For almost a year, George Packer — a writer for The Atlantic and winner of the National Book Award — told people he was working on a long-form story about Phoenix, Arizona. The response he got didn’t inspire the kind of confidence journalists seek.
“If I were too susceptible to the expressions on people’s faces I might have given up because it didn’t inspire excitement,” Packer said. “It was more a kind of bafflement.”
Serious readers are fortunate he persevered. “What Will Become of American Civilization?” is a 25,000-word epic that casts Phoenix as a crystal ball of a city, defined in the story’s subhed: “Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city.” Phoneix is where the battlefields of America’s future — blast-furnace heatwaves, bloody political violence, churning attitudes toward immigration and mean-dog partisanship that all but ignores the human toll — are already engaged.
Packer’s piece, which combines shoe-leather reporting and with essay-like insights, was published online this past June; it runs in the August/September 2024 print edition as “The Valley.” Packer reported and completed his assignment as seismic events continued to play out in the U.S. Before an assassin’s bullet grazed a former president, he wrote of a high-profile politician who weathered threats for standing up for his beliefs. Before the Supreme Court upended laws protecting unhoused people, he wrote of a homeless woman who suffered a second-degree burn from falling on hot pavement during a medical emergency. Beginning, ending and threading throughout his piece is water, a crucial survival resource that is both source and target of the region’s extremist politics — politics likely coming to a community near you.
Packer portrays a number of people who live at the edge of the future, such as Rusty Bowers, formerly a powerful state legislator concerned about the real-world effects of the region’s politics, and Fernando Quiroz, who helps asylum-seekers navigate the quotidian details of crossing the border. Along the way there are appearances by experts and scientists, elected officials and would-be elected officials, and one-time TV star Roseanne Barr.
The piece makes an invocation that Packer calls “bold.” He opens with a tight description of the sophisticated engineering of the Hohokam Indians, who built a thriving culture in the Sonoran Desert a millenium ago, then — for reasons still unknown — vanished. He quickly connects the dots between that past disappearance to the meteoric rise, and possible demise, of modern-day Phoenix. Here’s his opening:
No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.
It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.
He soon follows that with a tight and pointed summary nut :
Growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence. Democracy is also a fragile artifice. It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.
I was taken with the boldness and complexity of that story frame, so reached out to Packer to talk about his story. His comments were as considered as his magazine piece. This comment stood out: “If it makes the stakes of the confluence of issues seem high, that’s because they are.”
He explained what brought him to that point: “People in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. There’s a threat of extinction hovering over it, which is not something you’d normally write in a more grounded and conventional piece of reporting about a city. But it felt true. I’d heard it. I’d felt it myself: the heat, the unnaturalness of a place in the desert that contributes to it. I wanted to capture that feeling at the start and have it hover over the whole piece, so you’re never entirely at ease. You’re always feeling like this could vanish.”
To capture that mood, Packer and photographer Ashley Gilbertson walk readers section by section, chapter by chapter through the issues and characters boiling away in the Arizona heat: the border, where asylum seekers decide what precious objects to throw away before officials do it for them; a homeless encampment in a county where heat killed hundreds of people last summer; a community where the presence of water is as expensive as it is precarious.
While Packer spent a huge chunk of time on the project, he was sure to note it wasn’t a one-person production: “In addition to Jeff Goldberg and Scott Stossel, the Atlantic’s editors, copy editors, and checkers did a typically amazing job bringing this behemoth to the page.”
Packer agreed to spend some time talking to Storyboard about how “The Valley” came to be. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you settle on Phoenix as emblematic of the future?
Jeff Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor, came to me two years ago and said “I want you to fill an issue of the magazine with a story about some place in America that allows us to ask the question, ‘Is this country a viable concern?’” Which was a rather intimidating assignment.
I’d written a book called “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” which looked back at 40 years of American history from 2012-13. I knew you could take individual lives and extrapolate. So I had an idea: How would that work if it was one place?
