Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say something like that, but once again I just couldn’t pluck up the nerve to say it to today’s stony-faced Kentucky Fried Chicken employee. Especially as he was about to interrogate me on whether I wanted white or dark, my coating classic, grilled or flambeed, and exactly which Pantone shade I wanted it coloured. “Look, just put some protein and lots of greasy fat on a plate and we’ll call it chicken, shall we?”

I set out into a different world today. Yesterday was hot, sunny and arid; this morning I drove under gloomy skies, through lush vegetation and over creeks that actually had water in them. I’d assumed that Junction, Texas, was named after a road or rail junction, but maybe it’s a junction between two universes.

Bringing theocracy to the masses

Uh-oh. Rocking chairs on porches, black people in menial positions, humidity, pickups and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans… I’ve a horrible feeling this parallel universe I’ve just entered is called the Deep South.

The gloom has overtaken me today. I’ve had enough now. I want to go home. I want to unpack my bags, put my feet up, know where things are and find my own hairs in the sink. I want to take my eye off the road and sit on a chair, not a bed. I want appliances and tools and books and boundaries. I want to eat real food and not have someone shout “Housekeeping” in a Spanish accent every time I’m about to take a shower.

Oh, no, wait. I don’t have a home to go to. That’s right, I forgot.

All my world is contained in this laptop. All my photos and important documents. All my friends are in there too. I don’t know what I’d do if it broke or got stolen. Imagine what it must be like when you feel that way about the contents of a plastic carrier bag. Being rootless is a lot more unnerving than I would have guessed. I’m glad I found that out, but I want it to stop.

Ah well. I think it’s probably time to stop updating this blog, at least. I’m on I-10 now, which just plummets in a straight line towards Baton Rouge. I’m so dreading going back to Louisiana that I wouldn’t pay any attention to the scenery even if there was any, and so I don’t really have anything left to talk about.

I’ve booked the car in to be fixed on Monday, so until then I’ll just be lurking somewhere far enough away that my wife isn’t likely to bump into me and be embarrassed. And immediately after that I need to be heading for a new life, either by plane or rental truck. I just wish I could make up my mind where that new life should be. I’ll let people know once I’ve sorted things out. It’s all just practical stuff from here on.

Anyway, I just want to say a HUGE, HUGE THANK YOU to all my friends and my family for being so supportive and encouraging over the past few weeks. This blog has been my lifeline to you and it has really made a big difference for me. I’m ever so glad I wrote it. Thanks for tuning in.

The other great thing about driving across Texas is… No, wait. Don’t tell me. I had something. It’s… Oh yes, the fact that you have plenty of time to think. Although maybe I already mentioned that.

360 degrees of nothing

I’m kidding – there were also some mesas with some really nice rock strata. I sat in a road cutting for a while and read the story from the rocks. I’ll precis it for you.

As far as I could make out, nothing much would happen for two or three thousand years, just the gradual accumulation of wind-blown dust. Then a small creek, which fed a warm inland sea to the East and had until that moment been writhing away invisibly to one side, would suddenly decide to snake across the area, cutting a channel and leaving small mudbanks on its edges. And then nothing would continue to happen for another millennium or two.

At one point there was great excitement, as a local earthquake tilted up the ground surface and caused subsequent seasons’ winds to wear it all down again at a slightly different angle. But then the sea moved in and life got a bit dull. If there were intelligent life-forms around at the time and a great, enlightened and long-lasting civilisation had grown up nearby, then there would have been a small brown smudge in the rocks to commemorate it. I didn’t see any, so that probably didn’t happen.

Oh, I was lucky enough to pass through Loving County this morning. According to a pop-up in Google Earth, the seat of local government there is a village called Mentone, on account of it being the only settlement in the entire county. The population of Mentone is a healthy fifteen, presumably making council meetings a rather boistrous affair.

This was definitely ghost town country. Even the living towns I passed through were obviously moribund. Whatever brought people to this area clearly doesn’t cut it any more. Few modern humans can stray far from the oasis that is Walmart.

And it rained today for the first time on this trip. For almost seven seconds. Flooding is not thought likely.

30°30’34.54″N, 99°46’29.87″W

Today’s sensations: I went on this trip to find myself and I haven’t. But it suddenly occurred to me overnight that it’s because I’ve been looking in the wrong place - part of me is in Wells and the other part is in Saint Francisville.

Today I went to Carlsbad Caverns, which I’ve wanted to see ever since I first took up caving at the age of eleven. I still have the dog-eared book mum and dad bought me that revealed its existence. It seems like an awful long way to come just to see a cave, but boy was it worth it. Just the entrance passage alone was worth far more than six dollars.

