On the Riders in the Sky

 

Barren land stretches into the distance.  But there is no horizon.  Rather, the expanse of desert seems encounter a silvery shimmering wall.  A sort of mural moves on the wall, the simulacrum, I suppose, of a motion picture.  A group of elongated figures, shaped a bit like Giacometti sculptures, float in the air.  Next to them is a white bus.  The bus moves erratically, creeping away from the floating figures, then, reversing its direction, backing and turning to return to the assembled people.  The wheels of the bus are also untethered, floating on ribbons of pale, lunar light.  The figures begin to move, slowly advancing toward the white bus, but distances are foreshortened and make no sense – it seems that the bus, hovering over the figures in the desert occupies an entirely different space than the people.  They will amble toward the white bus forever without reaching it.

I saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana in the auditorium of an art museum many years ago.  The bus and the apparitions of people standing inexplicably in the empty desert was a mirage, as the film’s title suggests, a fata morgana.  Herzog used his camera to capture something that was visible but not real.  The film’s narrator (I think it is the German critic Lotte Eisner) says that Herzog and his camera crew drove across the Sahara desert in the direction of the bus and its stranded passengers.  But there was nothing at all where the image had appeared floating in featureless sky.  In the movie, the narrator tells us that barren desert extended for hundreds of miles in all directions around the place where the camera documented the mirage – there was absolutely nothing anywhere near.  Later, Herzog provided a commentary on the film.  He amended his account of the distances involved – “maybe, these people and the bus were standing twenty miles away,” he says in his later remarks.  He tells us that the day was an inferno and that he and his crew were desperately thirsty.  Buses in the Sahara deserts carry coolers full of ice and soft drinks and Herzog and his cameraman hoped to catch up with the white vehicle to get some ice to cool their tongues and cans of Coca-Cola.  But there was absolutely nothing in the place where they had sighted the mirage.

When I was a child, on rainy afternoons, I used to explore the old 78 rpm recordings stored in stacks in a corner of our basement.  Some of the ten-inch wide disks were kept in a sort of loose-leaf album, the records protected by clear plastic sheaths.  The album was a bit like the books in which photographs were kept in the late fifties and early sixties.  When you turned the pages carelessly, the records slipped out of their protective sleeves and fell onto your lap.  (This wasn’t different from flipping through a picture album – often, the polaroid snapshots detached from the page and fluttered like moths spiraling down to the floor.)  Other 78 rpms were simply stacked in piles on a shelf next to where my parents kept stacks of National Geographic magazines.  I recall the dim light in the unfinished basement room, the bare light bulb over the washer and dryer with chain drooping down from the socket, tool-boxes and sacks of nails, and the ominous drain in the floor, about the same dimensions as the records that I was examining.  In the paneled part of the basement, we had a cheap record player, designed for LP records, but there was an adapter that could be inserted over the spindle so that 78s could be played – of course, you had to adjust the turntable speed.  

Most of my father’s 78 rpm recordings were jazz tunes by Louis Armstrong.  But there were also some stacks of classical records: the third movement from Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, some Beethoven as well – a 78 RPM record will play about three minutes of music and, so, you had to stack the discs on the spindle to listen to the longer classical selections.  Sometimes, this worked and sometimes it didn’t.  The old 78s were thick and heavy to hold; they had a raw mechanical quality, like the nails and tools and fading National Geographics kept in the basement storage room.  (People reading these words today may have trouble understanding the dense, almost ceramic, quality of those records. They were colored like shards of stained glass and not fragile, in fact, robust and cool and durable.  You could pitch the 78 rpms like frisbees across a room and they wouldn’t break.  The loud parts of the music were visible in the striations grooving the records – volume was made manifest in the thickness of the grooves.  There was a synaesthetic quality to the records; you could feel the sound with your fingertips – the grooves in the vinyl made the music audible even before you played the 78.)

Among the 78 rpm recordings, I found a couple of discs by the Sons of the Pioneers.  I recall these records as turquoise in color, a little scuffed with frequent use, but playable.  My memory is haphazard and plays tricks on me; memories are like mirages.  I’ve always recalled that the disc played “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on one side and “Cool Water” on its inverse.  (Research on the subject persuades me that this was unlikely.  In fact, I now know that “Cool Water’s” B-side was “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” – the disc was pressed in 1947.  However, for the purposes of this essay, I’ll describe the 78 as I recall it: heavy, thick, the color of Navajo turquoise, cold as ice to the touch, and pressed with “Cool Water” on one side and playing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” when you turned the disk over.  This is a fiction, most probably, although who knows for sure – the actual 78 rpm recordings are lost in the abyss of time.)

My father told me that my grandfather (his father), a Lutheran pastor in a small-town in central Nebraska had once preached a sermon taking “Cool Water” as its subject.  How exactly this was accomplished, of course, I don’t know and the anecdote seems improbable.  I never knew my grandfather but he had been educated in a seminary in Germany – at least, that’s where he completed his training in theology – and seems to have been a rather dour, formidable man.  He died when I was very young, too little to have any recollection of him at all.  But, it seems that bending the scripture to the text of a Sons of the Pioneers pop song might have been out of character for the old preacher – however, people are surprising and I suspect it’s not easy to preach, once in German and twice in English, every Sunday with other pastoral duties, visiting the sick and baptizing children, marrying couples and burying the dead, and, even on occasion, traveling out into the dark country on Prom Night or New Year’s Eve to administer last rites to the victims of car crashes on the narrow, lonesome highways and, so, I suppose the popular tune (it reached number 9 on the charts in 1947) might have offered itself as a convenient subject for a sermon on God’s grace and the temptations of the Devil.  Albion, where my grandfather was called to Zion Lutheran Church, is on the edge of the Sand Hills, a vast terrain of dunes clad in green and yellow grass, rolling like waves on the sea to the horizon.  People living in that village were either farmers or ranchers and, I would guess, that the cowboy tunes performed by the Sons of the Pioneer were likely very well-known and beloved, canonical, as it were, for that time and place.

“Cool Water” begins with an ambling rhythm, a clip-clopping figure that imitates the gait of a mule making its way through the desert: “All day I faced the barren waste without the taste of water – cool clear water.”  The mule’s name is apparently “Dan” and the cowboy riding the animal under the blazing sun addresses his mount.  In fact, the song is a dramatic monologue addressed to Dan, the loyal long-suffering mule and the cowboy’s only companion.  The singer laments the heat of the day and finds himself deceived by mirages of “cool, clear water.”  (In a high tenor voice, one of the trios singers keeps repeating over and over again the word “water” – the effect is plaintive, the high echo suggesting the cowboy’s overwhelming thirst.)  Of course, the cowboy is tempted to urge his mule forward in the direction of the watery mirages on the horizon: “Oh Dan don’t you see that the big green tree where the water’s running free? cool, clear water...” But there is no “big green tree” and no overflowing spring at its base.  Rather, the devil “spreads the burning sand” with the mirage of water.  So the cowboy admonishes his faithfully plodding donkey: “Keep a movin’ Dan, don’t you listen to that man, he’s a devil not a man who spreads the burning sand with water.”  As the song continues, the cowboy becomes more and more desperate.  He prays for night fall and respite from the blazing sun and, at last, hopes that the dawn will bring them closer to “cool, clear water.” 

The song is haunting and has a nightmarish quality; there’s something hallucinatory about the melody and it’s lyrics – the song seems like the last words of a cowboy doomed to a thirsty death. The conventional and prosaic clip-clop of the mule’s hooves and the echoed refrain “water” sung in a voice that is nearly falsetto contrasts with the increasing panic and desperation of the cowboy crossing the desert.  Once you have heard this song, you’re not likely to forget it and, in fact, the tune has a fascinating quality and has been recorded by many different artists.  Bob Dylan and Burl Ives are said to have sung versions of “Cool Water” and there are many country-western recordings of the tune.  Fleetwood Mac released a nice rendition of “Cool Water” as side B to “Gypsy” in 1982.  Sometimes, Jimi Hendrix covered the song in concert.  Joni Mitchell sings a duet of “Cool Water” with Willie Nelson in 1988 – she changes the lyrics to give the tune an environmental theme: “Some devil’s had a plan / Buried poison in the sand / Don’t drink it, man / It’s in the water – cool, clear water.”  Joni Mitchell’s version is characteristically ethereal and her voice remains as cool and consolatory as water sipped from a metal canteen in the desert. 

“Cool Water” was written by Bob Nolan, a singer born in Winnipeg in 1908.  Nolan wrote the lyrics in High School.  At that time his family was living in Tucson, Arizona and so he had some familiarity with the “burning waste” of the desert.  Nolan formed the trio, “The Sons of the Pioneers” in 1933 with Leonard Slye, better known by his stage name, Roy Rogers, and Tim Spencer.  It seems that the “Sons of the Pioneers” began performing “Cool Water” around 1937, but the song wasn’t recorded until ten years later when it was released with “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” on a 78 rpm disk.

“Cool Water” describes a mirage of the “lower” or “inferior” type.  In the taxonomy of mirages, there are “inferior” images – that is, optical effects that are displayed below the horizon – and “superior” mirages.  “Superior” mirages include the fata morgana in which the illusory image is projected above the horizon and appears as a shimmering band floating in the sky.  

Most “inferior” mirages arise from a hot layer of air immediately above the ground.  Light encountering this stratum of warm air is bent downward.  By virtue of this refraction, the blue of the sky is deflected into an image shimmering under the horizon.  Since this sky is bright and luminous with blue-grey light, the mirage appears as a body of water, a lake, glistening in the remote distance.  Mountains or copses of trees or, in the Midwest, grain elevators hover over this lake as if they are islands in the quivering expanse of illusory water.  “Inferior” mirages of this kind are called “the picture” (chittram) in Rajasthan where such phenomena are common.  In Sanskrit, “inferior” mirages are named Mrigtrishna meaning “the thirst of the gazelles,” the notion being that gazelles drawn by the promise of water will wander into the parched desert and die of thirst there.  Not surprisingly, in Islamic and Hindu literature, “inferior” mirages are commonly invoked as metaphors for the vanity of human desire – we yearn for something that is merely illusory and, perhaps, perish in our vain pursuit of that phantasm.  Probably, my grandfather invoked the song “Cool Water” is that context.

“Superior” mirages are more flamboyant and alarming.  These kinds of images appear over flat terrain when there is a temperature inversion.  Ordinarily, the air immediately above the earth is warmer than at higher levels.  But, when there is a cold stratum of air, squashed to earth by warmer temperatures above, a fata morgana may arise.  These mirages appear above the horizon, stretched out across shimmering ribbon of sky.  Often the fata morgana are phantom cities, strange cubical towers and ramparts, or the reflections of objects on the horizon duplicating themselves in distorted form overhead.  Indeed, some of these mirages seem bound by wavering threads, shadowy pulpy excrescences, to their originals below.  The air refracted upward, above the horizon, acts as a magnifying lens and, in some cases, the images projected into the sky are much larger than their (real) earth-bound counterparts.  On other occasions, the projection tilts or topples the objects at the horizon together forming strange and grotesque chimera in the sky.  Fata Morgana can have an eerily precise and lifelike aspect – the name alludes to Morgan le Fay, a siren who appears in the Arthurian legends, luring men to the deaths at sea.   Some spectacular pictures of “superior” mirages exist: of course, Herzog captured one of these illusions in his film Fata Morgana and the first photograph ever depicting any kind mirage, a “superior” apparition, was published in June of 1885.  The picture was taken at Madras and shows a sort of dinghy with a high hull rowed by a eight men across a busy harbor; in the distance, a steamer with masts rides on the ocean horizon.  The photo when taken, “quite by accident” it is alleged, shows a ghostly dinghy, a so-called Massula boat hovering directly over the real vessel with the apparition of the more remote steamer to its side.  Temperature inversions are more common in cold climates than warm and, so, the Arctic skies display this phenomenon frequently.  There is an 1888 (or 1889) photograph taken by one Professor R. G. Willoughby named “Silent City” sold for 75 cents a print when first published and much-reproduced.  The picture depicts a city of gabled house-tops and shingled roofs studded with chimneys emerging from the mists of the Muir Glacier; behind the foreground of the city as seen from an aerial perspective, there seem to be some grandiose structures, government buildings with white columns or some sort of northern European palace, dissolved partially in the acid of foggy distance.  (I think the city may be represented to be St. Petersburg or Bristol or something on that order – certainly, no city of this magnitude existed anywhere near the Muir Glacier in Alaska in 1888.  The picture isn’t convincing to me and seems to be a double exposure of some sort and, although the image is supposed to depict the “silent city” protruding from the glacier, for the life of me, I can’t see any glacial ice in the photograph.)

