Epic Trip Out West, Day Forty-Eight, Continued: Tucson and Cacti

Although some people I’ve met insist that a city is a city is a city, I find that each metropolis has a distinctive feel. To me, St. Louis is a metal clutter of history and river-grunge, Seattle is a glassy shell over a grimy underbelly, San Francisco is a chaos of grit and style and international culture, Nashville is a dusty urban site with a flair of midwest, and Miami is a façade of perfect colors and housekept beaches. Although Tucson shared threads of similarity with each of these (skyscrapers, businessmen and homeless people, funky red urban art), it is the most uneasy city I’ve ever visited, the most tenacious, the most uncomfortable in its surroundings, even though its inhabitants don’t seem to notice. Put simply, Tucson is in the middle of the desert, and its every attempt to emulate the cities of elsewhere ends with the desert as the victor.

The Desert, like the dryness in the air, isn’t immediately apparent, until you feel your breath with clarity on your lips, drawing in and wafting out like an old air conditioning unit. Every green thing that isn’t astroturf seems on the verge of giving up and dying. I even found a dead cactus in a planter by a parking garage, shriveled up and brown. Every palm tree I saw seemed on its last root. At one point, I felt a distinct change in the air, and wondered what it might be until I saw a sprinkler system fighting nature a block away. Half of the carefully-watered grass was still dead. A couple buildings rise up high and proud, coated in dust, but most of them have the good sense to stay close to the ground, conserving their energy lest they be overcome with the dryness and sucked back into the earth.

The streets were quiet as I walked, but that was understandable since it was a Monday morning. I parked myself on a concrete bench beneath a desert tree in Presidio Park and listened to a busker play a mournful melody on his Native American flute. Black pigeons and slender-beaked crows picked through the dappled sun filtering through the trees and around saguaro and prickly-pear. Already the Desert mentality has seeped into my mind, transforming gravel to grass, and I abruptly realized as I wound through the park that I was keeping to the path to avoid stepping on the pebbles!

I found the hallmark sites of the city, thanks to Dennis’s advice and a map he gave me: The Fox Theatre, Congress Hotel, Chicago Music Store (I got to play a sleek black mandolin for a while), St. Augustine Cathedral, etc. I found a tourist district where every wall of the concrete complex was painted a different children’s-blocks color, hung out on a stretch of rare semi-healthy grass behind the library, trekked into the residential district in search of “world-famous doughnuts” only to find the shop closed and, of course, sat and talked with the homeless people I met.

After about five hours in the sun and heat and stinging dusty air (I’m still itching from the airborne needles, fine as hairs, that dug into my skin from a gust of wind), I called my cousins to see if they’d pick me up. Dennis met me over by the library, but my day wasn’t over. “Since you like saguaros,” he said, “I thought we’d take a detour.”

The detour was to Saguaro National Park, and we arrived via a winding asphalt road surrounded first by houses, then houses with the occasional cactus, then wide open stretches of land marked with the massive plants. We drove over the top of one of the jagged “little mountains”— and my breath was taken away.

Before us, spread out on either side of the curvy road, I saw a vast forest. A desert forest. A forest without a tree in sight. The mountains dipped and rose dramatically, jagged and volcanic and rusty yellow in the evening light, covered with a jumbled mosaic of brush and stone and pebbles and blasted bits of shale. Poking up from the beautiful wreckage of rock were saguaros— thousands and thousands and thousands of them. They reared their blossoming heads up to thirty feet or more, and raised their massive arms to the heavens, green and subtly striped with vertical shadow. The whole valley was laid out before us, curving down into a bowl before rising up in warm shades of blue in the far distance. The sky, without a cloud, was blasted out by the sun, a blank tapestry against the mind-blowing detail of the landscape.

I’m an incredibly articulate person, especially at such moments, so of course I said, in a voice full of awe at God’s creation, “Holy mackerel!” At that second, it was the best I could do.

~Lisa Shafter