1.
Beneath South Mountain, at the place where Tempe and Phoenix intersect, rows of linen-white condominiums back up against the park-reserve. The green ribbon of a golf course is wrapped around the base of the mountain. Quiet, expensive neighborhoods slow visitors with ruinous speed bumps – hit one of these too fast and it feels like the bottom of your car has fallen out.
One of the boulevards curves away from the condos and, on a grassy ridge between dry arroyos, leads into the foothills. The road dead-ends at a couple of large parking lots divided by a median full of cactus. Some concrete block toilets mark trailheads leading into the mountain park. It’s midday Monday about 10:30 and the sky is overcast, a grey pall slumped over the mountains. The temperature is 70 degrees, a little chilly for this time of year in the Valley of the Sun.
I walk about a mile into the desert along the Pima Wash. The trail is level, running along a terrace overlooking a dry gulch. There are plenty of people walking, many of them with small enthusiastic dogs. Most of the people are older, retirees, it seems, and they come into the desert well-prepared, bottles of water strapped to their hips, big broad-brimmed hats, hiking boots with elaborate hook-and-eye lacing, and light-weight graphite walking sticks, the sort of trekking poles you might observe on an elite Finnish athlete in the Winter Olympics.
I leave the main trail to scramble down into the sandy arroyo and, then, up the opposing hillside. A path leads up to an overlook. From that vantage, I can see the golf course at the base of the mountains and a row of transmission towers leading downslope in the smoggy basin. The ground underfoot is bare desert pavement, a hard calcined surface shedding pebbles from eroded channels cut in the hill. It’s unlovely landscape, grim and, mostly, featureless. Sometimes, a small lizard darts away from where I am walking.
2.
A winding road ascends to one of the buttresses under the high ridge of South Mountain. The road skirts dizzying drop offs and the exposure is plain to see – there are no trees of any kind, just some creosote brush and cactus clinging to the crumbling cliffs.
At the end of the seven mile drive, a lookout tower surveys the basin a couple thousand feet below. The valley is full of pale yellow haze. Latino families have gathered here and everyone seems to be having a good time. Hispanic culture sometimes seems carefree to the point of being reckless. Toddlers are wandering around the edge of the cliffs, mostly ignored by family members who are picnicking in shadows of the tower. A couple of Native women in dark shawls are selling turquoise and silver jewelry displayed on jet-black blankets spread out in the parking lot. Kids are exploring the environs and some of them are perched on pedestals of rock hanging over the canyon. Higher up the hill, an array of baffled-looking dishes and towers are aimed up at the sky. How would you know if they are transmitting signals or just receiving them? Every other vehicle in the crowded parking lot is a large black SUV. Some playful crows are robbing overflowing trash bins. Mexican polkas go hoo-hah on big radios and CD-players. Up here, I suppose the silence could be oppressive.
3.
The Capitol Grille is on Camelback Road in the Biltmore neighborhood. The restaurant is an expensive steak house. It has a fancy bar with a very handsome and hospitable bartender. (These sorts of places always have deluxe bartenders and wait-staff.) The bartender chats up the people waiting for tables or those loners who are willing to eat their lobster rolls or filet mignon at the bar. Bartenders aren’t judgmental – they accept you for whomever you are that night. The dress code in the restaurant is implicitly exclusive – women, at least, need to be attired for an evening at the opera; it’s more casual for men.
The dining room is large full of mirrors and glass walled alcoves. Hanging in a position of honor: a large portrait of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater wears horn-rimmed glasses like Federico Fellini or an Italian mobster and his skin is enameled, greyish-pink like an embalmed corpse.
4.
Visitors to Phoenix, if they are young and in good health, all want to hike the trail to the top of Camelback Mountain. This poses a logistical problem – the parking lot at the trail head is tiny and it will be full of cars by mid-morning.
I didn’t plan to climb the mountain but wanted to see the trail head. At a saddle on a desert ridge, gated communities huddle under the stark eminence of mountain. Road construction was underway. The stockade of a privacy fence ran along the side of the boulevard set back about 12 feet from the right-of-way. I noticed several middle-aged couples, men and women, fast-walking along the strip of desert between the palisade and the concrete roadway. The walkers wore spandex and had velcro-furred water bottles adhering to their buttocks. The road leading up to the mountain park was blocked by road crews excavating trenches next to the road: big rigs slowly, and with callous indifference, obstructed the intersection.
I made several passes at the cross-roads but couldn’t figure out how to execute my turn. It was pointless anyhow. The sleek-looking couples walking quickly along the edge of the highway sometimes gestured up to mountain looming like a bad dream over the intersection. They were apparently planning to ascend the mountain on the trail to the summit, but hadn’t been able to get anywhere near the inadequately sized parking lot at the trail head. My drive to Scottsdale to the base of the mountain was futile and I returned to the hotel.
5.
