You are sitting astride a large chestnut gelding called Sabino, wearing a Rolling Stones shirt, a pair of jeans and your flashy new cowboy boots.
Although it is December, you need a curly-brimmed hat to keep the sun out of your eyes. There are four riders in your cattle-penning team, and you’ve been appointed “the cutter”; that is the guy responsible for leading the charge towards a herd of steers, selecting three and, with the help of the other cowpokes, ushering the mutinous calves into a small pen.
You have ballsed it up twice already, and spent precious minutes chasing an uncooperative lump of beef all over the meadow. This time, it has to work. You take a deep breath, kick your heels and race off, yelling fit to bust, remembering to hold both reins in one hand and grip the front pommel for purchase, in the approved American style.
‘Fill your hands, you son of a bitch’
Two steers, accustomed to your waving arms, obediently trot off pen-wards but the third lowers its horns and regards you coldly. It is, frankly, sick to death of being badgered by an over-fed Limey tourist in a comical hat. If this steer could talk, it would say, “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch,” like John Wayne in True Grit. But as you guide the reins this way and that, as though turning a rope steering-wheel, the little blighter gets the message, turns and trots off, like a grudging teenager, to its tryst with the wooden gate. It takes you 90 seconds to get all three animals locked up. The other riders holler. The feeling of elation lasts all day. It is not, frankly, normal behaviour for a Monday afternoon.
Welcome to Arizona, folks, where men walk tall but with a slightly hesitant gait - it’s those heavy boots - and everyone’s real friendly, where the landscape is ruggedly exotic but strangely familiar from a thousand Westerns, where you’ll find old-style cowboy courtesy and alarming gun-shops, see road-runners straight out of Looney Tunes, and hear coyotes baying at night. You might come to Arizona just to check out a certain gigantic hole in the ground (Arizona is, after all, called the Grand Canyon State) but, if you’re wise, you will hire a car at Phoenix airport and go exploring.
You should be prepared to drive long distances through scrubby desert and waving sagebrush, endure weird extremes of heat and cold and consume an awful lot of burgers, quesadillas and beers, but you’ll have the time of your life. You are not actually required by law to embrace the cowboy ethos while you’re here, but it’s hard to resist the clothes, the shirts, the boots, the look…
‘Yeah, we git guys comin’ in here’
I first encountered it in Scottsdale, a district of the state capital, Phoenix. One of the largest cities in the US, Phoenix is a damned odd place. You can walk for hours down its endless main thoroughfares (Jefferson, Washington, Van Buren) without encountering anything resembling a heart. You’ll find the central public library, the YMCA, the Chamber of Commerce, the huge university campus and some promising-looking restaurants, but they all seem plonked down at random.
The Heard Museum holds a fascinating collection of Native American art from the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo tribes, featuring hundreds of Kachina dolls with scary eyes and barmy costumes, but look for a downtown, an East Village, a Vieux Carr�, a shopping centre or boho neighbourhood, in vain. All the shops, the bars, the street life have been, as it were, delegated to Scottsdale.
Overlooked by the Camelback mountain, Scottsdale is basically a big shopping opportunity (it’s got the biggest retail mall I’ve ever seen, in Fashion Square), but its tree-lined streets are full of charm and quirky bars - none quirkier than the Rusty Spur Saloon, the last genuine cowboy drinking-hole in Arizona, with swing doors, dollar bills speared to the walls, two-step dancing, good ol’ boys in Willie Nelson ponytails, and a chap on electric guitar playing old Jimmy Rodgers country blues. I found it hard to leave after my third tequila with salt lemon, but I had to buy some cowboy threads.
You can’t walk 100 yards in Arizona without finding a western-wear emporium, but those with sense go to Saba’s Western Store on Brown Avenue. It was founded in 1927, when customers used to arrive on horseback and wind their reins around a hitching-post. Its range of cowboy boots stretches 100 yards. Their white and black Stetsons are enormous. Their cowboy shirts are gratifyingly loud.
“Yeah, we git guys comin’ in here from Yurp,” said a very macho salesperson called Billy Bob, “an’ we make men o’them. When they leave here, hell, they even walk different.” Shrewdly noting that the dollar was, in world currency terms, languishing below the Matabele gumbo bean, I spent $165 (about R1 100) on some fabulous West Wing boots, and $75 (about R500) on a handsome black shirt festooned with skulls and roses, and did indeed walk slightly different all week.
Tourist information for Scottsdale refers to it as “the city”, although it’s no more than a small, mercantile suburb. It has, however, the lion’s share of the best hotels in the Phoenix area. The Hotel Valley Ho isn’t named after a local prostitute, but is a throwback to 1950s glamour, when Bogart, Monroe and Crosby used the place as a hideaway. The rooms are sprightly retro-chic with little patios that overlook the pool, the ZuZu restaurant is all abacus-bead curtains and stone cladding (think Barbie’s Desert Holiday) and they do a fine eggs Benedict for breakfast.
A few miles away, the grandest hotel in Arizona is The Phoenician, a luxury operation with a driveway and grounds the size of a national park. Its six restaurants include Mary Elaine’s, which has the US equivalent of a Michelin star, and in the grounds you can find nine swimming pools, 27 holes of golf and a 12-court tennis garden. True, they took 35 minutes to deliver a room-service cocktail, and misread my breakfast order so that enough fruit salad and scrambled eggs for 14 people arrived on a straining trolley, but it’s a sumptuous destination.
My favourite Scottsdale hotel was the Hermosa Inn in Paradise Valley, on the edge of the desert. In the 1930s, it was the home of Lon Megargee: cow-puncher, bronco-buster, exhibition roper, stud poker dealer and the best of cowboy artists, whose paintings in Adventure magazine in the 1920s defined American dreams of the Great Outdoors just as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers idealised small-town decency.
The house is all Mexican and Spanish architecture, with original adobe walls lined with Megargee woodcuts. Lon’s restaurant and the hacienda bedrooms have a solid, rustic feel to them: mine had a huge working fireplace, beside which to leaf through one’s Zane Gray first edition.
You have to get the hell out of Phoenix/ Scottsdale, though, or you’d spend your week shopping and eating (and visiting a marvellously ramshackle 120-year-old bunkhouse called Greasewood Flat, where they serve green chilli burgers, tequila shots and Don Camino beers to “weekend cowboys” who arrive on Harley-Davidsons, where a grizzled country guitarist called Bad Bob Bouchard plays “Free Bird” and “Fields of Gold” and the locals dance outside, under a fabulous chandelier hanging from a tamarisk tree…)
As I say, you must go exploring, so you power up your powder-blue Ford Mustang convertible, and head south down the I-10. Driving through miles of desert, with the Picacho mountains on your left, the Santa Cruz river on your right and the spiky eminences of Saguaro National Park dead ahead; driving with the top down, watching mile-long freight trains endlessly passing by on their way north, seeing clusters of mobile homes playing at becoming a miniature village: now this, you tell yourself, is a trip.
More info
Arizona is covered in Lonely Planet’s Southwest USA guide (about R200), but Moon Publications’ Arizona Handbook (about R250) is available locally and has more detailed coverage.
Arizona Tourism: www.arizonaguide.com
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