Overdue notes on Arizona

Oh, Arizona.

Desolate beauty.

Saguaro cacti piercing vast open sky.

Saguaros, so twisted, contorted.

So much like people, with unique, different, morphing shapes, stately arms, most reaching towards the heavens, some grasping for the earth, weighted by their own selves, some curving around, like arms of a ballet dancer circling her waist as she twists.

Some appear like faces, with funny noses protruding.

In the daylight: green, fully exposing their multiple uses by many species for habitat, their skins carved, eaten, becoming woody with age. Hosting nests of large birds in their elbows and shoulders.

In the evening: as the light falls, colors fade and the spines catch the dimming light, appearing to glow at their tops where their spines come together.

In the dusk: silhouetted against the sunset, the sunrise, the moonrise: giants, anthropomorphized towering statues, reaching for the stars.

Saguaros occurring singly amidst vast creosote seas.

Saguaros in dense forests of their own.

And a little horny toad scuttles from a hole underneath an ocotillo to the shade of a creosote bush.

Ohhh, co tillo. Mesmerizing in your spidery, upward reaching legs, arms, spines.

And you can walk for miles and not see a trace but then there are traces in the strangest places. Old rusted cans. For sale signs, selling land, selling hope (ha, is this what’s going to happen to Obama’s sale of hope to the American people?), selling the illusion of profit, the idea of a life.

And in the background, there is the gnawing knowledge of immigrants crossing this bleak landscape, often in scorching sun. They are desperate. In border areas you see abandoned clothing, and other remnants of human passing. They hide in the cool shade of the washes in the day, waiting to rebegin their fateful journey in the evening. And I can only wonder at what it is that drives them to undertake such an arduous crossing. Even after several months of being confronted with this reality, I am still overwhelmed when thinking about it.

There are drug smugglers, too. That is a whole other story, and one I am lucky I didn’t encounter, but merely heard about. Many things occur on these open lands that are myths, and realities of what is still the wild west.

We drove down an old road at the edge of a nothing town to find a plot. And at the end of it, at the very end of this very remote road in this out of the way place, we came to a gate guarding a house, and on the gate, was a sign, and the sign told us: GO AWAY. When you are out there, that far out there, you don’t want anyone here. What is it like to be ‘out there’? Surrounded by silence, surrounded by stunning, sometimes deafening silence, by all encompassing sky, and desert pavement that extends into the distance.

And you can walk for miles through creosote, its leaves yellow-green, always surviving this arid scorching ground. Creosote bush: ultimate survivor, oldest living plant species, the only thing growing in the most abandoned, forgotten places; when it is dying you know that the last fertility that the land could offer is gone. And you wonder what could have happened there to have robbed the soil of its soul.

We see a bighorn sheep in the canyon. It stares us down, calmly, coolly. It doesn’t mind we are there, in awe of him. He has a presence that renders us close to speechless, we can only whisper our most immediate observations. He moves surely, and almost silent except for the occasional rock that tumbles under his weight as he meanders towards the next bite of food.

And the agricultural land, green and lush and productive, using stolen water to manufacture life and livelihood.

And the cattle, grazing on nothing, their tracks and long-dried up piles of pies leaving legacy to their visit. You walk, and wonder how they survive.

We came upon 6 dead cattle; fresh enough to let off an odor so rank and forceful as to cause us to turn around, old enough to be so emaciated as to reveal rib and pelvic bones protruding. They are clustered. What is the mystery of their deaths? Were they shot? Put out of they misery of their hunger? We can only ponder, solemnly. A tear falls down Susan’s face.

Nightly, we sleep under the stars, in the elements, feeling the peace of the night as it settles in slowly. I become more and more comfortable living houseless, cooking on our makeshift stove setups, closing down myself with the coming of darkness and awakening before the light. I become more and more drawn to the sunrise, and fall more in love with it every day.

We slept next to a gas compressor plant, which sounded like an ancient truck trying to start up constantly; nearby was Poison Well, and the horizon was decorated by the steam of a nuclear power plant and a water reclamation plant in the distance. In the morning we arose early, eager to leave and were greeted with the most fascinating sight.

The sliver of a new moon fell slowly into the dawn, and was illuminated by the rising sun into a blood red as it dropped.

And the rocks are so dominant in the landscape. Piles of rocks, exposed by weather, the only thing with enough stamina to withstand the blazing sun, the absence of water.

And yet the topography is so completely shaped by water: the undulating surface of the land is defined by washes. Unseen during these spring months were those deluges of water, but in the landscape you could read its presence. A road seems it will traverse endless flat land, while there actually is a great deal of hidden topography, allowing our rented vehicles to go only so far.

I climb a rock to its top and perch. I gaze over the vast landscape before me and it is a seascape in reverse: green basin, blue mountains in the distance. I take it in and close my eyes and imagine it in reverse, thousands of years ago, when these mountains perhaps emerged, green from blue ocean, covered in vegetation. I always saw this ocean in my mind’s eye.

And the mountains in Arizona are of every color. They can be of red or orange or brown rock of any shade; covered with yellow lichen, or green vegetation; in twilight in the distance they take on several hues of blue and purple, until they become a black silhouette against the starry night sky. The rainbow on the earth is mirrored by the multihued sunsets: as starkly beautiful when cloudless as they are dynamic and beautiful with morphing clouds overhead.

The desert will enchant you. It will steal your heart.

The desert will eat you. It will eat your shoes.

And the cholla will bite you, and they will not apologize.