Recently in Arizona Category

Having written less than a week ago about the glory that is Tucson, I am pleased to find this article from the NY Times' travel section backing me up. If you have never been to Tucson or considered its charms, seriously, read the article. It has cool stuff--not just the geographic and botanical beauty I mentioned in my post a week ago, but an airplane graveyard (which you can drive right through, as a major street runs down the middle of it) and one of the largest photography museums and archives in the world.

Autochthony is a terrific word I learned as an undergrad and have to few opportunities to use. It means "the state of being autochthonous," which is a fancy word for indigenous. It is, rather obviously, made up of the prefix "auto" or self, stuck onto the word chthonic, a Greek word meaning "of or relating to the gods and spirits of the underground."

I wrote yesterday about reading The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, and how I didn't like it all that much, except for his discussion of sacred places. Eliade uses the term autochthony to refer to a religious feeling of "belonging to a place, and it is a cosmically structured feeling that goes far beyond family or ancestral solidarity" (140).

I like this because it describes how I feel about the Sonoran desert, an area running through south central Arizona and extending slightly into Sonora, Mexico. It is a particular ecosystem with some of the coolest vegetation in the world--the saguaro cactus, for instance, a plant so iconic and interesting that it has come to symbolize the entire southwest, though it is indigenous only to the Sonoran desert.

Thatcher, the town I grew up in, is not in the Sonoran desert. But Tucson, where my mom was born, where my grandparents lived til they died and where I went to college, is. I was in Tucson last week, and while it's not accurate to say that I ever forget that I love it and think it's beautiful, still, going home and encountering it again always has the force of a revelation.

I have so much to report--I spent most of last week at Sunstone, and it was FABULOUS! I will write more about it, when I've had a chance to recover.... In the meantime, please take a moment to appreciate the splendor that is my new blog design, courtesy, as always, of my friend Jim.

This update was long overdue. One reason I had gotten fairly lax about posting is that I had grown to HATE the old design--the color scheme, the artwork, EVERYTHING. Also there were weird problems with comment submission, and my category archives had somehow disappeared when we updated the software. This new and improved design takes care of some of those nasty problems, though I still don't have a blog roll.... I am going to work on that.

The photo in the banner is of my beloved Mount Graham, taken by me on Reay Lane just south of the Gila River in November 2007. It's not quite to scale--it had to be stretched a little to fit the space. But you get the idea of what it really looks like: this big cool lumpy mountain rising off the floor of the desert, overlooking cotton fields and a few small towns. it makes me happy to look at the photo--I hope you like it too.

OK, I am COMPLETELY recovered from my previous skepticism of Facebook and now embrace it wholeheartedly, and here's why: a discussion of tractors, gila monsters and criminals.

In a discussion of hair in high school yearbook photos, one of my friends gloated over the truly huge hair sported at his high school, adding, "Go Tractors!"

Tractors? Did I read that right, I wondered? Tractors? I had to make sure. "Your mascot was the tractor?" I asked.

Turns out my friend went to Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan. FHS was started with a generous gift from Fordson Tractor Company--hence the name. But apparently the unique, interesting mascot has been a source of embarrassment rather than pride. I couldn't find an image of the mascot on my own, though someone was good enough to provide a link to this picture.

I'm a fan of funky mascots. Everyone knows about the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug, and yeah, that's cool, but there are even BETTER mascots out there.

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while.... Stuff has happened. I was sorta sick and felt crappy for a while. Then my blog got sorta sick and felt crappy for a while: some of you might have noticed that a few days ago there was an entry entitled "Testing" that consisted of the word "testing." That was because things weren't working properly and had to be tested.... But everything seems to be healthy now. (Thanks, Jim.)

Then there was this point where I wasn't really interested in my blog; I was more interested in other people's. So I did a lot of catching up and reading and a little commenting. (If I haven't gotten around to yours yet, well, give me time. I was lazy for a good, long while, and I have plenty of catching up to do.) I think plenty of us feel like that from time to time, which is good, or most of us wouldn't get many comments.

And then there was this other thing that happened, which is that I was fairly happy and busy enjoying my life and appreciating weather that was fabulous in the concrete, but sort of freaked me out in the abstract, because it belonged to another time and place, and is a fairly good indication that global warming ain't going away--and will probably be worse than previously predicted.

In other words, I was totally loving Salt Lake City because its fall weather was almost identical to the weather of my childhood in southern Arizona, 1,000 miles away and 40 years ago. And I was experiencing that weather in more than one visceral way, because the building I live in now is about the same age (80-90 years old) as the building I went to first grade in, and has the same heating system: those old steam radiators that can't be set to a specific temperature, merely turned on and off. They put out LOTS of heat. And in the process, they give off a faint but noticeable and neither pleasant nor unpleasant smell, one that reminds me of being five years old and going to first grade (yes, I went to first grade a year early) and of how much I actually liked first grade, back when I first experienced it in 1969.

It's not often that I get to read about my home in the NY Times, but here's a story and a video (scroll down and look on the left side of the screen) discussing the current state of the copper industry in southeastern Arizona, which, along with Chile, "continues to rank as one of the two richest copper provinces in the world."

The article refers several times to the "Safford valley" in Graham County, but there's no such place: The name of the place is the GILA Valley; Safford is merely the county seat and largest town. (Thatcher, the town I grew up in, is the next largest--and still quite small--and now right next to Safford, though they used to be miles apart. Historically, Safford was the business center; Thatcher the intellectual and religious center, the place where the college and the church headquarters were.) There's a mention of the recently opened pit mine there, which just about everyone I knew was in favor of: sure, it was going to be UGLY, and extremely visible, given that it was just across the Gila River (hence the name of the valley) to the north of town, but hey, it would bring prosperity.

