Hot town where the livin' ain't easy
In front of a travel center in the middle of nowhere Arizona a scruffy man sits under an overhang away from the midday heat. It’s the kind of hot where your skin burns when you leave the comfort of air conditioning and your lips smack with thirst as if by instinct.
"You lost your smile back there," the man says as I walk past. I look at him sheepishly because I’m not sure how to respond, or how to help. “Good one,” I say with eyes downturned.
The travel center has a convenience store filled with a dozen varieties of iced tea and energy drinks. Shelves overflow with beef jerky and bags of Doritos. Beef jerky is huge here. Later, I’ll pass a billboard on the edge of small town advertising for David’s, home to “really good, fresh jerky.”
I get a bottle of water for the man out front. He has a dog with him, a skinny white thing with black spots and one eye that’s ringed in red. The pair are headed toward Phoenix from California, but their money ($50) ran out here, in Vicksburg, about 100 miles away.
When I get back in the car the thermostat on the dashboard reads 118 degrees.
In heat like that flying becomes dangerous (Phoenix airport grounded several flights in June due to temperatures). It peels the rubber off truck tires and creates an oil-slick sheen on the horizon. Half an hour outside the travel stop my mom and I cruise through Bouse, population 875, a number I’m sure has long since fallen.
There is an RV park advertising wifi just next to the beauty salon. A lone Family Dollar, so new it’s out of place among the dusty, wooden diners and mercantile stores, appears to be the hottest spot in town. Down the road we pass a diner named “Somewhere Arizona,” which is exactly where this town could be — somewhere, in Arizona, surrounded by tumbleweed, dry desert magnolias and palo verde trees. It’s a place where VHS are still for rent — people at the senior center where my mom volunteers “go crazy for them,” she says — and washing is done at the Laundro Mat.
The heat, the desolation, the vast expanses of nothingness are not features of the U.S. I’m used to. I grew up in Ohio, where the land is flat until you pass Lancaster and the trees turn a blaze of scarlet, gold and pumpkin in the autumn. It’s a new part of a country where everything seems different, where the wealth is overwhelming but so too is the desperation.
I hope the man makes it to Phoenix soon. I hope he finds what he’s looking for when he gets there.
