The Great Abandon (Part II)

It has now come to the time of hanging, stagnant heat.  Approaching mid April, the temperatures are surpassing 90 degrees, but the air conditioning in our apartment is not yet on.  The screen door gapes, all three windows are open, and two fans spin languidly.  Today is the first day a pleasant breeze has not been blowing.  So the heat settles.  Mid-afternoon was like a long summer day in the Midwest; it seemed noise had stopped.  The stillness surrounding me was surreal, and the heat drew me into a restless sleep on my bed, waking only to the phone, a pierce to the not-quite-summer day. 

It is past six o’clock now and the sun still hangs in the sky like a child refusing bed.  Birds cheep-cheep, children laugh and chase outside, cars rumble down the road.  The world has awakened from the oppression.  It is only early April. 

The heat of the desert is sometimes agreeable, like being wrapped in a warm blanket with a cup of hot cocoa.  Spending a summer in the high desert of Utah accustomed me to 85 degree days and 30 degree nights, but a trip to St. George brought back the pleasantries of home.

            “That thermometer just said it is 108 degrees.  This is stifling.”

            “I love it; it isn’t too hot yet.”

            “Let’s get back into the car and the air conditioning; my feet are sticking to the asphalt.”

I could not put into words how the heat made me feel alive again, the sun testing my skin to see if it still functioned properly.  Somehow, for that moment, I was happily hot.  A few days now and I have had enough.  But every so often, it feels just right.

The Great Abandon (Part I)

I think I have figured it out. That is, the reason Phoenix holds no place in my heart. I always feel I am a stranger here, though I’ve been a resident for four years. I love the Sonoran Desert; I am attracted to this land. The desert lies naked, quivering with heat, calling to me. The wide, embracing skies and rocky mountain walls stand testament. To something. I am drawn to the starkness, the great abandon. I cannot take water for granted, but rather search it out, pleadingly. A tinaja hidden among the rocks. A spring daring to rise above ground, filtering quickly back into the land. I felt it for a moment, just now, the reason I love the desert.

Tucson was my home for eight years, my middle childhood, played out in the foothills of the Santa Catalinas. I sprawled outside on our concrete pool deck/backyard and watched the monsoon roll in over the mountaintop nearly every summer afternoon around four. I transferred to the front porch to watch the lightning show from under the relative safety of an overhang. The rain came down and turned our perfectly landscaped yard into verdant fields of Texas Ranger, bougainvillea, birds of paradise. The natural desert portion of our land heaved with saguaro, palo verde, mesquite, cholla, prickly pear. If only the lightning came and the rain forgot to make an appearance, I watched the side of the mountain turn orange with flame, slithering like a snake, while the Forest Service decided whether or not to let it burn.


The mountains near Phoenix are far off in the distance; here I can never watch the storm come rolling in. The Valley of the Sun is not like the Old Pueblo, filled with native plants and visibly surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges, though development there is spilling out the passes, striving, always striving to become a second Phoenix. The desert here hides at the edge of town and sulks somewhere beyond the grass and shade trees. Here the desert is the enemy. Native cacti are ousted by plants from around the world, a usurpation of the native ecosystem, known as the ASU Arboretum. Snowbirds and displaced Midwesterners plant the vegetation of their childhood. Green grass is good memories brought to life again. Phoenix is not the Sonoran desert.

Mexican Vignettes

It was easy to go to Mexico, to the big flowery city, to the Orozcos, to the beaches where an ocean view costs change.  It was easy to love from the beginning.  

It was the frogs on the curvy mountain road in the midst of the storm.  It was La Ciudad de Dios, mini-Rio, where El Cristo Rey and los apostolicos watch over Ejutla.  It was seduction in Spanish, because everything sounds better in a language that is not your own.  It was the late night, the rain, and the fuzz in my head.  It was the songs in the streetlight and the supportive adobe wall. It was okay to say nothing in the morning. 

It was riding in the back of a truck, jostling out of town onto the cobblestones of Puerte in the obscurity of 1 am.  It was drunkenness off good tequila that remembered me in the morning.  It was the mariachi sitting next to me, picking la guitarra.  It was the low slung brick house and the night-time serenade.  