In North America, the most famous manifestation of a “superior mirage” or fata morgana is the “ghost rider in the sky.”  In the deserts of the Great Basin, Indians claimed to see colossal ghost riders trotting through the clouds.  The ghost riders are terrifying in appearance, said to be a giant White man writhing in agony on his horse and a Native American woman, shriveled and cadaverous.  A story accompanied these visions and explained their origin: an Omaha warrior named “First Thunder Falls” lived in the mountains of Oregon with his beautiful “Bird Woman” (Zecana).  (It’s not clear why an Omaha warrior has wandered into the alpine meadows of Oregon but the story is supposed to be a legend and so disbelief must be suspended.)  A Spanish trader visits the couple and, unbeknownst to First Thunder, rapes Zecana.  The trader lures First Thunder to a “boiling spring” that, like the hot springs and vents at Delphi, has oracular power.  First Thunder pays obeisance to the bubbling well by throwing some beads into the water as an offering.  But the spring belches the beads back onto its surface and refuses to accept the tribute.  In the water and steam, First Thunder beholds the face of Bird Woman, now distraught and wild-eyed with madness.  She mutters that the Spaniard raped her.  First Thunder bides his time.  He returns to the high meadows of Oregon with the Spaniard, disables the man, and, then, straps him naked to a wild horse.  Zecana, the Bird Woman, has committed suicide and, in a macabre gesture, First Thunder binds the decaying body face-to-face with the Spaniard.  Then, driving the horse with the Spaniard and Zecana’s corpse coupled in grotesque embrace, he trots across the deserts of the Great Basin, sometimes pouring a trickle of water between the White Man’s lips to keep him alive in this torment as long as possible.  It is this apparition, the Ghost Riders in the Sky, that haunts the Great Desert wilderness.  (This tale was printed in 1837 in the British periodical Bentley’s Miscellany, entitled “Nights in an Indian Lodge.”  The story was published anonymously but the probable author is Charles Fenno Hoffman.  Hoffman wrote a number of stories of this sort and was admired by Edgar Alan Poe among others.  He went mad in 1849 and spent the last thirty years of his life and spent the last thirty years of his life confined in the Harrisburg State Hospital.  The tale of Zecana and First Thunder bears a passing resemblance to Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, particularly with respect to the motif of the tortured victim tied to a horse and driven endlessly across the empty land – in Mazeppa’s case, the steppes of Ukraine.  Tchaikovsky wrote an opera on the subject of Byron’s 1819 poem and there is an alarmingly grim canvas by Gericault showing Mazeppa’s torture.)

Of course, everyone knows the Sons of the Pioneer’s song “Ghost Riders in the Sky”.  The song was written by man named Stan Jones and has been recorded innumerable times.  Jones was the son of a doctor and raised in Douglas, Arizona.  Although he presented himself as a simple cowpoke, Jones had a Masters Degree in Zoology from Berkeley.  Jones knocked-about the West for a few years, worked as a prize-fighter and cowboy, and ended-up as a Park Ranger in Death Valley National Park (then Monument).  When John Ford, the film director, was working in the Park, Jones met him and became drinking buddies with the irascible movie-maker.  (If you wanted to be friends with John Ford, you had to drink with him.)  Ford recognized that Jones had an agreeable squashed-looking face, probably the result of boxing, and that he was photogenic.  And so, Ford cast Jones in several of his movies and used him as a Wild West consultant on The Searchers.  Jones later went to work for Disney Studios and stars as John Wesley Powell in Ten Who Dared, a yarn about the exploration of the Grand Canyon, generally thought to be one of Disney’s very worst movies.  

Stan Jones claimed he learned the legend of the “Ghost Riders” from an elderly Apache who lived on a mountain near Agua Prieta in Sonora.  The song was first recorded in 1948.  The most famous version is the 1949 recording by the Sons of the Pioneers.  The song has a furious attack, a sort of sonic stampede.  The music gallops wildly forward and a French Horn sounds a bugle call.  The lyrics tell us that “(a)n old cow poke was riding out one dark and windy day”.  Pausing to rest atop a ridge, he sees a herd of spectral cattle driven across the gloomy sky, and “up a cloudy draw.”  The cattle have hooves “made from steel” and sharp black horns and their brands are still on fire, blazing overhead in the clouds.  Ghost riders vainly pursue this herd of nightmare, stampeding cattle, crying out the iconic summons “Yippie ay a (as in day), Yippie ay o (as in woe).”  The ghost riders are gaunt and their shirts are sweat-soaked.  One of the ghost riders calls the cowpoke by name and tells him that he must mend his ways or be condemned to hell, and, like this apparition, “tryin’ to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.”  Hell hangs over the dismal cobalt-blue ranges of desert mountains.  (There’s another fine recording of this song featuring Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash – this version has spidery, high-pitched wails on steel guitar and a noteworthy guitar solo.)  One wonders what Pastor Beckmann might have made of this song.

The most famous historical appearance of the superior mirage “ghost riders” occurred in what is now North Dakota on May 17, 1876.  On that day, the Seventh Cavalry under the command of George Custer left Fort Abraham Lincoln, marching westward in pursuit of the hostile Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull.  The column consisted of 150 wagons, Arikawa scouts, and, of course, the armed horsemen.  Libby Custer, George’s wife, watched the column departing from camp in the morning.  She recorded that the weather was uncommonly humid with mist covering the ground.  Above the column of cavalry and caissons, Libby saw ghostly apparitions of the horsemen and their wagons, a duplicate phalanx plodding westward across the green, treeless plains.  Mrs. Custer recalled that the wives of the Arikawa warriors accompanying the column fell to the ground wailing and, when she saw the apparition, she felt a premonition of “the fate of the heroic band.”  The column marching westward was two miles long and the mirage in the sky encompassed half of the force, projected in giant form against the mist still swirling opposite the rising sun.  

This writing imagines a fantasy artifact: a turquoise blue-green lens of vinyl, impressed with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on one side and with “Cool Water” on its inverse.  The 78 rpm record is by the Sons of the Pioneers.  “Cool Water” depicts an “inferior mirage” of the type of “the thirst of the gazelles.”  “Ghost Riders in the Sky” presents a “superior mirage” like the “Silent City”.  This exact record never existed.  Like its content, it’s a mirage.  

Note:

(I rely, in part, on The Waterless Sea, A curious history of mirages by Christopher Pinney, a Reaktion Book published in 2018 in London; the books are distributed in the U.S. by the University of Chicago.  Curiously, the book was withdrawn from the public library in Richardson, Texas, a place that I once lived.  My family moved to Texas and lived there for about 18 months in Richardson around 1968.  The book has a curious, inexplicable to me, convention used in the captions to the pictures, but not in the text itself.  In words like “construct” the “ct” and “st” letters are joined by a ligature, a curved diacritical mark, emanating from the “t” and linking that character to the preceding consonant; the effect is to treat the “st” and “ct” as a digraph.  Apparently, ligatures of this sort were devised when moveable type was invented to keep characters from colliding in unseemly ways.  The convention went out of currency in the 18th and 19th century, but seems to have been recently revived in some computer-generated orthography.)   

On a Masonic Funeral

 

A business associate recently died.  I was not good friends with the man but had cordial dealings with him.  The deceased was a member of a Lutheran Church in my town and his obsequies were scheduled for that place.  However, on the evening before the religious rites, a Masonic funeral ceremony was conducted at a local mortuary.  I attended that ceremony and report on its characteristics.  Freemasonry, at least, in the United States is moribund and, itself, dying.  In another thirty years, the fraternal organization’s lodges across North America will be extinct.  Thus, important traditions in both culture and history will perish.  It behooves us, then, to consider what will be lost when the Freemasons no longer exist.

The deceased was a civic booster, politically connected, and well-liked.  As a young man, he sold suits for a living.  Later, he worked in various family enterprises that were not particularly successful.  When he was about 35, this fellow (I will call him “John Smith”) ran for political office in the State legislature but was badly defeated.  Around that time, he obtained an insurance license and began selling various financial and insurance products, among them annuities and health insurance plans.  His unsuccessful political career, a venture in which he was essentially his party’s sacrificial lamb, created certain obligations in the Republican party owed to my acquaintance.  Once I delivered a speech on insurance issues at his request.  I presented my remarks at a Holiday Inn at a county seat forty miles from my home town.  A very prominent local politician, formerly a Senator in Washington, was present and seemed to be on familiar terms with Mr. Smith.  I recall seeing the two men sitting in the dimly lit Holiday Inn bar, discussing sports.  Mr. Smith owned horses and participated in trail rides, a pursuit that was also enjoyed by the State’s ex-governor.  I am told that Mr. Smith could call the former governor at any time and have his ear with respect to all matters of politics and governance.  

Mr. Smith joined the Fidelity Lodge of Freemasons in Austin, Minnesota in 1990.  By all accounts, he was not a particularly faithful member.  Freemasonry is an inherited avocation.  Mr. Smith’s father had been a 32nd Degree Freemason and, so, he aspired to that honor.  I’m not entirely sure that he succeeded in attaining this goal.  In his last several years, Mr. Smith was disabled as a consequence of a cerebral hemorrhage.  He had always been a very strong man, physically robust and vigorous, and was an optimist as well.  He struggled against his disability, engaged in arduous physical therapy, and, apparently, regained much of his functions that had been impaired.  He needed all of his strength to endure the ill-health of his wife, dying of cancer.  This woman’s passing was expected and, already, mourned to some extent.  But Mr. Smith died before his wife, without warning, on the first warm day of the Spring.  I am told he was found on the floor next to his bed.  As I write, I don’t know the exact cause of his death, something that is really none of my business.

It was also warm on the day of the ceremony.  A gathering for family and friends, that is, a “wake”, was scheduled for 5 to 7 at the mortuary.  After a long winter, spring was, at last, underway.  The sky was clear and the afternoon warm, probably about 84 degrees, unseasonably hot for mid-April in Minnesota.  Fuzzy buds with a vaguely lascivious aspect were bulging from branches and twigs.  A few bumblebees, tipsy with the warmth and the bright sun, hovered between shrubs – it was too early for flowers and nectar and the bees seemed a bit baffled by the onset of good weather.  The trees were leafless, open like scaffolds to the sky.  At the funeral home, the parking lot was full and, of course, some middle-aged men were standing at the door, smoking or wishing that they could smoke.  

Mr. Smith’s corpse was not in evidence.  I suppose the body had been cremated and reposed in an urn somewhere but I didn’t notice it.  Chairs had been set up in rows for the Masonic evening ritual.  I didn’t know anyone except for the wife of my law partner, a member of the lodge since 1990 (he had joined on the same day as the deceased.)  I looked at the video display in which a succession of photographs showing Mr. Smith limped across the screen.  The images were somehow disheartening: they showed Mr. Smith as a bright-eyed, round baby, as a handsome young man with an impish smile – in some photos, he was hawking suits – and, then, as a plump, powerfully built middle-aged business man.  He owned a pontoon boat and several photographs showed Mr. Smith with a cocktail in his big fist enthroned in a regal posture on the boat.  Later, of course, he was afflicted with illness and, in some of the last pictures, wasn’t really recognizable except for a certain cast of his eyes and the shape of his grin.  

A few minutes after 7, the lodge brothers entered in a solemn, very slow-moving procession.  The men wore business suits and their mid-sections were swathed with spotlessly white aprons.  The brethren were very old, most of them in their mid- to late-seventies.  I recognized the retired owner of the downtown Department of Motor Vehicle franchise, another old man who had run a service station near my law office, and several others.  Many of the old men were half-crippled and the Lodge Master moved with a walker that he shoved before him with each step.  The youngest lodge-brother was in his forties, a Hispanic man obviously an immigrant to Austin – I believe that in Mexico and central America, the Freemasons continue to thrive.  Closer to the Hispanic member in age was a gentleman in his fifties with long hair and shaggy beard – he looked like an aging hippy.  (I know that many counter-culture types from my youth were obsessed with the Freemasons, primarily interested in the mystery surrounding the secret society – I recall some drug-fueled conversations about Jacques DeMolay and the Knights Templar, an organization that had some remote and arcane connections to the Shrine.)

The members of the Fidelity Lodge took places standing at the chairs at the right side of the room.  They remained standing respectfully as the ceremony was called to order.  The Master of the Lodge, a distinguished-looking fellow about eighty years old, assumed a presiding position behind the podium.  He announced that the Freemasons were not a religious faith, but they believed in God with fervor and intensity.  A Bible opened to Ecclesiastes 12 sat on the table, surrounded by big bouquets of flowers.  The Master said that Masons prayed by crossing their hands over their chest, a gesture that he demonstrated.  He explained that at the end of each prayer, the brothers would intone the phrase “So mote it be”, words that I didn’t understand and had to research later.  (So mote it be means “So shall it be” – the phrase is first recorded in a founding document of the York Rite, the so-called Halliwell Manuscript or Regius Poem, a set of couplets in Middle English dating to 1425 to 1450.)

