Doors of the Southwest are unlike doors anywhere else. They can have wild colors so that you notice them. They can be in hiding so you have to discover them. Doors are powerful and mystical. If there were no doors, everything would be a hallway. The meaning of a door, Christopher Morley said, is to hide what lies inside.

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Today paranormal investigators and ghostbusters come to Bisbee, Arizona, from all over the world with their ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs, and they’re looking for spectres and ghosts of cheating card sharks, murdering cowboys, zombie miners, and dangerous women you don’t want to know. Scared yet?

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When I first moved out West, it was so hot and dry that I thought they needed a few good shade trees.Instead they had the saguaro, which did not even look like trees to me. They certainly don’t do much in the shade department.After a while, I began to respect them, even though I didn’t like them. You have to respect them because they are so heavy they can crush a car, and because they live in the hot desert without water. They swell up like watermelon the few times it rains. They make do in the heat.

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Tombstone, Arizona, is the town too tough to die. Part history and part Halloween, it’s where you can watch the Gunfight at OK Corral, drink a whiskey or intolerable water, walk around the graves at Boothill Cemetery where a cowboy got hanged by mistake, and see ghosts in a mirror at the Bird Cage Saloon. In fact, there are ghosts everywhere in Tombstone.

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“The American West is the real deal. It is a spiritual space.” Spring in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona is so beautiful that it proves the poets wrong. Sometimes it is enough that April comes running down a hill, spewing flowers everywhere.

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Tucson Rodeo comes only once a year but it’s the biggest time of the year. Schools and businesses close, so everybody can cowboy up and go down to the arena.

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Gabrielle Giffords seems like one of those lucky princesses that the fairies bless at birth with beauty, brains, and wealth. Poised, ladylike and articulate, she does our district proud. It is impossible to believe that this could happen to her. It is impossible to believe it could happen at our grocery store.

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by Jane St. Clair Out West it is easy to be by yourself, truly by yourself, the only person for miles with a wilderness stretched out before you.  The landscape is not as friendly as back East, and yet its strangeness and foreboding only adds to the sense of solitude.  You don’t see mammals with […]

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