As I was pondering this, my editor, Scott Stossel, said, “You should go to Phoenix.” Not the Rust Belt. That was my first thought — Pittsburgh, Milwaukee. But those are well-known stories. They’re the stories of the past more than the future. Phoenix is the story of the future. (Storyboard Note: Read more about Scott Stossel’s editing approach in our series “What makes an effective editor?”)
It wasn’t something I particular relished. I’m not a fan of high heat or urban sprawl and Phoenix has both in amplitude. I feared sitting in a hotel room not knowing how to begin — a kind of dread setting in as I try to figure out how to find my way around this place geographically as well as socially and culturally.
Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You’re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence.
The first two trips, in the summer of 2023, were pretty disappointing. I had the full blast of the desert heat. I didn’t know anybody. I had a few names and hung on to them for dear life. It’s such a big, sprawling place you feel lost, very easily lost. There’s no sense of ‘Here’s where the core of the story is. Here’s the neighborhood you can build out from.’ Or ‘Here’s the community organization that will allow you to make connections between different kinds of people.’ It doesn’t feel that way in Phoenix.
Things got better on subsequent trips. I’m just remembering how much unease there was for me in the first two trips.
When you say things got better, was there one thing that helped you turn the corner? Or was there an accumulation — meeting the right people, going to the right places?
In my experience as a reporter, you begin to know you’re getting somewhere when you pull on a string and it turns out to be connected to more than one thing. Those things lead you to other things. Then you notice a pattern. You start hearing the same names, keep hearing about the same issues and events. You sense the structure of the place, the things that matter to people.
One of them was water. That came up not in a single event or interview but over and over again — first with two experts I went back to again and again to understand this incredibly complicated subject of water, and groundwater especially, but then in finding people whose lives were in crisis because of disappearing water. Like this woman who ran a donkey rescue ranch in the hills of unincorporated Maricopa County; they had their water cut off by the city of Scottsdale. She told me how she got through the summer and kept her donkeys alive, and it turned out she did it without a reliable well. She depended on hauled water. Well, who hauled it? A man who had a business hauling water. I ran him down and we drove around in his truck.
Reporters depend on the kindness of strangers. You’re looking for someone who seems to welcome your presence. That was true of the donkey-rescue lady and hauled-water guy, and it was true of Rusty Bowers. He was one of the names I kept hearing. “You should talk to Rusty Bowers if you’re interested in politics.”
I didn’t know enough about him and Arizona to know how important he was. So I texted him along with 600 other people and the answer came back almost instantly. He was in Washington D.C. painting a fountain outside the White House — because he’s a painter — and he said he’d be glad to see me when he got back. So right away there’s readiness to spend time with me.
When I met him, he was impressive to the point of almost intimidating, with a deep faith in both his Latter-day Saints religion but also in public service. He’d been Speaker of the House of Arizona until he refused to do Donald Trump’s bidding and throw the election to him 2020. After that, he became a pariah, ostracized from the Republican Party, his career was destroyed.
By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question…“Can a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?”
He was also just wonderful to spend time with. We spent many hours together during several visits. By then, I knew I was getting somewhere. I was getting into the politics of Arizona through Rusty Bowers and that led me to other people. I was understanding water and seeing the human face of water through others. And on and on.
In December I went to the Turning Point USA convention at the Phoenix Convention Center. That gave me a set piece that allowed me to capture something of the extremist, right-wing politics of Phoenix and the country.
Finally, in my last trip in February, I went to the border. Even though the border is not exactly Phoenix, it’s so important to politics and life I had to see for myself what it was like.
So … five trips. By the last one, I felt like I’d like to keep coming back. I liked it there, partly because I was meeting people and learning things. But it was time to start writing.
Did you go to Phoenix knowing, ‘OK, I’m going to write about extremism. I’m going to write about heat. I’m going to write about water?’ Or did you let the topic come to you?