The article mentions that Safford's Main Street, which was "once full of empty storefronts with boarded-up windows, is nearing 95 percent occupancy." And I guess that's a good thing: I worked in a couple of businesses on Main Street, and it was indeed depressing to walk past these abandoned businesses. Though the tone of the article suggests that lay-offs and boarded-up storefronts are imminent. We'll see.

(by the way, in case you didn't recognize it, the title of this entry is taken from "Moonstruck," and occurs in a line delivered by the plumber dad about the virtues of copper pipe.)

My distaste for Arizona politics increases daily.

This is long, but you MUST watch it.

Before I came home, I emailed a friend to say I was coming into town and ask if she was busy this past weekend. She emailed back to say, "Yes, I am busy, and now you're busy too." She took me to a couple of really cool events, one of which I plan to write about more. At both events, there were plenty of people I didn't know, and she was very gracious about introducing me to her friends and colleagues, but she kept saying, "This is my friend Holly, from Pennsylvania." And I would have to say, "No, I'm not FROM Pennsylvania; I just live there right now. I'm FROM Arizona--Thatcher, Arizona, to be exact."

I realize this isn't a big deal to everyone, but it's a big deal to me. In a way that is deeply important, I really truly am FROM and OF the Southwest. I was born in Arizona and raised Mormon at a time when Mormonism was still in many regards a regional religion, and my sense of self is thoroughly tied up with a sense of place, as well as a sense of community and spirituality that derives quite specifically and literally from the place I was taught to call both "zion" and "home." It MATTERED that I was not only born in Arizona, but born in Arizona because my ancestors walked the distance from Illinois to Utah, then headed south for various reasons. Frankly, it matters to me still.

So to introduce me to people by saying that I'm FROM some place without no real mountains to speak of and a great lake and lots of rivers instead of pervasive and profound aridity is akin to introducing me as "Heidi" or "Heather," both of which I get called from time to time: even though you can see how people make that mistake, it's just not right, and it's annoying to have to correct someone on this.

And then there was what happened when I asked other people where they were from.

I haven't posted recently because I've been traveling.... I arrived at Sky Harbor Airport (PHX, in case you care about airport codes) a few days ago so I can hang out in Arizona for the Thanksgiving holiday. What is there to say about air travel except that it sucks in just about every possible way, but is nonetheless quicker than driving or taking a train (which unfortunately is not really an option for certain kinds of travel in the US anyway)?

But I arrived. And the weather is beautiful, in that "it's way too warm for November, but that's what global warming gives us" kind of way. Seriously, when I was a little girl, beginning in November and lasting until February we had something I wasn't embarrassed to call winter: you had to wear a coat, and the temperature would drop below freezing regularly, and sometimes there would be snow. But now if you live in southern Arizona you don't every really have to own a coat.

Anyway, things are going OK on this trip, except that something about the way my wireless whatever is configured on my laptop means that I can't access the wireless service where I'm staying, so if I want to blog or do email, I have to do it on the shared computer, and as there are four children 13 and under who all want to check email and edit anime videos, I have to queue up. Right now everyone but me and one sick niece are at church, so I have the computer to myself.

If I get the wireless thing sussed out, there will be more from me, but if I don't, both entries on my blog on comments on yours might be sparse for the next week.

Woke up this morning well before 5 a.m., not particularly rested, all freaked out about mortality again.... I haven't written much about, because I lately haven't much inhabited, the spells of profound despair I'm sometimes subject to.... Sometimes I just worry. I bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart heavy and fast, tears already in my eyes, because the ice caps are melting and all the polar bears are going to die. Read a couple of days ago that all these new species, including the hippopotamus, have been added to the list of endangered species, and it pretty much bummed me out. "Entropy," I thought. "This is fuckin' entropy: everything reduced to the lowest common denominator, as boring and uniform as human beings can make it before they die out too."

And I also think about the fact that I'm 42 and probably about half way through my life. I sorta believe in reincarnation, and I wonder what I'll come back as.... I'm not announcing suicidal tendencies or anything--no need to worry about me--but there are times when I think, "Yeah, it wouldn't be so very bad to start all over again...."

And then I read something like this or this from Chris Clarke, which tears my heart in ways I can't fathom or describe. I realize that those of us who love the desert romanticize it terribly, and it's not because we don't know there are other places that are really beautiful. It's because, hell, I don't know.... In some ways the best thing I ever heard anyone say about the desert was T. E. Lawrence's response (at least, Peter O'Toole said it, in the movie version of T. E. Lawrence's life) when asked why he likes its so: "It's clean."

It's clean. You get dirty there, but the desert itself is somehow clean.

I spent most of my Christmas break in east Tucson at the home my parents recently purchased two doors down from my brother and his family, and one of the things I did while I was there was go for walks and look at the Catalinas, the strange mountain range to the North. The Catalinas are amazing: they're so weirdly bumpy and irregular, and they are perfectly situated to capture shadows created by the sun as it travels across the sky: the Catalinas change more than any other mountain range I've ever seen.

Like I said, there's something about all this I can't fathom or describe. The air seems clean (not that it really is these days) and clear and I just have this sense of... the sublime? Intimations of mortality? I'm just so aware of how the landscape I grew up in shaped my sense of... life as something bright and harsh. Of the world as something that doesn't much give a shit whether we manage to live in it or not, but is incredibly beautiful--and somehow knows that--whether we notice it or not. I've never not felt this sort of awe and despair and gratitude and certainty inspired by this deep visceral language-less knowledge the desert communicated to me the first time I look around and said, "Huh. So this is home."

I doubt this is making sense. Plenty of things I feel I can describe adequately. My love for my home and the reasons why the desert moves me--that I can't describe.