There are two parts to the cave that you can visit unmolested by tour guides: the natural entrance route is supposed to take about an hour and wandering round the main chamber another hour (although there’s a shortcut in case you’re stupid). Over four hours after I entered I was still gasping out loud as I rounded every corner.

Most people go down a 750-foot elevator, straight from the visitor center to the in-cave restaurant and gift shop, presumably so as to avoid any sensation that they’ve actually descended deep into the bowels of the earth. But I chose to go down the natural entrance route, which is a mile of passages. Just the entrance alone is far bigger than any cave I’ve visited. It was so big I got the feeling  it ought to be in Texas.

There were very few people going down this way so it was virtually silent, apart from the swifts reeling in the entrance. At one point I found myself stuck alongside a group from Mississippi, who (and I’m not kidding) insisted on saying things like “How d’yall think rock grows upwards like that? Don’t make no sense. Is that a tree inside it?”, but mercifully they took the shortcut to save themselves the mental torture of it all. Most of the time I could just sit and listen to the drips from the stalactites and the blood pounding round my arteries. There was absolutely no-one for half a mile in each direction. It was utterly serene.

The main chamber is like being in the middle of a Roger Dean painting. It’s impossible to get across the size of the place in a photograph, especially as my tripod is in Louisiana and nobody would stay still to act as scale. I thought it would be one large oval chamber and we’d have to shuffle round the edges oohing and ahing at twee little stal formations, but no Siree! The place is roughly cross-shaped, and at least a dozen times I rounded a corner expecting to be back where I started, only to discover that I’d hardly even begun to encompass it and there was a stalagmite the size of a small moonrocket staring back at me. To give you some idea, one of the rocks that had fallen from the roof, not of the main chamber but merely the entrance passage, weighed 22,000 tons. You could easily fit Wells Cathedral in the main chamber ten times over and still have room for the marketplace. It was BIG, I tell you.

I almost went out and started the whole tour again, but it was too late. So eventually I dived among the fat people who hadn’t dared to wander very far from the nearest burger and waited for the elevator, which has a display which counts in feet, not floors.

And finally, four hours and 380 photographs later, I emerged blinking into the 98-degree desert sunlight. I’d planned to go on the scenic loop road and do some hiking next, but after that anything else would have seemed an anticlimax, so I rushed straight back here to tell you all about it. Wish you were here.

Location: same as last night

Today’s sensations: Wow! Coo! Jeez! Complete serenity.

BOO!

I’ve relocated to Carlsbad, ready to go see the caverns tomorrow. Boy, you’ve got to remember to fill up with gas around here. I looked at the map and thought there might not be that many gas stations, so I filled up. In the event there weren’t any at all for 200 miles. Practically the only thing I came across was a security checkpoint, where they made sure I didn’t have any Mexicans clinging to the underside of my car.

I had a short hike in the Guadeloupe Mountains but I didn’t have water or food so I couldn’t stay long. The mountains are a Permian coral reef, and it still blows my mind to sit on rocks like that and visualise them underwater, with the corals and crinoids waving their tendrils in the current, and then think that when they actually did that, humans were not going to exist for another 250 million years.

I went straight past the unpreposessing entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park because I want a whole day there tomorrow, and drove into Carlsbad itself. I wasn’t terribly impressed until I stumbled upon Lake Carlsbad, close to the middle of town, which is a beautiful turquoise colour. I’ve no idea why – the only times I’ve seen water that colour it has been caused by rock flour ground down by glaciers, and there ain’t no glaciers in New Mexico!

Lake Carlsbad

32° 8’14.65″N, 104°29’6.24″W

Today’s sensations: I started out feeling serene, as if things were finally getting sorted out. Then my mood bounced around for the rest of the day, trying to dodge a bunch of thoughts that kept throwing themselves against my brain.

Tonight I’m in El Paso, which is just inside the Texas Panhandle. It’s continuous with the city of Ciudad Juarez, which is in Mexico. 80% of the population here is “Hispanic or Latino”, as they say in the Census Bureau (which I couldn’t help pronouncing as Thensoos Bureau, after trying to get my tongue around Ciudad Juarez).

It's been a day for mirages

I almost took a detour to Silver City in New Mexico, to spend a day or two camping, looking at the cliff dwellings, and generally hanging out in the hot springs, but after a few miles I realised I’ve been here three weeks now and I really should be heading back, so I turned round. I want to see Carlsbad Cavern while I’m down here, so I shouldn’t take any more side trips.

I’m in the Wild, Wild West right now. This morning I passed over a granite intrusion, not far from Tombstone, Arizona, the site of the famous bun-fight at the OK Corral gift shoppe and tea rooms, so here’s a photo of the granite for Ann, to remind her of Joshua Tree.