Guadalupe is a Latino suburb under the long austere flank of South Mountain. Like its upscale neighbor, Tempe, all residential roads are mined with porpoise-sized speed bumps. A place recommended for breakfast, the Vane Café, was marked on the map as near the freeway to Tucson. We found the intersection with ease, but the location of the café was concealed. On one side of the street, there was a day care and elementary school. A structure that looked like an abandoned adobe shopping center occupied the other, opposite side, of the road. A couple of Mexican restaurants with gaudy storefronts showing big, grinning sword-fishes were in the third quadrant of the intersection and its fourth corner was a vacant field slashed with trenches overgrown with thorns, a construction project that had not progressed beyond some initial excavation work. About eight men dressed in shabby work clothes were loitering around the blank mud-colored walls of the forlorn shopping mall. Presumably, they were day-laborers waiting for someone to drive up in a van and offer them work.
The neighborhood looked a little intimidating. Furtive figures were moving unsteadily around the edges of the vacant lot and the men squatting outside the adobe shopping place were talking a little too loud and seemed, perhaps, to be slightly drunk or, at least, contesting their hangovers with displays of macho bravado. After a couple of passes, I pulled onto the broken-up concrete next to the shopping center and found that, in fact, the place was a Mexican style Mercado. A plaza opened up beyond some steel gates pulled apart to allow pedestrians to enter the Mercado. Apparently, the market was busy on the weekends, but we were there on a Wednesday morning and the big concrete pad where the merchants set up their booths and sold produce and wares was empty. Some restrooms down a little open-air corridor were unlocked – I saw an Uber driver picking up food for delivery use the Ladies’ toilet. The Vane café was a tiny place, three tables inside of an alcove with plaster walls painted bright green. A girl was sitting at one of the tables studying a calculus text. A woman on a stool behind the counter was watching a Spanish-language TV show. Someone had painted portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O, and John Kennedy. Kennedy’s picture was hanging between the paintings of the two women. Of course, the Virgin of Guadalupe was on hand to bless the place, pasted to the front of a refrigerator and, also, gracing a big calendar. Across the from the President, two smaller paintings depicted John Wayne and Elvis Presley.
I had an omelet, made with about a quarter pound of jalapenos and chorizo sausage. The jalapenos were sweet and I was surprised that I could eat the dish without much discomfort. Julie had French toast with maple syrup together with a side order of bacon. The café seemed to be well-known in the neighborhood. About every ten minutes, an Uber driver arrived to pick up an order of food.
A small tax-preparation place and a travel agency, closed this morning, were the only other businesses operating in the Mercado. Someone was hosing down the concrete. The sun was high overhead and the day-laborers waiting outside the plaza had moved into the shade of some bushes with greasy-looking spiked leaves. So far no one had offered any of them a job.
6.
After he became famous, Ettore (“Ted”) DeGrazia sold paintings to Vincent Price, Broderick Crawford, Lee Marvin and other Hollywood luminaries. For a time, DeGrazia claimed to be the most widely reproduced artist in the world. Perhaps, this is true, although DeGrazia was an accomplished fabulist. Certainly, the artist’s fame reached its height around 1960, UNICF acquired the rights to reproduce an image that DeGrazia had made of Indian and Mexican children, Los Ninos. The painting was sold on UNICF seals and stamps and was, indeed, known world-wide. (I recall seeing the picture reproduced in a copy of Arizona Highways, a magazine to which my grandmother in Nebraska subscribed; DeGrazia was the house-artist for the periodical and everyone my age has seen his paintings at one time or another.) Los Ninos isn’t half bad – it shows a group of urchins dancing in a ring: the little kids have black shaggy hair that it picturesquely unkempt and they wear ragged clothing – their faces are indistinct blurs, smears of mahogany and cinnabar pigment; the little boy at the top of the ring dance and it’s apparent leader wears an exuberant sun-colored cowboy hat. When UNICF picked up the picture for its stamps and Christmas seals, DeGrazia knew he had stumbled onto a good thing and, so, he made hundreds of variants on the ninos, many of them nakedly kitsch.
DeGrazia was an aggressive self-promoter and capitalized on his adventurous life. The child of Calabrian immigrants, DeGrazia was raised in a mining town, Morenci on the New Mexico border. When the Morenci mines closed in 1920, his family moved back to Italy, but returned when the copper industry revived in 1925. He claimed that he had forgotten his elementary school lessons in English and had to start over as a first-grader when he was 16. DeGrazia said that he didn’t finish elementary school until he was 23. Although he posed as a self-taught, eccentric outsider artist, in fact, he attended art school and had an MFA from the University of Arizona – his 1945 thesis was on art education and synesthesia: he claimed to have invented a machine that converted music into paint and light. (While studying for his MFA, DeGrazia traveled widely in Mexico and was friends with Diego Rivera; he had several well-reviewed gallery shows in Mexico City while he was intermittently studying at the University in Arizona.) DeGrazia played trumpet in Mariachi and big bands, was a notorious ladies’ man, and, after college, opened a studio in downtown Tucson. Later, as the city expanded, he moved his studio to a ten acre site in the Santa Catalina foothills, about five miles from downtown. This was DeGrazia’s famous Gallery in the Sun, still a popular tourist destination in Tucson, although the acreage with its archaic looking chapel, museum and gallery, and the artist’s grave (he died in 1982) under a heap of what looks like shattered black pottery, is now surrounded by the suburbs. DeGrazia made thousands of paintings and, also, worked extensively in ceramics. He was an expressionist artist by temperament with an agile palette. His best work is as good as Chagall and, indeed, the compositions often are reminiscent of the Russian artist’s work. DeGrazia’s figurative art (he also painted, less successfully I think, abstractions) kept him outside of the mainstream of American painting between the fifties and seventies, when he was most active, and he avoided the art world and its institutions – DeGrazia always claimed that he was most happy when traveling by mule in the mountains of south Arizona or Mexico, visiting his Yaqui and Tohono O’odham friends.
