Land of the Canyon and Cities of the Plain.

Riders on the Storm. Into this house we're born, Into this world we're thrown. - Jim Morrison / The Doors

Arizona, United States - Largo in D-flat major. 'From the New World', Dvořák Symphony No. 9.

Highway 64. Desert View, Grand Canyon; A crisp November morning on the south rim. The scene is set under high rolling skies with a surging sunlight pouring into the rusty red interior of the high plateau. Through years of movement, gravity on stone, the Colorado River has chiseled a deep cut into the flesh of the earth, exposing the sedimentary rock to the winds. Like a cross-section of a million years, this natural sculpture has been excavated by water surging through the landscape on its way from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Few natural sceneries can truly compete with this. A visit to the Grand Canyon can comfortably be combined with other great escapes and national parks such as Bryce Canyon, Arches, Zion, Death Valley and Joshua Tree. With a soulful of space and vision refreshed by stunning natural beauty, day visitors can continue their journey towards the mountains or into the desert, ramble on to gamble in Las Vegas or head out for a drive along Route 66. The canyon itself is an impressive 277 mile/446 km rift through the Colorado Plateau, 18 miles/29 km at its widest and with a depth of a 6093 feet/1857 meters. The park offers spectacular hiking, rafting and helicopter viewings most days of the year. At an elevation around 7520 feet/2290 meters above sea level, the canyon has an intriguingly shifting climate, with changes in temperature and humidity that keep hiking conditions and visibility in constant change throughout the year. At times, the canyon appears like a white lake of fog off the shores of the surrounding rim. Other days we can see for miles ahead, setting our eyes adrift to the slow rhythm of erosion beneath our feet, to follow the sedimental veins of the interior, left by stages in nature's own excavation of the bedrock. Like all canyons, it is like an inverted mountain range showing how drop hollows the stone. Unlike a mountain range - the result of tectonic plates pushing shards of the earth upwards - this is a mega scale rupestrian sculpture in the sense that what we see is what the river has left behind of the layered Paleozoic strata after 40 million years of movement. Still standing in the gulch are a number of peculiar rock formations, like towering islands in a stream, each having been aptly named as the Shiva Temple, Cheops Pyramid and the Vishnu Rocks etc.

Reaching the canyon from the east along Highway 64 from Cameron town, we arrive at the semi-autonomous Native American territory of Navajo Nation. About the size of Belgium, this is the largest among more than 300 reservations in the United States. It receives visitors from all over the world - here to take part in its cultural heritage, craft, music and daily life. This ancient American culture has withstood immense challenges, and general interest for its legacy has grown in recent years. At the heart of the culture lies the Grand Canyon - Tsékooh Hatsoh in Navajo - which has been a holy site of pilgrimage to several Native American peoples since long before the time of European settlement. The first European known to have seen the canyon was García López de Cárdenas, a Spanish conquistador who arrived in 1540. This was around the time when Martin Luther and Henry VIII were quarreling with the Pope, when Copernicus' new heliocentric world view saw the light of day, when the Inca city of Machu Picchu was still thriving in today's Peru, when the Ming dynasty ruled China - and 48 years after the native population of the Bahamas discovered the Genovese seafarer Christopher Columbus. The goal of Columbus, his crew and their sponsors, was to find a western sea route to India to compete with the Venetian and Ottoman controlled route east from the Mediterranean when trading with silk, spices, precious stones and other desirable goods. Given that the world was considered round rather than flat by then - and if no obstacles lay in the way - a good alternative to the hazardous 13th century adventures of Venetian explorer Marco Polo seemed possible to find. The expectation was that once the new trade route was established, the European markets would see a new order - with Genova, Florence, Spain and their allies in charge at the expense of the old trade capital of the world: Venice. Things did not go according to plan. The western sea route to India was not found then and there. Instead, the European explorers first reached what was later called the West Indies. For lack of a better word - though any word would probably have been better - the newcomers referred to the local inhabitants as Indians, underlining the very failure to reach actual India. The misunderstanding was soon addressed by the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci and publisher Martin Waldseemüller as they launched a new world map where the westernmost continent was named after Mr Vespucci, latinized as Americum or America.