The Master of the Lodge asked an officer to call the roll.  Each lodge-brother was named and responded “Here!”  At the end of the roll-call, the officer said: “John Smith”.  Silence.  “John Smith” was repeated and again silence. And a third time, “John Smith” with no response.

“John Smith does not answer,” the Lodge Master said.

Silence again.

The Lodge Master asked: “So what shall we do?”

“Let us pray,” the officer responded.

A dignified and eloquent prayer followed, something about a Brother Mason having been called home to paradise after his labors on this earth.  The brothers remained standing, each crossing his arms over his chest, with left arm over right and palms placed on each shoulder.

At the end of the prayer, all recited: “So mote it be.”  

The Master, then, read a short homily about how men are called to be builders and that it is the dignity of each of us to work in the temple in the world to make in a better place.  The Master asserted that the order of Masons was ancient and noble and that life is in earnest and that the Brethren, particularly the deceased, had taken their obligations seriously and would go to their reward in a heavenly realm where the great eye of Justice is unsleeping.

There was another prayer.  Then, the Master took up the Bible and read from Ecclesiastes 12 – to everything there is a time appointed for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to rejoice and a time to mourn...

(In the row in front of me, several old ladies were inhaling oxygen through tubes under their noses.  The oxygen tanks hissed and the women made a sound like people loudly slurping soup.)

The Master said the Masonic order expresses its truths in symbolic form.  He explained that the white apron signifies purity and cleanliness of purpose to which each Lodge Brother aspires.  The Master raised before our eyes, an hourglass.  “Like sand through an hour glass, such are the days of our lives...” The phrase, of course, has been appropriated by a day-time soap opera.  “There is only gift that all men are given equally,” the Master said.  “This is the gift of time.”  The Master told us that a sprig of acacia, an evergreen, signifies life eternal.  Then, the Master called the lodge brothers to approach the urn in which the ashes of Mr. Smith reposed.  (The urn was hidden to me behind great fans of flowers.)  In turn, each brother stood for a moment in front of Mr. Smith’s ashes, then lifted the acacia overhead, to show it to the assembled congregation, before setting it in front of the urn.

When the acacia sprigs were all deposited next to Mr. Smith’s remains, the brothers returned to their seats, although they remained standing.  The Master said that Mr. Smith had been a 32nd degree Mason like his father and that he joined the honorable and ancient order in 1990.  

There was another brief prayer: “So mote it be,” the brothers said and, then, the ritual was at an end.

Each lodge brother, in turn, saluted the widow and the dead man’s family members.  The old men shook hands solemnly with the survivors and hugged the women.  The Master said that the lodge brothers stood ready to assist the family in all ways.  

I saw the Master in the parking lot, alone, and inching toward his car within the bright silver cage of his walker.  The breeze stirred in the bare branches overhead and the air was sweet and wiry shadows cast by the naked limbs moved underfoot.

The emphasis of the funeral rite was that men are called to a better world.  In this sublunary realm, temples must be raised, walls constructed, repairs made and the masons perform this labor cheerfully and without surcease.  Their rest is in heaven when they are called home to that “undiscovered country from which no traveler returns” and where God’s temple is not “made by human hands.”  

What’s wrong with this?  Nothing so far as I can see.  I think the world will be a poorer place when the noble and ancient order of the Freemasons has gone the way of the mastodon and the Tasmanian tiger.  Their time has past and they are hastening toward oblivion.  Nothing better has replaced them and, after they have passed, there will be a hole in existence.     

On S'Cuk Son

Superbowl slaughterhouse

The Superbowl flooded Phoenix with visitors.  Room rates skyrocketed.  Obviously early February 2023 was not a reasonable time to schedule the board meeting in Arizona for the captive insurance company on which I am a director.  Instead, the annual meeting was deferred until March 6, a late date for this event.  

The board meeting is a junket, scheduled primarily to afford an opportunity to escape Minnesota and enjoy the warmth and sunshine of the great Southwest.  Most of the board members play golf at the Arizona Grand Resort where the meeting is held.  On the two evenings before and after the morning conclave, a tedious affair involving many balance sheets and discussions of accounting principles, the owners of the company sponsors feasts at various expensive steak-houses.  Slabs of beef go with golf, apparently, and drinks with dinner are put of the board member’s compensation.  

At the Phoenix airport, on the Sun Country airline concourse, a big mural welcomes Super Bowl visitors.  The mural shows a blood-drenched landscape specked with gory gobbets of flesh.  The image looks like a slaughterhouse floor with the words SUPERBOWL emblazoned on the carnage and strange hatchmarks blue as florescent lights hovering over the grisly vista.  What in the world is this supposed to mean?  

The Creaturely insists upon its prerogatives

The night before our early morning flight to Phoenix, I was restless and couldn’t get comfortable in the hotel bed.  Before dawn, my bowels were unsettled and I developed a violent case of the flu on the airplane.  The flight to Phoenix breasted enormous headwinds, over 200 miles an hour, under the clear, ice-blow dome of the sky and so flying time elongated.  Most of the United States west of the Mississippi is barren, grey plains scuffed with pivot-point irrigation circles, rumpled badlands, and, then, blue and green mountains riven by brown empty canyons brightening, at last, into mesquite-speckled desert.  It’s endless and empty and frighteningly vast without towns or villages, only faint trails of freeways here and there like contrails pressed into the dull matte of the earth.

Every time, I closed my eyes, waves of nausea threatened to submerge me.  I was afraid to drink so much as a sip of water and so my mouth dried and became a scalding inferno.  On the jet way, at last, exiting the plane, I almost stumbled and, in the concourse, I felt faint and was afraid that I would pass out.

Julie and I took a train to the rental car terminal.  We went first into the garage only to be told that we had to check-in at a desk hidden above in alcoves along the front of the multi-tier parking facility.  I had to wait in line for forty minutes, teetering a bit with exhaustion, muscles aching, the center of my body, my core, as it were, melted into viral mush.  Then, we had to drive through the traffic across Phoenix to the Arizona Grand Resort where the conference was scheduled.

At the resort, I collapsed into bed and slept for 16 hours.

A not-so-amusing parody of a beer commercial   

My brother-in-law sent a meme spoofing my illness.  The image showed Jonathan Goldsmith as “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” a character featured in beer commercials beginning around 2012.  Lounging in a throne-like chair with beautiful women on his arm, the Most Interesting Man in the World says: “I don’t always get explosive diarrhea, but when I do I make sure I’m traveling.”  In the beer ads, the bearded and debonair Goldsmith, speaking in the accents of a faintly depraved Latin lover, says: “I don’t always drink beer, but, when I do, I drink Dos Equis...Stay thirsty, my friends.”  

Goldsmith, who played minor roles in Westerns in the seventies, modeled his performance on the actor, Fernando Lamas.  Fernando Lamas played Latin Lover roles in the movies made in the fifties.  His motto was “It’s better to look good than feel good.”

Room Service

I stayed in the hotel.  Julie read the two mystery novels that she had brought with her.  I attended the Board Meeting by speaker phone.  Instead of feasting, we ate room service.  A water park with a “lazy river” feature, a concrete-lined channel snaking between cabanas, occupied the terrain beneath our balcony.  Birds with bright feathers sang melodiously in a couple green palo verde trees and, now and then, a child dropped down the forty-foot water-slide to explode into the pool at the base of the tower.  A sound system played disco music and Cold Play tunes but the sidewalks and cabanas in the water-park were mostly deserted and the yellow figure-eight floats drifted unmanned down the blue channel.  

Read to the last paragraph and punctuation point

Julie finished reading the books brought for the trip.  After all, there was nothing for her to do but watch me sleep in the room at the resort.  On the third day, we ventured out so that I could buy some Imodium for my diarrhea symptoms.  At the CVS pharmacy in Tempe, about a half-mile from the resort, the shelves were empty with respect to this remedy.  Then, we drove to Scottsdale, passing by the red dome of rock in Papago Park.  There is a bookstore specializing in crime fiction, the Poison Pen, and we went to that place so that Julie could replenish her stock of mystery novels.  A few blocks away, I found a Walgreen’s pharmacy with the anti-diarrheal.  The skies were clear and vivid with the heads of palm trees nodding together.  The barren mountains crouched like lions on the horizon.

I read most of R. Cunninghame Graham’s A Vanished Arcadia, a history of the Jesuit missions (called “Reductions”) in Paraguay.  The book is wonderful, vibrantly written, interspersed with the author’s recollections of travels in the Argentine pampas and jungles of the Gran Chaco, and, also, very witty.  Cunninghame Graham is a younger contemporary of Oscar Wilde and fashions memorable aphorisms that wouldn’t be out of place in The Importance of Being Earnest.  According to the book, in the late 17th century, the Jesuits established a dozen or so missions in Paraguay, ministering to the Guarani Indians.  From about 1680 to 1740, the Jesuit reductions were unmolested and the author, who is vehement in his defense of the Order, tells us that about 78 Jesuit priests successfully maintained the peace in a territory larger than France.  However, the Jesuits resisted attempts to enslave the Indians intrinsic to the encomienda system of coerced labor prevailing in the rest of Spanish South America.  As a result, the Jesuits were expelled by a 1767 decree of the Spanish Crown and, although they could have mounted a guerilla war against the local authorities, they complied with the King’s judgement and returned peacefully to Spain.  Cunninghame Graham is an aesthete of the forgotten and abandoned – his book explores mission ruins reclaimed by the flowering lavender jacaranda brush of rain forest: where great rivers flow and cascades throw up perpetual rainbows in the sky, jaguar-stalked pathways lead to stone arches and overthrown bell-towers in the Paraguayan wilderness.  It’s silent and the wind seems astonished into stillness and motes of pollen rotate slowly in clearings in the vast and trackless jungle.

Atlas Obscura

According to Atlas Obscura, a Yaqui cemetery, colorful with votive candles and grave offerings, is located about 1.1 miles from the resort.  How can I resist the temptation of driving to see that place, even though, I’m still a bit queasy?  When I was a little boy, I recall reading J. Frank Dobie’s book Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver and, so, the description of the graveyard intrigues, even excites, me.

Beyond Baseline Road, at the edge of Tempe, a featureless sprawl of suburban housing, small brick and concrete block houses on lots of gravel studded with cactus, surrounds the cemetery.  At one time, the graves were on the edge of the Mexican Yaqui settlement of Guadalupe, a small impoverished barrio today in the shadow of the I-10 freeway.  Tempe has expanded to swallow the cemetery, an acreage incongruously enclosed by tract housing.  (The church that was once at the site is gone now, rebuilt in the center of Guadalupe about a mile away.)  The place is easy to find, although visitors must be aware of some aggressive, even potentially destructive, speed bumps on the residential streets leading to the cemetery.

The gates are open and, so, I can drive into graveyard where there is a emerald Porta-potty next to a small parking lot.  The cemetery is a riot of color, closely packed metal and wooden crosses set atop rectangular, raised grave-mounds.  The mounds are covered with plaques, votive candles, beer bottles and potato chip bags (apparently reflecting the tastes of the deceased), plastic toys, stuffed animals, football jerseys draped on stakes and baseball hats, every sort of thing that you can imagine.  Many of the crosses are elaborately painted in floral designs, a bit like the craft work called “rosemaling” in Norwegian communities.  On the clapboard fence around the cemetery, murals show skeletons cavorting in taverns, saints enduring martyrdom, and various scenes from Jesus’ passion.  The images are vigorously painted, very colorful and large, and many of the graves are festooned with lace and ribbons and bouquets of plastic flowers.  The place is mostly barren, exposed to the naked and vast sky, with a half-dozen tattered-looking palo verde here and there.  Leaning against the trees are old rakes used to keep the paths bright and clear.  

Easter Bunnies

Like many southwestern border Indian groups, the Yaqui are inconvenienced by the fact that their ancestral homeland and sacred sites are mostly in Mexico, although the majority of the population now lives in the United States.  (The situation is similar, for instance, to that of the Tohono O’odhom whose cultural centers are mostly located in the Mexican Sonoran desert, although most of the tribe now lives in Arizona).  About 16,000 Yaqui survive in northwest Mexico; there are probably about 26,000 living in Arizona, mostly in the Phoenix south suburbs and on a small reservation near Tucson.  

These Indians speak a Uto-Aztecan language that is pitch-inflected.  They are nominally Roman Catholic although their religious customs involve spectacular deer dances around Easter time, the use of peyote in their sacraments, and the belief that flowers are the product of Christ’s blood spilled on Good Friday.  The Yaqui make impressive masks for their deer dances, brightly painted discs of wood carved into sardonic smiles and tufted with horse-hair eyebrows and moustaches – the native gods apparently have a sense of humor and manifest as powerful, dangerous clowns.  

