Arizona is perhaps the most desolate state we’ve traveled through thus far. This is by no means a bad thing—the stark beauty of the surrounding landscape is just as awe-inspiring as it was in New Mexico and West Texas. But it does mean that there’s a lot of ground to cover in between each sign of civilization, and most of the towns we passed through were little more than a strip of road with a few restaurants.
The two exceptions we encountered before Phoenix were Winslow and Flagstaff. Flagstaff in particular was a very strange place. It was by far the greenest town we encountered in Arizona, thanks to a remarkably high altitude that made the nights there chilly even by the standards of us as New Englanders. And while we only saw the Wal-Mart, we got the impression there of a diverse, endearingly oddball community, shaped in large part by the proximity of Northern Arizona University.
Exhibit A: We were in the Flagstaff Wal-Mart for all of two minutes, surrounded by RVs, before we got a friendly knock on the door. A beefy, talkative guy with a scraggly beard bounded onto the bus and introduced himself as Pockets. He was traveling with his friend, Shadow, and their dog, in a van that they had been living out of for years. Pockets called us “family,” saying, “I knew there would be family in this parking lot,” and asked us if we had been at the gathering that year—meaning the massive flash-hippie commune known as the Rainbow Gathering. We said that we had not, and he launched into an involved description of his various debaucheries and hallucinogenic experiences over the course of the gathering.
Later, after the Sun Dance and the Grand Canyon, we rolled through Flagstaff once more on our way to Phoenix, in search of veggie oil. Unsurprisingly, the downtown was really cool—depending on who aboard the bus you ask, it was almost as interesting, or more interesting, than downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The music shops, food and street performers were all great, but the best part for us was that everyone seemed to genuinely like the bus; it felt like we were surrounded by friends. Or, as Pockets had put it, family.