The New World was an old land of canyons and plains, of deserts, rocky mountains, great lakes and immense forests. From the east to the west of the continent, the Cherokee, Iroquois, Sioux, Cheyenne, Ute, Apache, Nez Perce, Paiute and other Indian tribes lived as they had for centuries. It is interesting to note that many among the tribal names ere not their own, but generally those by which the settlers referred to them. What was radically new about this world was the difference in terms of space; seemingly unlimited pastures of green, minerals and a peculiarly vague notion of land ownership that differed immensely from what the newcomers were used to. The European idea of land and ownership was based on cultivation, competition and royal blood, whereas in the new world, the soil was not something that a person could own, but merely dwell on, explore and enjoy in the same way that we breathe the air around us. The notion of locality was spiritual rather than constitutional. Borders were vaguely determined by custom and practice, and the land was generally big enough for conflicting interests not to get out of hand. This would later lead to the kind of friction depicted in our tales of the Wild West and of How the West was won. What the North American continent west of the Rocky Mountains to the Californian coast conveys more than anything else is something supremely peaceful. The dry plateau with its canyons is like a dusty ocean between the stone waves of surrounding mountain ranges. Timeless. The greater part of the area is set under the Mountain or Pacific time zone, differing two to three hours respectively from Eastern Standard Time. The state of Arizona however, never changes time with the spring and autumnal equinox - as if an hour either way would be too futile to make a difference in the vast realm of the canyon.

Arizona became the 48th member of the United States in 1912. Before that, the West - with the exception of California - was divided into large Territories that would not enter the nation recognized as individual states until well after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Nearly three centuries passed between the initial trans-Atlantic encounter 1492 and the declaration of independence of from King George III in England by the thirteen colonies, yet it was not until the following 19th century that the western half of the continent was incorporated into the nation. The American declaration of independence in 1776 - the result of what is sometimes referred to as the American Revolution - was closely related to the ideas that fueled the French revolution shortly after, which lead up to the war between Great Britain and France at the beginning of the 19th century. The costs of the war would eventually prompt Napoleon Bonaparte's decision to sell the entire French colony named after King Louis XIV, including its coastal capital Nouveau Orléans to the newly independent United States. The Louisiana purchase of July 4 1803 nearly doubled the territory of the former colonies and relocated their western frontier from the Mississippi river to the Rocky mountains. Separate events led to Florida, Texas and California joining the United States, and as gold was discovered in the far west, a rush would later be underway through the continent towards the Pacific coast. Among those who first set out to map the territory on behalf of the authorities in Wasington D.C. were were ethnologist and geologist John Wesley Powell and his crew. Like Columbus nearly four centuries before, they set out into uncharted territory.

The distance to all places in western United States is measured from an unassuming engraved stone just outside the town of East Liverpool, Ohio. The stout, slightly tilted, dismal looking obelisk by the side of the road marks the Point of Beginning from which the first surveys of the nation were carried out. These calculations were of great importance to the legal and commercial division of the West, as land in these territories was sold on the stock markets of the east end of the country to landowners who then would travel west to claim their purchase. The catch was that once there, the locals might disagree. The land may indeed have been purchased, though it wasn't yet conquered on behalf of the government in Washington D.C. and no national army could guarantee anyone's safety. The way to fend for oneself and to protect one's interests, was therefore to get armed. This outlook would inevitably shape the culture of the settlers and future generations, with gun slingers like Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and many others becoming living legends. Here lies perhaps a piece of the background story that can help us understand what many consider to be an American obsession with carrying guns. Regardless of the points being made today, the truth of the old American west wast that a settler needed to own a weapon to claim one's land and farm. Life was a dangerous gamble on a daily basis, and - obsession or not - this is a part of world history that has given us the image of the Wild West. Conquering the West came with a wide range of problems, of unfair exploitation and human suffering for most of the people involved - a lot of which John Wesley Powell had foreseen and in fact warned his government about. During the second half of the 19th century, the United States would nearly double its territory once again, as the western states became part of the Union and the nation was populated with settlers from all over the world in search of a better life. The America we see and travel through today is the temporary result of great expectations, the spectacular dreams that in many cases came true - and some that didn't. The new world offered little protection, but freedom previously unimaginable to most people. The opening of the west even pushed woman's suffrage forward, with the Territory of Wyoming Territory becoming the first electorate in the world to grant women the right to vote. * * * Back at the southern rim of the canyon, , we treat ourselves to one last look across the great divide. The edges of sediments shimmer in the sunlit frost as the cold starts to numb our faces and the wind gain strength.

