A Trailhead That Makes You Think

I’m always amazed when I go back and see the word is still there, weathered down but essentially unmarred, all these years later. The word is “passage,” and my family painted it on an asphalt pathway at the Pecos-McLeod trailhead (of the Flamingo Arroyo urban trail) — all the way back in 2012. We were part of a public art project called “Site on Site,” which saw words painted in five spots around the Winchester neighborhood, each attempting to distill the essence of its specific place. Offered this location I chose that word, and my family did the rest. (If you click on the link, that’s my granddaughter with the red umbrella.)

Though it’s far from where I live, I’m still fond of this space, a windswept urban plot stitched together from three otherwise useless bits of land orphaned by a road realignment. It’s a quiet set-aside in the urban sprawl.

I chose “passage” in part for the obvious reason — it’s part of an urban trail — but for other reasons, too. Among the natural rockscape, you’ll see a few unnatural features: chunks of concrete rubble from the imploded Stardust hotel-casino. A crumbling pillar, a piece of pool stairs with five small decorative tiles still embedded. Implosion debris was apparently used to shore up some of the natural wash. “We wanted to bring some of the rubble into the project, as artifact,” said Seattle artist Buster Simpson, part of the team that created all this, in a video for the site’s 2010 dedication.

“Transience is here to stay,” as a poet or a fortune cookie once reminded me, and “passage” was my rueful acknowledgement of that, given a very Vegas twist by these fugitive concrete lumps momentarily paused in their transit from Strip glamor to eventual dust. Of course, passage applies in other ways — for example, the curvy shade structures inspired by the basketry forms of the Paiutes who came before us. And because nowhere, however quiet or set aside, is immune to its contemporary social context, the tents and shopping carts of the homeless who post up here give “passage” a more urgent meaning. (Trail users are not big fans.)

It’s a resonant little patch of land, like so many in this valley, and I’ll keep checking back until “passage” finally moves along. I hope it takes a very long time.