7.
On May 30, 2017, fire in the suburban foothills of Tucson set The Gallery in the Sun ablaze. Traces of the conflagration were visible in the compound when I visited in March 2022. The chapel to the Virgin of Guadalupe that DeGrazia built with his own hands was damaged – it’s being restored today and the murals that DeGrazia painted on its inside adobe walls are sooty and charred around the viga penetrations through the clay bricks and plaster. In a way, burning improved the place – the chapel, at least, now presents an ancient patina that is appealing in a perverse sort of way.
The gallery is large, showing hundreds of paintings. By my estimate, about sixty are worth looking at – the rest are just exhausted variations on themes that DeGrazia found profitable with his patrons. A picture sequence on the adventures of Cabeza de Vaca after his shipwreck in 1527 is powerful and effective. Some paintings of Tohono O’odhom myths and legends have a strong mysterious presence and another picture cycle on the missionary to the Indians, Father Kino, is also compelling. The rest of the stuff is colorful junk, although interspersed, here and there, with genuinely effective canvases. DeGrazia was not as reactionary as he pretended and there are traces of European surrealism and cubism in many of his paintings. I’m not competent to judge his ceramics which are also numerous.
Some aging acolytes of the Master, now old women, guard the front door, answer questions, and take admissions. The exhibition spaces are warmly lit and have brownish-cream walls and people speak in whispers. I’ve never seen a DeGrazia painting or print in any conventional museum – the artist belongs in that rank of painters, popular with the public, who have to create their own museums in the face of institutional indifference. (There is, for instance, a lavish exhibition hall in Watertown, South Dakota that celebrates the works of the wildlife artist Terry Redlin.) Gradually, he is being forgotten everywhere but in Tucson and, I suppose, that in another two generations, the Gallery of the Sun will be gone as well.
There is an impressive cactus garden in the plaza between the living quarters, the half-ruined chapel, and the galleries. A fountain splashes water on colorful Mexican tile. An old man has gone into the Men’s Room in the little building next to the mountain. He’s taking his time.
8.
DeGrazia said that he was happiest prospecting in the Superstition Mountains. In Arizona, it seems that everyone who has lived here for a decade or so, takes a shot at finding the Lost Dutchman Mine, hidden, it is alleged, somewhere in that mountain range. DeGrazia was no exception to this rule.
With a mule heavily laden, in 1976, DeGrazia ascended into the foothills of the Superstitions. The mountains are sheer, protected by huge rubble fields at the foot of mighty escarpments. In remote canyons, there are stone pinnacles of rock as tall as skyscrapers. It’s hard country and people wandering around in the labyrinth of gorges and peaks die all the time. DeGrazia didn’t go too far. On the hillside, he lit a bonfire from wood gathered from deadfall near one of the springs at the base of the peaks. The site was accessible by jeep and journalists watched as he burned 150 of his paintings – a protest against the Federal inheritance task. The government had assigned a high value to his works and DeGrazia was concerned that when he died, his Estate would be saddled with crippling taxes. (One presumes, he would have been offended if the government had not assessed his paintings as valuable.) There are a few photographs of DeGrazia burning the canvases. Probably, the wanton destruction of his own work was too disturbing even for a tax protester like DeGrazia and I suppose he didn’t destroy all 150 paintings. There’s a legend that he buried the rest of the paintings. People still find nuggets of gold washed down from the high cliffs perched over the desert – as they say, “thars gold in them thar hills.” Do treasure-hunters comb the Superstition foothills in search of DeGrazia’s lost cache of paintings?
9.
San Xavier del Bac is still where I left it four years ago at the edge of the Tohono O’odham Reservation beneath a stony calvary where the Stations of the Cross make their penitential way up the bare, sun-scorched hillside to a splintery wood cross that is the deadest thing in a dead landscape. On this morning, the church is open only to a side exit in the nave and the richly decorated chapels can’t be seen and visitors are blocked from approaching the gaudy altar screen. A thousand painted angels peep at the tourists who enter between the pews, gawk at the spectacle and, then, depart through the door into a little enclosed garden under the great white turret of the church. White geometry soars upward, great curved buttresses beneath the pale bell-tower, forms massing overhead like some sort of abstract destiny.
Two-hundred yards away from the church with its lavish facade, some booths are arranged around a small square with a couple of picnic tables beside a small fountain. The fountain is dry. When I was here before, I had a vegetable burrito (squash, beans, chili and corn) that was one of the best things I have ever eaten. But the tribe is taking the COVID virus seriously and the little taqueria and snack bar is closed. You can’t even buy a can of pop. The booths selling pottery and Indian jewelry are open and wares are displayed. A couple of old White ladies are inspecting turquoise-studded earrings.
