Mauled by Malls

Last week we traveled to Tucson to check in on after Rick's mother, who is 91. Margaret is a dear soul for whom we would do anything. Anything, in this case, included leaving our political values at the shore and wading neck-deep into Retail America.

Tucson's city center is a place of considerable charm, with historic architecture, small businesses and a well-developed community of creatives. Out beyond the downtown core, however, are miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of indistinguishable strip malls, which we crisscrossed again and again as we searched for watch batteries, large print books, sun visors. We put 600 miles on our rental car and never left town, doing our part to warm the planet and generating our own little mountain of trash at chain restaurants as we went.

The westering sun on the mountains, the saguaro cacti marching up the hillside, the jack rabbits and javelinas at our campground were an insufficient antidote to the driving and driving and driving and driving and driving and the low-slung box stores stretching to the horizon and the open canals that carry water through the desert from the Colorado.

The sheer acreage of the sprawl, and the fact that most of it is dedicated to consumption, left us cranky and  homesick. Among the rotating Christmas trees and bobbing mechanical Santas, under the worst holiday hits ever recorded (hand-selected to be piped into every shopping center), I wanted to shake outer Tucson by the shoulders and cry THIS IS NOT CHRISTMAS. This is a horrible, joyless simulacrum of Christmas from which all inner peace has been siphoned out. This is acre upon acre upon hundreds of acres of pointlessness, each component of which has its own tiny zip-lock baggie, packed together with others in a plastic box and stuffed into a plastic shopping bag for its short trip from the mall to the landfill.

This may just be apocalyptic thinking brought on by nausea and crushing boredom, but on the other hand I could be right: in a hundred years, I think, there will be no Tucson as we know it. There simply will not be enough water and energy to maintain this grotesqueness. These endless miles of shopping opportunities will become a vast and trashy ghost town. And in a thousand years, what was once a 195-square-mile metropolis will be the site of an archaelogical dig, revealing layer upon fascinating layer of a strange and incomprehensible ancient culture.