A Homely Place
We’re planning on a trip to Arizona this year, to see the Grand Canyon and sundry attractions. If we’re ambitious, we may drift across the New Mexico border to see Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Roswell is vaguely tempting, but I can’t believe it amounts to anything like what I wish it were.
The job of finding interesting places to go falls to me. This is somewhat tricky, since Arizona is a big desert, when you get right down to it. Geography they have in spades; urban attractions like restaurants and museums, not so much. The big population centers—Tucson, Phoenix, Santa Fe—only number a couple hundred thousand people. Hardly trackless wilderness, but nothing like a metropolis, either. These regional centers are comparable to large suburbs around L.A., Chicago, and NYC. Speaking of suburbs, the population difference is sharpened by the absence of suburbs in the desert. Newark may be no larger than Tucson, but it can draw on shoppers and audiences from a dozen neighbors; Tucson’s market ends at the city borders. Without the sheer numbers to support many cultural attractions, Arizona’s tourist bureau relies on geography.
All this demography has me thinking about the great cities of the past, and how size is always relative. At their respective peaks in ancient times, Rome and Baghdad and Chang’An got above a million residents. Urban centers in medieval Europe didn’t even get that far. Nevertheless, they were the biggest population centers people had ever seen, and supported marvels that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Travelers passed on tales of these wonders. Sometimes these tales were preserved for us in the writings of people who had seen them, sometimes they grew by way of rumor to ridiculous claims, but either way, we remember ancient cities as places of wonder.
But think about it again, without the perspective of historical significance or making allowances for primitive technology and institutions, as a not-especially-precocious kid today might. Imagine stopping overnight in Babylon as it existed at the dawn of history: buildings of clay, because clay and stone were all they had to build with, and it cost too much to ship in wood. The buildings sag, from inadequate support, because the bricks aren’t quite uniform, and because cheap clay slowly melts away in the occasional rains. No quality restaurants: everybody eats bread—coarse, unleavened bread—and, if they’re lucky, vegetables or a scrap of meat. The water is murky, the beer and wine crude and amateurish by our standards. Roads aren’t paved. No sanitation to speak of, or, for that matter, proper toilets. Everyone wears the same outfits of coarse wool, or, if they’re lucky, linen. The celebrated Hanging Gardens are remarkable only because there aren’t any other sizeable floral gardens in the city; people need that space for vegetable plots. The central palace/temple is done up with a bit of gold and paint, but everything else is a uniform sun-baked ash brown. Nightlife is non-existent, because the lights go out when the sun goes down.
What a dump! On returning from your 7-day, 6-night cruise, you’d describe the place as a seedy, boring place you passed through on your way to more exotic locations.
The whole process scales downward, too; roadside farm towns in Nebraska, with a diner, a video store, and a video game in the gas station sparkle in comparison to backwater farm towns in medieval France, which had el zippo for tourists—or residents, for that matter.
Chances are good that we’ll spend a night or two in some dull spots on our vacation: a motel next to a T.G.I. Friday’s, or a town that closes up at 7. That’s okay; a bit of quiet meditation is part of a good vacation. But if the times between Grand Canyon and the Crater get to be too much, I’ll remind myself of ancient Babylon, and count my blessings.