10.
Around sunset, while Julie was napping at the hotel, I followed the avenue downtown to the center of Tucson. It was very still and the roads were empty, fortunately, because street construction interfered with traffic flow and, more than once, I found myself driving the wrong way on a one-way road or, even, traversing sidewalks. Markers on the pavement and affixed to the corners of concrete block administrative buildings show that the core of the city is very old, although nothing really remains of it. Some sleepy looking government offices form a compound near an art museum that seems so fortified against the sun and heat that there is no way to enter the building – in any event, it’s closed. Probably, a river ran through here once, but it’s long since gone underground or simply been desiccated to dust and paved over.
I park in a lot buried under the square in front of the courthouse. It’s a spectral place, dimly lit with only a few scattered vehicles under the heavy concrete lid of the ceiling that supports the monuments and fountains, the public art above and the benches and walkways of the courthouse square. Greenish light makes the chrome on the parked vehicles look mossy. Probably, the owners of the cars are in custody as a result of calamitous court hearings or, perhaps, have committed suicide in alleyways somewhere. Ghosts wander the remote corners of the underground lot – it’s not exactly Hell, but, more like an indifferent Hades, a place leached of its color and light and the emotions that color and light embody.
The courthouse has a Moorish dome with inlaid mosaics of semi-precious stones. (Arizona is full of minerals with color and luster when washed and polished a little.) The facade under the dome is Spanish baroque with embedded fluted pilasters framing a big door, now padlocked shut, carved swags and fruit decorating the arch over the entrance. Some bronze statues that look like massive oxen skulls stand on plinths and half of the square is occupied by two reflecting ponds paved with shiny black bricks like the scales on a fish or lizard under the clear, limpid water. A causeway runs between the ponds and they are sheltered by twelve-foot berms, surfaced with forearm-sized filets of polished petrified wood. This is the January 8 Monument, a memorial to six people killed when a gunman opened fire on a political rally in a Safeway parking lot at Casa Adobes near Oracle, about 12 miles north of Tucson – the shooting was in 2011 and the monument, it seems, is new, apparently dedicated on the 10th anniversary of the massacre. (In this mass-shooting, a politician named Gabby Giffords was badly wounded when she was shot in the head and a Federal Judge was killed.) The names of the casualties (there were 18 wounded in addition to the dead) are inscribed on granite panels inset into the petrified wood berms wrapped like “embracing arms” around the pools. At ground level, the memorial is cool, dignified, and, of course, in the desert, water always signifies grace and, indeed, something like mercy. It’s all too large for the rather small terrace in front of the Courthouse and, indeed, the monument seems to crowd both the buildings and the other commemorative statuary in the plaza. (A few yards beyond the encircling embankments, there’s an old bronze bas relief showing Father Kino, the missionary to the Indians living here, hiking along briskly in the desert – on the memorial relief, an Indian boy scampers ahead of Father Kino a bit like a coursing hound on a leash.) Tohono O’odham symbols for water and other natural features are engraved on bricks and set into the walls above the ponds.
An aerial shot of the monument is less flattering. From the sky, the January 8 Monument looks like a giant vulva, raised labia represented by the curving embankments around the deep vaginal opening of the reflecting ponds. I suppose no one thought what the thing would look like when seen from above. After all, people aren’t supposed to view the earth from a vantage in the sky – only angels and birds of prey hover above the earth to watch us.
11.
The next morning, Julie and I make our way downtown again. We park next to a large mural a block from the January 8 Monument. The wall-painting is inscribed Tour de Tucson and shows desert animals riding bicycles – there’s a tarantula, a javelina, a scorpion, a coyote, and a gila monster all competing in the race.
For some reason, the art museum seems half-buried in the earth (it’s not) and curving walls exclude visitors from a sunken courtyard displaying a few vaguely anthropomorphic slabs. We can’t figure out how to access the building’s front door and end up entering through the back at the Café al a C’Art, the upscale snack shop affixed to the galleries. The lunch crowd is backed up into the entry-way but the line moves. You can get an expensive sandwich here or a slice of cake with mineral water or a four-dollar infusion of juice in cucumber water. The tables are occupied by groups of elderly ladies and service is very slow.
