The Furious Spinner

One day Mario and I drove up to Mount Lemmon, in the Santa Catalinas. Actually we went up twice. The first time the road was closed, so we only got partway. We went far enough to see some absolutely splendiferous Arizona sycamores. I’m using all those adjectives in an attempt to stall before I actually describe the trees. It was daylight when we drove up, but it was cloudy and rainy. We had gone past the upper limit of where the saguaro grew to coniferous forest. The rock all around us was pink, pale yellow, and rust colored. We drove around a corner and saw serpentine blond and bare sycamore branches reaching up from the ravine beside the road. Light-colored bark undulated over each tree, like waves coming into shore, one at a time, only each was a slightly different shade than the one before. Yellow leaves, hanging like disembodied hands, fingers pointed down, decorated the branches here and there. The contrast between the sycamores and the dark conifers and dismal day was striking. I turned to Mario and said, “I’m in love.” Just about then we had to turn around and go back down the mountain.

A few days later, we tried again. One book about the Sonoran Desert describes going up the Catalinas like driving from Mexico to California in 26 miles. It’s an apt description. By the time we got up to the mixed conifer forest, with over a foot of snow all around us, I felt as though I was back in the Pacific Northwest. We stopped at Summerhaven, a small village near the ski lodges on Mount Lemmon. A year and a half ago, an arsonist set fire to the area, burning over 80,000 acres, including 250 homes in Summerhaven. We could see the devastation as we drove up, mile after mile of charred trees, standing up on the mountainsides like black toothpicks waiting for hors d'oeuvres.

We stopped at the only restaurant in town to get some pie we had been told about. In the snow all around the restaurant were burnt tree stumps with a new house here and there on the hillsides. We walked up the snowy steps to the cafe. A sign on the door flapped in the breeze. I held it down to read: Only customers were allowed inside the restaurant because of the cold weather. The restaurant is housed in a rickety old building, small and cluttered inside. It might even be a trailer. I used the bathroom and I think it was an airplane bathroom. No one else was inside except a woman who was moving around boxes of paper cups, plastic spoons, paper dishes, things like that.

We told her we came for the pie, and she brought Mario blueberry pie and me cherry. As we ate the sugar-loaded goodies, I asked about the road closures, then about the fire.

“When was the fire?” I asked.

“June 17, 2003,” she said.

She was never going to forget that date. She began talking about how many homes were destroyed, how many acres. She said most people weren’t allowed back to their homes after the fire started on Tuesday, even though the fire didn’t reach their homes until Thursday. Many of the residents went down the mountain on Tuesdays to shop in Tucson, so all they had were the clothes on their back. As she put more Styrofoam coffee cups out near the coffee maker, she said, “Two days. They could have saved so many things. I was lucky because I was working so I was here. We loaded as much as we could into our vehicles. They wouldn’t let people back up. That’s the forest service for you.”

She lost her home, as did all of her neighbors.

“Was it nature or on purpose?” I asked.

“It was arson,” she said. “Kid wanted to see what it was like to burn down a town. A young man, really. 20 years old. They gave him six months probation. That’s the justice system.”

“That must have been so hard,” I said.

“Yes, it was,” she said, “but I’m a Christian woman and what I lost has been returned to me double.”

She said a lot of people couldn’t rebuild even if they had insurance. It cost more to build now, plus insurance didn’t pay for everything.

“You should check your insurance to see if it pays for clean up,” she said. “We had ash four feet high. All of that had to be cleaned up before they could rebuild. Insurance doesn’t pay for that.”

I asked if she had rebuilt.

She shook her head. “No. Not yet. I don’t know what we’ll do.”

When I finished the pie, I said, “This was good, but I don’t normally eat this much sugar.”

The woman shook her head. “She’s known for her pies,” she said, “but I don’t eat any. I’ve been working here for so long I don’t want to hear any thing about pies.”

I thanked her for the conversation; then we got a piece of strawberry-rhubarb to-go for the caretaker at the retreat, we started down the mountain again. In places along the way where the forest hadn’t been completely destroyed by fire, I saw black tree stumps half-buried by snow that looked like bears. We stopped at a yellow diamond sign with two bears walking (bear crossing) and Mario took my photograph.

The sky was magnificent. Huge lenticular clouds topped the mountain, looking like the biggest mother ship of all time. We stopped to look at the “balanced boulders.” These rock formations occur when weathering shapes the rocks into improbable standing boulders, one on top of the next, sometimes the larger rocks on top of the small ones. Some of these natural art pieces were so tall and big and precarious-looking we wondered if even a car horn could bring them down. Below us the sun was beginning to scatter its light beneath the clouds covering Tucson.

Another day, when it was warm and sunny, we went to Sabino Canyon, also part of the Catalinas. It’s closed to automobile traffic, so we had to park near the entrance. Many, many, many, many other people had also decided to come to Sabino Canyon that day. We could hike into the canyon or take a shuttle up. Mario and I decided just to hike one of the trails.

We left the visitor center and went to the left, away from where the hordes were going. We were pleased to be in the desert, dodging prickly pear and jumping cholla, watching for birds, pointing out cool looking saguaro. Then we heard people talking. We thought someone was coming toward us on the trail. We looked to our left and saw many people. A couple of them were even pushing baby carriages. They were all walking on the road (which was now closed) only a few yards from where we were. We laughed. So much for us being desert explorers. Eventually we ended up on the road too. It was strangely eerie and satisfying, all these people walking on this road, as though it was the end of the world, after the apocalypse, and those of us who were left were...talking a stroll in the desert.

We saw no bears, cougars, jaguars, coyotes, or much wildlife at all. We did see a creek, swollen with water, filling the air around it with moisture and the succulent sound of water over parched rocks. We also saw a woman walking along, talking animatedly in Spanish. For a moment, as she looked at me, I thought she was speaking to me, but then I figured out she had her cell phone plugged into her ear.

Ah, wilderness!

Labels: Arizona, travel

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All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.