Bella Pollen

I don’t like fish. I don’t like their scales and bones. I don’t like the way they eyeball you from a restaurant plate and I particularly resent the size they grow to if left unfilleted and grilled. Oh, I realise nobody was actually eaten during the making of that film, but I saw Jaws at an impressionable age and the sea and all things under it have profoundly scared me since. Thus, when a trip involving a boat, the Pacific and a scuba-diving course was suggested, I balked. The Pacific Ocean and I have met before and we did not fare well together — but the boat in question was of the swankiest kind and who in their right minds turns down an opportunity to see the Galapagos?

Germinated on the greed and profligacy of mankind, it’s now the fastest-growing city in the US whose every new building rises like a brittle, neon flower out of the scorched earth. Sticking up its finger to the notion of living anywhere close to within its means, it leeches resources from its neighbouring states only to repay them by polluting their airspace. It currently boasts a reckless 360-gallon water usage per capita despite being built on a spot so arid that a sky-diving honeymooner squeezed into a white nylon Elvis suit is more likely to land on your head than a single drop of rain. I’m talking, of course, about Las Vegas, Nevada, the devil’s very own Garden of Eden. Vegas has always been a repulsive town.

For a soulless city, Phoenix certainly has an interesting airport. The last time I was here, supposedly on business, I had my boarding pass issued by a vampire and found myself being herded through security by an official dressed as a giant chicken. Then it was Halloween, but here we are on an ordinary June afternoon and circumstances seem no less strange. I am stuck in a lift between arrivals and car rental with a Mexican cradling a large, foul-smelling ice chest in his arms. What’s in the box? I ask. ‘A feesh,’ he whispers, ‘for my wife and children. I catch him in Veracruz.’ A sea bass, you understand, will not be the only thing smuggled out of Mexico today.