Motel Nirvana

Getting Off

‘Beneath him with new wonder now he views

To all delight of human sense exposed

In narrow room nature’s whole wealth, yeah more,

A heav’n on earth …’

JOHN MILTON

The road north up through Tucson towards Oracle is known as the Magic Mile, although quite why it’s difficult to say. The kind of stores and services littered along it suggest a highway favoured only by truck drivers en route to somewhere else. Just where the mile begins there is a series of blacked-out bars with billboards made up of women’s torsos, announcing ‘24-hour show girls’. From the slow lane on the Interstate all you can see of the Magic Mile is a row of gargantuan cardboard legs in spike heels and garter belts the colour of cotton candy.

It’s a busy road, though, not because it runs up to Oracle, which is a sclerotic little nowhere of a place, but because a few miles beyond that town lies an oracle of another kind, as much of a draw to apostates and New Age types as Lourdes is to Catholics.

What drew me to this oracle was a set of circumstances sufficiently strange to warrant explanation. It began quite by accident in western Belize some years ago, in a ramshackle town called San Ignacio, near the border with Guatemala. I had become entangled in a brief and unhappy love affair from which I made a cowardly escape very early one morning by stealing away and boarding a bus heading to Dangriga, a swamp town on the Caribbean coast. There I found a boarding house and resolved to lie low. Creosote tar sweated from the stilted shacks gathered around the little harbour and the air was so sullen that it was difficult not to be lowered by it. At night liverish land crabs scuttled from their holes and took over the streets, like an army of dismembered hands. Every structure in Dangriga not actually made from mud was covered in it. A few lugubrious rastafarians hung about what passed for the centre of the town, which was separated from the swamp all around by a blue fug of burning weed. Dangriga’s only source of income, so far as I could make out, came from bussing snapper, lobster and the occasional barracuda to the inland capital. The men who could afford a dugout or a one-man, flat-keeled dory would put out at night and bring in their catch early the next morning. Those who had no boats became assistants to the others, or rastafarians – or both. The women would pass their mornings gutting and drying whatever fish were surplus to the day’s requirements on long lines of twine, hung over the doorways of the shacks and serving, incidentally, as mosquito nets. By two in the afternoon, everyone was asleep. There would be no-one left to talk to, nothing much to do but roll up a reefer, tune the radio to the station that played ska and marimba and settle down to watch the pale brown sea. I spent many days of distant, peaceless reverie like this.

Absolutely nothing that was not already on show had ever happened in Dangriga. No wars, no revolutions, no great passions of any sort. Dangriga’s history was without secrets.

According to my map a huge uninhabited atoll group called Turneffe lay directly out to sea from Dangriga. I would often sit wall-eyed in front of that brown bay and imagine Turneffe in the distance as a lush, mudless Eden. Without the listless daydream of Turneffe I like to think that I should have gone mad in Dangriga. I should not have done so, but I like to think it all the same.

About four years later I met the man who owned Turneffe, or at least, a little part of it. At least, he managed a little part of it for someone else. His name was Ray Lightburn, and he had some environmental project going, he said. Ray was what is commonly known as a charismatic – huge, commanding, almost insanely driven. He’d been a prominent trade unionist in Britain in the sixties, and he possessed a store-cupboard of anecdotes about political heavyweights he had known and met. Whether they were true or not didn’t seem to matter. Like many charismatics, who are after all expected to be emblematic rather than real, Ray was his own parody. Obviously, he liked it that way. In any case, back in Belize he’d made his political ambitions evident by sinking himself into the environmental movement and conspicuously raising the cash from a Texan oil billionaire with ecological leanings to buy up part of Blackbird Caye in the Turneffe cluster. Blackbird Caye was to all intents and purposes uninhabited at that time; a hippy with too much leisure on his hands had set up a little diving school on one side of the island, but it was Ray who got the money together to transform the Caye into what he envisioned would be an eco-tourists’ paradise. As he saw it, the islands’ future rested in tourism of one sort or another, and the only means to prevent them from becoming sites for honeymoon hotels and Clubs Méditerranées was to preselect the market. Ray was a prophet of the inevitable. The idea that the islands might be purchased to be left pristine evidently had not occurred to him, or if it had, he had dismissed it out of hand. Ray had a name to make. The Texan billionaire, Ed Bass, was perhaps his means to this end.