Yaqui history, of course, is, more or less, tragic.  The Indians resisted the Mexican government, generally backing the wrong side in the various rebellions and civil wars that afflicted the country – for instance, they allied themselves with the French and emperor Maximilian in the wars in the 1860's.  During the Mexican Civil War, they seem to have continued their history of siding with factions doomed to defeat.  Their intransigence and stubborn refusal to concede their rights to the government led to mass deportations around 1908, thousands of Yaqui sent to Oaxaca and the Yucatan to labor as slaves on sugar cane and henequen plantations with predictably disastrous loss of life.  These circumstances forced many Yaqui to flee across the border into Arizona where there was more conflict – for instance, in 1918, a troop of African-American Buffalo Soldiers fought a band of Yaqui in Bear Valley near Nogales but on the American side of the border.  The Yaqui were never conquered – rather, they were, more or less, exterminated in their native lands in Chihuahua; fighting with the Mexican government continued until 1928, when the last of their war chiefs was lured into an ambush, captured, and, then, summarily shot to death.  

The deer dance signifies rebirth with the return of game animals and, since this occurs around Easter, the Yaqui in Arizona are called Pascua Yaqui, that is, Paschal or Easter Yaqui.  I noticed that many of the cross-shaped grave-markers were decorated with fuzzy, sun-bleached Easter Bunnies and that there were more bunnies and Peeps (chick) candy on the burial mounds. 

How a Spirit manifested as a breath of wind 

With my cell-phone, I took a video showing the innumerable crosses and grave decorations in the Yaqui cemetery.  As a point of initial visual emphasis, I aimed the camera at a large white whirligig industriously spinning on a grave-mound decorated with soda-pop cans and beer bottles and stuffed animals.  I panned the cell-phone camera 360 degrees to show the landscape of lavishly adorned graves returning, after 40 seconds, to the whirligig on the grave on which I had commenced the shot.  Exactly, as I panned back to the whirligig, the breeze as if exhausted, sighed for a moment and, then, hushed, and, at that moment, the spinning decorations slowed gracefully, and, as if on cue, stopped moving.  It was an instant in which I felt eyes on me, a tickle between my shoulders, but, turning, I saw that there was no one around.  

An unwanted visitor intervenes

When I return to the Resort, Julie tells me that she is now very sick.  Of course, I have infected her.  But now we have to cross 97 miles of desert to reach the rental house in Tucson.

An ugly drive: oncoming (northbound) I-10 lanes jammed up for miles with grunting trucks and Rvs filled with the fit elderly.  Somewhere there should be a catastrophic accident, a car upturned in the median, a fire-truck spraying down grass set ablaze, an enchanted victim with blood in her eyes sitting half-upright in a pile of anti-shock blankets.  But there seems to be no crash, just a crush of Phoenix-bound traffic.  

Julie is increasingly miserable, eyes closed, sprawling on the reclined passenger seat of the rented Jeep Grand Cherokee.  The flu makes her restless; she can’t get comfortable.  

Arizona’s vast carcereal system (prisons and border detention centers) is pushed away from the freeway, hidden somewhere in the parched, featureless desert near Coolidge and Florence.  Those places are just exits on the freeway but, during earlier trips on state highways parallel to I-10, I’ve seen the prison barges stranded in their strange islands of concrete and concertina wire fences.  The distant mountains ride tremulous columns of mirage.  In the distance, the mountains, most of them isolated when seen from a dozen or so miles away, merge into rings of jagged blue shadow against the horizon.  

At the midway point, Picacho Peak, like an upturned talon guards the pass into Tucson. Julie is half-delirious.  The light is vast, overwhelming.

Needle-City

We’ve rented a small house, a casita in a placid, sun-baked neighborhood three miles from the several skyscrapers and white church towers of downtown Tucson.

The gate to the casita is open and the door to the place is unlocked.  A middle-aged woman with tattoos and a weathered face is drinking a Modelo beer and mopping the tile floor in the kitchen.  Garbage in white bags twist-tied at the top is stacked along the wall.  

The woman is friendly, if a bit slovenly.  It’s cold for these desert dweller and her sweater is frayed.  I explain that Julie is sick and she says that she will work as quickly as possible to get the casita cleaned for us.  But she still has an hour of cleaning ahead of her.  I ask the chambermaid where Julie can rest.  There’s no place except a Starbucks a couple blocks away or, perhaps, a grocery store, an Albertson’s in the strip mall at the end of the street.  Julie is nauseated by the thought of coffee and, so, she stays in car, cooking in the heat radiating from the windshield.  I walk down the street.  It’s warm now, maybe 80 degrees with the Santa Catalina Mountains, a brown-grey facade of cliffs and summits sharper than a serpent’s tooth, glowing overhead.  

At Albertson’s, I buy some deli-prepared food for tonight.  Tucson has no cross-town highways and so the principal thoroughfares in the city are always crowded, often to the point of gridlock and it’s no easy thing to cross North Campbell where the grocery is located to get back to the casita.  

At the rental home, 1630 East Adelaide, the cleaning woman has just finished, proud of her effort on Julie’s behalf, and, carrying another beer, she saunters out into the parking lot between the units.  She’s looking for Jeff, apparently the caretaker of the complex.  A girl named Teresa comes out of an adjacent suite of rooms, nibbling at a quesadilla with white threads of cheese dangling from the flattened tortilla.  Teresa calls to the cleaning lady from our unit and tells her that there is another quesadilla in one of the other apartments and that she can have it. These women seem to be ex-junkies, perhaps, working off some kind of debt to Jeff.  Strange black birds with long tail feathers zoom around and cry out to one another.

Jeff appears, stumbling along the sidewalk by the flimsy wooden fence.  Somehow, he trips and staggers off the sidewalk, crashing into a sun-powered torch staked into the gravel next to the pavement.  The black night-light is uprooted.

“I’ll fix that later,” he mumbles.  “The sun got reflecting off my glasses and blinded me.”

Sure, brother.

Later, I see him squatting by the fence, pounding the little torch into the gravel with his naked fist.

Paseo de Debilucho

Julie sleeps for the next twenty hours.  

I go out for a drive.  It’s cool in the morning.  The sky is blue and empty.

Sabino Canyon is a popular park in the bajada (alluvial foot hills) of the Santa Catalina Mountains.  By 9:30 am, the car-park is full, several acres of SUVs roasting in the sun.  It’s like a Walmart parking lot except without the Walmart.  The well elderly are everywhere, old men and women in hiking togs, queuing up at the information desk in the visitor center, crowds of the fit elderly scrutinizing maps showing the various trails leading up into a crack in the mountains.  

Ahead of me, a vivacious Senior Citizen, a woman of about 75 poses questions to another elderly lady dressed as a park ranger but obviously some kind of well-informed volunteer.  Along a side corridor, there are exhibits, stuffed birds under glass and a mummified javelina, an exhibit on useful wild plants and seeds, a scale model of the Catalina ridge.  The hiker-lady is wearing a floppy wide-brimmed hat, a visor over her eyes that are concealed by fashionable sunglasses, and some sort of cactus-repellant leather shorts and vest; she has hiking boots that are big and square on her little feet and carries two graphite poles of the kind that you see Nordic skiers using as they swoosh through the snow.  In her fanny pack, the lady hiker carries two bottles of water so that she will stay properly hydrated as she walks through the desert.

The mountains are full of snow at the higher elevations and the snow-melt has filled up the washes and creeks.  The bridges higher in the canyon along the loop road serviced by a shuttle are all under water.  The lady-hiker inquires about several trails.  She obviously knows the park very well and the purpose for her colloquy with the park ranger at this information desk is to demonstrate her bona fides as a desert trekker.  It seems that she intends to tell the ranger about the status of the trails and, in fact, suggests that she will go out to reconnoiter the depth of the water surging through the washes.

The ranger tells her that the arroyos under Bennet Ridge are flowing “calf-deep” with icy water and that fording those streams is probably not advisable.  The lady-hiker seems undeterred.  “I can get across if its less than knee-high,” she says.  The park ranger looks at her skeptically.  “Well, the rocks are slippery,” she says.

If this little old lady tried to ford a stream that was knee-deep with icy meltwater, I think she would never be seen again.  Perhaps, her sun-visor might be retrieved from a thicket of thorn-mesquite three miles down the creek bed where the stream plunges into the culvert of a storm sewer.  

I want to take an hour-long walk in the desert.  I explain this to the old woman dressed as a park ranger.  “No adventure,” I say.  She shows me on the map a trail about sixty feet from the parking lot that loops around a desert cactus garden.  “Very level,” she says, “even wheelchair accessible all the way.  Then, you can catch the loop up into the foothills for a quarter-mile or so and, then, come back down.”

I have the plan.  The Weakling Trail, Paseo de Weakling (de Debilucho).   

A Know-it-All pontificates

On the Weakling Trail, I study the small, metal plaques identifying the different plant species: Mormon Tea, ocotillo, various aromatic shrubs (assorted sages), cacti and so on.  Who am I fooling?  I’ve never taken the time to learn the names of the trees in my backyard in Minnesota so my interest in these spiny succulents is more than a bit unseemly.  

About two-hundred yards into the loop trail, I come upon the path’s undisputed highlight, a rare cristate (crested) saguaro.  The big plant’s limbs are fused together about fifteen feet above the main stalk with its tap-roots in the hard desert pavement.  The mass of grown-together branches is grotesque, like a shield adorned with a green Gorgon showing her medusa-locks to the world.  It’s a serpentine tangle of barrel-like branches all entwined at the top of the big cactus.  “No one knows why this happens,” the plaque tells me.  There is some surmise about lightning strikes, damage to the growing plant, or a fungal infection.  

Three old men are ambling along the trail.  One of them, who sounds like a retired High School teacher, is explaining how he once got pierced by fish-hook barbs from one of the cacti species marked along the trail.  He tells his gory story as the other old men marvel.  This guy is a know-it-all.  He gestures vaguely and says that there’s snow today atop the Santa Rita Mountains.  What is he talking about?  These are the Santa Catalina Mountains looming in spires and pinnacles overhead.  I’m about to correct him because a know-it-all, of course, needs to be put in his place.  (It takes one to know one.)  But, fortunately (as I later learn), I hold my tongue.

Yesterday Summerhaven was inaccessible

At the crest of the Santa Catalina mountains, at about 9000 feet, there is a village called Summerhaven.  This hamlet is at the end of the General Hitchcock (or Catalina) Scenic byway, a 26 mile mountain road that rises from the basin to the top of the range.  The day before, when I checked on the road on my cellphone’s maps, the computer informed me that “Summerhaven” was “unavailable” because all roads “to this destination are closed.”  Today, however, there is no such advisory and, so, I drive to the end of one of the long commercial boulevards in east Tucson and, then, follow the winding road into the mountains.

The two-lane highway assaults the mountains by main force, climbing by exposed switchbacks up the steep southern flank of the range.  The escarpment of the mountains has significant “prominence” – this means it rises from the desert basin very steeply to the first ridge, an eroded wall of completely barren pinnacles capped with a little bastion-like nub of stone called “the Thimble.”  This feature is about three-thousand feet above the valley, looming over a slit in the range, a narrow canyon that cuts upward to a amphitheater-like basin, an abyss ringed by higher peaks invisible from the highway climbing the front face of the mountains.  The interior basin seems bottomless, a crater lined with deep trench-like canyons.  Along the high ridge over the cavity in the mountains, another road runs a quarter mile to some bunker-like concrete coffers in the sun-scorched hill-top – this is the site of the Japanese interment camp where prisoners involved in building the mountain road were confined during the war.  Not much remains at the site.  Some water is impounded by a stone dam and there’s a little campsite with a few glittering trailers in the abstract saguaro forest.  

The road takes a turn to scale the ridge high over the basin behind the front range and, now, it becomes apparent that the Catalina Mountains are very lofty, rising another four thousand or more feet above the dramatically eroded escarpment.  I can see the road running on a flimsy-looking retaining wall a thousand feet above, clinging to the side of the cliffs in an improbable and perilous-looking way.  From the top of that ridge, I can see down to the Thimble, now a button-like excrescence on the cliffs overlooking the valley.  Tucson is lost in the yellow haze between cobalt blue mountain ranges.

The road rises through some dramatic hoodoos, steeples of cracked rock rising a hundred-feet high on both sides of the road, stone perched on stone, boulders precariously balanced atop split pedestals of granite – how do these things keep from falling?  And, then, the pines replace the cactus and the trees grow larger and more majestic and, at last, the highway runs through a corridor of douglas fir and ponderosa pine with deep, white, pillowy snow piled all around so that the blacktop, running with water, is like a tunnel through the drifts.

I stop at a place called Palisades Ranger Station.  The visitor center is open, buried up to the eaves in snow.  Some birds, offended at the deep snow, call out indignantly.  A couple of fat Navajo dudes are manning the desk, chatting about their plans for the weekend.