A corridor leads from the C’Art into the museum. The place owns a half-dozen very mediocre Old Master paintings but the strength of the collection, not surprisingly, are archaeological artifacts from Meso-America and some very fine folk art from across the border. The pre-Columbian objects include a nice redwood-colored Colima dog inexplicably wearing a human mask, some Mayan beakers with scrawny-looking and tattered gods somewhat like Callot’s commedia dell’ arte figures gesturing at one another in a sprightly manner – one of them is administering an enema to another figure: apparently the beaker was used for theobromine – that is, hallucinogenic cacao. Some formidable Aztec sculptures hunker down in a glass case and there are a number of charismatic Moche portrait vessels. A Wari textile, remarkably preserved, brightens the gallery. The Peruvian colonial-era paintings on the walls are wan, dimly lit martyrdoms of white-faced saints. The Native American and folk art is superb: gory scenes of violence from the dark and bloody ground of Ayachuco province in Peru – little retablo images showing men with machine-guns massacring peasants. An alarming breastplate of hammered tin, enormous and weighty like a kind of grim anchor, was worn in Corpus Christi processions by men impersonating Roman centurions – the thing is scary, an object designed to convey an impression of brute force. Another retablo shows the hand of God hovering like a storm cloud above a hapless man painted in shackles with a monstrous goat and a skeleton wielding a scythe threatening him. On an opposing wall, Fidel Castro is portrayed embracing some Latin American dictator. An artist named Abraham Mauricio Salazar (born 1957) is represented by parchment scrolls painted with religious processions – campesinos are gathered around a knoll on which there are several crosses; the sky above them is half night, lit by a grinning moon surrounded by stars, and half day dominated by a great fiery sun. This artist is a formidable talent and I write in my journal that I should learn more about him. But there is really very little published about this painter – he comes from Oaxaca and produces the parchment on which he draws and paints himself, from agave fibers. In the late seventies, he seems to have published a book depicting the religious ceremonies in his home village. The book is very rare and expensive and, probably, not a good representation of his art – the artisan paper on which he paints has a unique coarse texture that probably can’t be successfully photographed.
Outside the day has become grey. On a wall, some painted tiles seem to illustrate proverbs from a world turned upside down: A man waving a scythe threatens a cowering skeletal death; a bird gloats at a man in a cage; a malicious chair is sitting on top of a figure; an upright bull dressed like a matador prods a naked man with a picador’s lance; for some reason, a wolf-dog is giving a man a haircut. These blue, glazed tiles flank the Coat of Arms for the City of Tucson – Alma de Pueblo 2010, the tiles proclaim.
12.
The divided highway leading north to Oracle passes strip malls, fast food places, tracts of new houses, grocery stores and places selling liquor and guns. White clusters of modular dwellings are perched on ledges above the valley. The Santa Catalina Mountains are to the east and, in the morning, they cast long blue shadows over the chaparral on the foothills at their base. There are no trees and the sky is enormous.
A two-lane road intersects the main highway leading eight miles or so toward the mountains. The range rises to a high-dome dark with pine trees, 9000 feet at the summit. It’s not a fierce-looking range, rather gently sloping with more rugged terrain at lower elevations where gorges chop up the rock pedestal on which the peaks pose overhead. A big State Park occupies the north-eastern foothills where some wide sandy draws fan out from an angular canyon piercing the side of the ridge.
The trail-head parking lot is as crowded as super-market. Polo verde trees with their sinuous soft-green trunks and boughs crouch close to the car-park and green brush shadows the arroyo where the trail lifts off toward the mountains. The vigorous elderly are adjusting their rucksacks and trying out their boots among the picnic tables by the pit toilets.
I walk along the path pointed toward a notch in the foothills known as Romero Canyon. After climbing a little bluff above a broad sandy draw and, then, pitching down to cross the wash, the trail is mostly flat looping across brown grasslands toward a cut-off about a mile from the parking lot. In fact, this branch is the main trail that rises through Romero Canyon to the high country. I follow the loop to where the path drops on some steps cut from logs down into a ravine where water is trickling over a rocky stream bed. Yellow-pink boulders divert the water in tight meanders so the little creek twists and turns. This is an inconsequential water-course by any measure but in the dry desert the presence of flowing water seems remarkable – the sound of the stream washing over the stones in the gully brightens the air and, indeed, revives the spirits. At intervals, tongues of sand and pebble impound the stream creating little pools, vividly bright in the sunshine. Dragon-flies course over the trickling water, seeming to guide the stream forward through the desert. The trail skirts the creek for about a half-mile, then, ascends the bluff to the barren chaparral overlooking the parking lot. It’s warm now and the parked cars are thinning out – best to hike here before mid-day even in the first week of March.
The walk demonstrates this phenomenon: the merest presence of flowing water in the desert is fabulous, the manifestation of something mythical – the legend of Eden with its lost gardens.
13.
A mile down the road in the direction of the strip malls on the highway, another small parking lot (empty when I visited) marks the short trail to the Romero Ruin. The topography is similar to the landscape under Romero Canyon: a terrace elevated over a sandy wash and, then, a great expanse of chaparral extending to the rocky promontories of the Santa Catalina foothills.
A rancher named Francisco Romero lived at the high point of the terrace. Some stacked stones make the square footprint of a house, really just a rock cell. Romero raised cattle on the chaparral and periodically engaged in long distance rifle duels with Apache raiders. Apparently, he and the Apaches had achieved a sort of detente – they took a couple cows from him each year, shot at one another without anyone getting hit, and, then, did this all over again six months later throughout the decade of the 1850's. The Indians knew better than to rub-out Romero and his family; after all, he was a reliable source of beef to them when they were in need.
