Where Routes 64 and 180 meet in the Arizonan desert, on the way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a grounded squadron of birds of prey sulk in their cages.
We’re at Raptor Ranch, a rehab and conservation facility for eagles, falcons, hawks, owls, etc., that can’t be released into the wild because they were domestically bred or injured. This place ostensibly exists to teach visitors about birds, but in practice, they seem to just let the birds fly insanely fast in the middle of nowhere because it’s gnarly.
Reader, as you might have guessed, I don’t really give a horned owl’s hoot about Raptor Ranch, particularly after the last few weeks. I have been trying for a while now to find the words to describe what I actually went to see on the grounds of Raptor Ranch and why it moved me: I think now is a good time to try again.
As the contrarian child of elegant, sophisticated parents, I have long been a big fan of lunatic roadside attractions. scraps of favor, true to its mission of making IRL life more fun, will endeavor to share these with you as long as my little plug-in hybrid keeps whizzing around.
A spectacle I’d been angling to see for years finally presented itself as my partner and I barreled through the desert south of the Grand Canyon. Raptor Ranch was only on my radar because it opened at the same site—the aforementioned confluence of highways—a few years ago. Its proprietors intended to set up a resplendent bird ranch and education center, but that hasn’t happened yet.
To do that, they would have to tear down a decrepit, coextensive landmark of America’s cultural memory: the 50-year-old Bedrock City, a life-size concrete approximation of the Flintstones’ ancestral home complete with houses, cars, domesticated dinosaurs, a restaurant, a grocery store, a post office, a jail, a barbershop, a schoolhouse, a pterodactyl rotisserie, etc., etc., ETC.!!!
And why not? Bedrock City is in shambles.
Every stucco pebble is caked in dust. The paint is peeling. Many of the installations have been, to put it gently, tampered with.
But at a time when much of life feels a little less real, crappy diversions like Bedrock City can nourish us. They’re singularities where the distinction between past and present (& real and unreal) is effectively meaningless… places where time and neglect have transformed what was once a simulation into semifreddo. Here, a place about a TV show now has its own ~ materiality ~.
That you may, in 2022, visit a busted ‘70s simulation of a 1960 cartoon about a Stone Age family living in a ‘50s-style suburb is a freaky thing. The dark cultural antimatter accumulated in a place like this has a dimensional quality: linear time has folded in on itself enough that what you’re actually visiting is a kind of vectorless history museum… a diorama of our cultural memory of white, TV-watching, roadside-attraction-visiting, suburban family life… roasting in the middle of the desert, going absolutely nowhere.
Themes resonate even between those layers of experience. I couldn’t help but feel like the park’s crappiness reflects how we currently value the simple American world it depicts—but was that what Hanna-Barbera was up to in the ’60s? Was the Stone Age angle just funny? Or was it smart?
After all, it’s tough not to recognize the brilliance of the Flintstones. In its Saturday-morning myopia, it managed to mirror much of the white American psyche: the preeminence of design (mid-century, in the show's case) as a marker of class, a toxic reliance on cars and car infrastructure, an (impersonal, aesthetic) obsession with Africa expressed via animal skins and “primitive” rock and wood carving, a blue-collar success narrative (Fred provides for a family working as a crane operator on large earthworks projects), and an understanding that women are beautiful homemakers and foils to the shenanigans of their male counterparts.
All still unfortunate themes of every day’s news in America.
When the present is as complicated as it has been recently, I find that a meditative practice helps me contextualize the current moment in the infinite series of moments that have preceded and will proceed it. My practice is hard to explain, but a core Buddhist principle I draw from is embodied in visiting places like Bedrock City, where you have to turn off of a major road to arrive at both everything and nothing.
In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki writes:
“When you practice zazen, there is no idea of time or space. You may say, ‘We started sitting at a quarter to six in this room.’ Thus you have some idea of time (a quarter to six), and some idea of space (in this room). Actually what you are doing, however, is just sitting and being aware of the universal activity. That is all. This moment the swinging door is opening in one direction, and the next moment the swinging door will be opening in the opposite direction.
Moment after moment each one of us repeats this activity. Here there is no idea of time or space. Time and space are one. You may say, ‘I must do something this afternoon,’ but actually there is no ‘this afternoon.’ We do things one after the other. That is all. There is no such time as ‘this afternoon’ or ‘one o'clock’ or ‘two o'clock.’ At one o'clock you will eat your lunch. To eat lunch is itself one o'clock. For someone who actually appreciates our life, they are the same.”
For me, meditative practice isn’t about weathering a storm, that things will change, that they’ll be all right, that we need to regroup and fight back, that we need to rejigger our strategy. It’s not about achieving emptiness or arriving at nothingness or equanimity or perfect balance.
It’s just about continuing. “We do things one after the other. That is all.”
And like visiting Bedrock City, it’s about experiencing and accepting something much more like everythingness than nothingness. Understanding and embracing the sheer weight of history and the present and the future, but not trying to put it inside a Pokéball. Not trying to rise above or move beyond or get out of the way, but to let time go on, to be a part of it, and to simply continue.
Even in a semi-place (a forgettable (forgotten??) place) like Bedrock City, where things are falling apart and it gets so hot that you perceive heat as a physical object, you can continue.
And you can find great joy!!!!!!!!!!
love,
alex
ʕ ·ᴥ·ʔ
SOON… a lost publication by Japanese streetwear nerds, found …… FINALLY, a really great way to eat a pomegranate ...... a Thai artist lectures corpses about death ...... and more :)
PS: How bout this friggin chair???
