The land of the ramada

In LOTR, one enters Gondor on the River Anduin by passing between two immense pillars. In my life, I entered the Land of the Ramada on Interstate 8 by passing between the twin pillars of Native American economic power in Southern California: the Golden Acorn Casino and a procession of wind turbines on the Tecate Divide. (These two features once scared the wits out of me: Last winter, I was returning to San Diego from Yuma, Arizona, well past dark and through dense fog. On the horizon, for miles, I saw a flickering red and orange glow through the fog, but there's no radio reception out there except for some Mexican mariachi music -- no emergency radio notifications, nada -- and so I could only keep trundling through the fog at 35mph, hoping not to be fried in 15 miles. Your imagination can fill in the 'duh' factor I felt when the fog parted near the summit, and I beheld the as-yet-unfinished row of blinking red pylons to one side and the Vegas-neon starbursts blooming on the Acorn's signboard on the other...)

These badlands are a mean landscape of polished gold and buff boulders, colder than the surrounding countryside in winter and hotter in summer. Ranchers in the shouldering countryside build little ramadas, or shelters, for their horses (the cattle, I suppose, don't mind baking their brains). One ranch I always look for, just before entering the rocky badlands, seems to have given up its battle with the countryside: the horses are gone and the makeshift ramadas are falling to pieces.

As I descend into the even more desolate flats on the eastern side of the ridge, I pass slow-moving herds of Airstreams, Bambis and Excellas mostly, crossing the plain and browsing the edges of the Central Valley's vast broccoli fields. Their owners brew pots of coffee in the parking lots between I-8 and those fields while their excitable little dogs dash about widdling on every available vertical surface. I wish for eagles to swoop down on a few and carry them off, but the nearest raptor, a red-tailed hawk atop a telephone pole, is uninterested.

At Yuma, I observe what I take to be a new, human, equivalent of the hawk's watchtower: a 6' square box with windows raised up on a heavy-duty cherry picker. At least I guess there's a person inside; there are Border Patrol trucks parked next to two of them. Much more fuel efficient than helicopters, eh? They're not the only new things since my last visit to Yuma, during the endless days of renovation: a new hotel has sprung up on the salt flats and there are roadworks pronging out into previously untouched scrub. The radio station here is promoting "Yuma's best gumbo, at the Mardi Gras Street Party... join us at the Dollar Store for the fiesta..."

The sun is always hotter in Arizona, even in the dead of winter. As I approach Tucson, I pop open the sunroof for the first time in several months as I pass the newest type of ramada: a sun-shade for a huddle of bee-hives.