Park Bound
I woke up on my first morning in the park in the parking lot across from my casita. Why did I not wake up in the casita, you ask? Excellent question. In a word: Hertz. As in, hertz to be betrayed by your rental car company, doesn’t it?
You know it’s going to be a rough day when your Greyhound trip is the smoothest part of of it. Other than the one godless woman sitting next to me who gave me regular updates on how many people had liked her facebook status- 40 and counting- it was a pretty smooth ride. Some people just don’t respect the sanctity of the I-Have-Headphones-On-Please-Leave-Me-Alone-Now law. What can you do?
The next portion of the journey will be familiar to all those who travel. It is unavoidable. It is the cost of mobility exacted by the Adventure Gods. It is the price we pay for seeing the world.
In going forward, it is important to note that car rentals are way cheaper in suburbs than cities. We’re talking 1/4 the cost of city rentals. It also helps to have a AAA discount. This is why I made plans to pick up my rental car in a little city outside of Phoenix than the rental place right next to the Greyhound Station. My pick up time was 4pm. I called Hertz from the uber to let them know I would be there shortly before 4pm, which is the time that the rental place usually closes. I arrived at 3.58pm. Empty desk. This particular Hertz was attached to a hotel so I asked the concierge where I could find the attendant. “Oh,” he said. “I saw him walk out about two minutes ago.”
Um… What?
That’s right. Not ten minutes after he said “No problem, see you soon!” this guy left his post and in effect left me stranded at a Renaissance Inn in Tempe, AZ. I was supposed to be at the park- at my new job- that evening.
I spent 90 minutes on the phone with AAA, who I had booked the rez with, while they told me I’d just have to “wait for the area manager to call back.” “And when might that be?” I asked. “Oh, well, there’s no way to know.” “So it could be, say, tomorrow when they finally call back?” “Yes, it could be.”
I will spare you the utter nonsense that led to me ending up back at the Hertz next to the Greyhound station two hours later and the battle that ensued that allowed me to pay less money rather than more money for the great honor of renting a car in the city proper after trekking out to the suburbs only to be utterly and completely abandoned. I will say that for as assholic as the guy in Tempe was, Mary, of the Phoenix staff, I would happy marry and live out my days with.
In the time that it took to call AAA, re-call AAA when the call was dropped, start the whole process over again with another agent, take an uber back to Hertz Phoenix, convince Hertz to pay for both uber rides, honor my Tempe rate, and to not add an additional $250 in airport taxes at the last second, I had been in Phoenix for four hours. During this time, The Petrified Forest National Park had closed. No one at the office was picking up their phone and the man who hired me was on vacation for two weeks. I’d been told that if I were arriving late that night they’d leave me a key at The Painted Desert Inn across from my casita and I could pick it up there. I could only hope that someone had done that without my calling.
The four hour drive from Phoenix was peppered with torrential rain, lightning, thunder, and fog. Apparently this is the only way I enter national parks: though a literal hellscape. I arrived at The Painted Desert Inn at 11pm to find that it is not so much a functional inn as a historical landmark. Meaning, there is one sleeping there, no 24/7 front desk, and most certainly no key to the casita. I pulled out my headlamp and walked across to the little building across the street that matched the photos I’d been sent of my living quarters. The doors were locked, the windows bolted. Something scurried under a bush in my peripheral vision. Something else scurried just outside my ring of light. I returned to my car and pulled out my sleeping bag. Four night on a train last week had prepped me well; what was one more night of sleeping at a 45 degree angle?
The next morning I got my first glimpse of the park:
Giddy and surprisingly well rested, I set out for the visitor’s center to get keys and find out what I needed to know. Much like in The Smokies, my contact person for the next few weeks, Sarah, is a highly capable, incredibly kind, clearly overworked woman who has about nine other jobs in addition to orienting me to the park. She gave me a rushed tour of the compound, complete with rec center and laundry facilities, and set me up with contact info for the biologist, paleontologists, and archaeologists. As to performances and artistic duties, she suggested I text Kip, who is on vacation in Utah. “Is that all?” She asked. “Yes.” I said. Sarah breathed a sigh of relief and returned to her real job.
I returned to my casita, opened the windows, which look out in all directions over the painted desert and the Arizona badlands, and breathed in the desert air, which is so clean here that you can see up to 120 miles in the distance. Park rangers are going to have to pry me out of this little casita by my cold, dead hands. I gave it a good scrub down, got two large months out in the bowl that will hereafter be the Moth Removal Bowl and made peace with the fact that two others will be my permanent houseguests, or I theirs.
Settled in and fed, I headed out to see the sights. The park is only 28 miles long so even stopping at every viewpoint on the main drag I was at the other end of the park in under two hours. The vistas aren’t very far apart but each one looks out over completely different terrain.
This month’s residency is more process oriented than product oriented. Whereas in The Smokies I was performing regularly, here I am mostly developing my own work and honing my skill set in my own time. I have one performance/workshop/showcase set up so far but free reign to art wherever in the park I feel like arting.
As I made my way through the hills and badlands of the park, miroduoro by miroduoro, I stopped to examine the namesake of the park: petrified wood. It looks like a five year old melted a box of crayola crayons onto a log, but it has become quartz; surpassed in hardness only by Topaz, Corundum, and Diamond.
It is most definitely illegal to remove the petrified wood from the park (there’s even a “conscience pile” at the south end of the park for people who took wood with them but felt so guilty about it that they mailed it back) but no one said anything about learning to juggle with it. So I sat in a canyon for the better part of the afternoon singing silly songs to myself about rocks, juggling ancient quartz, and telling stories to the wind. I think I’m going to be very happy here.
