Many people do not like organized religion or churches. They say they get more out of being in nature and I can understand that, because I feel close to God on a lonely mountaintop like the one in this picture. But I think even atheists would like San Xavier Mission in Tucson.

The Italian priest who made our mission was an impractical man who wanted to be in China, not Tucson. When he got the notion of building a boat to cross the Sonoran desert, his followers questioned his sanity.

Padre Kino somehow organized the local Native Americans to help him build San Xavier mission in 1700. It never really got finished, as you can see from this picture. The top of one tower is missing, but that is part of its magic.
The interior of the Mission is over-the-top amazing. It’s slowly being restored, but there is never enough money to finish. It doesn’t really matter: it’s beautiful the way it is.When you go inside San Xavier, you sense that people here really believe in God. They pray very deep prayers, and leave little momentos of their prayers pinned to the Virgin Mary’s dress or to santos. These are called milagros. If you pray about your bum leg, you leave a milagro in the shape of a leg. They also leave candles, pictures of loved ones, and other symbols of their devotion to God and prayer.The services have no show, no sham. Once on Christmas Eve, the old wood pews were filled even though there was no heat in the Mission. An old bitch dog with long tits was walking around, licking people.The priest was wearing a simple brown Franciscan habit with rope and sandals. In the middle of Mass, the theme from “Rocky” came over the intercom, because they cannot afford a decent sound system. Yet it was beautiful, the way Christmas should be.Outside the church, Native Americans sell fry bread and trinkets. You can walk up a little mountain to a tiny shrine that is very inspiring. You look out on a simple cemetery and think of your own mortality.Even if you don’t like churches, I know you will like San Xavier mission. Trust me, it’s a sacred place.

by Jane St. Clair

The Day of the Dead — or Dia de Muertos, as we call it in Tucson– comes after Halloween, but it’s even spookier. Every year hundreds of people gather downtown at night for the very very spooky All Souls Procession.

Skeletons rise out of their graves– and they walk around, looking much the worse for wear. On the Day of the Dead, they eat and play cards …

They dance —

And some even play in orchestras

While I always liked the kiddie party trick-or-treat spirit of Halloween, the grotesque images of the Day of the Dead used to creep me out. I mean… SKELETONS! And GHOSTS!

Then a friend who grew up in Mexico took the time to explain Dia de Muertos to me. When someone we love dies, she said, we miss them so much! Our uncles, our aunts, our grandmothers and grandfathers — all of them. We miss them and wish every day they were here.

But on Dia de Muertos, they can come back to us for one more happy day. We have dinner with them! We play cards! We dance! We tell jokes! We party again!

But mostly, we are just happy to be together one more time. Right before Dia de Muertos, we prepare their favorite foods and pull out their favorite games and sometimes even clothes so that they used to like to wear. This way they will be sure to come visit us.

It was the Aha! moment for me.

What a cool idea – how accepting and loving to think even though my Great-Aunt Charlotte may now be a skeleton, she is happy where she is. She could stop by to see me on Dia de Muertos.

People honoring all those they love! This celebration is so jolly that some people even remember their pets! And of course, no Arizona cowboy never ever forgets his favorite horse on the Day of the Dead or any day, for that matter.

Yo, Aunt Charlotte! Party down one more time! Viva la Dia de Muertos!

For more information about the November All Souls Procession Parade in Tucson, see 2024 All Souls’ Procession

Tombstone’s Gunfight at the OK Corral
by Jane St. Clair

Tombstone, Arizona, where the cowboys live, sets in the mountains. It’s the Town Too Tough to Die.

It’s down the road from Bisbee, where the hippies live. Bisbee is the Town Too High To Die.

Tombstone today is part history

and part Halloween party.

It’s famous for the Gunfight at the OK Corral and Boothill Cemetery.

Boothill’s got many cool grave markers …

As well as net graves like The Tomb of the Unknown Cowboy — Killed by Indians, Found Dead in a Mine Shaft, Killed in a Card Game, and such.

Tombstone was full of cowboys in the 1880s who worked the mine on Toughnut Street

and then drank all night at the 116 saloons in town. The slogan was Good whiskey and tolerable water!

The very cool citizens of Tombstone brag that other towns have histories but their town has a LEGEND. The guns, violence, and brave dead cowboys inherent in this LEGEND are so very American that it just makes you feel proud.

