Sedona, 亚利桑那Sedona, Arizona

In early November we flew into Phoenix, picked up a car, and drove north into the high desert. On paper the trip was about red rocks. Somewhere along the way it became a trip about blueprints: everyone who ever fell for this desert seems to have arrived carrying one.

Last light in Sedona#

Sedona sits under a wall of red sandstone, and the town’s real event is scheduled every evening: the buttes go from rust to ember to ash, in that order, and when the light leaves a rock face it leaves for good.

A hole in the ground#

The next morning we drove out past Flagstaff, to where the ponderosa pines run out and the land flattens into grass and wind. Fifty thousand years ago a lump of nickel and iron about fifty meters across came down here.

The crater is still private land. A mining engineer named Daniel Barringer bought it in 1903.

Then in the 1960s, when the United States was spending more than four cents of every federal dollar on the space program, NASA sent its astronauts here to rehearse. Standing on the rim, that whole era feels the way the crater itself does. We know it happened, but the half century since the geopolitics changed feels like forever, and it too seems to have gone from memory to myth.

Back among people#

By early afternoon we were back in Sedona, where the Chapel of the Holy Cross grows straight out of the red rock with a concrete cross for a spine. The sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude first tried the idea in the 1930s. Twenty years later the chapel came down to earth here, wedged into the stone it might as well have eroded from.

The desert camp#

The last morning of the trip had been reserved long in advance: Taliesin West. Years ago, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, we stood under the concrete trays of Fallingwater; this is the other pole of that world, the winter camp Wright began in 1937 on a mesa at the foot of the McDowell Mountains, at seventy, an age at which he was officially supposed to be finished.

The walls are the desert stood upright. Wright and his apprentices gathered quartzite off the slope, set the flat faces against wooden forms, and poured concrete behind them. He called it desert masonry, and up close it reads as geology that has been persuaded into corners. Above the stone, the roofs are canvas stretched over redwood trusses, pitched at the same angles as the mountains behind them, so that the whole camp sits in the landscape.

Wright kept the place deliberately half tent. The light still arrives through the roof the way it arrives through a paper lantern: no bulbs at noon, just a ceiling that glows. He liked to squeeze a passage down until your shoulders notice, then release you into a room that opens sideways into the valley. He called the view from up here a look over the rim of the world.

Everywhere the same game with openings: a black room with one bright garden hung on the wall, a window the size of a painting doing a painting’s job.

Wright wintered at the camp until he died in Phoenix in 1959, at ninety-one. The Guggenheim opened six months later.

Leaving#

The desert does not collect ruins; it collects intentions. Some got built, one actually reached the Moon. As for us, we brought home the red dust on our shoes, and it took days to come off.