“I came from Minnesota,” I tell them.  “See,” one of the guys says.  “We brought the snow for you.”  

A little sign is dislodged and rests half-buried in a drift.  “Snow play forbidden,” it says.

It’s 26 miles downhill to Tucson, the curving blacktop crowded in places with bikers drifting down the mountain.  The route takes an hour to drive.  

The Death of the Trees

A friend later tells me that he lived with his first wife in Tucson for a year.  Of course, they missed the green and pleasant landscapes of Minnesota.  So every couple weeks, they drove the mountain road to Summerhaven just to ascend through the green Northern forests at the summit.  The big trees and the snow sometimes gathered at those heights assuaged their homesickness, at least, a little.

Later, when they returned to Minnesota and Austin, my home, they were delighted to see the trees interlaced above the sleepy avenues in the town.  Shade was everywhere and the trees grew into green vaults over the sidewalks.  Of course, later there was Dutch Elm disease and most of those stately trees were cut down. 

Nurse Trees

A little saguaro, fist-sized, has pushed up its head under a small, thorny mesquite tree.  The tree provides shelter for the budding cactus, a micro-climate rich in nutrients where the little plant can grow.  Saguaro at full maturity have root systems that are very shallow but extensive – the tap-roots are only two or three inches deep but they form a thirsty circumference extending up to a 100 feet away from the plant.  The saguaro roots suck up all the moisture in the soil, ultimately killing the nurse tree under which the cactus first sprouted.  Old saguaro often stand at the center of ghost groves of dead mesquite, the shrubs arrested, it seems, in their desperate flailing, a sort of dance of death, around the big cactus.

Fashioned from the very substances from which they would be made in real life

The Mini Time Machine Museum occupies an opulent gallery with a plashing exterior fountain and detached wall elements, marching like sentries across an immaculate cactus garden.  It’s a tourist attraction, of course, but very upscale and with admission that is not at all cheap, a place that has pretensions to seriousness that are, in fact, reasonably valid and plausible once you’ve inspected the collection.  A series of vaguely circular rooms radiate around a rotunda-like entrance and there are shadowy corridors linking the galleries.  It’s quiet with the characteristic hush of an art museum; people are speaking in whispers in the dim exhibition spaces.

The museum is devoted to miniatures, mostly doll-houses of various kinds.  The oldest assembly on display dates to the mid-1700's and, apparently, this collection is renowned for its variety and excellence.  Of course, you would have to be some kind aficionado of these things to really understand the collection and most of the miniatures, many of them not all that small (some are the size of an old VW Beetle), are doll-houses crammed with elaborate furniture, tiny portraits, and fully-stocked kitchens.  Some of the miniatures are animated with elaborate 19th century gears and ratchets, clockwork packed into the back sides of the little houses where maids are churning butter, small dogs dancing, a young lady playing at the piano forte and, even, a wounded soldier on crutches and with peg legs begging at a back door.  The little figures gesture poignantly inside their traps, the wooden boxes of the rooms where they cavort and the glass case protecting the assembly from visitors.  It’s all very elaborate and exhausting – you could spend a half-hour in front of every doll-house if you were so inclined studying its intricate details or, in the alternative, you can glance at the thing to get its gist and move on.  The latter is my approach to the museum, albeit with a bit of regret – clearly, there are things here worth attention.

Some wall placards explain that miniatures generally must be made of the same material as the full-sized objects that they represent.  So, if a tiny kitchen displays pewter, the pots and pans will be made of that substance; the chrome on miniature vehicles is auto-grade chrome and so on.  (An exception is textured materials such as marbles – the grain in marble is too large for the scale of these models and so has to be carefully painted in reduced scale onto strips of wood.)  It seems that the miniatures are made in three varieties.  Some represent historic houses or rooms and, therefore, have a patina of education about them.  Other miniatures are virtuoso displays of tiny artifacts, for instance, chocolates or musical instruments or toys packed into the small stages of the rooms – the point of these assemblies is to demonstrate the craft of the artificer in making the replica objects that populate the model rooms.  Finally, some of the miniatures are intended as works of art – these models have a disquieting aspect, showing vacant and disheveled rooms in which something bad has happened or is about to occur.  (A fourth category is whimsical doll-houses full of pastel dragons and friendly witches and gnomes – this stuff is kitsch although I don’t discount the craft necessary to make these things.)

In the category of art, the museum displays wrecked cars, all about six inches long, half sunk in the desert sands or tilted into lagoons of water.  In another display, rooms from torture-porn horror movies, complete with ghastly stains of blood are on exhibit.  There are several haunting displays of squalor: one miniature shows a kitchen in a barrio with debris on the floor, cleaning agents in a discolored cabinet, and a rusting water-heater in the corner.  A broom, apparently little used, stands against the splintered side-wall.  In another model, we see a basement complete with a nasty-looking toilet exposed amidst the detritus, a big boiler furnace with limbs of water-piping plumbed to it, scary wreckage and old tools lining the back brick wall, some bowls containing rotting cat food (and a cat hiding in a corner amidst the spider webs) with a collapsed chair – it has lost of all its legs – moldering in the foreground next to the furnace.  The thing is fascinating and, true to its esthetic, you could look at it for an hour, although a minute will also suffice.

Japanese netsuke, the clasps used to hold Japanese garments in place, occupy one display case.  Some tiny monsters leer at the viewer and a man is sprawled among some fat toads; a sprightly boar shows his tusks to the spectator and seems to grin.

The greatest of all miniatures

At the Ranch restaurant in Fairmont, Minnesota, the best miniature that I know is on display.  This is a full city street at scale of six inches to six feet occupying a case in the cafe’s entrance foyer.  The object was made by an artist named Michael Garman and its impressively disturbing.  The thoroughfare seems to be in a bad part of town, perhaps, among brothels and clip-joint bars, and all sorts of unseemly things are suggested by the little figures in the windows of the brick commercial buildings and loitering in their alleys.  There are some drunks – it’s apparently skid row – and overflowing cans of garbage; one of the bums is reading a newspaper that he’s retrieved from a trash bin.  The whole thing is crepuscular, dimly lit, either depicted at dawn or sunset, and the model is a Russian novel overflowing with plots and subplots. 

I’m surprised that the people who make these miniatures, at least as displayed at Tucson museum, are mostly chaste and have no interest in titillating the viewers with traces of the wild side of life: unlike the Garman display, there are no drifters or hobos or whores in the Mini Museum models.  This seems a shame.  The Garman miniature run aground somehow at the café in Fairmont near the freeway is dark, dismal, like a more populous version of a canvas by Edward Hopper, the mystery and melancholy of a mean street in the gathering darkness.  

(Michael Garman died, apparently by suicide, in October 2021.  He was 83 and, after a series of strokes, was unable to work in the clay that he favored for his models.  You can visit his museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  The Magic City is the showpiece in the exhibit, an autobiographical chronicle of Garman’s years as an alcoholic drifter.  When he was 18, Garman was in a car crash in which his girlfriend died.  He took up drinking and wandered around as a transient laborer for twenty years, traveling through Mexico, Central America, and down to Peru.  He began making clay sculptures when he sobered-up and continued this vocation until his death.  He was much-beloved in the Pikes Peak area of Colorado and his museum is apparently very popular.  In his obituary, the writer notes that Garman’s favorite writer was Dostoevsky.) 

A vow and the White Company

A man named Felix Lucero was wounded in a World War I battle.  Lucero had fallen on a part of the battlefield remote from the principal assault and, where he lay, the wounded were abandoned in the muddy craters.  The young man was an Indian, Spanish-speaking, from Trinidad, Colorado and, therefore, a servant of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  As he lay forgotten and swooning from loss of blood, the Virgin appeared to him.  Lucero told her that if she would save him, he would devote his life to making religious images.  A few minutes later, stretcher-bearers appeared among the dead and mangled wounded and Lucero was lifted out of the mud and carried to a field hospital.

About twenty years later, Lucero was living in a cardboard shack under the West Congress bridge that spans the Santa Cruz River in Tucson.  He recalled his vow to the Virgin and began collecting debris, mostly bits of metal from wrecked cars and splintered wood from the river bed.  (At that time, the river was used as a garbage dump and the braided stream flowed between heaps of trash and small plots where marijuana was cultivated.)  Lucero hammered the wood into frames for concrete and used stray bits of metal for reinforcing rod.  Bed springs formed the core of the big flat table that Lucero fashioned for his life-size sculpture of the Last Supper.  

After nine years, the Last Supper was complete, Jesus and his disciples gathered at a big altar-like table on the west bank of the river.  (Pictures from the early fifties show the Last Supper sculpture standing in a grove of locust trees, a curious apparition when viewed from the river’s east bank, some other concrete figures standing together at the foot of a cross on which a stone Jesus glows as if radioactive in the broiling sun.)  Lucero’s Last Supper imitates Leonardo.  The artist’s energy didn’t flag after he made his Last Supper and so Joseph and Mary with the infant Jesus were poured into concrete forms, then, finished in ghostly plaster.  The big crucifix with its life-size figure was erected in the shade of the trees and Christ’s sepulcher with Jesus supine in a stone box stands to the side of the Last Supper.  Lucero made a chest-high concrete box with castellated towers at its four corners.  When finished, the box enclosed a foot-high figurine of Pontius Pilate washing his hands against the ornate wall of his palace.  

Lucero died in 1951.  Vandals attacked the sacred statues and, at one time, Christ had lost his head and his disciples were all similarly decapitated.  (Presumably, the smashed heads were found in the garbage heaps lining the Santa Cruz River.)  Lucero erected a monument to himself, a portrait bust on a crude concrete pedestal.  There are several pictures that show Lucero squatting next to the concrete figures that he made by mixing sand washed up along the side of the river with lime and gravel.  Lucero is a stocky Indian with almost black skin.  In the bust, he portrays himself as a hidalgo, a knight of the mournful countenance with an elegant moustache – I can’t see any resemblance between the photograph and the features of the handsome gentleman sculpted atop the plinth.

For several decades the City of Tucson worked to clean up the river.  Periodic floods and monsoon rains scattered the garbage around and the filth regularly inundated the barrios near the river-bed.  Ultimately, palms were planted and fruit trees and a fourteen-mile river park was completed, a pleasant greensward between the desert and the barren stream bed.  (For most of year, only a trickle of water runs between tufts of mesquite growing in the dusty trough of the river-bed.)  The Jaycees restored the damaged figures in what Lucero called his “Garden of Gethsemene” and built an enclosure around the figures, some nondescript concrete walls with an arched opening into an enclosure set on two river-side terraces neatly covered in brown brick.  Metal bars fence off the spaces between the white plastered walls.  This enclosure organizes the space, delineating the sacred from the profane, and has the advantage that the site is gated and can be locked at night.  But the place is less uncanny than it looked seventy years ago with the full-scale pale figures standing mysteriously in the shade of old thirsty trees next to the derelict river-bed.

Affliction

Like much folk art, not much reliable is known about Felix Lucero.  His account of the vow to the Virgin dates to a 1947 interview with a Tucson newspaper reporter.  It isn’t clear what Lucero did before he came to Tucson and built his shanty under the Congress Street Bridge.  (Some accounts say that he made religious sculptures in other places but no details are provided and this seems to be wishful thinking.)  No one really knew him: an old-time resident of the barrio near the Garden of Gethsemene said his sculptures were “more visible than he was.”  In the markers at the park, the battle in which Lucero was injured is described as “nameless” – disguising, it seems, some skepticism about his narrative.  

When I visited the site, a big sign on the iron bars enclosing the sculptures said that the place was not open for gatherings except with the payment of a fee and permission from the City of Tucson.  (The place is often rented for parties particularly quinceanaros.)  The figure of Pilate washing his hands has vanished and the little concrete block with open front like a toy theater is now packed with votive candles, polaroid pictures of the sick and dying, wreathes and flowers and small plastic figurines of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Jesus lies like flattened road-kill in his stone sepulcher and someone has painted each of his fingernails with bright red polish – I can’t tell if this is a sign of respect or some sort of vandalism. A wooden bar on which one might perch kneeling before the figure of the crucified Christ has been drawn up in front of the sculpture.  At the massive table of the Last Supper, most of Christ’s fingers have been amputated.  Judas, who rises to expostulate with Christ, has one hand suspiciously pressed down atop a money-bag.  But the Betrayer’s fingers are also all smashed off and missing.  

The bust of Lucero is afflicted with some kind of stone gangrene – the forehead and concrete cheeks are pustulant and blistered with peeling plaster.  The plaque embedded in the plinth supporting the concrete torso says that “Misery and pain stalked Lucero all the days of his life.”