There was a large dolphin population down at Turneffe, which (until Ray stepped in) had enjoyed almost no contact with human beings. Ray’s idea was to hire a scientist who would take out crews of paying guests on ‘scientific’ expeditions to mark and tag these creatures. Ray didn’t really seem to know the details. ‘What species of dolphin?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I leave those things to the scientists. This is a great project. I believe in it.’

The scientist, a singular marine biology student, had accepted the post of tour guide cum researcher in order to complete her Ph.D. In exchange for accommodation and the use of a research boat the student would drag along on her expeditions a pack of dew-eyed puppies who had endowed the neighbouring dolphins with a range of miraculous capabilities, from an ability to heal inner children to the composition of sonic messages that would seek out and shrink malignant tumours. The eco-tourists would put out to sea each day, heady with expectation, and return in the afternoon in a state of mystic transcendence or savage disappointment, depending on whether or not there had been a sighting. The student’s job was single-handedly to control the mob in whichever mood, a task she went about with benign and systematic brutality.

Moored a little way off the coast of Blackbird Caye near to the eco-tourist compound was a reproduction Chinese junk, the Hercules. According to Ray, the junk was the scientific outpost of a project called Biosphere 2, a futuristic venture based in the Arizona desert. From time to time a limpid woman in a wetsuit would appear on the deck of the junk and wave at the lone scientist and her pride of tourists. The crew of the Hercules did not welcome visitors, said Ray.

This was just about all I knew of the Biosphere. I had come across a few speculative articles in the press and a few figures, such as the fact that the project had swallowed the $150m raised by a Texan magnate called Ed Bass (the same Ed Bass whose interests included Blackbird Caye), through a holding company, Space Biosphere Ventures. I knew that Biosphere 2 was the largest experimental closed environment on the planet – three and a bit acres sealed virtually airtight by a metal and glass frame – that eight people had been shut inside and left to get on with things, which they hadn’t managed quite to do, because the oxygen levels in the bubble had begun inexplicably to fall, necessitating the introduction of a new supply from outside. There had been rumours that Bass was influenced by a New Age cult led by a charismatic worker-poet whose aim was to begin life again somewhere out in space. Extraordinarily for these times, I had never seen an image of the Biosphere.

The last tourist bus has already left by the time Caboose and I turn off the highway onto Biosphere range. It is June, start of the rattler season – the heat so intense it pushes the air into strange, eddying flues and pulls at the ligaments in the throat. My fingers have fused to the wheel of the car and become woody and aged. Up ahead a paved track runs off the road and leads to a forlorn sentry house with a uniformed guard. Bumping across the cattle grid it feels as though I have crossed a border and am somewhere liminal that is not a part of America at all.

The hotel at the Biosphere is hunched along a mountain ridge above the complex proper, and has a view southward through the Canyon del Oro to the Santa Catalina Mountains beyond. I open my notebook and retrieve the number of Sam, a friend of someone I met in a bar outside Santa Fe. Sam now works at the Biosphere. The switchboard operator intercepts my call and promises to pass a message on.

