Working in the USA (part 7)
The Long and Winding Road
There is no feeling of isolation, I discovered, than standing on the shoulder of a two lane blacktop in Arizona with nothing ahead of you but sky and horizon.
It was my choice, my decision. You can’t travel halfway across the world with a vision in mind and then not take the chance to see it when it’s there.
All my life, all eighteen years of it at that point, images of American deserts were as iconic as a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, a bottle of C oke or John Wayne.
When we played cowboys and Indians in Donegal, in a field with cows on the bank of a stream behind our house, we rode mustangs we’d broken and wrangled ourselves; we cursed our dry tack fare of corn dodgers and jerky, distrusted strangers and while we longed for home, cast a thousand yard stare into the wild abandon of Monument Valley and those high altitude mesas.
Now it was on my doorstep it felt further away than when I was seven and escaping a marauding band of Apache hostiles behind our red bricked terrace house in Lifford.
And it was too when I thought about it. It’s easy to get close to somewhere in your head. It’s a whole lot further away when it’s five hundred miles through a network of mountain roads and state highways. Yet there I stood.