Everybody in Tombstone takes their LEGEND very very seriously. The actor who plays Doc Holliday quotes Shakespeare, while they play opera music during the reenactment. There are actually statues of all eight participants in their exact spots.This is serious stuff.

Doc Holliday was actually drunk during the Gunfight, but luckily he had a shotgun whereas the others had pistols.

The McLaury boys and the Clantons were feuding with the Marshall Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday. It started over a hold-up of a Wells Fargo stagecoach, and just kept getting worse until the afternoon of October 26, 1881. Snow was falling. The good guys wore black dusters. The bad guys had red sashes round their waists.

The feud finally climaxed at the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Legend has it that they fired 30 shots in 30 seconds.

When the first shots fired, Ike Clanton ran tail and pleaded for his life.

Bam bam bam Bam BAM – !!! Within a few seconds, Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were dead. Doc Holliday got himself a permanent limp from a bullet hole to his knee.

The Earp brothers ended up just fine.

Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton ended up in Boothill Cemetery

With a great view of the mountains…

That night there was a party in the Bird Cage Saloon, which today is haunted by ghosts of cowboys and saloon women.

If you’re psychic, the images of ghosts will appear in your pictures of the Bird Cage. The ghost of Wyatt Earp’s lady/friend is in the little mirror in this picture.

At night you can still have a great time in the saloons of Tombstone, and you feel all goosebumpy and part of history.

So pardner, it’s true — old cowboys and their legends never die,

They just ride off into the sunset and live in technicolor movies forever and ever.

Netflix has a terrific new series called “Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War.” For more information, go here.

By Jane St. Clair

The other day it rained in the Sonoran desert. It took perhaps a month to build up to it; the desert is not a place for rain.

The sun shines 360 days a year, it hardly ever rains. Desert rain comes inbetween great lengths of sun; waiting for rain is like walking on pebbles that are too far apart.

Without rain, the plants in the desert grow brown. They lose their tops first — their tops shrivel up and fall off and then the whole plant goes into shock and struggles to survive. The big saguaro cactus turn into drying watermelons; the paws of the prickly pear go from thick and chubby and childlike, to old and dry and thin.

Meanwhile, the sun keeps shining in its fake-friendly way, forcing the animals into panic. They drink every bit of standing water left; when that disappears, they suck water from cactus; when that dries up, they must go without water. Snakes, lizards, turtles – they are the most fortunate because they can go without drinking for the longest time. The liquids in their bodies become so concentrated as to be poison. The mammals –bobcat, pack rat and coyote — are less fortunate. A local mountain lion, so desperate for water, comes to a children’s park to drink from the swimming pool.

A terrible tension builds up in the desert as the plants struggle against wilting, drying and premature death, and as the animals slow themselves down to survive. There is no water, no water anywhere. Arizona has great beds of dry sand where rivers can run, and long stretches of dry creeks that run from the mountaintops to the valleys, but they run dry between rains.

Then one day, the storm begins to spin itself! Big dramatic white clouds take days and days to form in the clear turquoise sky like the overture of a grand symphony.The Navajo call the spirit of rain Yei. On his body are bars of rain, on his wings hang bags of water, his legs are dark clouds, his hands and feet are lightning. At first Yei brings his gifts slowly, gently.

Then the whiteness turns strange unearthly colors: –grey, black, blue, pink, orange– like a horrible gigantic bruising wound in the heavens.

Thunder roars – something has to let loose and something must crash and shake down the sky! there’s too much tension! So it rains, how it rains, rain like you’ve never seen before!

The people of the Tohono T’oham Nation, the Native American people here, say the desert smells like rain. Now as the desert rain comes down in great solid sheets of water, it does. The desert has the musty odor of wet creosote, and it smells like rain.

Then two great arcs of color form over the Catalinas: a double rainbow: red, yellow, blue, violet. Bright light of color, lighting the soft pastels of the desert into the colors of jewels: emerald, citrine, ruby, sapphire.

The riverbeds fill up and develop currents that drown automobiles and people. The little dry creeks run again.

It’s dark and very cold for us outside, but we run out barefoot anyway to see the desert rain. Everyone is out for the party – bobcat, snake, lizard, coyote, puma – everyone’s out for a drink – just because it rained.