The stony detritus of Romero’s dwelling sits atop an much older and larger habitation, a Hohokam pueblo that occupied the terrace six-hundred years earlier. Nothing really remains of the pueblo on the surface of the grassland – the ruin is of the order of the archaeology maxim that three rocks in a line represents a wall. Some markers point to a few alignments of random-looking stones, low walls that apparently determined the boundaries of the pueblo. A round depression faintly visible on the terrace marks a ball-court where Indians played a team-sport imported from the Aztecs and their precursors in old Mexico. (Archaeologists have identified a second ball-court – it’s not clear to me whether this is a precursor to the facility marked next to the trail or whether the village used the two courts at the same time.) The village once occupied 15 acres and the lower hillsides sloping down to the wash were extensively farmed. A large ridge-shaped midden rises near the edge of the site, a wrinkle in the land that you wouldn’t notice except for the marker describing it. As many as 350 people may have lived here around 1100 when the village was at its height. I surmise that there must have been a half-dozen smaller satellite communities in the foothills – you don’t need elaborate sunken ball-courts unless there are other teams that the village can host in home and “away” games. Rancher Romero undoubtedly built his hut and corrals from cobbles strewn around the hilltop remaining from the pueblo. His humble walls are made from stones that once comprised the bigger and better dressed walls at the Hohokam village.
Some sturdy Sonoran saguaros flank the steps leading down into the wide, white draw. For six months of the year, slivers of flowing water snake over the sand. During the rest of the years, a woman with a pot and a scapula-digger could cut down through the sand to the wet seep about 18 inches below the surface – and, so, water was available here year round. Some bees in cactus-flowers mumble at me as I pass.
14.
A couple of glass cases with artifacts occupy a corner of the small visitor center at the entrance to the State Park.
Inside one of the cases, a tiny bell about the size of a thumbnail rests between fragments of pale grey pottery. The bell, cast from copper, was made 800 years ago in Valley of Mexico 1400 miles to the south. Urban Nahuatl-speaking craftsmen made the bells as a trade item for the wild nomadic Indians roaming the northern deserts. Somehow, the bell ended up at the Hohokam pueblo in the shadow of what we now call the Santa Catalina mountains.
The shapely little bell seems querulous – what does it tell us about human destiny and commerce? Once the trinket made a silvery tinkling sound. Now it is silent.
15.
In 1861, 120 horseman from New Mexico rode into the dusty Mexican village at Tucson and claimed the entire territory for the Confederacy. California territory was aligned with the Union and a column of cavalry was dispatched from settlements around Los Angeles to drive the Confederate forces out of the desert southwest.
The Sonoran desert in southern Arizona was vast and empty. The Union cavalry couldn’t find anyone to fight. The troops captured a flour mill that was said to be somehow connected to the rebels in Tucson. The soldiers didn’t know what to do with the several hundred sacks of flour that they commandeered at the mill and, so, these foodstuffs were given to a band of Pima Indians living nearby.
The rebels in Tucson sent a couple dozen horsemen to the ridges under a prominent mountain north of the village, a ghastly looking plug of volcanic magma called Picacho Peak. This was in April 1862. The Union cavalry approaching Tucson were camped under the rock spire where there was a small spring.
At least two accounts of the action of Picacho Peak (sometimes called “Pichacho Pass”) exist and they are completely different. This was a skirmish arising from blunders on both sides. No one claimed any glory from this fight and exactly what happened is unclear. One account says that the Confederates staged an ambush from positions in the rugged terrain under the peak. The other story is that the Union troops contrived an ambush for the purpose of capturing the rebel patrol and, thereby, weakening the forces holding Tucson. (The Union objective of the expedition was to take and hold Tucson for the North.)
Both accounts agree that the ambush was botched. Either the Union troops hiding in the rocks opened up too soon and triggered a firefight or the Union troops, descrying the Rebels hiding behind their stony fortifications, made a calamitous frontal assault on that position. Seemingly, both sides to the affray knew what they were doing, although no one effectively executed their maneuvers, and both sides knew the positions of the other. In the first fusillade, some soldiers were shot down. Then, there was a ninety-minute exchange of gunfire with much long distance sniping. In the end, both sides had casualties, more than two and less than six, with a couple fatalities – accounts vary even with respect to the number of people shot in the skirmish. Three graves existed for a few years at the site and all accounts agree that a young man named Barrett, commanding the Union patrol, was killed in the first exchange of fire – either he died fatally leading a charge on the Rebel position or he ordered his men to open fire too soon on the Confederates and was shot in the botched ambush. Two of the dead were exhumed after the War and re-interred at the military graveyard in the Presidio at San Francisco. Barrett’s grave was unmarked and his bones couldn’t be located. Later, a rail line cut through the field of combat and historians surmise that Barrett’s skeleton is somewhere under the railroad track right of way.
16.
Pichaco Peak is a gaunt claw of stone maliciously twisting up into the naked burning sky. You can pull off the freeway there and look at the monument and the small State Park in the shadow of the 1500 foot pinnacle. The summit looms overhead atop impossibly sheer grey cliffs, a jagged spike that, viewed from the east, seems brutally inaccessible.
A little town with a convenience store and bar services a small encampment of trailer houses. When I visited every single parking lot in the State Park was jammed with cars and campers and people were illegally parked along the sides of the loop road leading to the trailheads. There was no place to stop and we couldn’t even get out of our car to stretch our legs. Old folks were sitting at picnic tables in the empty desert, playing with small furry white dogs.