The Castaway

Across the river to the east, and a few blocks south, two barrios intersect under an empty crossroads.  Iron arches are adorned with letters BARRIO LIBRE and BARRIO HOLLYWOOD.  A Catholic elementary school with a mission tower stands across from some humble adobe-brick houses, brown walls enclosing tiny courtyards where flowering shrubs and small ornamental cactus grow over caramel-colored flagstones.

This is an old neighborhood, formerly the commercial district for the Mexican and Yaqui barrios along the Santa Cruz River.  Floods have ravaged the low terrace over the river – this part of town used to be called the “Hole” in Spanish because it was beneath the adjacent barrios and, sometimes, under water.  Many of the lots are vacant here.  A couple of rather sinister-looking Mexican restaurants, just kitchens with hornito ovens surrounded by heaps of adobe brick with small patios surrounded by wrought iron, stand along the street and there are some historical markers explaining that this was the old part of Mexican Tucson where there was once a dance-hall called the Corillo Gardens and some hot springs feeding brick-lined tubs for bathing.  Low parapets funnel toward a wall rising in undulating scallops above a niche full of votive candles, the sort of velas you can buy at Walmart, saints and the Virgin represented on decals pasted to the side of glass tumblers (from which you might drink lemonade) with charred wicks in puddles of melted wax inside. The parapets are lined by ocotillo cactus with prickly pear and agave growing in gravel beds along the walkway. Several large iron-candleholders display fabric on which big leering skulls are depicted.  The flag-like skull tapestries are drooped over the cast-metal candleholders and surrounded by loops of flowers, wreathes, and bundles of cut blossoms.  In the nicho under its semi-circular vault, more flowers are heaped among candles and objects like whiskey and tequila bottles. A scum of melted wax fuses the brick pavement to the exposed adobe walls. This is the shrine to El Tiradito, that is, “the castaway”.

El Tiradito is the only extant Sonoran-Catholic shrine of its kind in the United States.  (Although, apparently, these places are common in northwestern Mexico.)  I have the sense that I am trespassing in some way and the tingling feel that I am being watched, although the place is strangely silent, not even a bird sings here, and the traffic in downtown Tucson, although only a couple blocks away, seems muffled.  Here, no cars pass.  Some big parking lots to the north provide spaces for City employees and I can see a complex of office building nearby, but no one is moving and the parochial school across the street is also strangely silent, empty shadow-filled windows in rows gazing vacantly down on the deserted intersections  There is probably some kind of penalty for a gringo to be inspecting such a place and, so, a little spooked, I hasten to my car parked in the shade along the old adobe walls of a Sonoran rowhouse.  

To the dead of the Border

Although the El Tiradito shrine seems ancient, even, timeless, in fact, the place has moved a few blocks since it was first observed around 1870.  Folk shrines of this kind mark the graves of people who died sudden, violent deaths without the benefit of clergy or last rites and, therefore, are thought to be consigned to limbo.  This isn’t consecrated ground and the local Roman Catholic diocese doesn’t recognize the place as holy – rather, as if by mutual agreement, the priests turn a blind eye to the shrine and its devotees also are silent about the prayers and petitions for intercession with which they mark the site.  

A grave-mound by the side of one of the barrio streets is mentioned in newspaper articles from around 1870.  Initially, the mound was a low rectangular heap of gravel, adorned with cut-flowers and set apart from the nearby road by a ring of tin cans.  When the road was refurbished, the cans and the grave-mound were moved a couple of blocks.  (Apparently, no one thought to disinter the corpse supposedly buried at road-side).  Later in the 1920's, the shrine was relocated again to its current location next to the very old La Pilita restaurant at the northern edge of Barrio Libre.  The scalloped back wall was built according to the au courant Mission style popular in California. (This work was done by a youth association of the WPA in 1940.) The adobe bricks made with mud and straw were left exposed and a nicho was installed in the open-air enclosure. In 1971, when the City proposed to build a crosstown freeway through this area, a poor barrio centered around the shrine, people protested and the plan was abandoned.  Thus, the site has historically been a focus for political activism. 

No one knows exactly why the place is called El Tiradito.  The words imply a cadaver denied burial in consecrated ground and left to welter in a public place.  It’s unclear whether there was ever a body here; obviously, no one is buried under the present-day site of the shrine.  Although stories vary, the most frequently cited account involves a young cowboy who was married and had the misfortune to fall in love with his mother-in-law.  Caught in flagrante delictu, the cowboy’s father-in-law hacked the young man apart with an axe.  Because of the “castaway’s” sin, the corpse was refused burial in the church graveyard and, so, a shrine was erected over the place where the dead body was thought to be resting.  People noticed that prayers offered at the shrine were often granted.  And, so, the place became a site of pilgrimage.  People scribble messages in pencil on the plaster walls around the niche and, sometimes, small notes written on paper are shoved into cracks in the adobe.  

Today, the shrine seems to be dedicated to Santisima Muerta, “most holy Death,” depicted as a female skeleton with long flowing hair emerging from her bony skull.  Santisima Muerta, a figure denounced by the Vatican, is a patron saint for drug dealers, heretics, and various kinds of criminals. Since 2000, every Thursday, local people gather at the El Tiradito shrine to offer candles in memory of immigrants lost to the desert along the Mexican border.   

The Best Burro

When I first visited Tucson, probably about five years earlier, Julie and I drove a few miles south of town to the Tohono O’odhom reservation to see the painted church at San Xavier del Bac.  The mission at San Xavier del Bac was established by the Jesuit, Father Eusebius Kino, and was a satellite to the larger Reduction at Tumacacori about forty miles to the south.  From the outside, the church is a graceful Moorish edifice with white domes, an entrance sculpted from a greyish monolith of stone, and towers facing a big plaza that is inlaid with a labyrinth across from some Indian enterprises, a turquoise shop and a booth selling pottery and a small café with a little plaza where water jets and splashes in a purplish ceramic basin.  The church is nicknamed the “White Dove (Paloma) of the Desert”; the sanctuary’s interior is a baroque fantasia where innumerable painted angels flutter around gilded, impassioned saints carved from heavy blocks (Bultos) of hard desert wood.  

It was around noon and, on the occasion of my visit to the church, I paused to eat a burro made from squash and cheese at the Indian café.  The burro was so remarkably good, filled with soft white cheese and grilled squash, with pinto beans and corn, that it has formed a focal point in my memory, an example, as it were, for food that is both good-tasting and nutritious, even wholesome in some exotic way.  I’ve tried to replicate the burro with my own ingredients, but, although the results have been pretty good, certainly edible and satisfying, there was something indefinably excellent about the dish as prepared at that café with its wooden benches under thorn-brush ramadas across the dusty plaza from the blinding lime-plaster plumage of the desert paloma.  Probably, it was the mild day, the influence of the swarms of angels brewing their honey in the sanctuary, the stillness of the desert, the smell of venison chili cooking in iron pots in the café kitchen – in any event, it was a magical experience for me, a touchstone.

The next time I visited the church, the café was closed.  The drowsy pottery and turquoise stalls were still open for business but the restaurant was in ruins and the little fountain dry, its painted ceramic basin cracked apart.  One of the Indians told me that the café had moved to southwest Tucson where many of the tribal members lived – it was called the Santa Rosa Café. 

Around noon, after visiting the Garden of Gethsemene and the shrine to El Tiradito, I drove down the broad avenue between white churches, tracts of small adobe houses, car repair shops, and taverns to the Santa Rosa Café.  The restaurant is large with the heavy, carved doors typical of places like this in the Southwest.  On the sign above the door, the cafe’s emblem is displayed: a bunch of roses from which an eagle feather hangs. The neighborhood is treeless and desolate, some warehouses along the roadway, and an evangelical church housed in a shed with a metal roof sharing the parking lot with the restaurant.  

I ordered as take-out two squash and cheese burros and a fry-bread plate with beef and Oaxacan cotija.  While waiting, I drank a Modelo beer in honor of the junkie maid at the casita.  The beer came with a frosty mug and I thought that the Modelo taken with squash and cheese burro would be salubrious to settle my stomach and, also, make repairs on Julie’s damaged digestive tract.  Some Indian couples were eating big platters of huevos rancheros served with nopal and beans and fried plantain.  A camera crew was shooting an interview with the owner of the place.  Some toddlers toddled about.  

Back at the casita, we ate our lunch.  The squash and cheese burro was good, but, of course, not as wonderful as I remembered it.  Julie ate half of the big burrito and a few bites of the frybread and hamburger.  She was still a bit queasy.  

The only stretch of kilometer-marked highway in the United States

In the afternoon, I drove I-10 to the intersection of I-19, the highway to Nogales, Mexico.  The signs indicated mileage in kilometers.  Many of the vehicles displayed white Sonora licenses.

The Santa Rita Mountains are to the east of the highway, across a trough-shaped desert valley where the Santa Cruz River runs through mounds of sand and dark, thorny-looking mesquite islands.  There isn’t any river visible today, just some rivulets stapled by the sun into the dry creek bed.  

The mountains are bright with snow, probably about two-thousand vertical feet of drifts and ice at the crest of the range, blazing white and gleaming in the afternoon sun.  In the center of the mountains, a big pyramid-shaped peak, adorned with a crown of snow rises to an improbably angular summit.  At the base of the range, another pyramid mountain, with facet-like reddish cliffs juts out of the foothills, rhyming with the white shape overhead in the high sierra.  I suppose this spectacular range is visible from Tucson, probably from the Weakling Trail at Sabino canyon, and, presumably, the pompous and fit elder acting as cicerone for his two buddies, was pointing in the direction of these peaks when he mentioned the Santa Ritas.

A ghostly presence and a survivor

Viewed from a distance, like most remote mountain ranges, the Santa Ritas exude mystery and danger.  Shadowy canyons are gored into the mountain flanks and, of course, history whispers of Yaqui mines full of silver, battles with the Apaches, and canyons crowded with enigmatic mummy bundles.  Migratory birds frequent these “sky islands” in the Sonoran desert and there are famous birdwatching venues in the chaos of cliffs and gorges.  

Mount Wrightson at 9500 feet is the crest of the range, the peak named for cavalryman killed in a skirmish with the Apaches.  Some trails lead up from a high saddle on the ridge angling up to the summit.  In November 1958, five boy scouts set out on the trail to the peak.  It was raining and the rocks were slippery but they made reasonable progress.  At the saddle, two of the younger scouts were tired and turned back to their camp in the canyon.  The three older boys continued up the mountain.  As the day progressed, the rain turned to snow and, then, a blizzard.  Six inches of snow fell in Tucson, but the drifts in the high Santa Rita range were more than two-feet deep.  The three hikers were lost in the storm and their bodies discovered in a ravine below the saddle a few days later after an extensive search and rescue effort that involved more than 700 volunteers.  There’s a monument to the three dead scouts along the trail over the Josephine Saddle.  The place where the corpses were discovered in rugged terrain was marked with makeshift crosses and small hand-painted signs but the site was later lost.  Forty years after the catastrophe, some hikers in the high country felt themselves mysteriously nudged into exploring some of the gulches below the saddle.  They came upon the remnants of the crosses and cairns left at the place where the bodies were discovered.  Hiking down off the mountain, the men who had found the cairn and markers encountered another group climbing up toward the Wrightson summit.  The guide leading that hike was one of the boys, now a middle-aged man, who had turned back from the climb on the day of the blizzard in November 1958. 

The Boss

Between 2012 and 2015, a handsome male jaguar, nicknamed el Jefe, made his home in the Santa Rita Mountains.  El Jefe was the only jaguar known to live north of the border.  He was first sighted in the Whetstone Mountains about thirty miles from the Santa Ritas by a hunter and his ten-year old daughter.  The hunter’s dogs treed the jaguar and so a number of good photographs were taken of the animal.  

Trail cameras periodically photographed el Jefe in the Santa Rita Mountains beginning in 2012.  After 2015, el Jefe was no longer seen in his mountain retreat.  However, in 2021, he was caught on camera again at an undisclosed location in northern Sonora.  The animal has a distinctive pattern of spots by which he can be readily identified.     

Mysterious mountains conceal Yaqui silver, a big cat, and lonely graves.  

San Cayetano del Tumacacori

An arched doorway frames the ruins of a Mission church.  It’s a picturesque vantage at the Visitor Center for the Tumacacori National Historic site, a dozen miles north of the international border at Nogales.  The Depression era museum built a hundred-and-fifty yards from the ruins has ripened into a protected monument itself.  One day, it’s California mission-style architecture will be as worthy of admiration as the Mission church.  Certainly, the vantage framed in the cloistral arch of the walkway leading to the museum is precisely designed, a pictorial effect that makes you grope in your pocket for your cell-phone and its camera. 

