“America,” noted H.L. Mencken, “is a land so geographically tilted that everything which is loose rolls to California.” In the last few years, however, it seems that most of the great untethered mass has run out of steam amid the cactus groves of nearby Arizona, known in these parts as the poor man’s California and in any event just as open to whatever is both bizarre and lucrative.

The land abounds in evidence. Exhibit A is Arcosanti, an experimental community a hundred miles north of Phoenix. A garish bit of construction perched on a high plateau, it resembles nothing so much as an anthill, one that mixes the architectural sensibilities of Antonio Gaudi and Albert Speer. Paolo Soleri, the Italian designer and “visionary” who has made Arcosanti his lifework, has articulated over the years a weird sort of future worid view that seems to go something like this: in the coming years, humankind will have despoiled the planet (a likely enough possibility) to the extent that we’ll all be forced to live in hermetically sealed towers, our allotment a cubicle apiece, so small that it would make the good denizens of San Quentin riot in a second.

Armed with this unappealing vision of future shock, Soleri has been plugging away at his ziggurat for three decades now, aided by laborers who pay for the privilege of basking in his light. In that time, his complex has risen to a height of three stories, a mere 3 percent of its intended final mass. At this rate, his lifeboat— whence the buried “ark” in his project’s name—will be completed at about the time the cockroaches inherit the planet, too late to do anyone any good.

Then came the New Age, that weird post-1960’s concatenation of feel-good pop psychology, denatured Eastern religions, and general fuzziness. The whole nation, I know, has been made to endure its have-a-nice-day excesses, but here in Arizona the New Age has become a real plague. Exhibit B: the formerly pleasant town of Sedona, in the red-rock country north of Phoenix beloved of Zane Grey, seems unaccountably to have become the international headquarters for levitators, meditators, and speculators. The latter soak the former by means of vastly inflated real estate values and avenues full of incense and crystal shops—incense and crystals being essential accoutrements for anyone who would channel an ancient Egyptian medium through his or her delicate psyche (or, in the case of a humanities professor at a nearby state university, who would channel such a spirit through a geranium). These are the folks who brought us the so-called Harmonic Convergence (in my circle it was known as the Moronic Convergence) a few years back. The planets of our solar system would fall into alignment, they claimed, on a certain bright autumn afternoon, and universal peace would reign over Earth. For whatever reason, it didn’t happen.

Sedona is not the only Arizona town to suffer the creepy nontheologies of the New Agers; the poor Navajos and Hopis now have to ward off bus loads of gawking becrystalled visitors in search of the native American essence. Even Phoenix, that vast cow town to the south, the home of Barry Goldwater and the great laughingstock Evan Mecham, now overflows with Birkenstock-clad post-Blavatskyans. It all fits, I suppose, with our state’s backwardness in so many ways.

And now to Exhibit C, the clincher. Thirty miles north of my hometown of Tucson, in the appropriately named hamlet of Oracle, the state’s latest monument to kookiness is rising: Biosphere II, a stack of glass-and-steel pyramids (of course) the size of three football fields. Within it lies a series of carefully constructed miniature ecosystems that mimic the natural processes of swamps, savannas, coral reefs, jungles, and deserts, inhabited by butterflies, bumblebees, and dwarf pigs.

But this is no petting zoo. Instead, Biosphere II is a prototype for a Martian space station, the decades-old dream of the cultists who run the place and who have long imagined a terrestrial future even bleaker than Paolo Soleri’s. New Mexico communards in the 1960’s (they appear in Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider) since reorganized under the rubric “Institute of Biotechnics,” the Biosphereans are, as one said, now “poking among the ruins of dying civilization” in order to seed the distant planets with their kind—handsome Caucasians who don’t mind a steady diet of lentils and chanting, one supposes, given the makeup of the eight young men and women who have been locked inside the glass pyramid, where they are to remain until September of 1993 as a test of whether the microcosm is indeed self-sustaining. The truer test, I suspect, is whether eight adults can be penned up like deep-space sheep for two years without murdering one another.

The Biosphereans may be the cutting edge of the loopy New Age—at least they seem to think so—but they are real-world shrewd. Having extracted $100 million from fellow cultist Edward Bass, a scion of America’s fourth richest family, they have spent a great deal of capital and time cultivating such media as the New York Times and National Geographic to secure an image as reputable space scientists. Millions of taxpayer dollars now go into their coffers for unspecified research, while tens of thousands of tourists monthly descend on Biosphere II for a peek at the future, at a mere $30-$75 a pop.

The ghost of Nostradamus, the patron saint of pseudoscience, must be grinning from ear to ear. (Somebody please warn the Martians.) You won’t see it in Arizona Highways, but this former refuge of cowboys and prospectors has been overrun by would-be Indians and latter-day space cadets, who by all rights should be confined one state to the west. Anyone for a round of “Aum on the Range” before Exhibit D comes along? Gregory McNamee is a freelance writer and editor in Tucson, Arizona.