Day 13 - Flagstaff to Phoenix

More sightings of Daleks and a conversation with a lady who knows someone that is in a favourite film of mine

The saddest day had arrived. 

Phoenix airport was a two hour or so drive from Flagstaff and my Delta Airlines app had been warning me to allow three hours before my mid-afternoon flight time. 

I dropped Adam at NAU and we spent some time moving furniture around in his bedroom to practical effect. We said our goodbyes and I left his first-floor room. I got to the bottom of the stairs and an American family, laden with the box trolleys I described earlier, were in Dalek mode. I sensed an opportunity for Adam to help and meet a fellow student so ran back upstairs and knocked on his door. Adam joined me downstairs and I left him to make sense of their apparent bewilderment. Adam later told me that this family had also a second lot of belongings that he was involved in carrying and somehow squeezing into the student's room.

The journey to Phoenix was trouble-free and I passed through passport control and security in rapid time so I started to write this diary. The journey had the same split as that coming out with a change of flight at Seattle. I got on the plane and the aisle seat next to me was occupied by a middle-aged lady who I had to disturb as I had the window view. This was Nancy from Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix.

We started chatting and I gave her a brief synopsis of what I had been doing after she asked me why I was flying. Nancy asked me what Adam was studying and I relayed something of his love of American and film studies. She mentioned that he should go to the Sundance Film Festival. I knew of Robert Redford's connection to the event as he founded it. Nancy then dropped on me that she knew Robert Redford as she was his security organiser for a number of years and also that she met him on the set of 'Jeremiah Johnson' which was one of her favourite films. That film may be little known in the back catalogue of the Hollywood star but is also one of my favourites, in fact if you ask my children, they would probably regard it as a rite of passage moment as they have each obediently sat with their father to watch it.

Jeremiah Johnson tells the story of a man who decides to leave behind the urban life he has known in mid-nineteenth century America and head north to make money from fur trapping and hunting. The film plots his adventures and is characterised, as my children each discovered, by a lack of dialogue as much of the time is spent with Robert Redford on his own understanding how to survive in the beautiful wilderness to which the cinematography does great justice. On reflection, and reviewing what I've just written, maybe this is quite a step up from the diet of Disney movies that my children would have been watching before I sprang this masterpiece on them. 

Back to the flight. My new best friend (movies are a powerful connection) was in an 'animal management' role for Utah state when she met Mr Redford who was filming Jeremiah Johnson there. Her job meant she worked in a Department responsible for the well-being of the wild animals that roam over the numerous parks in Utah. After leaving Robert Redford's employ, Nancy told me she went on to train sniffer dogs to seek out explosives and that led her to Iraq where she met her second husband who she was now in the final stages of divorcing. As you can probably sense, there was not going to be any need to consider what might be on offer in the in-flight entertainment menu.

Following that job, she decided to retrain and obtain a medical qualification so now she picks up contract work with the US government going to 'allied' nations and teaching their troops about providing emergency first aid in combat zones. She reeled off a list of countries that she had been sent to including Uzbekistan and, interestingly given recent news, Taiwan. She was asked to go to Ethiopia this week but was already booked to go on holiday in Alaska which was where she was heading now. Crikey this woman has time for a vacation?

Again another conversation drifted off in to politics but this time from a more international perspective, which I guess would be understandable from a well-travelled American. Nancy talked about the extremism that was prevalent in Iraq and its impact on the female population. "They just want to make a safer and better world for their kids.", she relayed. Interestingly, she knew that Boris Johnson had been deposed and that the UK was awaiting to hear who its next Primeminister was to be but, like Jeff in Flagstaff, didn't know that Brexit had actually happened.

I then decided to carry out a theoretical experiment that Adam had suggested. He had told me that an American would be shocked to find out that the UK does not have a written constitution. Our conversation had also drifted into the gun lobby debate. We had talked about the American Constitution being used like an extremist religious book to provide a justification of something now that was wholly out of date. "Well, that is never going to be a source of conflict in the UK because we don't have a written constitution", I said. Adam's theory was proved in its first trial as Nancy's face revealed a look of unknowing bewilderment and a mouth that could utter no words. It's not often you get to talk about the Magna Carta on a flight, but I introduced that as a significant moment in British history followed by the English Civil War ('the Civil War' was what happened in America), Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the 1714 Act of Succession. Finally, a practical reward for those many hours spent long ago labouring over 17th and 18th Century A Level history.

Suddenly announcements were made about landing in Seattle and our three-hour flight had passed with it seeming like we had barely left Phoenix. We said our goodbyes and parted in a 'Brief Encounter' moment based on a discussion of religion, history and politics, rather than whatever Trevor Howard felt for Celia Johnson, which I could never understand because I thought she was rather shallow and pathetic, as well as having a very irritating plummy voice. And of course, we were in an aeroplane and not a railway carriage and thankfully there wasn't all that smoke, which would have been very concerning in this updated adaptation.

The Final Words

In the moments I had before boarding my connecting flight, I excitedly sent a message to Adam to say, 'got a huge story to tell you about the lady I sat next to.' 

Back at Heathrow his reply was waiting for me, 'You thought you were done with the road trip but the road trip wasn't done with you.' 

And I can't think of a better expression on which to close this journal of our travels.