In exploratory mood I throw off my boots, unpack my camera, take some tortilla chips from the mini-bar, flip on the TV (Star Trek – The Next Generation), flip it off, fetch a half bottle of Jim Beam from my suitcase and take off along the deserted paths running across the top of the ridge. To the east a mountain range glows hot from the reflection of the sunset and far below two huge, white-boned dome lungs spin in the shifting light like the eyes of spy insects. From the canyon to the south come the echoes of a woodpecker chipping saguaro cactus. Biosphere 2: two grand glass ziggurats embedded in the lilac rock of the Sonora basin and made insubstantial by the light, like some reinvented Crystal Palace, a grand and brilliant technological announcement. There are lights on in the human habitation tower which illuminate the surrounding metal frame in sodium flare and give the whole the air of an ethereal city. Tatty palms press up against the glass, below the palms floats a miniature ocean encircled by fibreglass cliffs. To the fore buff rocks, and upon them, stringy thornscrub scouring the structure’s frame, as if waiting its moment to punch through the glass and reclaim the air. A rustle in the bushes and a mule deer stumbles out onto the path and plunges down the slope of the ridge, leaving only a wave in the mesquite.

Back in room 11, there is no message from Sam. I lock the bolt and chain and call him again. Sam answers. Yes, he got my message, but he thinks I should talk to someone official. I just want to meet up, I say. Oh, he replies, he’s very flattered to be asked but he really feels it would be better for me to discuss the matter with a spokesperson. There is no ‘matter’, I reply, I just want to talk. But we’ve all signed agreements, says Sam, then clicks his tongue against his palate and hangs up. I ring back, but when he answers the phone I hang up on him too. Not revenge. I just can’t figure out what to say.

About two I take a couple of hits of J.B., swallow a unisom and fall into an easy sleep on top of my bed. Towards dawn I dream a series of amorphous dreams linked by their atmosphere of ambient threat. At about eight the telephone rings. Some stuffed shirt in the public relations department says he’s heard that I contacted Sam.

‘These things need to be done through the official channels.’ The roof beams begin to click in the heat.

A press pack mysteriously arrives at the same time as the chambermaid. Inside are a few factoid press releases, some xeroxed newspaper articles and a slim booklet about Space Biosphere Ventures. I browse through a couple, lose interest and take the first visitor tour beginning at the Orientation Center with its ‘environmental art’, followed by a supervised gaze in at the window of the Biosphere ‘Test Module’ and the opportunity to admire the complimentary tram which runs to and from the car park. I drift off and meander over to the Biosphere itself, where a desultory group of men and women sit in a small square of shade waiting for the official Biosphere tour guide to show up. From the Orientation Center, I have discovered precisely one fact – that Biosphere I is planet earth, which presumably makes Biosphere 2 the reissued version. A huddle of us collect in the shade and are rewarded eventually by the appearance of an anxious thread of a girl who busies down the pathway with a large black box slung about her hip, beating the box with the flat of her hand, as if it were a recalcitrant child she has grown too used to admonishing. The box, to which a microphone is attached, is careless of its chastisement and misbehaves from the start, puking up feedback, and spitting out white noise. Pretty soon it caves in altogether, which is no great disaster since no-one in particular is listening. They are eating. The skinny tour guide presses on, shouting bravely over the cacophony of fifteen men and women slugging back Coke and tamping down potato chips. I am trailing behind with my black notebook and a wetted pencil, waiting to catch a few ripe factoids and conduct a little independent research on the side.

Up close, the Biosphere looks remarkably like the new palm house at Kew Gardens near London. Unlike Kew, visitors to the Biosphere have not come to see the palms but the human inmates, the so-called Biosphereans or ‘expedition members’. Sadly for the visitors, the human habitation tower is cordoned off. There is absolutely nothing visible of a remotely prurient nature. Whoever heard of such a thing? There are murmurs of significant disquiet. The crowd, bored, overheated, and – crucially – having eaten all their snacks, are spoiling for a little rebellion. The guide tries her luck at mediating through the incipient mutiny by climbing down beyond the cordon and screwing her head to the glass in anticipation of a sighting. After a minute or so she comes up for air and says:

‘I seen one, planting crops.’

A shrunken ghost-face appears at the window and peers out briefly, causing the fattest man in the party to raise his eyes from his Coke and comment:

‘Looks damned near dead to me.’

‘Surprisingly,’ counters the tour guide, supposing she has the fattest man’s attention, ‘each Biospherean has lost on average only fourteen per cent of their original body weight.’