I emailed no one, called no one, missed no one.  Perhaps you would say I did not love enough.  But it was only that I loved Mexico too much.

Mother

My mother stands in front of a mirror and says,

“I hate to look at my face.”

It’s the wrinkles she fears – those subtle

            lines of wisdom, experience, life itself

Fifty-five, looking barely forty-six

Her worries are needless

Yet she compares her face to mine

            And I am green in the world, young in life

            My face like a baby’s – two eyes peering out unknowing

            Innocent

            Brash

My face is my mother’s a few years ago

But she faces the mirror and says,

“I look so old.”

She does not understand she looks like life treated well

            I want to age like her

            An imprint of a good life to show the world

            Lines of age, but mostly beauty

Grandma

We were sitting in the lobby of the optometrist, arguing about some hangers. 

After she was called into the office, a gentleman near me leaned over and said, "She sure is a firecracker!"

When was it that the fire started ebbing? 

When was it finally gone? 

Like a “fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” we let it, she let it, slip away.

“I’ll see you later,” I said, knowing there was no later. 

I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye. 

I wish I’d known her when I was older and she was younger. 

I think I would have learned more, understood more. 

Maybe I wouldn’t have given her up so easily.

Bryce Canyon Collection (Part II)

II

I walk over rocks;

I walk through time,

through space, through beauty,

through true amazement.

My shoes grow white, and orange, and yellow;

dust coats my pants; eroded limestone.

I am part of the landscape, of the rock, of the spell of the hoodoos.

The wind blows as I traverse the ridge,

trying to conquer my harsh environment

while it threatens to conquer me.

Just pick me up and toss me off like a feather in the wind.

But I will still be with the land and it will be with me

as I fade into purple and pink and red,

the color of hoodoo in the setting sun.

You cannot separate me from this place,

for it is a part of us all.

The Legend People watch over me, serene in their eternal beauty;

inviting almost to join them as they cast their spell.

I walk through trees, a part of the rocks,

an inspiration in their survival in a land

of streams without water.

I walk through history

and the fears and happiness and awe and power

that are extracted from all who pass by.

I am a Fremont, a Paiute, a Mormon, a geologist.

I am everyone who has gone before and all who will follow me.

I was history,

I am history,

I make history

with every step I take in this awesome place

and every breath that takes in the dust of the hoodoos

and the scent of the ponderosa pine.

I walk through would-be camera snapshots

but I have left my camera;

it will not tell the story that my mind can tell

of the hoodoos’ color in the cloudy light when shadows

fell through the Amphitheater

and each minute was a different picture

and story within itself.

I walk like a cloud,

a hoodoo,

an ever-changing shape

for no emotion is ever the same, nor I’m sure is the look on my face.

I walk through people who are utterly impressed

slowly seeing the beauty which passes so fast

and can’t be described with words.

I walk in the rocks

and the dust

and the years

and I become a legend as well.

Bryce Canyon Collection

Once I wanted to be a writer. Once I even got paid to write. I started digging through old writing, looking for something. I might as well self-publish on my blog. Beware: a series of writing from my early twenties.


I

Limestone:

soft rock, crumbly to the touch,

completely unfit for climbing,

but rather good at falling.

Prime substance for erosion,

ice-wedging, geological processes

before my very eyes.

Limestone welcomes; it lets the water into its pores

in the warmth,

but the water remains indebted to no one

and will freeze as the day turns to night,

popping apart its host

slowly

but surely

until suddenly

the rock falls.

Two hundred nights a year,

freeze thaw freeze thaw.

Fin, window, arch, hoodoo.

(Like holding up your hand

and slowly splitting the fingers apart.)

Hoodoo?

Pinnacle like voodoo.

To cast a spell.

Hoodoo, like a cloud ever changing

and not looking the same to two people with eyes

side by side but different minds to process.

Like a cloud, no two hoodoos look the same.

Hoodoo, like a cloud, changing,

the limestone does not stop welcoming.

Is it voodoo?

Coyote the demigod once welcomed,

but his guests were rude and raucous at his party, 

all of them,

snake, prairie dog, mountain lion,

sometimes looking like people

but all rude and now stone. 

They wore out the welcome and

Coyote turned them into stone. 

The Paiute’s Legend People of the limestone,

lurking in the Amphitheater.