Potsherds

The weather here's beautiful, as usual.

This morning, the news awoke me to let me know that the next likely tsunami strike is along the midAtlantic coast, between Virginia and North Carolina. Since I just sold a house in that area and moved away four months ago, I can't say I regret the change of location.

North Carolina is a beautiful state, excepting Charlotte, Durham, Winston-Salem and Raleigh. The coastal region never drops below 40, the western Blue Ridge Mountains contain the highest peaks east of the Mississippi, and I'd never lived somewhere before where even the weeds are pretty. Wilmington enjoys an interesting tourist synergy with Myrtle Beach: Wilmington passes itself off as historical and well-mannered, and Myrtle Beach is South Carolina's conception of Sodom and Gomorrah: amusement parks, titty bars, outlet shopping and one of every theme restaurant. 70 miles of rural US 17 separates the two; the perfect day trip or even dinner jaunt.

Flagstaff is more isolated. Phoenix is the nearest city in any direction, three hours to our south, and Flagstavians consider Phoenix the way the Amish see us. Phoenix TV news is an education: I've never seen so many creative forms of murder and manslaughter before moving west; my original conception for this site was to be an index of the baby killings, high speed freeway chases and automotive homicide, pitbull maulings... The times I'm disappointed at being so far away from a metro center are ameliorated by ten minutes driving through Phoenix.

Phoenix, down in the flatlands, is the imitation potted ficus plant of cities. The streets are proudly lined with obviously non-native palm trees, which looked amusing in the Cape Fear border islands, but just plain vulgar in the middle of Arizona. Competing with the palms are beautiful citrus trees bordering the yards of the homes, except that the plump orange fruit are bitter ornamentals, to prevent the homeless from picking and eating them. The air is referred to by the locals there as "hazy," the same sort of "haze" that typified Los Angeles a decade back. Before long you realize the intense whitebread perspective of "The Family Circus," whose creator has been a Phoenix local for some time, isn't a caricature. Still, Phoenix is enjoyable to visit, and shop for stuff you can't find here.

The first thing about Flagstaff that took me by surprise is how small it is. Perhaps twelve miles at its widest axis, it constitutes the seat of and largest city within Coconino county, the largest county in the United States (San Ber'dino subdivided last year, losing the title).

A longtime native took us out on a road trip a few weeks back, to a large but secluded portion of the country just twenty miles out. Atop one of the hills, we could see for seventy miles in one direction, and no signs of civilization in any direction save a dusty car trail in the scrub. In another nearby location we stood in Hopi ruins, vividly-colored potsherds at our feet that were baked before William the Conqueror set face on England. As we heard nothing around us but the wind blowing, a potsherd caught my eye and I picked it up. On the inside of the rim was a small crack the potter had tried to fill in with slip, and suddenly I realized I was sharing an artist's secret with someone from another world. Our tour guide, a potter himself, summed it up neatly: "You're looking at a thought from a thousand years ago."

It's one thing to see artifacts in a museum, butterflies pinned to cotton in a window box, but to handle them yourself in their original context, where you are the alien element...