There’s more than one way to tell when you’ve finally arrived in the real West

About 100 miles east of Yuma, driving in a rented car, we came to a junction called Gila Bend. I felt the need of a cold drink. I pulled up at a weather-beaten saloon called the Owl Buffett (with two t’s). A sign on the door said: “NO loitering, attitudes, minors, guns.”

Inside it was lighted only by neon beer signs. We sat at the bar. A pool cue was leaning against the stool next to mine. Four men who looked like bad guy extras from an old Western were leaning against the pool table, drinking beer from bottles.

A barmaid in a French fisherman’s T-shirt and red shorts came to take our order. I ordered a Diet Pepsi, feeling like a rube. I asked the barmaid, “What do you mean by ‘attitudes,’ on that sign outside?”

She thought it over. “It means like two guys fighting. You know?”

Somewhere between Gila Bend and Phoenix we saw a sign that said, “State Prison. Don’t stop for hitchhikers.”

We were in the real West.

The last time I was in Phoenix I slept in the park. This time we had a suite in The Pointe at Squaw Peak, one of three Pointe resort hotels that rise from the Phoenix highlands like the fantasies of Kublai Khan.

Phoenix ought to be the prettiest of towns. It is situated on high desert circled by low, dark, sharply eroded mountains; the air is thin and clear; objects sparkle in the sun.

But as in so many American cities, Phoenix’s wealth has moved to the suburbs, running out along strips to the north and east in an almost shocking eruption of conspicuous consumption.

Surely nowhere else in the world can one find such a plethora of palatial estates and condominiums as in Scottsdale and its neighbors.

Guarded retreats stand side by side like medieval castles, completely walled in from the outside world. Limousines and luxury cars vanish through security gates to pass behind those walls into a private world of what I assume must be ease, luxury and self-indulgence.

As Ross Macdonald once wrote of a Southern California community, “You could smell the money burning.”

From Scottsdale this extravagance continues in three directions, climbing right up the rugged scarps of the low red mountains to scar their lonely beauty. Surely, I thought, only the cynicism of city officials could produce such gross defacement.

Later, I was gratified on reading an editorial by Kenneth A. Welch, publisher of Phoenix magazine, in which he denounced the same delinquent city fathers I had imagined:

He wrote: “The massive scarring of the Phoenix Mountains foothills . . . demonstrates clearly how insensitive, uncaring and aloof the politicians running City Hall have become. . . . That fragile desert has been ripped asunder, its natural beauty gone forever. . . . Does no one really care about the future of our city? Enough is enough.”

As egregious a landscape as the spread of all this money has produced, it has not been done in complete architectural anarchy. Block after block, mile after mile, the resorts and condos have the earthen colors and blocky lines of the pueblo; and the most sumptuous of them rise like Mayan or Aztec temples. Evidently this fake pueblo style derives from the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the famous Phoenix Biltmore in the 1920s and who has left his mark all over the Southwest.

We decided to find Taliesin West, the house and architectural school Wright built in the desert foothills east of Scottsdale in the 1920s.

We drove east past more miles of utopian walled communities until we found ourselves suddenly in raw desert. We came to a sign that said Fort McDowell Indian Reservation.

“We’ve gone too far,” my wife said.

I turned into the reservation. “Might as well see what it looks like,” I said.

We drove about a quarter of a mile and turned into a road that led to an enormous structure in front of which many cars were parked. We parked and went inside. It turned out to be a bingo parlor. Dozens of patrons sat at long tables, dolorously playing their cards.

We drove back to the highway and in toward town and found the street that led to Taliesin. The approach was guarded by a security gate and sentry. We were entering Taliesin Gates--a new “enclave of luxury homes.” Taliesin’s splendid isolation had been breached.

There was a gift shop at Taliesin and a guided tour on the hour. Wright’s masterpiece looked a bit decrepit. The guide told us it was soon to be rehabilitated. He was one of the students; a chunky young fellow with long black hair. It was hot standing on the terrace by the pool. We obviously were not going to get inside. He was an enthusiastic and talkative young man, and when he began to philosophize at length about man’s unity with the plants and animals of the desert, we surreptitiously peeled off.

Going back past the miles of walled estates, I wondered where all the money came from to build these stately pleasure domes. I couldn’t imagine, but an ad in Phoenix magazine told me what kind of people they were:

“There’s an opportunity for a very few to live within a community that provides a ‘sense of arrival’ and an aura unparalleled in the East Valley. Imagine driving up to a single entry controlled by an electronically secured wrought iron gate. Pass under a massive red brick arch into another dimension of personal prominence. . . . “

They were the very few; and they had arrived.