Amazingly, a trail leads to the top of the pinnacle. Most of the moderate part of the trail follows a ridge on the west side of the mountain not visible from the facilities under the peak’s east flank. However, there is also a trail that snakes up the side of the mountain on the freeway (east side) of the lava plug. Only a fool would attempt the climb to the top, although, of course, fools abound. On its upper heights, the path is marked by iron stakes with metal airplane cable stretched between them. You haul yourself upward, gripping the metal cable. (Of course, gloves are “recommended.” The cable becomes unbearably hot in the sun – it’s often 110 degrees F. in this basin and, I suppose, the fraying metal strands of the cable would also shred your hands.) Of course, there are scorpions and snakes underfoot.
Some photographs of the view from the pocket-sized summit of the pinnacle may be seen on the internet. What can you see? Endless miles of featureless desert, cobalt blue ranges of mountains at some indefinite distance away, dust devils whirling in the basin, the stark scar of the freeway cutting across the barren land shimmering in the heat haze.
17.
Every year, Civil War enthusiasts crowd the State Park and stage re-enactments of the battle. The actual battle involved about forty combatants at most. Modern re-enactments involve several thousand costumed troops complete with infantry battalions and artillery, both of which were conspicuous by their absence in the original skirmish between small cavalry units.
Out here, where the Civil War really didn’t happen at all, the conflict gets bigger and bigger each year.
18.
The day darkens as I drive east from Liberal, Kansas traversing a diagonal stair of highways, at first two-lane blacktop leading from grain elevator to grain elevator, and, then, freeways funneling into Kansas City. Storm clouds loom over the tall buildings in the city’s downtown. A few cold drops of rain pelt my windshield.
My cell-phone navigates for me and I reach the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at about 1:00 pm. There’s a hollow place under the slanting hill on which the museum is built, a underground car-park in which the air smells like chow mein and fried rice. It’s Sunday afternoon and the galleries are crowded.
The museum consists of a square classical temple with columns framing a marble atrium around which gloomy galleries are arranged. The exhibition rooms are dim and enforce hushed whispers upon the visitors and the art is displayed in sedate repose, like rouged corpses bemused and sitting up in their frame-caskets. Annexed to the beaux arts temple, standard for just about every museum built in the United States between 1890 and 1930, a long narrow corridor, a bit like a concourse in an airport, descends the hill. The concourse is wide and equipped with both cascades of steps and ramps at intervals of about 100 feet – the galleries are located in white rooms with towering ceilings to the right of the broad descending corridor. In this part of the complex, the Bloch building, everything is white on white and the pictures hang in a pale void that seems to be simultaneously bright (lit by overhead skylights) and, yet, like a mine adit deep within the earth. On the day of my visit, the skies were grey, mottled with pale wormholes through which rain and, sometimes, whiffs of sleet fell.
Every part of the museum smelled of chow mein and pork fried rice. The guards emitted this odor. The patrons of the museum were saturated with this smell. I could perceive the scent in my hair and moustache and in the folds of my garments.
19.
Here is where I describe the highlights of the Museum’s collection, at least as I perceived it on the day of my visit. I’ve toured this museum four or five times and, probably, written as many reports and, so, dear Reader, you may glance away from this section if you so desire.
Assiduous museum-goers know that your eye is most fresh and perceptive during the first forty-minutes looking at pictures. After that, things deteriorate into a technicolor muddle. Therefore, my narrative as to a trip to the museum is always skewed toward admiring things that I saw early in my visit and, probably, neglects the galleries through which I hastened after two-and-a-half hours on my way out through the gift shop.
An Etruscan Zeus dominates one display case in the old part of the museum. The bronze figurine’s state of preservation seems suspicious to me. Only 16 inches high, the little god, nonetheless, threatens to fling a thunderbolt at his worshipers (our status, I suppose, as we gaze at him in his vitrine.) The thunderbolt is missing but the god wields a curious serpentine dagger in his left hand. He’s conspicuously naked although with a sort of shawl casually draped over his shoulder and forearm. The Etruscans called Zeus “Tinia” and the figure is much more slender than Roman counterparts – the god looks lithe and athletic. Nearby, a marble Roman sarcophagus has been carved in deep relief. The deceased, a bland-looking and elegant matron, seems baffled by the fact that she is dead and surrounded by gesticulating figures of the muses. George Bellows is represented by an alarming portrait, the life-size figure on the canvas named as “Frankie the Organ Boy” – meaning that the urchin is an organ-grinders (hurdy-gurdy) assistant. The kid seems mentally defective and his face is painted in a manner that presages Francis Bacon, a meaty blur of features, all folded together under black bulbous eyes. The remarkable aspect of this canvas is that it has been painted with all the sensual gaudiness of a society portrait by John Singer Sargeant – a few examples of the latter’s paintings share the wall a bit uneasily with Frankie. In another gallery, a supernatural bison confronts viewers on an Arikara shield – the creature is clearly some sort of deity with a great hirsute breast, curved horns, and eyes widely spaced (the artist has eschewed perspective in painting this apparition’s head) so that the beast-god seems to gaze directly into your soul. A short walk away, a very elegant bulto or hand-carved statue of a saint, stands on a plinth, a bit helpless because her hands are either missing or mutilated. Although the image is described on the label as a bulto, it’s not clear to me whether that term is completely apposite: the figure represents the Virgin Mary – is she a saint or something else? The wood mannequin is shaped like a triangle or Christmas tree. Her skirt bears the pattern of a Navajo blanket, a strips of color with tear-drop shaped pendants, probably an image of water falling from a sky-band. In one hand, the figure originally held the Christ child and there was a rosary dangling from the outstretched fingers of her other hand. The goddess was fitted for silver crown that, like the baby Jesus and the rosary, has now gone missing. The figure was made in New Mexico, probably between 1830 and 1850, and scholars have, even, recently put a name to the artist that made this devotional effigy. The Virgin’s face is the most notable aspect of this 30 inch tall figure – the wood-carver has given her tiny head strangely precise features, as if the image were modeled after a real person known to the artist. It’s a memorable work, once seen quickly forgotten in the very forefront of the imagination, but lurking forever in the mind’s more shadowy recesses so that once you glimpse the thing, you feel as if you have always known and, even, perhaps, reverenced it.
