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BIG AMERICA
27 August 2006
I just got back from an epic 7,000-mile road trip with my sister Lee and her two kids, Nora, who's 9, and Harry, who was
12 when we started the trip and 13 by the time it was over.
We drove from Las Vegas to the coast of North Carolina to visit with family, picking up my mom eventually for the next
leg of the journey, motoring to Upstate New York for my niece Keaton's wedding. My mom hitched another ride home and we returned
to Nowhere, Nevada, at last.
Along the way we made pilgrimages to sites of deep Americana, the first of which was Monument Valley, which straddles
the Utah-Arizona border. This of course is where John Ford filmed many of his Westerns. The inn his company stayed at when
on location there is still in business, with a museum and part of the outbuilding that doubled for Colonel Nathan Brittles'
quarters in "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon".
[The boulder on top of the roof is a prop.]
You can see immediately why Ford loved this location. Although its mesas and rock formations are indeed monumental, they
have an almost human scale -- unlike the Grand Canyon, for example -- and they're scattered about in a pattern that yields
new vistas, a new sense of space every few hundred yards. It might have been built as an epic movie set.
It's weird to visit a place you feel you know well just from movies, and moving to visit a place that a great artist has
appropriated as part of his myth about America, a myth that has helped shape what America is, or at least how it sees itself.
The scenic route through the valley is still just a dirt road, rough even on my high-slung 4-WD vehicle. The valley is heavily
visited, but you still get a sense of being in a wilderness, or a dream of wilderness . . . the other tourists are like fellow
audience members in a dark movie theater, there but not there.
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