underneath, a small group of people riding in an open car.  They waved up at me as they went past.

I see Flagstaff as a high point, where depending on one's perspective and direction, they can stop and take a look at the possible directions they can travel.  However, Sal's mind is set directly on East.  The book he mentions, but is not interested in, tells the story of a hopeless romantic at the crossroads of childhood and adulthood.  Perhaps Sal is at his own crossroads, passing from his previously romantic dream of the West, tarnished a little by his experiences and his lost love, and longing for that simpler worldview represented by the American landscape as his bus hurtles east, toward adult responsibility and the comfort of the familiar.

If you want to know more about Flagstaff

Arizona Daily Sun (Flagstaff newspaper)
City of Flagstaff
City of Flagstaff Blog
Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau
Flagstaff Daily Photo Blog
Northern Arizona University
Wikipedia: Flagstaff

Next up: Dalhart, Texas

On the Road: Salome, Arizona

Click on Thumbnail for MapNote: First published on Blogger on October 20, 2008

Unfolding the Map

Hello again. We are continuing the zoom with Sal Paradise back across the country to New Jersey. Today he goes through Salome, Arizona. Click the map to see our progress.

Book Quote

...Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south."

On the Road, Chapter 14

Salome, Arizona

Before I met my wife, I had never been to nor seen an opera. Wasn't interested. But when we first lived in Texas, she signed us up for season tickets to the opera in Austin. Every month in the opera season we would make the hour and a half trip up to the opera, and watch something by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, and other composers.

One opera that made a huge impact on me was Salome, by Richard Strauss. Some operas I could take, some I could leave, but this had me riveted. I found that I liked the tragic operas best. The comic ones were okay, but to me you needed a good tragedy in an opera. That's what all those booming voices were for. To weep, and cry and gnash their teeth and die tragic deaths from consumption or something.

I was raised Catholic, and Catholics don't know the Bible for anything. We are all in to community and common good, but I think the many centuries of priests translating the Bible for us and telling us that we will get our reward by coming to Church on Sunday, not eating meat on Friday, and giving to the collection plate means that, compared to fundamentalists and evangelicals, we know next to nothing about the Bible which serves as the basis of our faith. Evangelicals can quote the Bible. Catholics might be able to recognize the Bible in a stack of books. So, that long evocation was simply to let you know that I really did not know the story of Salome very well.

Well, along comes Strauss and his opera. And at the end, when Salome dances the Dance of the Seven Veils for Herod, and produces the bloody head of John the Baptist, well, that's when I really decided that opera was all right. There was just such a sexiness, yet horrifying aspect to it that I found myself thinking that I wouldn't really mind getting beheaded by a woman like that.

If you want to know more about Salome

The Arizona Outback Online
Salome, Arizona
Wikipedia: Salome