Cave of the Iron Door

What I wanted to say . . . was: I could not bear it, but out of my mouth came the words, “I cannot bear it.”

—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

The surface couldn’t have looked simpler. A brief getaway, some extra warmth at a chilly time of year. On the face of it, so natural. A visit to your old hometown—your first hometown, pays natale, place of birth, original setting for those big-bang memories. People smiled and nodded when you told them. Wholesome as a July 4th picnic.

Yet I remember my heart squeezing as the plane touched asphalt, white sun deceptively mild through the air-conditioned cabin’s window. Out that window: purple-brown desert hills, landscape of childhood. Was it January?

My husband sits beside me on the plane, happily crunching down my ignored mini-bag of mini-pretzels, tapping it to dislodge last bits, his mind dancing (as it does when he sets out anywhere) with images of turquoise swimming pools, tequila cocktails, gritty Mexican food, eye-watering barbecue. He loves heat because he grew up with wrenching cold, so he becomes lavishly cheerful when we’re entering a guaranteed-to-bake kingdom. The plane’s windows are a pulse of light, like the blur filling Keir Dullea’s travel-pod in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Have I secretly assumed things will stay as I remember them? Maybe everyone who visits her childhood setting, after a lifetime away, has no choice. You’ve only your own lonely memory to go by. No one else is still alive—no one you know of—to second you, to say yes: it was that. What can anyone be sure of, after all? Less and less looks the way it once did.

But tell me—what stays the same in the American West for fifty years? For five?

Sky Harbor Airport: The words still send a shiver. Once the very sound of that name punched us little kids in the chest like the word Christmas. Now the image shrinks to that of an old hand-tinted postcard: its single control tower a lone lighthouse, scanning empty expanses of runway in clear, hot sun, its crown a big cut jewel, impenetrable dark glass facets flashing. What dwelt inside? Looming and silent—yes—as the omniscient monolith in 2001. Takeoffs and landings could in fact have been space launches, so much did their drama dazzle my family.

You went to the airport for thrills: on ultra-special nights to dinner at Sky Harbor’s restaurant, watching planes come and go while you ate. We may as well have been driving our olive drab ’49 Ford straight into the future, those evenings: baby sister Andrea and I bouncing along in the back seat (beltless then), dreaming out the windows, singing made-up songs while dust billowed behind the car—so many roads still unpaved. Mesmerized, our family: pulled as if programmed toward a new modernity: fat propeller planes servicing ant-sized human masters, a shoal of shining silver airbuses trundling slowly in and out, plump with passengers. Tiny figurine-faces smiled through the capsule windows. Tiny figurine-hands waved.

Everyone dressed for air travel as if for church, or a dinner party. Men wore fedoras, jackets, ties—sometimes bolo ties. Plenty of cowboy hats, often with business suits for a formal effect. Women wore crisp shirtwaist dresses, or what was heedlessly called a squaw dress: full-skirted, rickrack-and-sequin-trimmed. Petticoats, hose, heels, girdles—gloves and chic hats. Air travel was still viewed as a privilege; Arizona air itself, ultra-clear and dry, prescribed for sufferers of tuberculosis and joint problems. In that clean light, colors shone true, deep and saturated as Christmas ornaments, and the clustered planes threw light back in blinding silver.

From behind a simple chain-link fence, easily stepped around—the extent of security—we watched passengers descend like royals, stepping across the tarmac toward us with a kind of self-conscious self-possession: something surreal about this (though a child does not yet use that word), about seeing your uncle or...