31°50’24.38″N, 106°34’22.04″W

Today’s sensations: Complete mistrust of my memory of the past. Disappointment that I couldn’t follow my nose to Silver City. Oddly intrigued by all the fanous wild west stuff I’m passing, since I was never at all  interested in cowboys and injuns.

Apologies to Nicholas and Tom – I just checked the spam folder for this blog and both of you had sent me messages that got filtered out. But you persevered and I got the info elsewhere.

Since I haven’t posted any interesting photos lately, here are some water pictures for Christopher “fountains of Paris” Grand:

Location: same as last night

Today’s sensations: A distinct reluctance to travel east.

That's Tucson down there, although you'd never know

I stayed in Tucson again today – I felt too tired to go anywhere else. My friend Bill very kindly sent me a list of interesting things to do in Tucson, so, of course, I ended up doing none of them. Serendipity took me instead to Collossal Cave, which, I was very disappointed to discover later, isn’t the eponymous cave in the first ever adventure game. That’s in Kentucky. But it was interesting nonetheless, because I hadn’t been in an American cave before. That sounds silly, but they are a bit different, especially out here in the desert. For one thing it was a steady 70F inside, which is a good bit warmer than British caves. The guide didn’t know which geological period the cave was formed in, but thought it was probably Jurassic or Cretaceous. All British caves are Lower Carboniferous, of course, but the Carboniferous is different in the US – there are two seperate periods, Missisippian and Pennsylvanian, if I remember right. And it was a “dead” cave – the water table had lowered too much after the last Ice Age for stalactites to continue to form. There were some helictites, but they were hard and brown, completely unlike the delicate milky things I’ve seen in “living” caves. So it was all very interesting in an academic sort of way, and I got a feel for how American spelunking differs from British caving, too.

But my biggest treat of the day was hanging out with the two ladies in the gift shop, who were a delight. They spent ages looking for pictures to show me of various desert animals I’d never heard of.

Bill also recommended a better motel, which is nice. It’s cheaper than many of the budget motels I’ve stayed in and yet everything works; even the internet at long last. I spent several hours yesterday in the baking heat trying to steal other people’s wi-fi. I’ve just had a nice swim (the spa, incidentally, is only one degree warmer than today’s air temperature) and there are a couple of beers cooling in the fridge, so I’m set. I’ll probably do some more work on my novel. I may even stay here another night.

32° 9’48.91″N, 110°54’54.22″W

Today’s sensations: I’ve taken to joking with beggars now, telling them that I’m homeless too and maybe we should work together. Except of course I have enough money to live on for a year or more, while they don’t even know where their next meal is coming from (unless they laugh at my jokes, that is). All this angst I’m going through and yet really I’m incredibly lucky in so many ways. I’m ashamed of myself. On the other hand I can see a bit more clearly how quickly and unexpectedly the sands can run out for people, turning a perfectly normal person into a tramp. If I didn’t have some cash in the bank life would be pretty precarious.

Today has been one of those days. My plan, such as it was, was to drive to Tucson and camp for a couple of nights in the Coronado National Forest, which covers the Santa Catalina Mountains, just to the east of the city. The first problem was finding them. Susan got in a real muddle and I found Tucson very confusing, which is odd considering it has a standard grid pattern. I always seemed to end up in the wrong lane and had to overshoot almost every junction. But eventually I found my way to the mountains, which is when the next problem arose.

It’s 103F today (almost 40C),  and at these temperatures you have to take life a bit seriously. I didn’t have any way to keep water cold, let alone myself. So I started to climb the mountain, heading for cooler air. But even at more than 4,000 feet it was still 96 degrees, and by the time I got to the automated fee payment area I just couldn’t decide whether to risk paying my money and then drive another 20 miles, only to find that the campgrounds were still blisteringly hot, had no shade and cost extra (there was no information and no-one to ask). So after a bit of humming and hahing, I turned around and drove back into the now traffic-jammed Tucson to find a motel.

I cleverly headed south to hit I-10, so that I’d be on the right side of town to get out of it as quickly as possible in the morning. This involved driving through an airbase, which was the only interesting part of the day. There were literally hundreds of planes on the tarmac, with their windows covered, waiting in suspended animation until the apocalypse finally arrives.

On reaching the Interstate I confidently headed the wrong way, away from the motels. But this only took me another ten miles out of my way, which by this time was peanuts. Eventually I came upon a Motel 6, but this was the first motel I’ve refused to stay at on this trip. It looked like it was primarily a stopping off point for Mexican immigrants. The lobby was being rebuilt and was full of plaster dust and the sound of circular saws, and the only person standing in the lobby was a resident, whose first words to me were “so what’s wrong with your room, then?”