Sunsets
by Jane St. Clair

I wondered what it would be like to go to the same spot in Tucson every day and watch the beautiful Arizona sunsets day after day.

I would go to the same place every day in the same way

that Manet went to the same spot every day to paint the same haystack in different lights.

I found out that while most sunsets are everyday ordinaire, like vin ordinaire,

Arizona sunsets can be, more than anything, light shows.

Sunsets are also events in that the sun moves from the top of the sky to the edge of the horizon and then it disappears.

When it happens, the energy of the earth changes. The energy loses its everyday quality and becomes restless.

Everything becomes restless, even people. Animals need to hole up for the night.

Flowers shut down, and birds pepper the sky right before sunset.

We humans do the equivalent with our “rush hour,” the nervous scramble to get home before dark.

Though most sunsets are ordinary,  a few clouds can turn them into spectacles.

Add thunderheads for real drama.

Some sunsets have crazy combinations of colors that no human artist would use –wild fusions of orange, pink, chartreuse and turquoise.

Big, dramatic, bright colors lighting up the world one last time before night.

They are like the big colors of autumn back East that light up the world

one last time before the black night of winter.

Brother Sun says, “Look at me! Here – something’s happening here!”

He does not go gentle into the dark desert night — in fact, sometimes

he sets the mountains on fire.

It keeps getting more and more beautiful. Just when you think you cannot

take in such beauty,  it grows even more beautiful.

You are thankful for your eyes, that you can see this beauty. Surely a thing of beauty lasts forever!

But it fades to black …

Every time.

Good night, Arizona, until tomorrow at 5:30 near Oracle and Hardy Roads.

White Heat
by Jane St Clair

I don’t think there is a place as quiet as the Sonoran desert in summer noon. The temperature is an impossible 119 degree inferno in the shade but then, there is hardly any shade. I call it “white heat.”

It is the white quiet heat that rises and radiates above the quick licking tongues of fire. White heat, a white aura rising from the desert ground. White heat bleaching away the colors from the desert so everywhere you look, it is faded and brown.

Noel Coward said only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun, and he was right. It is madness to stand out here. No one and nothing is out here, which is why it is so quiet.

The silence is all encompassing – nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees. Desert colors are subtle, mostly a series of pastel greens, but the white heat and the silence fades them.

I can see for miles and miles and miles past the mountain ranges and into skies a hundred miles away, and nothing moves, not even a leaf. I can see for miles and miles, but I can’t hear anything at all.

Why listen for a leaf? — cactus don’t have leaves – their leaves have shriveled up into prickly needles eons ago, sturdy little stubby things that stand up and bloom in the noonday sun. I admire them.

Where is everyone? It is so silent here, it is so quiet. Nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees.

Everyone has gone underground where it is cool or else they are sleeping under cool rocks. They are sleeping and they will do their foraging by moonlight.

A kitfox ..

…

A puma …

A Mexican wolf

A bobcat …

Even a centipede…

They are sleeping, sleeping past the noonday sun. It is so silent, it is so quiet as Brother Sun casts down his white heat rays. Summer heat, white heat, so very very hot.

Finally the sun’s cruel rays slant and wane in late afternoon.

Mercifully, Brother Sun is walking to the other side of Mother Earth.

Now the creatures will come out and they will dance by the light of the moon. They will dance all night until the desert sleeps again, until she sleeps in the white heat of summer.

“May you walk in beauty” means something like shalom in Hebrew or being in a state of grace in Christianity. Walking in beauty is being in harmony with everything around you – recognizing the beauty and connectedness of everything you see, even with those things that may not seem conventionally beautiful. It is a heightened state of consciousness.

May you walk in beauty all your days.

NAVAJO BLESSINGWAY POEM OF BEAUTY

In beauty may I walk
All day long may I walk
Through the returning seasons may I walk

Beautifully I will possess again
Beautifully birds
Beautifully joyful birds

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk

With beauty may I walk

With beauty before me may I walk

With beauty behind me may I walk

With beauty above me may I walk

With beauty all around me may I walk
In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk

It is finished in beauty

It is finished in beauty

Bisbee, Arizona, sits on top a hill in colorful pieces like a kid’s jigsaw puzzle. It was once the biggest city between the Mississippi and the Pacific, but it shrunk and it is still shrinking even as you read this.

