Sedona’s trailer park vortex

I was in Sedona over the weekend for a travel story that will appear in PHOENIX magazine. For anyone who has never been to Sedona, please visit this wonderful town… before new subdivisions and traffic have erased its character entirely.

So there I was, hiking, eating steak and mingling with locals. They talked about “spiritual” vortexes linked to the area’s early Native Americans. Some say these vortexes are places where the earth is abnormally healthy; others say they are places where mighty energy fields exist. As a journalist, I was skeptical.

Aw, what the hell. You may get to see my “aura” photos in the April edition of PM.

But during the assignment, I hatched an idea about a different kind of Sedona story, one that talks about the town’s natives. These are the local people who are Sedona’s original retirees and those who work in the shops that serve the rich out-of-towners who just built that McMansion tucked into the Red Rock. These people live in trailer parks far from any self-enlightening vortex. If anything, these people are stuck in a vortex all their own.

And so, I wondered: What about a story on Sedona life from this perspective, and what will happen to these trailer park-dwellers as Sedona gets more and more crowded? I can see a slice-of-life story with some interesting predictions.