So, after looking round for a bit and not liking what I saw, I gave up on south Tucson completely and headed back north, to where I knew there was a tidy shopping area. Unfortunately the motels were correspondingly pricey, so I went south yet again and found the northernmost Motel 6, which had an actual receptionist (who was dying of hay fever) and rooms that mammals could live in.

The only snag now is that their internet access is down, so I’ll have to head north one more time to steal some wi-fi from one of the more expensive motels in order to send this. Oh, and there’s a railroad outside my window and the trains hoot.

So as well as Susan the Satnav, Serendipity also let me down today. Women, huh?

P.S. Sorry to anyone who’s waiting for emails from me – it’s too hot in this parking lot to deal with that now. Hopefully I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

Location: I have no idea – I don’t have internet access.

Today’s sensations: That sort of Zen feeling you get when you know that things can only get worse.

Phoenix Sky Harbor, seen from South Mountain. Not many cities can claim whole sets of mountain ranges in their midst!

(Sara, if you’re reading this, stop! You said you wouldn’t)

Location: same as last night

Today’s sensations: For reasons I won’t go into, I feel a little welcome peace has descended.

Anyway, I passed through Flagstaff for the third time and headed out towards Phoenix. On the way I saw a sign that said “Arcosanti”, which rang a bell in my mind, so I turned off the interstate and drove up a dirt track to see what I could see.

Arcosanti is an experimental vision for urban architecture, created by Paolo Soleri. They promised tours, so I stopped in. A nice guy called Jeff showed me round (just me) for an hour or so. I felt I had to double the normal donation of ten bucks to justify being the only one on the tour. Judging by what I saw, this probably made a significant contribution to the project’s income.

Arcosanti

Soleri’s vision is for high-density urban development, as an antidote to the awful sprawl of most American cities, where you need a car just to get from one store to the next and you rarely see another actual human being. His big thing is “arcology” – a mix of architecture and ecology – and since I’m a biologist and a complex systems theorist, and I supervise a PhD student who is specifically interested in adapting biological principles to architecture, it sounded right up my street.

From the little I’ve read so far, Soleri’s ideas sound solid enough, but the practice leaves something to be desired. The grand vision is for a city with 5,000 inhabitants on the site. He started the project in 1956, the building process got underway in 1970 and now, almost forty years after that, there are a scattering of half-finished buildings and a transient population of roughly 80 people, mostly students.

Part of the problem is funding. Soleri funded his own career making bronze and ceramic bells, so the first building on the site was a foundry, and now people make bells to provide income for the project. Unfortunately, making bells seems to occupy the time they ought to be spending building structures. Amazingly, there are no significant research grants going into the project. The US government can stump up a few billion dollars for a particle accelerator but nothing whatsoever for figuring out how to rebuild their cities when urban decay meets up with an energy crisis, leading to ecological disaster. So the project continues in fits and starts, funded by profits from bell-making and a little income from workshop participants and the odd musical production.

An awful lot has happened in architecture, energy technology, town planning and even ecology since 1970, but the Arcosanti project seems stuck in the hippie past. It saddened me. In principle I’m in a position to just drop out, put my sleeping bag in one of their concrete cubicles and devote my life to helping them out. From what Jeff said it certainly sounds like they’d welcome me with open arms. They desperately need engineers – people who can actually make things – and they need people who know about modern ideas in ecology and self-organising systems. Plus people who can translate between the mutually incomprehensible languages of architecture, science and hippie. But I think I’d be hugely frustrated by the inertia of the place. Not much seems to happen per decade. And it reminded me of my own “career” – a big vision, creeping painfully slowly forward for lack of resources. It gave me an awful feeling of deja-vu. I’m glad I saw it though.

A social space in Arcosanti

After that I descended 5,000 feet from the High Desert to the low Sonoran Desert, land of the seguaro cactus, and I’m now in Phoenix, Arizona. The temperature has risen as I descended, from the mid 70′s to 93F (34C), even though it is the evening. Phoenix has the distinction of being the hottest major American city, with temperatures well above 100F throughout the summer, sometimes reaching over 120F (49C). But unlike Louisiana it’s bone dry, so the heat is relatively bearable.

So, a couple of days ago I had half a mile of beach all to myself, and now I’m in the fifth largest city in the United States. Bit of a contrast! So far I’ve only seen one person whose waist measurement is smaller than their height, and he had needle holes all down his arm, so my first impressions aren’t great. And the city planners clearly didn’t listen to a single word Paolo Soleri said. But we’ll see what tomorrow brings. For all I know I’ll get in the car and suddenly decide to drive to New York…

33°36’11.07″N, 112° 7’6.31″W

Today’s sensations: Unusual impulsiveness, but I think that’s probably a good thing.