Adoring Arizona, Updated In November of 2009, I wrote a story for The Big Bend Gazette entitled “Adoring Arizona.” I’ve been back to the state since then but didn’t write about it. How mystifying is that?! The piece was a tribute to a state I love almost as much as I love Texas. The politics in both places are rotten, but the scenery is beyond reproach. Words such as “beautiful,” “awe-inspiring,” or “fantastic,” don’t do justice to these mountains or this desert any more than they do justice to the scenery back home. Like the Big Bend Country of Texas, Arizona is desert-mountain country, and Tucson sits right in the middle of it, surrounded on all sides. Somewhere along I-10, between New Mexico and Arizona, the desert landscape subtly changes from Chihuahuan to Sonoran. The mountains, though, seem unaware of the difference and continue to look similar: rugged, naked, layered, and constantly changing in the ever-running light/shadows drama. Sometimes they appear to be scattered with low-growing shrubs and trees that cause a “five o’clock shadow” effect. The nature of the desert subtly changes, but the mountains are anything but subtle. Everyone who knows me and/or my writing knows how I feel about deserts and the mountains that belong to them. I write about them all the time, even when I try not to. Here is Part One of “Adoring Arizona,” borrowed from the old Big Bend Gazette piece, but updated yesterday: It’s Friday morning, and I’m sitting in the peaceful backyard of my Tucson friends, drinking coffee and listening to a distant train mourn its way past a city I’ve come to love. There’s a chorus of birdsong and bright native flowers, lots of green things, some prickly, but many that are not. There’s a warm but fresh-smelling breeze that sweeps down from the Tucson Mountains, then abruptly changes direction and comes from somewhere else, as if it doesn’t know where to go first. That’s exactly how I feel about visiting Arizona again. I’m sitting outside with my laptop propped on my lap. My presence made the hummingbirds suspicious at first, but now they come as if I weren’t here. Toby, my cute little Westie charge, is happily yapping at lizards and a bird that sounds like a squeaky toy. It’s as long-winded and expressive as a cactus wren. A dozen or so LLB’s (little brownish birds) are sitting in the top of a large ocotillo on the other side of the fence at the back of the yard. The moon, nearly-full and pale pearl-colored now, still sits in the pale blue sky at ten o’clock in the morning, as if it can’t bear to leave its post on such a glorious day. Along the fencing at the west side of the yard, doves are lined up every few feet, probably waiting for me to leave and take my joyously barking Toby with me. We’re having too much fun to leave; the birds will have to live with it. Adventures await, but this morning I only got as far as the bench on the front porch. From there, the Catalina Mountains stand out from and above everything else, about thirty-five miles away. The air is clear, and I can see the ridges and canyons and exposed slabs of rock. The mountains look bare, but at their base is a forest of saguaro and more growing things than I can name. At the top are deep forests that smell of pine and other evergreens. I doubt if I leave the house today. I changed seats and everything is different. What a place!
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 13:28:54 +0000
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