I’d say a mix of those. I knew Arizona had the threat of election violence every time there was an election. It happened in 2020: Armed people outside the counting center chanting, “Stop the steal!” In 2022: Every defeated statewide Republican claiming they’d been cheated of victory; armed guys sitting outside drop boxes, watching who came and went. That was certainly something I wanted to write about.
And I knew Phoenix was hot. I knew climate change was causing a drought that was threatening the water supply, not of the city so much but of surrounding areas.
What I didn’t know was the connection between those two stories. By the second or third visit I was able to articulate a question, which is how I like to see it — not as an answer, but as a question. And the question was, “Can a political culture so divided and prone to extremism solve a problem as big and complicated as water?”
Once I hit on that I knew that would be the throughline. It’s a real question, and it’s an interesting question, and I hadn’t seen much written about it before. When I phrase it that way to people they would say, “Yeah! That’s the question. Can we do this?’
And a lot depends on the answer.
You made five visits. How many people do you think you talked to?
Actually talked to for more than five or ten minutes? Probably 50 or 60. I had both notebooks and recordings to transcribe, and I’m hopelessly a Luddite about these things; I don’t like to send them out to have another human being or AI do it for me. It ended up being something like 350 single-spaced pages. At this point, I’m approaching the level of research a short book would have. And of course, most of it ends up not being used. I have to overreport to get what I need.
So you have 350 pages of notes. How did you begin to organize the piece?
This is the hardest moment because it’s a radical shift in spirit. Rather than being a curiosity machine and hoovering up as much information and observation as I can, now I have to tell a story. The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it’s essential to it. If I don’t get lost and don’t feel like I’m drowning, I will not have the authority to write it the way I need to write it.
The amount of information I have is almost the enemy of telling the story. But it’s essential to it.
There’s a temptation to turn the piece into the sum total of all the research: ‘Well hell, I did that, that was hard. i spent hours on that. I had to write 10 e-mails to get that interview.’ But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is, can you write a good story? Will people want to read it? Will it move them? Will they want to stick with you for 25,000 words, which is what I was given?
For that, you really need to get away from the burden of your own reporting and think more like a novelist or short-story writer. In that phase I’m always reading or listening, while on my dog-walks, to fiction in order to have the rhythm, the imagery, the feel of narrative.
I also need an outline. In this case, the outline was not obvious because the story was so kaleidoscopic. It was a little book, and the thing that united it was Phoenix. But there was so much pulling it in different directions: Politics. Climate. Immigration. We haven’t even mentioned education. All these categories: How do they fit together, and in what order?
Storyboard Note: The outline of Packer’s story played out in ten chapters, bookended by a prologue and epilog. The chapters vary in length, though most are the length of a substantive magazine piece. While the chapters inform each other, each has a clear focus that almost lets it stand alone.
- The Conscience of Rusty Bowers profiles a former state legislator who has experienced the full range of issues threatening Phoenix
- The Heat Zone faces the reality of climate change, often through the experience of Phoenix’s growing homeless population
- Democracy and Water gets to heart of a dwindling resource that affects everything else, including survival
- Sunshine Patriots profiles far-right conservatives and some of the conspiracies that define their views
- The Aspirationalist squints at an innovative future through the eyes of a university president
- The Things They Carried gets to the gritty reality of border crossings
- America Dreams profiles the challenges and triumphs of an immigrant family
- Campaigners follows select people who hope to provide a voice of leadership
- The Good Trump Voter is a short profile of one man who has lost trust in the system
- Dry Wells returns to water and the political and policy decisions that rule it
Usually, the order has a logic that unfolds according to the demands of the story. But in this case, the pieces were disparate enough that my editor, Scott Stossel, and I went through the piece, asking: Well, what if you put heat before the first water story? You’d miss a few things because there are references in the first water story that then come up in heat. But heat is so basic to people’s sense of Phoenix, and it’s so vivid maybe you want to go to heat before water.” Those are calculations based on what will keep people reading. They’re always ready to throw the magazine across the room, so how do you keep them reading?
