I was in Chicago for an hour on a stopover once before, and it bugged me. For a dozen years that was my only experience in Chicago, and I didn’t know if it counted as me being there. I was within city limits (although technically I think O’Hare is in Rosemont) but I just sat in an airport chair. Luckily I got to go back there and have a real experience in the city that invented the clogged artery.
This stopover would be different. I would max out my time in Phoenix the first time around, and not have it linger in my mind.
How, I couldn’t tell ya. Something appropriate would happen. Possibly I’d find a way out of the air conditioned blandness and feel what the weather was like. Maybe I’d mix up my bags with a jewel thief’s, and have a wacky luggage cart chase across the tarmac. Perhaps I’d have a brief yet insightful conversation with a Phoenician local, who would be able to tell me if he’s a Phoenician or a Phoenixer or a Phoenixonian.
I was glued to the window as the plane got low over the city. I couldn’t see where we were going, but I could see small buildings, the occasional big building. A cluster of big ones must have been downtown. If only I knew what any of those buildings were.
As the plane touched down, I emptied my head. What did Phoenix have? Whatever I knew about this city I would swirl in my head, see if I could use it while on the ground.
It had the Arizona Cardinals, which used to be coached by Buddy Ryan after an angry mob chased him away from Philadelphia (no relation, thankfully). Arizona had the Grand Canyon, which was literally so big I couldn’t see it all from a plane six miles in the air. It was a Four Corners state, something only me and half a dozen cartographers gave a damn about.
My best bit of Arizona trivia: the entire state was stolen in the nineteenth century. It was a territory back then, but it all got snatched up by a guy named James Reavis. When America took the western part of America away from the noses of freshly killed Mexicans, it upheld a few pre-existing deals with Spanish nobility, to prevent a Spanish-American war (good to see that worked out). Reavis spent years forging a fake nobleman, Baron Miguel de Peralta, complete with paperwork promising him the territory of Arizona. Peralta was a kind ruler, demanding only 25% of the sliver mined and a reasonable railroad fee. He was a multimillionaire for ten years, in 1880s money. Then he got caught, and convicted. And you know how prisoners treat nobility.
This was the farthest south I had been in my life, so I was expecting hot. I had just come from five days in Las Vegas, so I was nonplused by the smidgen of 80 degree no humidity that seethed in through the sleeve that suckled at the plane’s door. More of it would be an experience. Not a pleasant one, but something legitimately Arizonan. It’s hard to appreciate air conditioning if you can’t escape it.
The airport was an airport. Except for localized ads for golf courses and hotels along the way, all airports have the exact same look to them. They aim for non-specific, non-offensive and pleasant. They somehow make every airport offensive in the same specifically unpleasant ways.
I looked around at the people. Yes, Arizona people. They’d all be wearing Suns jerseys or be reciting Barry Goldwater and John McCain trivia. They’d be selling turquoise jewelry off a blanket or offering half hour tours of local cool spots (I’d say hot spots, but that’d be the whole damn Southwest).
The people I was looking at couldn’t be Arizona people. If so, they were just regular folks. No extravagantly localized patriotism, no 100 year olds who remembered when this place wasn’t a state. These people were barely interesting, much less holding my only Arizona experience in their curiously unsuntanned hands.
Of course. I was looking at the people also waiting for the connecting flight to Newark. These weren’t Arizona people, these were Jersey people. I could see these people any time I wanted. This was like going to Europe for a week and spending it all in the McDonalds.
I tried to read a newspaper over someone’s shoulder. I could get this from reading any of the local papers’ web sites any day of the week, but there’s something satisfying about having a real newspaper in your hand. Or so the guy next to me must have thought. But it was a USA Today. Damn Jersey commuters.
It wasn’t long before the connecting flight boarded, and I filed in the airplane and lifted off of Phoenix. As I went up, I saw that the stadium was recently renamed America West stadium, the airline I was flying. So now I knew two building names: America West Stadium, and Phoenix International Airport. I’m practically a Phoenixonian now.
I saw that the flight attendant was serving Arizona Iced Tea. I asked for one. This would have to do for me ingesting real Phoenix culture. I turned the can around. The tea was made in New York. D’oh.
See you in a decade, Phoenix.