The ghost-face retreats back into a simulated salt marsh behind the glass.

‘What d’they eat anyway?’ asks a fat woman dressed in pink shorts.

‘Well …’ pipes up the tour guide. Something in her tone alerts pink shorts to the disturbing possibility that she is staring a lecture right in the face, when all she had been expecting was a sound-bite.

‘I guess they eat just the same as anyone else,’ says pink shorts, cutting the lecture off at the knees.

‘Well, you’d be surprised,’ perks up the tour guide. Jeez, she must be new on the job.

‘Meat?’

The tour guide smiles. Poor creature. So amiable, so anxious to please.

‘How’d they kill it?’ asks the fat man, sweating luxuriantly.

The tour guide swallows.

‘Gross,’ says pink shorts.

And for a single moment we tourers are of one triumphant fraternity, basking in the illusion of a common victory.

Ten minutes later, the tour guide disappears into the staff rest rooms with liquefying eyes. A few stragglers hang around with questions but twenty minutes later there is still no sign of her, which leads me to suppose there must be an escape hatch fitted round the back for precisely such awkward moments.

It has become another damned hot day and the nearest air-conditioned space happens to be a movie theatre in the tourist village showing “Meet the Biosphereans”. The quotation marks are important. No-one gets to meet the Biosphereans because they are sealed into a giant glass cage but anyone can “Meet the Biosphereans”. Not that anyone other than me actually shows up to “Meet the Biosphereans”, but they could have done. At the interactive Q and A after the show the projectionist, noticing a certain vacuum in the theatre, skips down the aisle, proffers an agonizing grin and says ‘Oh, oh, seems like you’ve got them to yourself, ask any question you like,’ so I say, ‘Wha’d they eat anyway?’

Back at the control desk the projectionist presses a button and Sally Silverstone, co-captain Biospherean, appears on the screen and begins to explain how to make a Biospherean pizza, at which point, under cover of the dark, I slink off to my room like a bad cur, lie on my bed with a can of beer from the mini-bar and watch a Tex Avery cartoon on the TV.

That evening I’m feeling lonely so I ask the man next to me in the Biosphere Cafe if he’d mind my joining him. We natter inconsequentially about this and that for a while. He shows me a scorpion under a prickly pear and mesquite pods lying on the desertic soil like dried-up slugs; ‘full of protein for the cattle’. He points out a place where the diamondback rattlers come out to snooze in the sun. I tell the story of Ray Lightburn and the sea at Dangriga, and it turns out that the man I’m talking to knows Ray Lightburn, because the man I’m talking to is John Allen, head of the Biosphere’s R&D. He’s been out to Blackbird Caye.

‘That’, he says, pointing to a blue peak illuminated by the sinking sun ‘is where Carlos Castaneda found himself.’ Allen loves the Sonora. He likes to think of it as the desert-lovers’ desert, a man’s man’s desert. Allen mentions the Biosphere – only to say that it is a gesture that will grow into inventions and gadgets and information, and, eventually, to the human colonization of the universe. I am briefly troubled that a man so wedded to his environment should long to occupy another, but the thought soon leaves me, replaced by admiration for the man’s ambitions. We talk on through books and travels, winding skeins of conversation. At about seven the sun strikes a silver lozenge on Allen’s bolo tie and projects an orange halo around his face. For those couple of seconds John Allen turns to look directly into the sun and smiles. And then he says, ‘So you’re one of those indomitable British traveller women.’ That really gets me.

A few weeks later I stumble on a paper written by Allen and shelved away in the library at Arcosanti, an experimental ecological community built on the desert uplands north of Phoenix. I take the paper out and read it, for no other reason than a general curiosity. About himself, John Allen writes:

I acted many roles to avoid creating a personality and by 1962 I was up to four distinct lives a day in Manhattan: a global technocrat, a Village writer working on the ‘Great American Novel,’ a hip adventurer and a revolutionary. By mid-1963 I added a fifth, an entrepreneur in high-tech and energy corporations and somehow, innerly, everything came to a stop.