The 19th century painter Caspar David Friedrich would have loved this place, and studying his spacious landscape paintings, one can imagine him trudging through these parts of the world along with Mr. Powell, bickering about the most suitable spot to set up a camp for the night. That did not happen, but a prominent European who took a great interest in America and actually did travel here, was the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. He explored the idea of American Music as a genre of the future, that would combine influences of Native American traditional music with African American spirituals. Part of his interpretation of this idea can be heard in Symphony No.9 From the New World, which premiered in New York 1893. The symphony was a hit, and Neil Armstrong supposedly brought a recording of it with him on the first Moon landing 76 years later. The Native American culture of the Grand Canyon is closely linked to the land. It is a spiritual culture rather than a materialistic one, influenced more by harmony with the elements than by territorial ambition. Its architectural legacy is modest, as the nomadic lifestyle does not strive to build cities, castles and cathedrals for posterity to admire. Looking down the canyon or gazing up from its bottom towards the rim, we understand why, as the temples and high-rises are already naturally here. * * * National Forests were created by Congress in the late 19th century as a way to protect these areas from exploitation by settlers. Heading south from the rim into the Kaibab National Forest with the canyon occasionally flashing by between the trees is like a gradual farewell to another world. The altitude makes the high plateau a suitable terrain for various pines, firs, oak and juniper - seducing in their frosty autumn splendor. We slowly sink back into the inland, as if leaving a coastline behind. From Highway 64 onto Interstate 40, the descending landscape shifts to a dry barren scene and catching the exit to Seligman leads us to a section of the road known as Route 66. Established in 1926, it originally connected Chicago with Santa Monica at the Pacific Coast, a distance about the same as Dublin to Moscow. Not all of it is operational today and most of the legendary road is a mere tourist attraction, though it still holds a great historical significance.

Driving trough America is different from driving anywhere else, and we all seem to come here looking for something, whether it be great nature, the wealth and fame of Hollywood, living the rock'n'roll dream or simply getting lost. The Californian writer John Steinbeck concluded as he traveled coast to coast toward the end of his life, that the spirit of the American is that of a nomad, adrift on a vast new-found continent. American literature is full of these hard travelers and easy riders in search of orientation in a new world, from Walt Whitman to Jack London, from the travel tales of Woody Guthrie to the ramblings of Jack Kerouac and sharp modern life meditations of Don DeLillo. Woody Guthrie inspired songwriters like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen as they captured the sound of their homeland. Guthrie, like the acclaimed Native American writer N. Scott Momaday, was born in Oklahoma, as was the destitute family Joad in Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck tells the story of America in the thirties, struck by the Great Depression following the financial collapse of 1929. Searching for work, the family travels west through the land of the Navajo and Route 66, led by the young son Tom, later to be portrayed in Springsteen's solemn acoustic hymn The Ghost of Tom Joad. * * * Route 66 will eventually lead us to Highway 93, through the torrid desert mountains north to Lake Mead. This is where Arizona meets Nevada, and where the canyon reappears, but filled up with water impounded by the massive arch-gravity Hoover Dam that was built during the Great Depression in order to generate work, hydroelectric power and irrigation water to the ever expanding towns and cities of the West.

Just a half hour drive further, the coarse plateau flattens out into a hill-encircled, plain valley known as the meadows, or Las Vegas in Spanish. The city that erupted in this valley is one of the fastest growing in the US and a surprisingly interesting place. The first visitors to the land we now know as Las Vegas were probably the nomadic Paleo-Indians, who traveled here around 10 000 years ago, leaving some fascinating petroglyphs - rock carvings - behind. These were much admired by the Mexican scout Rafael Rivera, allegedly the first non-native to enter the area. John Fremont later mapped the valley for arriving pioneers in 1844. One of Las Vegas' main streets, Fremont Street, was named after him. To the settlers of the 19th century, the hot and barren western territories were dangerous to traverse. The area west of Las Vegas between the Colorado River towards the lush Joaquin Valley and the cost of California was apply named Death Valley, as many settlers perished along these trails. is brutal and there are many tales of settlers that have perished along these trails. In a way, there has never been a good reason to come here. But history sometimes seems to run its course through clusters of circumstances all pointing in the same direction. The crash of Wall Street in the late 1920's sent shock waves across America, prompting thousands of families to travel west across the continent along the newly built Route 66 in search of work. At the same time, a severe draught took its toll on agriculture throughout the American mid and southwestern United States. In order to check the impact of the ensuing economic crisis, President Roosevelt launched the New Deal that created grand scale building projects such as bridges, roads, and the Hoover Dam, all of which supported the needs of rapidly growing western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles. Construction of the dam started in 1931, the same year as the state of Nevada legalized casino gambling. Meanwhile, the Arizonan capital of Phoenix as well as Los Angeles were growing fast with a galloping requirement for/of comprehensive power and irrigation projects. Liquids were needed, and two years later the alcohol prohibition was lifted, after keeping liquor stores out of work for years while Al Capone and the mob building fortunes on illegal smuggling and sale. That same year, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and many Europeans found themselves with good reason to believe that it was time to move assets as well as themselves elsewhere. The world went west. Las Vegas then, had it all coming its way; With Los Angeles not too far away and Hollywood emerging as the fifth-largest industry of the nation already by the 1920s, hard cash from all over the world in search of lucrative investment was literally in the air, expectations on the financial market on Wall Street understandably low, people desperately in need of work, legalized gambling and liquor - and the worlds biggest dam next door to water the meadows and turn on the lights. Jackpot.