There’s a little prologue to the piece that set the mood. It’s very short and sort of poetic, and I wanted that literary style to inform the whole piece. But from there I had to get to the stories I’d found. The first one is of Rusty Bowers, partly because it sets up politics as the crucial pillar of this whole thing, but it’s also a compelling human story of one person, with (former President Donald) Trump and (Trump lawyer Rudy) Giuliani hovering in the background.
All sorts of questions about the order kept popping up:
Water’s so complicated, maybe it can’t be too early; you might lose people.
It also can’t be too long.
It has to have human faces. It can’t get technical.
It has to be simplified.
All these considerations went into writing of individual sections, and the organization of the whole thing.
Then there are throughlines. One is politics. Rusty Bowers is at the beginning, and he’s at the end. Extremism is there in several chapters.
But the other is water. There are two specific water chapters, but it’s there in other ways, maybe mentioned in a sentence or two in almost all of them.
To back up what you said, this might be a facile way to think of it, but if I’d started the piece and it started with water policy, I might think, ‘Oh, is this about issues?’ It’s less visceral than the scene of Rusty confronting protesters outside his home while his daughter is dying inside. Once you read that scene, you have to keep reading and see what happens. You have to see how this affects and winds through everything else.
I’m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.
The guy who took me along the border was handing out water and snacks and advice to migrants who had just literally crossed to the wall. At nighttime, with the wall behind us — the whole thing had this ominous and chilling feeling because we are in this little area with a handful of people who look exhausted and afraid. In that corner of Arizona, I’d found a way to portray an issue that’s a giant abstraction most of the time, one that’s driving politics everywhere.
But really, the opening was so important to get right. It’s written in a looser and more poetic style than most of my work. The sentences are longer than usual for me. It makes claims that are a bit bold. Like people in Phoenix wonder if Phoenix will be there in 50 years. I know our country won’t vanish off the map. But there are things that seem fragile about it right now and Phoenix embodies that.
How did you find out about the disappearance of the Hohokam tribe and then land on it as your opening?
I read about the Hohokam in one of the books I was reading about water in Arizona. It was fairly technical but it began with the story of the Hohokam Indians, who had a 1,000-year civilization in the Sonoran Desert and had built canals and turned the desert into farmland before mysteriously vanishing in the middle of the 15th century. To this day archeologists and anthropologists don’t know what happened to their civilization, whether it was climate change or social upheaval. You can see traces in different part of the Phoenix Valley — ruins of canals and structures.
I’m always looking for and holding on to moments of tension, of vividness.
I spent time at an Indian reservation south of Phoenix with the Gila River Indian Community leader Stephen Roe Lewis and he told me, “Hohokam means ‘Those who came before.’” His tribe feels it is descended from Hohokam and inherited a lot of their culture, so it’s not extinct. But in some ways, it has vanished because there was a physical civilization that’s no longer there.
All of this fired my imagination. There’s a vibration that tells you this is something powerful and, from a literary point of view, useful. So the first sentence occurred to me all at once: “No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished.” That sets a tone and mood I hope are potent throughout the piece.
You said you turn to fiction to inform and inspire your writing. Do you tailor what you listen to or read based on what you’re writing?Yes. For “The Valley,” I was reading a lot of American fiction, my favorite writers: Faulkner, Ellison, Fitzgerald. I was reading some of Didion’s essays — not fiction, but informed by the same sensibility as her fiction. I love Dickens but don’t think he would have been the right voice to have in my head. These were different American dialects and certain American rhythms of the sentences I wanted to get into my bloodstream.
Tell me about the response to the piece.
The response has been almost uniformly positive, which isn’t always the case with my work. I was grateful The Atlantic put so much behind it. They put it on the cover, they gave it promotional muscle.
My more polemical work gets potshots and criticism from the right and the left. This did not. It isn’t polemical; it’s more an attempt to encompass something large rather than take a narrow view. I think people were glad to have that.
I did hear that some found it depressing — terrifying with little bits of hope. I didn’t realize it was so terrifying. I didn’t intend for it to be. But maybe it’s the only way it could be.
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Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.