It seems he was known as Johnny Dolphin then, or perhaps that was just his nom de plume. In any case, the man who is or was John Allen or Johnny Dolphin went off to Tangier and meditated himself out of his fix – a not wholly original activity in the late sixties. Later, towards the tail end of that decade, he put himself ‘into the hands of magician shamans’, somewhere in Latin America, and lived on strange herbs and his own mythology.

We are twenty-five years on and Johnny Dolphin now heads R&D at one of the most grandiose scientific longshots in history. How’d he get there?

According to his own testimony he ‘perceived intimations of a Planetary Mind’ around 1967, which he took to be the call of the Noösphere, a mystical realm apparently combining nature and technology in perfect balance. But this was not all that happened, for he also had a premonition ‘that the contours of a newer and mightier Mind are beginning to appear. I call it the Solar Mind – it’s the Mind capable of foreseeing the evolution of the entire solar system and making provision for the integrated operation of Culture, Life, Matter and Energy on that extraordinary scale.’

He came to the conclusion that the future of humankind lay elsewhere. John Allen began to believe in getting off.

That night at Arcosanti I am lying in bed watching the stars in the Arizona sky, thinking about the ghostly face peering through the half-light from inside Biosphere 2. If the earth must crumble into a poisoned miasmic shell, then I want to crumble with it. Rather that than be shut into a sterile pod and blasted into space to live a simulation of a life on some boiling sulphuric planet. Next morning, driving away from Arcosanti I recall the feel of the thick grey air over the pale brown sea at Dangriga, and I recall the coral sun creeping along the Canyon del Oro and by the time I have reached the freeway I have formed the conclusion that Ray Lightburn, John Allen and their like are prophets of doom, and that, god knows, those are the kind of prophets we least need.

There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute

‘Everything you are, except hydrogen, is made of stars.’

Very Large Array Telescope Visitor Center,

Datil, New Mexico

Polarized light drops silver contours around the rows of date palms. The dimming sun over Camelback Mountain is bloody with colour. A Latter-Day Saints temple across the street dissolves into gobbets of rosy haze. It’s magic hour in Mesa, Arizona, and I’m in a terrible mood. The mood stole up on me a couple of days ago. I don’t know why it’s with me, nor how to make it go. For the time being we are reluctant fellows. An endless stream of inner witterings has kept me awake at night, invading my dreams, tick tick ticking over breakfast. Cheerios, toast, black coffee. Black. Coffee. And the time is … sugar, sugar and milk. Nip nip nip. Buzzzzzz. Noyz noyz noyz. Tune out, turn off, drop dead. A terrible, terrible mood.

I’m sitting in the Paradise Cafe reading Arizona Light, the state’s premier New Age freesheet. One item catches my attention, an article on the back page about the rise in reported alien abductions. The article tells the story of a Sedona woman who claims her foetus was taken from her by some unknown thing when she was out walking in Secret Canyon near Sedona. It was an overcast day, but she noticed a very bright light through the trees, almost as if a shaft of brilliant metal were being lowered to the ground. After watching it for a while she began to feel she was locked in some strange form of time warp. Alarmed she turned back towards the mouth of the canyon, but however hard she walked, the scene around her remained unchanged. She could hear her own breathing as if it were the breath of a giant. She woke some hours or minutes later lying on the path with a peculiar feeling of emptiness, a little bruised, but otherwise ostensibly none the worse for wear. On a routine visit to her doctor she discovered she was no longer pregnant. Aliens had taken her child, and implanted a chip in her brain to ensure she would never recall in detail what had happened to her.

‘Hi.’ A woman in beads puts her glass of juice down on my table. She glances at the copy of Arizona Light. ‘Heading to Sedona?’ Sedona is to Arizona what Santa Fe is to New Mexico, only more so. There are more New Agers in Sedona than in the whole of the rest of America, bar Santa Cruz and Sausalito, California.