If it is true as the Chinese saying goes, that "the earth is a mirror image of heaven", then Las Vegas is a champagne supernova burning a hole through the the center of the Black Star. At 30,000 feet, gambling cities like Vegas and Reno look like abandoned money temples misplaced in the sand, with parking lots like burial grounds around the high-rises. With nightfall, they light up like gold quarries aglow in the desert. Fremont Street flashes in a never-ending show of light and music in a floating space, half indoors, half outdoors, hysterically present in itself, yet far away from anything else. Down along the main road, known as the Strip, spacious sidewalks spread out with fountains and fireworks alongside luxury hotels featured in movies like Casino and Oceans' Eleven. There are replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, Caesar's Palace, Empire State. At the Venice Hotel, visitors can enjoy a gondola ride and fit the campanile of San Marco and the Rialto bridge into the same selfie - virtually impossible in real life Venice.

Central Las Vegas is a clean, polite, well-functioning machine, more honest than most cities in the sense that here - everything is fake. Not even time is the same in Las Vegas; wandering from one casino to another - all saturated with the same stale sweet smell, visitors will see no clocks on the walls, no differences in menus offered at different times of day and night, and few windows to let the early morning light into the gambling halls after a long night of humming along to the pacifying relentless music of chance. This is the timelessness of Dollar Wonderland, an assault on the senses in fascinating contrast to the meditative stillness of Kaibab and the Grand Canyon, just a day-trip away. Yet, the same cycle of natural movement and energy that runs through the bedrock of the canyon is the very same energy that lights the bulbs in Vegas every night, that waters the golf courses and rolls the Blackjacks, day after day in timeless succession. Future archeologists might try to fit the pieces together in order to understand the past of this area the same way that we examine our history today. The Paleo petrogryphs, the Spanish conquistadores, Route 66, Hoover Dam, the casinos and the curious replicas of world-famous buildings may appear puzzling to them. Why is there a Caesar's Palace here and why a statue of Emperor Augustus in front of it? Were the Romans ever here? How did the Bellagio fountain actually work and what kind of deity was worshipped in these meadows? What did people believe in and how did they live? We might even be asking ourselves some of these questions today. The future story of the Grand Canyon is likely to remain less ambiguous; water running through the sediments of rock, years of movement, gravity on stone. In 2010, Las Vegas was surpassed by the former Portuguese colony of Macao as the largest gambling market, with Venetian Macao as its largest casino. We constantly see examples of of how changing circumstances create similar changes in power, influence and investment. Throughout the world, everything is set in constant change for better of worse of perhaps neither. "Change", in Mad Men Don Draper's words, "isn't good or bad - it just is."

Las Vegas is not truly representative of America, but it tells us a lot about money's curious position in the US, in the world and in our global consciousness. Vegas is - like most things around us - a fairly logical product of historical circumstances, of hard facts and some wild imagination. Leaving Las Vegas, just beyond Betty Willi's legendary Welcome to Las Vegas sign, the desert reclaims its presence. Passing the Nevada-California state line, one marvels at the bravery of those 19th century settler parties, like the Donners and Forty-Niners, who continued their journey from the meadows into the dry wilderness of the Mojave Desert and Death Valley. Driven by a lack of alternatives and the promise of incredible riches, the Gold Rush drew hopeful settlers from all over the world out on a journey to the pacific coast, a place then considered one of the most remote places on earth.