My lips are chapped, the top of my shoulders faintly pink despite sensible shirts and the omnipresent wide-brimmed hat, and my mind is filled with constant contrast of an arid, spiny and primeval beauty locked in a death struggle with ugly human sprawl.
Saguaro National Monument (East)
Saguaro cacti, the “apartment houses” of the desert, even in the National Monument, are no longer the “forests” remembered by my Dear One from his visits thirty-some years ago. The ground looks barren, expanses of stone and sand between mesquite, cholla and prickly pear; hard to find is the rich diversity of lichens, wildflowers and agaves that tone the earth with verdigris, silvers, shadowy green and cream, and flecks of brilliant yellow, coral and purple under the blue, blue southwest sky.
Worst of all is the skeins of power lines that wrap the landscape, the endless acres of strip malls and housing developments, the expanses of pavement and blight of billboards, all the evidence of “improvements” that produced wealth for the comparative few, led to social and economic chaos for too many and destroyed habitat and home for countless indigenous critters and Peoples.
All the more breathtaking, then, are moments in wilderness. Sedimentary rock towers into view as one rounds a curve. A veil of green swathes the pale and thin-skinned branches of sycamores that line a canyon creek. Desert extends into the distance, dense with plants, convalesced from the depredations of cattle and farmer. Rising and setting sun saturates ferrous stone to carmine and sharply defines every crack and crevice. Haze wraps it all in violet light.
Sedona’s red rocks
It is easy to understand the allure, even to a heat-averse New-England puritan like myself. Even more one feels the spiritual, ineffable, the sacred that is a matter of reverence to Native Peoples and religion to New-Agers. The highest elevations with their towering pines and snowy crags draw me upwards and inwards but even the valleys and their forbidding coverings of thorns and sand seduce.
I like Arizona. I like the art museums in Phoenix and Scottsdale and the coolness that comes with sundown everywhere and especially in the mountains. I love the mom-and-pop Mexican food places where the tortillas are handmade. I adore the drive down the Salt River to Saguaro Lake and the glee with which families celebrate the unusually warm March weather with picnics and splashing and giggles.
the Salt River near Saguaro Lake
It’s the destruction left behind by a society bent on wringing every dime out of this lovely place I can’t stand