Clearly, we had found the Promised Land. Cheap food and gasoline overflowed in conveniently located grocery stores and filling stations; wide, car-friendly boulevards stretched to the edge of the receding wilderness; the dust of a thousand construction projects filled the air like pollination; water flowed magically from our taps despite the near absence of rainfall; seductive carpets of flood-irrigated bermuda grass lawns tickled our toes; and glorious year-round sunshine fell on our peeling shoulders. Best of all, if it grew too hot while errand-running across the blazing asphalt, we could go slip inside our new homes and relax in air-conditioned bliss.
I loved it.
For a young boy, pioneering Suburbia was a great adventure. Our first home backed onto a golf course and I recall long, restless walks with my mother in late evenings across the trimmed fairways, dodging 'tsk-tsking' water cannons and ducking into fairytale forests of oleanders and eucalyptus. A few years later, when we moved across town to a cinder-block house I discovered the desert. Our new home sat on five acres of backyard wilderness that became both a personal refuge and a stage for elaborate games (alone, alas) that I created among the palo verde trees, creosote bushes and sandy washes.
Later, we moved again, this time to a generic townhome in a generic subdivision with no wilderness anywhere, literally or figuratively. When I went outside to escape various family disharmonies, all I could do was go into the backyard to bounce a ball off the building's sloped roof, over and over, or ride my bike around and around the cul-de-sacs. The move required that I
We moved once more, this time to a spacious house near what-was-then the last stoplight on the edge of town. I could smell the desert. Liberated at last by a driver's license and a new but mechanically-challenged Jeep Cherokee (a source of many adventures in its own right), I began to explore the rapidly expanding boundaries of Suburbia with delight. I dug in archaeological sites with an amateur society (Phoenix was founded on the ruins of an ancient civilization, thus its avian namesake – a mythological symbol of rebirth). I prospected for photographs among the cactus and rattlesnakes, climbed hills, hiked trails, and drove that damn Cherokee back and forth relentlessly on unending blacktopped streets and highways, luxuriating in every unleaded moment.
It was 1976, our nation's bicentennial year, and the world was definitely my oyster.
I never asked, but I'm certain my parents enjoyed their roles as homesteaders too – at least in the beginning. Both had humble roots; my father was born in a shack in a dairy field near Hope, Arkansas, in 1926 and my mother grew up middle class in Charleston, West Virginia. Their journey from want and need to hard-earned success and (for a time) affluence was typical of their generation, my father's story especially. After enduring a hardscrabble childhood spent knocking around Tennessee, North Carolina, and Louisiana with an itinerant dad who at times was a teacher, lumberman, football coach, and preacher, my father
Reproduction is permitted, as long as credit is given to the author.