On the way out of Phoenix, I bought five gallons of water, 12 Mexican beers, a bottle of bourbon, coffee, oatmeal, cans of beans, a Styrofoam ice chest, a miniature camp stove and a tin cup. Everything else I needed – tent, sleeping bag, coffee pot, knife, spoon – was already in the back of my rental car. I took off my watch, turned off my phone and buried them in the bottom of my suitcase.
Now I was ready. But the city didn’t want me to go. It trapped me on rush-hour freeways. It blocked out the sky with enormous billboards of smiling TV presenters, discount accident lawyers and magnificent-looking cheeseburgers. On the radio, I found a show called Six O’Clock Stoner, which played The Rolling Stones and commercials for local defence lawyers specialising in drug cases. Finally, with Mick Jagger yowling
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
, I was able to stomp down the accelerator and break free.
Two hours later, I was sitting by a campfire in the mountains near Flagstaff, cold beer in hand, moon rising through the pine trees, tension draining away from my shoulders. Deadlines, family worries, airports, insomnia, machines and screens, news and advertising – goodbye for now. I stood up and looked around: no other campfires or artificial lights in any direction. I rolled out my sleeping bag next to the fire and made a pillow from two sweatshirts. Gazing up at the stars, I fell into a long, deep sleep for the first time in weeks.
At dawn, there were elk moving through the trees, coyotes yipping and yammering in the distance. I made coffee and studied the map. My only commitment was to drop off the rental car in Denver, 1,000 miles away, and there was no hurry to get there. An inviting swathe of the American Southwest lay before me – northern
Arizona
, the Utah canyonlands, the Colorado Rockies – and it was hard to think of anywhere better in the world for a freewheeling, soul-healing trip with plenty of camping and hiking and solitude. I would avoid cities and towns, bathe in rivers and restrict my dealings with humanity to petrol stations and roadside attractions.
I dropped down out of the mountains on to the high Painted Desert of the Navajo reservation. ‘Step inside nice Indians’, read the handwritten sign at Chief Yellowhorse’s highway souvenir stand, but sadly it was closed. I drove on past rock formations that looked like camel heads, elephant feet and wedding cakes, while dust devils whirled across the red plains like miniature tornadoes. Some people find desert landscapes harsh and alienating, but I saw a kind of raw, invigorating purity, and a humbling reminder of how old the planet is and how recently it produced us. Further up the road, behind a sign reading ‘dinosaur tracks’, I stood over the three-toed footprint of a velociraptor, embedded in the mud 160 million years ago and preserved as the mud turned to rock.
