The Long Goodbye: Arizona
posted in Arizona, OmegaDad, OmegaGranny, The Move |OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981. I was 22. Everyone in the family was amazed.
OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly. Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix. She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also. So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move. She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.
One day, out of the blue, the family got the word: Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”. OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!
After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them. I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins. They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance. As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.
Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon. (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.) And Phoenix and Scottsdale. So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer. It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.
This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to. The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.
So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.
It was great. There was only one problem: money. Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.
So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).
As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.
At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny. To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more. He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas. He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.
They started talking.
It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.
It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.
State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch. MOMTB did. And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed. MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…
…moving to Arizona.
But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.
Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast. Philadelphia? Baltimore? Boston? I can’t remember. But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.
OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful. We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious. We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts. We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts. Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes. You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…
There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter. I will miss it. I hope to return “home” someday.
