Monumental

After, for once, an outstanding sleep we headed downstairs for breakfast at the Riverwalk restaurant, styled in non-threatening Midwestern hues, dark wood paneling, and the occasional brass relief of a rodeo rider where we were met by a small, troll-like woman with long, lank red hair and a face reminiscent of someone who’d overloaded on extreme sour warheads candy. With a dour gesture and a mumbled greeting she led us to our tables then grimly went off to delight other guests with her miserable presence. Why she was grumpy, I cannot say – maybe she’d rather not be serving anyone in Farmington. Maybe – and this is a distinct possibility – she’d rather be anywhere else than Farmington.

I breakfasted in a disinterested manner, only sparking up when I noticed biscuits and gravy curdling slowly in the bain-marie. It may be an acquired taste, but I’d acquired it quickly. The lot was washed down with some of the most unrelentingly wretched coffee I’d had so far, but hey, it was hot, coffee-like, and kick started my day. Perhaps I was being slowly imbued with the spirit of the Southwest. Or maybe I was just hungry and desperate.

I went to the front counter where a very nice guy called Hoss checked me out. I wanted to ask him what Hoss meant – I thought it Southwestern for Horse, but then I read it’s also slang for a friendly person. I wondered if he was born a Hoss, or became a Hoss over time when coworkers and friends decided he was a top bloke. If his parents did name him Hoss, wasn’t it awfully presumptuous of then? Was he a Hoss, Junior – son of a Hoss, from a long line of Hosses? I’ll never know.

We loaded up the last of the gear in the car, when I was approached by either an old American Indian man, or a middle-aged one who’d lived rough. He asked if I could give him something to eat, or, failing that, some money so he could buy something to eat, and it was here the flipside of the American Dream was made real to me. I’d often laughed to myself when watching CSI: Miami – everyone lives in palatial splendor, drives BMWs and Mercs, wears designer clothes and is perma-taned and perpetually blow-waved. Sure, it’s tongue in cheek fantasy, but to my mind it perpetuates the myth that everyone is, or can be, rich, beautiful and successful.

Sometimes, sadly, poverty is not the fault of the person living in it, and it just leads to further, ongoing and stlll more crippling poverty. In the land of the free, the riches country on earth, roughly 15% of Americans at any given time are living below the poverty line, and roughly 40% fall below the poverty line at some point within an arbitrary 10 year span. The top 1% of households own more than one third of all privately held wealth in the US with the next 19% owning 50% - the 15% of remaining wealth left in the USA is shared between the remaining 80% of all Americans. More often than not, the Horatio Alger myth of hard work and determination leading to wealth and riches is exactly that, no more.

So what did I do redress this imbalance? I lied. I told him I had no food, and no money. He thanked me and walked on, and sat on a kerb at the end of the parking lot.

I walked back to the room, thinking of him, considering how he’d asked if I’d had food first and foremost, not cash, then walked downstairs, headed over to him and gave him $5. He looked at me, shook my hand, and thanked me, and to my surprise I felt tears in my eyes, told him to look after himself and walked away. For all I know he could have smoked it, injected it or drank it, but in my mind he used it to get some food, and I think I’d rather continue to believe that than to know the truth.

Lost in thought and oblivious to the irony, we headed to Wal-Mart where I bought a replacement digital camera for my six year old son on his third overseas holiday, then continued our drive westward through the balance of New Mexico, past still more weatherboard houses, ratty diners, pawnshops and pasture land strung with low, barb wire fences. One guy was being patted down by a policeman and was laughing about it, as though it was either common, or he didn’t care, or a combination of the two.

We passed Ship Rock, rising from the plains near the town of the same name, and fleetingly headed back into Arizona before heading north for five minutes to Four Corners, where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. I was a little surprised by being charged $3 a person for the privilege of standing on the spot. Oddly, it was Apache who manned it – odd, because the states, in their modern cartographic sense didn’t exist when the Apache were the dominant regional force, yet here they were charging us to visit. Perhaps, in a way, it’s some sort of partial justice. We stood, as does everyone, with hands and feet in a separate state, took photos, bought a replica Apache arrow made in the traditional style from a trader, then continued our way into Monument Valley.

In my opinion there are very few places that live up to their reputation in print and film, and Monument Valley is one of those few. Entering from the north, via Mexican Hat, it’s more like ‘guess the movie’ than a driving holiday – “that’s where Forrest Gump stopped running”, “that’s where John Ford filmed Stagecoach”, “that’s where Michael J Fox was chased by Indians in Back To The Future”.

We’d arranged to stay at The View motel after I’d learned of it at a video seminar run by Philip Bloom only a couple of weeks earlier, and it’s an awesome place, with every room having a balcony view out over the classic, Monument Valley landscape of mittens and buttes. Our room wasn’t ready, so we hit the floor , literally, doing the self-guided valley loop by car, photographing everything liberally, then returning around 4:15 and checking in.

Against my better judgment from my miserable time-lapse experiences at Joshua Tree barely a week earlier, I set the camera up on a tripod on our balcony room and set it snapping a photo every thirty seconds for the next four hours, and thankfully this time it paid off in spades – a drab, flat mid-afternoon light finally broke through a wall of clouds, projecting a spotlight across the valley floor before fleetingly lighting up the mittens in a flood of blazing red and orange light. All of it, thankfully, and with great relief, caught successfully on camera.

We ate at The View restaurant (which, for a resort style hotel was ridiculously good value, knocking back Navajo Tacos, Green Chili Stew and Chili Con Carne, all accompanied by frybread, powdered sugar (icing sugar, to those back home) and honey, before returning to the hotel proper. We sat on the balcony knocking back a California Chardonnay (the kids opted for scotch and tequila), then called it a night but before I went to bed, fired up from my success earlier that day I decided to have a crack at time-lapses of star trails. Once again –amazingly – they worked perfectly, running from 10:40 til I happened to wake up around 1:15. Hopefully the misfortune of Joshua Tree has been banished forever.

Hardly, but I live in hope.