Bisbee is arty and has a love-and-peace 1960s vibe, but don’t you believe that one minute! Bisbee is full of ghosts and the paranormal investigators and ghostbusters who track them!

Scared yet?

Bisbee has always been and still is about copper. Today the Big Lavender Pit Mine uses bulldozers and technology ….

But back in the day, the miners rode little railroads into the cruel darkness of the underground caves blasted open by the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Back in the day Bisbee was full of violent men who’d shoot each other and hang each other over women and cards or because they were too drunk to know better.

Today people come to Bisbee from all over the world with ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs. You can even take a Bisbee ghost tour while riding in a hearse. Ghostbusters look for spectres and ghosts of cheating card sharks, murdering cowboys, zombie miners, and dangerous women you don’t want to know.

Scared yet?

The Oliver House alone was the scene of 26 murders.

It’s so creepy that its neighbors put up gargoyles as a feng shui measure to keep those ghosts in their usual home.

Scared yet?

City Park at Brewery Gulch looks peaceful enough, but it’s a place with extreme readings of paranormal activity. It used to be a cemetery. The legend is that all the bodies and caskets floated down this innocent-looking hill during a flood.

Scared yet?

A miner’s ghost turns on the jukebox at St. Elmo’s Bar, another ghost climbs into bed with guests at the Bisbee Inn, a prostitute-ghost roams the streets of Bisbee looking for the cowboy who killed her accidentally while cleaning his gun, and a Madam refuses to move out of Opera Drive Brothel. The Lady in White shows up at the top of the staircases,

and once she scared three little boys so badly that they ran away — accidentally saving their lives as the ground behind them collapsed in a sudden torrential rain.

Scared yet?

Even the Bisbee prom has a zombie theme.

Every night teams of ghostbusters go looking for spooks and spectres and the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man! Aha! We have a reading here by the Copper Queen Hotel on our ghost detector that shows a non-repeating phantasm or a class-5 free roaming vapor circa 1912 ….

Scared yet?

Lions and Tigers and Bears and things that go va voom in the night.

Scared yet?

But now …Yes! Oorah!

We’ve made it to dawn —and— Bisbee’s not a bit scary in the morning.

Good job, you Ghostbuster of Bisbee. Oorah!

 
For more about ghostbusting in Bisbee, go here.

DeGrazia
by Jane St. Clair

I have a snooty friend who says Ted DeGrazia was not much of an artist. It’s true that his most famous work is a UNICEF Christmas card. It sold in the millions, but it’s not like it’s the Mona Lisa or something.

To me, DeGrazia’s art is not just about his paintings. His art is about how he lived his life here in Tucson. That is why I like to go up to where Swan Road almost ends under Fingertip Rock. There I can see how an artist truly did it his way.

DeGrazia built everything himself – his little house, his chapel, his studio and his art gallery. Because everything’s hand-built adobe, the buildings are small and primitive.

There are nutsy-putsy decorations everywhere – crucifixes mixed with beer cans, candles on cactus, and old Singer sewing machines used for planters. Nothing’s wasted, like the way poor people do things. There’s art in every corner. Everything’s art.

The chapel, dedicated to Padre Kino, could hold maybe ten people on its little benches.

Drawings are all over the chapel walls, and some you wouldn’t expect – like a clown brightening up a dark corner in the back.

DeGrazia liked to go up Superstition Mountain on horseback and visit the Yaquis. Sometimes they would come to his house and hitch their horses in this handmade corral.

DeGrazia did paintings, but he also worked in metals. I picture him working on this stove outside,

fashioning the copper door to the art gallery.

or making a beautiful crown.

He put a lot of humor that shows in many of his works.

But DeGrazia believed the artist’s role was to feel deeply and express emotions for people. Here is the resurrected Christ in glowing white, yet His face says so much more about what He is feeling.

DeGrazia famously took 100 paintings up a mountain and burned them to protest unfair tax laws. That’s a Western thing — to not much like the government.

When he came toward the end of his life, DeGrazia designed his own grave. Like I said, he did things his way.

I like to go up to where Swan Road almost ends not just for his paintings, but inspiration. DeGrazia’s place is sacred because it shows you what it’s like to lead an authentic life. His house, his chapel, his studio, his grave, his way. Adios, amigo.

To plan a visit to DeGrazia Studios, go here.