The sky is faded blue this afternoon and desert is grey and pale brown with stark mesquite trees encircling the embattled-looking church.  A stone facade carved with two orders of simple pilaster columns rises to a bell-shaped pediment above the dark entry to the church, itself flanked by squat pillars embedded in the brown wall.  Behind there’s a white dome, also squashed a bit by the overwhelming pressure of the sun.  A brick belltower casts a shadow on the white plaster bulge of the dome.  The cross-member in the tower vault has a hook that looks like a pulley used for executions; the hook is for a bell that has now vanished.  When the ruins of the place were surveyed in the 1850's, a bronze bell rested in the dust and sand beside the church, metal inscribed with the date 1809 and the name of a local grandee who commissioned the object. 

The church is cold as a cave.  Under the dome, faded yellow and brown pigment represents a painted scroll or bracket of some kind.  A plastic windbreaker rests against a limestone baptismal font and there are two tin lunch buckets also next to the entry into a small, vaulted chapel.  A radio is playing in the chapel and two workmen are restoring a wall, carefully brushing flecks of toothpaste-colored plaster into fissures.  This church has always been a ruin.  It was never completed and the walls are bare except for a few vestigial floral forms sketched under the inverted white cup of the rotunda.  Indeed, the church went from incomplete to abandoned in the course of a generation.  Some life-size Santos were retrieved from the place and carried by Indian women in wicker baskets to San Xavier del Bac; the baskets are large with back-breaking capacity and ordinarily used to collect windfall branches and thorns for firewood.  

A camposanto with a dozen graves dating to the end of the 19th century is enclosed by adobe walls behind the church.  A stubby round mortuary chapel with a couple of gourd-sized holes in the round walls casts a shadow over the graves.  One of them is a beige tomb made from concrete on which visitors have left a row of silver coins along the spine of the sepulchral box.  This tomb represents the last burial in the graveyard, a little girl who died in 1916.  Some plastic flowers, bright and incapable of wilting, decorate some of the wooden crosses and adorn the head of the grave.  Other crosses are incised in the camposanto’s adobe bricks.  Nearby, there are some foundations excavated in the hard desert and an acequia lined with brick.  A round kiln for cooking limestone into plaster stands at the edge of a small orchard, the trees as gnarled as old olives in Crete or Delphi.  Adobe brick has to be shielded from the elements by a skin of plaster and, when these buildings are freshly surfaced, they shine with a white supernatural radiance.  The dead, empty watercourse of the Santa Cruz river is hidden behind a frail screen of locusts and cottonwood and acacia trees.  It’s quiet with the traffic on the freeway a mile away whispering like the wind in the trees and everything is soft, yielding, fragrant with memory.  Red ants on very long stilt-like legs run to and fro on their mysterious errands.  Their little shadows skitter under them.

Kino

Father Eusebius Kino, the Jesuit who founded the Mission at Tumacacori, stands as big as life in the museum, a waxwork that is surprisingly vivid and startling.  Kino wears the black garb of his order with a cape and a broad-brimmed hat.  His glass eyes are distant, staring into heaven or hell or the future in which both destinations await.  A brilliant enameled Yaqui mask for use in the Easter deer dance glares at the missionary priest’s shoulders and backside.  In a glass case, a metal tongs levered to form a press rests next to some sacramental wafers, not consecrated, and, therefore, presumably not the Body of Christ.  The Jesuits trademarked everything, including the Host, and the wafer is imprinted with the three fused nails that are the emblem of the Order.  The same insignia is emblazoned on two morteritos, bronze mug-shaped objects that were filled with gunpowder on Easter and Christmas and, then, lit afire to burst and sputter with celebratory explosions.  Some santos almost life-size with bald heads and anguished expressions turn their eyes skyward.  The wood-carved mannequins are dressed in wool and cotton garments.  Saint Xavier, the founder of the Jesuit order, wears a rich brown robe with rope clasped around his waist.  (This is a mistake; the Jesuits wore black – but the Indians attiring the figures for their processions didn’t preserve this distinction.)  Father Kino’s patron saint was Saint Cajetan (San Cayetano) a Neapolitan priest who founded hospitals in south Italy and, further, established a bank that loaned money without charging interest; this institution later became the Banco di Napoli.  A bulto of Saint Cajetan stands behind glass, facing the other saints – he seems smaller and leans forward precariously as if to administer the sacraments to a believer and his feet and hands are charred.  

Some realistically detailed dioramas show the conversion of the Tohono O’odhom Indians, Kino standing among the almost naked men and blessing them.  A more violent, even disturbing, tableau shows the great Pima rebellion of 1751 with a priest directing musket fire through a breached wall.  A dying man sprawls on the floor and a woman clutches her baby to her breast and, in the right corner of the diorama, another woman kneels to pray desperately in front of an icon of the Virgin.  (The alarming Pima Rebellion miniature is the work of Bart Frost, a WPA artist who made the work in the ‘thirties.)  In the corner of the room, the Yaqui mask with its white horse-hair eyebrows and fur tufts looks on sardonically, showing crooked teeth in a crooked mouth.  

The Enemy of Adobe Houses

The Jesuits had an advantage over other Orders: their vow of poverty didn’t preclude them from using horses.  (The militant Order didn’t eschew the use of horses because many of their members were former soldiers.)  Accordingly, Jesuit missionaries could service vast territories more efficiently than rival Orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans who had to plod along on mules or on foot.  Kino, the missionary to the Tohono O’odham, the so-called Pima Indians, converted the tribe in 1687, building a dozen or more Reductions between Durango in modern Mexico and Tucson, the so-called Pimeria Alta (or upper/Northern Pima Indians).  

Kino, who was revered by the Indians, died in 1711.  Things deteriorated in the Pimeria Alta after 1730 when gold and silver was found in great abundance in the Santa Rita Mountains.  The Jesuits didn’t exactly profit from the mines, but established a lucrative commerce with the prospectors, exchanging fruit and corn meal as well as adobe brick and timbers for precious metals.  Around this time, Father Keller assumed leadership over the Pimeria Alta.  Keller was a German-speaking Moravian Jesuit and he was more tightly wound and aggressive than his predecessors.  In typical German fashion, Keller thought that Tohono O’odhom were undisciplined, prone to suddenly desert the Missions for weeks at a time to fight the Apaches or pursue religious ceremonies in their Rain Houses, large huts at the center of the villages in which the Indians kept their pagan, pre-Christian medicine bundles and regalia.  

Keller clashed with the O’odhom chieftain Luiz Oacquicagigua.  For some reason, he insulted the leader, calling him a Chichimic dog, running about the desert in coyote skin and a loincloth, hunting down rabbits and rats.  This insult offended Oaciquicagigua to the extent that he changed his name to the equally exotic Bacquioppa, a O’odhom word that means “enemy of adobe houses.”  Luiz now-called Bacquioppa, gathered his warriors for a sortie against the Apaches.  (In this part of the world, the Apaches raided the O’odhom villages for slaves, horses, and Spanish longhorned cattle; the O-odhom retaliated, equipped with Spanish weapons; the Yaqui fought the Apaches and the O’odhom; the Spanish exploited everyone as did their successors, the Mexicans and the Americans.  And this pattern of perpetual warfare continued until General Crook finally captured Geronimo in Skeleton Canyon in September 1886.) On November 20, 1751, Luiz invited the Spanish settlers and several priests to his quarters to discuss the planned raid on the Apaches.  But, instead of a council of war, Luiz’s warriors killed the Spanish and two priests, clubbing them to death and burning the survivors when they retreated into an adobe mission house.  

The O’odhom rose in a general revolt and attacked the Missions.  The charring on San Cayetano’s santo is said to have been the result of fire set by the rebels.  About a hundred settlers were killed.  The Indians laid siege to an important Reduction at Tubaluma – this is the scene depicted in the museum diorama.  After about three months of fighting, Luiz Bacquioppa agreed to end hostilities if Keller were removed from the northern Pima territories.  Bacquioppa also provided testimony as to Jesuit abuses in the Alta Pimeria – whether this evidence was truthful is debated up to this date.  Strong political pressures existed in Europe to repress the Jesuits and these measures ultimately resulted in the expulsion of the Order from New Spain in 1767 and 1768.  By this time, Keller was dead – he died in 1759, apparently at the bedside of an Indian to whom he was delivering last rites.  

The Spanish crown sent troops to Tumacacori and the Missions to arrest the Jesuits in the summer of 1767.  The priests were force-marched across the desert at the height of summer and several of them died.  However, as at other missions throughout the New World, the Jesuits didn’t resist the King’s decree and complied with the royal order to return to Europe.  

Competing stories

Some think that the fire damage to San Cayetano’s bulto is the result of the Pima Revolt of 1751.  But an old woman interviewed in the late 19th century said that wooden image was placed too near a fire when it was evacuated from Tumacacori to San Xavier del Bac around 1848.  As the garments on the saint began to smolder and, then, burn, God sent a thunderstorm, a rare event at that time of the year, and a downpour of rain saved the figure.

Carried in wicker burden baskets

For some reason, the Mission at Tumacacori failed.  Crops failed and the Winter of 1848 was particularly harsh.  The trails were locked in ice for several weeks.  This was too much for the remnants of the congregation and the people, abandoning their unfinished church, trekked north to San Xavier del Bac, driving their sheep and mules ahead of them, the sacred Santos gesticulating in vain reproach from their wicker carriers.  A photograph from 1908 shows a dark-clad congregation of Indians gathered to venerate the holy figures  who look away from the people, their eyes rolled up to the heavens.  San Xavier del Bac seems half-ruined in that picture.

Music

As at the missions in Paraguay, the Jesuit Fathers taught the Indians to play stringed instruments.  The Tohono O’odhom became accomplished and enthusiastic choral singers.  Ultimately, the Indians invented some unique musical forms that persisted into the twentieth century.  Some of the O’odhom songs were collected in a booklet published by the University of Arizona called Canciones de mi Padre edited by Luisa Ronstadt Espinel.  This woman, a famous singer and beauty, performed in vaudeville and acted in the pictures, appearing once with Marlene Dietrich.  (The film is von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman).  Of course, she is the grandmother of Linda Ronstadt, the pop star.  One of Linda Ronstadt’s records is named “Canciones de mi Padre” (1987) and echoes her grandmother’s work preserving the old O’odhom songs from the Sonoran desert.  

Javelina

On the road between Tumacacori and Tubac, a cheerless stretch of two-lane blacktop that runs parallel to I-19, I see a javelina.  The creature is near the road trembling as if terrified in the spiny ditch.  I slow down.  It’s not a javelina, but only a brown plastic bag rooting around in the sage and mesquite.

A Surprising Find

At Tubac, the Spanish built a fort or Presidio.  The settlement is about two miles north of the abandoned Mission at Tumacacori.  The State of Arizona manages the Tubac site where there are some inconspicuous ruins.  Snow-birds live in the area and there’s a Community assembly-room where edifying lectures are presented and travel movies.  It was in this space that the archaeologist Deni Seymour publicly announced her important discoveries in the Fall of 2022.  

Seymour is an independent archeologist, not affiliated with any university, but, apparently, well-regarded.  She recruits worker-volunteers among the local people living the retirement communities in the Santa Cruz valley south of Tucson.  Many of her volunteers were present and enthusiastically endorsed her account of her findings when she reported them to the public and news media in the community center at Tubac.  Although there may still be some controversy about the discovery, Seymour claims to have discovered the site of San Geronimo III, a garrison village founded by Coronado on his famous expedition across the southwest in 1540.  The place is hidden in the thorny desert to the east of the Santa Cruz and near the Santa Rita mountains.  At the garrison village, Seymour and her volunteers have unearthed many caret (that is, cast-iron) nails, medieval horse-shoes, fragments of copper vessels and some shards of Spanish majolica pottery together with rivets from chain mail and pieces of broken daggers and swords.  Most notably, her volunteers discovered an intact wall cannon or bronze versillo.  Records from his expedition show that Coronado marched with six versillo cannons and Seymour seems to have found one of them.  

Coronado marched north from Campostela, Mexico in 1540, commissioned by the colonial governor on an expedition to locate the Seven Cities of Cibola, thought to be rich with gold and silver.  We know that Coronado reached the Zuni pueblos in western New Mexico, Acoma, and, then, the big Rio Grande Pueblo villages at modern-day Taos and Bernallilo.  About 2800 people comprised the expedition, including 350 armor-clad conquistadors.  The explorers ultimately reached Kansas before returning to Mexico.  Coronado’s route from Campostela through the Sonoran desert to the Zuni and Acoma territory is mostly unknown.  Records show that he established several fortified villages where native people were dwelling – these places were called San Geronimo I through III.  The garrison towns were surrounded by Sobaipuri (river-dwelling) O’odhom villages comprised of pit houses adobe and pole (jacal) structures with large centrally located ceremonial (rain house) structures.  The location of San Geronimo III was not known until Deni Seymour discovered its artifacts somewhere in the desert between Tubac and the Santa Rita mountains.  The GPS coordinates of the place are unpublished. No one wants you poking around there.