Among the modern paintings, there’s a big, chubby “Woman” by de Kooning, a pastel-colored smear on the canvas that looks like Basquiat or as if someone had applied paint to the Willendorf Venus or some other robust paleolithic goddess carved from stone or antler. A painting by Marsden Hartley of Mount Katahdin in Maine proposes a landscape comprised of the peak’s black stela looming over a green blur of forest and lake. One gallery is hung with big pictures by Thomas Hart Benton, a native son: there’s bumpkin peeping at a voluptuous nude girl reclining in the hay and straw, a suitably impressed tableaux of the Hollywood dream factory, also equipped with a half-naked girl, and the fierce image of Carl Ruggles, the composer, bent over his piano as if it were a tool box in an iron foundry. Benton’s pictures are sophisticated in that they manipulate the viewers to see things from the perspective of some bemused rube fresh from the country, voyeuristically inspecting the art with naive and baffled eyes.
20.
A challenging conundrum for a museum of this sort is its large collection of mediocre paintings. What should be the fate of 400-year old devotional images, for instance, very carefully painted but either uninteresting or, perhaps, even laughably inept? Although the status of such things as “fine art” may be problematic, nonetheless, museum curators may feel doubts about simply deaccessioning these things or, even, hiding them to gather dust in a storeroom. After all, pictures of this sort possess an undeniable historical significance even if incompetently executed. This problem vexes not merely big and encyclopedic museums like the Nelson-Atkins but, also, I suppose Ted DeGrazia’s Sun Gallery in Tucson.
The Nelson-Atkins museum shows the work of artists who may have produced a half-dozen reasonably good paintings. But they are in other museums. For instance, how is the viewer supposed to respond to a Northern European Madonna and Child, presumably roughly contemporary with Jan van Eyck – the pinched-looking mother is wax-white and she seems to be suffering from rigor mortis and her eyes are painted like black raisins? In stiff arms, she holds the Baby Jesus who looks like a scalded baby monkey shaved down to its pale flesh. These are Old Masters who are Odd Masters – they get the perspective wrong, can’t depict figures as foreshortened, and, sometimes, the application of color is idiosyncratic or just plain wrong. In a nearby gallery, there’s a Romanesque sculpture of the Virgin, probably fake, I think, that seems to be influenced by Botero – the Virgin is fat with a round smiling face and the babe on her hip is also jolly: here Baby Jesus looks like a plump Jaycee, a miniature civic booster who extends his hand in a cheery greeting. The artifact is carved from raw porous stone that is half-eroded around the edges, the work poorly executed, but, also, (if authentic) very old.
21.
Sleet pelts my windshield as I drive the freeway north from Kansas City to Kearney, Missouri. Somewhere behind these curtains of falling ice, there must be a city but I see nothing more than an intersection beside my motel with two competing gas stations, a couple of fast food places, and, on the hill, an anonymous strip mall. A red flare of neon advertises The Hunan Garden in the strip mall. (There must be 400 Hunan Gardens scattered between various cities, suburbs and towns in the United States.) For some reason, I have a hankering for Chinese food and I’m hungry, not much to eat during my long drive across Kansas except gas station food on which it’s better to pass. I skid through a couple intersections to reach the Chinese restaurant on its bleak ridge above an empty snow-smeared parking lot. When I try to exit the car, my foot slips on the ice and the windshield is now caked with freezing sleet and, it seems, that if I go inside for my Chinese supper, I’ll depart in any hour onto a parking lot that has become an ice rink and, perhaps, it will even be impossible to reach my vehicle due to the slipperiness underfoot and, then, when I am there, if pedestrian transit is feasible, the car doors will be frozen shut and I’ll have to spend a quarter of an hour chipping ice off the windshield, all these operations conducted with zero traction on the concrete below and the danger of spinning out of control in the intersections, or at the stop lights, on my way back to the motel. And, so, I pull shut the door and watch The Hunan Garden receding in my rear-view mirror and there is no other choice but to use the drive-through at a Burger King to buy some fast food that I will eat in my room as the ice storm continues in the darkness outside the window of my motel room.
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