So how come I know all the words

The rental vehicle’s radio was tuned to Sirius (satellite) stations.  I couldn’t figure out how to access local news and weather or the regional public radio stations.  Furthermore, the Grand Cherokee’s radio was set to the country-western spectrum of frequencies.  The most tolerable of the three or four country-western stations that I sampled was Willie Nelson’s Roadhouse.   The Roadhouse features down-home announcers with names like Dallas Buck and plays country-western tunes from about 1980 dating back to the inception of recording.  

This is a form of music that doesn’t interest me and that I instinctively dislike – but the songs were all familiar to me, so ingrained into my memory that I could sing the choruses and, somehow, knew all of the words.  Listening to classic Country was like exercising a muscle (and a faculty) that I didn’t know that I possessed.

Under ‘A’ Mountain

On the morning that we drove from Tucson to Phoenix, I first went to the Mission Gardens, allotments on the southwest edge of town where urban farmers grow native vegetables.  The allotment is on the edge of desolate barrio, entirely treeless with sandy arroyos draining down from Sentinel Mountain and cutting through the neighborhood.  In these treeless places, nothing screens the squalor – cars without tires squat like tarantulas next to houses and appliances are scattered like tombstones across backyards.

I saw an old Subaru ahead of me, it’s back plastered with bumper stickers.  There were some rainbow coalition decals, oddly aggressive admonitions to not mess with Texas, the slogan “No Farmers / No Food” on the bumper chiming with a Spanish motto Sin Agua no hay Vida.  The car’s politics were politically cryptic, but I was pretty certain where it was headed, and it was a helpful to be guided by the Mission Gardens by the vehicle – the driver knew where all the sleeping speed bumps were installed in the dusty neighborhood.  

The car parked in a gulch a dozen yards from a long, rickety fence enclosing the gardens.  A husky girl and an outlaw boy, probably a marijuana farmer, emerged carrying a battered hoe and a couple jugs of water.  I followed them into the gardens where a dozen or so people were scattered across the acreage, tending to small hopeless-looking gardens.  The terrain was once Tucson’s landfill and so the cactus and Indian maize are growing out of rubble poured over garbage with only a faint skein of dry dirt covering the debris.  I wrote the names of some plants in my Moleskin, although again, this seemed faintly ridiculous to me – I don’t know the plants at the Nature Center in Austin and, so, why would I presume to jot down information about this exotic desert flora.  

The morning was mild and the sun glowed in the haze overhead.  The gardens were planted in grids of shallow ditches that could be periodically flooded from stakes with spigots on them.  In a shack on the edge of the allotments, agave syrup was brewing in big iron pots.  The air smelled faintly of cilantro and chili peppers.  

Sage was growing in grey-green clouds under the mesquite trees.  Someone had posted an inscribed sign by the tree: “All critters like the shade when its hot.”  A parched conical mountain loomed over the gardens set on flood terrace to the Santa Cruz River.  At the pyramid-shaped top of the hill, maybe 600 feet above the garden, there is a big “A” etched into the side of the peak.  I have no idea what the “A” means.  

Little boxes, a bit like post office cubby-holes, stand over the tiny gardens and provide useful information about the plants.  This brush is Amaranth, here you see Ironwood and river Palo Verde.  The fruit of the saguaro grows ten or eleven feet above the ground where the branches divide and it ripens quickly so that birds will tear it open, each the mush inside, and seed the nearby desert with their droppings.  Curiously, Engelmann’s prickly pear possesses fruit that doesn’t fall from the plant and, instead, stays in place until it ferments and rots.  Botanists think that this means that the prickly pear evolved in concert with some mammal or lizard that ate the fruit on the cactus and, thereby, disseminated its seeds.  But the unknown quadruped has gone extinct and so the Engelmann fruit is not harvested and decays on the plant.  

In a small shanty, you can buy souvenirs: Day of the Dead trinkets, jars of cactus jelly and agave syrup, small Tohono O’odham ceramics, mostly tiny seed jars.  It’s all extravagantly priced.  An old photograph taken from pointed peak of ‘A” Mountain shows a wasteland marked with a big adobe box, a heavy mass of bricks where there was once a mission along the Santa Cruz river.  The mission building had massive walls even in ruin, topless with its roof fallen into the void.  But the monsoon rains had eaten the structure, softened it and blurred its outlines – the structure reminded me of the big adobe blockhouse built by the Hohokam eight-hundred years ago at Casa Grande: today the hulking heap of mud-brick masonry is covered by a steel awning or ramada to keep off the rain.  There was no similar accommodation to the Mission and, so, it gradually shrunk and, at last, a brick company ripped down its walls and sold the adobes and, then, garbage was dumped in the pits and quarries where the clay for bricks had once been mined.  After another fifty years, the Mission Gardens were planted to reclaim the site.  

From the Talmud

At entrance to the gardens, a plaque informs us: “I did not find the world empty when I entered it; as my parents planted for me, so I will plant for my children.”

Ancient people

The site of the old Mission was built where ruins of a Hohokam village stood along irrigation ditches channeling water from the Santa Cruz river into the Indian gardens.  The Hohokam were pueblo-dwellers who built mounds and dug L-shaped ball courts into the hard desert caliche.  They cultivated corn in their fields between about 1100 to 1450 AD when they mysteriously, vanished.  But archaeological studies on the site have founded evidence of much older encampments by the river:  people grew corn here beginning about 4200 years ago; these early farmers didn’t have ceramics.  The ceramic phase at the old Mission site began about 50 AD and continued through pre-classic and, then, classic phases of Hohokam culture.  Pre-contact O’odhom lived here from 1450 to 1690 when the Mission was built. The name of the O’odhom village by the river was S’cuk Son, the name from which the word “Tucson” derives.

Edifying Slogans

The casita is repository of edifying mottos, mostly written in cursive text on wall plaques.  I recognize some of these objects as things sold by Walmart:

Enjoy the little things in life for one day you will look back and discover they were the big things.

A stylized picture of a tree reads: FAMILY:  Like branches of a tree we grow in different directions but our roots remain the same.    

In the toilet, a little picture says: You don’t know what you have until it’s gone: toilet paper for instance. On the couch, a throw pillow is embroidered with word “hope”, spelled phonetically with the dictionary definition.  Another sign reads: Our family, a Circle of Strength rooted in Faith, joined by Love, and kept by God.

Next to the door to the outside: WORK HARD AND BE NICE TO PEOPLE.

It’s easy to be condescending about these mottos strewn around the little casita serviced by its crew of alcoholics and junkies.  But Frank Lloyd Wright was an advocate of inscribing slogans in his buildings and, perhaps, there is something to be said for the presence of edifying writings always in sight.  At his Oak Park studio and house, Wright put this inscription above his fireplace: “Truth is Life” and “Good Friend, Around these hearthstones speak no ill of any creature.”  There’s a baffling inscription at Taliesin East: “Ye’ve left a glimmer to cheer the man – the artifex, that holds in spite o’ knocks and scale o’friction, waste and slip and, by that light, well-built, the perfect shape.”  At Taliesin West, Wright incises into a wall an aphorism by Lao Tse: “The Reality of building does not consist of roof and wall but in the space within to be lived.”  In another place: “I believe in GOD only I spell it Nature.”

And, on my wall, in my office, constantly before my eyes, this quotation by FLW: “LOVE is the virtue of the HEART, SINCERITY is the virtue of the MIND, COURAGE is the virtue of the SPIRIT, DECISION is the virtue of the WILL – the so-called “Organic Commandments.”  

More playgrounds for the fit elderly

On the way back to Phoenix, I drove west from Tucson to Saguaro National Park.  Beyond a screen of mountains, flattened blue scenery pasted to the sky, some turn-offs access trail-heads.  Although it’s only about 9:30 in the morning on a Saturday, the fit elderly are everywhere, scrambling up and down paths between the big, brutish-looking saguaro, everyone of those cactus a cliche from a Gene Autrey or Hopalong Cassidy movie.  The road winds through the bajado terraces under the ridges and the blacktop rides up and down over flash-flood arroyos.

It’s another 10 or 11 miles to the Visitor Center tucked into the fan-shaped arroyo tilted up into another range of jagged mountains.  The saguaro are everywhere.  Once again, the fit elderly have parked their Sport Utility Vehicles side-by-side, tightly packing the lot so the extent that vehicles are idling in the aisles as they wait for the old codgers to mount up and get along from stalls that they are fixin’ to vacate.  Lines of old folks are patiently waiting at the toilets.  I don’t feel any particular urgency but I look around, as if by reflex, for a convenient gulch where, if the need arose, one could heed nature’s call.  Behind the building, there’s a bow-shaped protrusion that seems glass, but all curtained-off.  No one’s moving around out there.  The trails wriggle up and down piles of rubble, but not to the rear of the building.  Some birds with long tails are flitting about and others call from hidden roosts.

The National Park System wants you to know how to feel about Saguaro Cactus

In an small screening room, the NPS shows a film, really just a slide show, about the saguaro (properly pronounced “sah-wahr-o”).  Pictures show the sun setting behind the iconic flora, a lizard on a rock, some fleshy-looking fruit shaped like a human heart blossoming among the spines.  On the sound track, there’s a faint sound of rippling water, bird calls, a plaintive Indian flute noodling atonal notes.  Two Indians comment: they have soft native-inflected voices and sound grandfatherly.  The saguaro, the men say, are humans.  They must be respected.  The Native People respected the cactus as their brothers and sisters.  The Saguaro bring gifts to the Native People.  These gifts must be respected.  Of course, I have my questions about the big cactus: how long do they live?  What is their cross-section?  Why do they grow in the forms that we see?  What do their seeds look like?  What species of animals are dependant upon them?  How can they be used?  How are their fruits made edible?  If they are men, something that seems obvious to me as well, under what enchantment do they grow?  Are we metamorphosed from them or are they humans that have been transformed into these enigmatic sentinel figures?  What does “saguaro” mean?  What “gifts” do they bring mankind?  How does one “respect” a cactus?  And so on and on.

I keep waiting for the informative part of the presentation to begin, the facts, as it were, provided after the introductory dose of New Age maundering.  But the maundering never ends and, after a while, it becomes clear to me that the NPS doesn’t trust my reactions to the saguaro and that the sole objective of the narrated slide show is to tell me how to feel about the plants.  But no facts are ever presented – it’s all what can be called “fake news”; the NPS urges me to respect the big cactus and honor their gifts but I have no idea how these gifts might be characterized or why they are relevant to me.  If you respect something, you try to learn more about it – but this impulse is nowhere apparent in the hushed voices narrating the slide-show.  The presentation is a wholly fact-free zone.  

The Big Reveal

At the end of the slide-show, the screen dims and slowly rises up into an alcove in the ceiling and, then, the curtains behind the screen, whispering to one another, glide apart.  Beyond the curtains, there is a bow-shaped window, a floor to ceiling expanse of glass that opens onto a vista of the craggy purplish mountains and the hundreds of saguaro cacti studding the ridges and standing like green pillars among the flailing mesquite trees, blackened as if charred by great fires, the glint of mica on the boulders and the skitter of a lizard across a sandy draw and there crouched behind a pile of yellow rock, some old guy squatting to defecate.  

Crackers

It’s an interminable drive back to Phoenix.  North of the Florence and Casa Grande exits, traffic grinds to a stand still and runs stop and go, bumper to bumper to the Tempe suburbs.  For a week, Julie has been longing to go Barrio Queen, a restaurant in Scottsdale that she loves.  According to her cell-phone, she sees that there is a Barrio Queen located in Tempe, not too far from the freeway.  Excited to go there, she accesses an on-line menu.  But Mexican food is probably not a good option for her at this time.  After looking at the menu, she confesses to being more than a little nauseated.

We get off the freeway and eat at a Cracker Barrel.  The food is awful.  There are peg solitaire games on each table and pictures of NASCAR drivers on the walls.  In the gift shop, Easter bunnies are on the shelves and there are numerous signs that you can purchase to decorate your home reminding you of the importance of family and faith and hard work.   

From the Air

From the air, the country is empty and grey speckled with yellow and green dots.  Reservoirs glint like spills of mercury in crevasses between mountains.  Then, the peaks are buried in snow above green valleys where rivers twist and bend, drawn by invisible influences, and, below the front range, the plains look like Tibet, rumpled and barren, and, then, it’s snow again and the exhalations from snow that gradually fill the abyss under the jet’s wings with mist and we land in a dull, pelting rain.  Ice-pellets are falling near the cities where it is cooler in the suburbs, but, then, it warms enough so that the precipitation is grey rain, soaking the ditches and filling them with water.  

March 26, 2023