by Jane St. Clair

The other day I found out that Europeans are crazy about tumbleweeds from Arizona. They’ll pay $25 for a small one and $50 for a big one — as long as they are genuine Arizona tumbleweeds.

So -today at the Tucson Mall when I saw a great big humongous tumbleweed nestled next to a potted plant in front of Sears and about to roll into the parking lot, it was just like finding $50 cash! I couldn’t let it go tumbling to waste!

At a great risk to myself and my reputation (people were staring after all)  (in fact, one woman looked like she was phoning Mall Security), I tried to stuff this tumbleweed in my back seat. I got covered in nasty little prickles that are probably poisonous, and finally gave up and stuffed it in the trunk. My dog is mad at me because he was sitting in the back seat and now he is covered in tumbleweed stickers too. That’s the sacrifice we are making to bring YOU genuine Tumbleweed that was genuinely tumbling in Arizona! So here it is! For Sale! $50 cheap! Free shipping!

I will throw in this beautiful picture of your tumbleweed in its natural Arizona habitat! For Free! Now you won’t get this deal on eBay.

I have since learned that people in Japan are crazy for jeans worn by cowboys out West. Well, we Arizonans love cowboy jeans too! –in fact, my best friend has a bumper sticker that says “Cowboy butts drive me nuts” which pretty well sums it all up. Arizona Cowboys wear nothing but Wranglers, available at Walmart’s everywhere. Nevertheless, I am offering these jeans for sale -because they were used out west — in Arizona!

These Wranglers are the same price they are in Japan — $500 a pair! These are rare Arizona jeans, folks! Genuine Wranglers worn out West! Go for it!

Another inspiration came to me! Last year I bought this genuine Native American turquoise necklace from an eBay seller in China. Although I paid only $3 for it from China, I am offering it for sale here at $1300 because it is a genuine turquoise necklace worn in Arizona! Well, it’s turquoise-colored anyway.

(Disclaimer: The beads may be made of wood)

I am also selling genuine Mexican  tortillas! Tortillas may go for eight for a dollar, but since these were made here in Arizona and are usually eaten by cowboys, I am selling them at the fantastic price of $20 a package.

I am now totally inspired! Let’s see if I can get my genuine Arizona pick-up truck that is sitting on blocks in the yard right now and hasn’t cranked up for years — well,  let’s just see if I can get that baby started up.

Remember: for all your Arizona needs, you come right here, pardner — right here at  TUMBLEWEEDS-R-US!

by Jane St. Clair

Tonight there is a blue moon, as in once-in-a-blue-moon moon and blue-moon-you-saw-me-standing-alone moon.  I want to get a picture of it over Pusch Ridge, my mountain in Tucson, Arizona. It is clearly very blue…

 … but only if I use a blue filter, and I decide that’s cheating.
Here it is without the filter, you can see some blue anyway.

I snap many more pictures and they all turn out with a white moon on top and a blue moon on bottom.

I mess around on Google to figure out some scientific reason why I am getting two moons until I decide I don’t care why.

I really like the pictures and I really like the news headline “Blue Moon Shines Throughout the World.” That’s just such a nice thought.

Okay, one more blue-moon picture and then it’s …..

Good night moon.

Southwestern Doors
by Jane St. Clair

Artists paint pictures of Southwestern doors because they are unlike doorways anywhere else. I think it’s the sun.

The sun is so strong out West that buildings look two-dimensional. As if they were made out of paper. You open them up and you walk into nowhere in particular or just into nowhere.

Southwestern doors are strange and look as if they lead into simple space.

Southwest doors must be passages to something wonderful and interesting. Open them and where do you go? You could go this way, or you could go that way or you could just find yourself somewhere strange.

Southwestern doors can be powerful and mystical and from somewhere very old and long ago.

Southwestern doors can have wild colors so you notice them.

Or they can be hiding so that you discover them unexpectedly.

Even the ones that are for business ….

Even the doors that are for business are magic in the West.

Christopher Morley said if we did not have doors everything would be a hallway.

He said the meaning of a door is to hide what lies inside and to keep the heart in suspense.

“The opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human forces. But the closing of doors is far more terrible. It is a confession of finality,” Mr. Morley said.

But I say …

I say … one two three …  Open Sesame.

Open Sesame.

Open Sesame.

by Jane St. Clair

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! You can even sign up for ghost adventures in Bisbee Arizona! 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, and 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 their ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs, and some even take a ghost tour while riding in a hearse. 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?

The Oliver House alone was the scene of 26 murders.

It’s so creepy that its neighbors may have 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 where you can get extreme readings of paranormal activity. It used to be a cemetery, and 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 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.

Bisbee locals even put up scarey posters. How scarey is this one down here?

Every night teams of ghostbusters go around looking for spooks and spectres and the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man! Aha! We have a reading here by the Copper Queen Hotel 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?

Yes! Oorah!

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

Good job, you Ghostbuster of Bisbee, you. Oorah!

by Jane St. Clair

Lately I have discovered John Denver.

Okay, I’m tardy to that party — but whatever, I’m here.

Why do I like  John Denver? Let me count the ways.

John Denver could get high looking at sunshine. Sunshine on his shoulder makes him happy, sunshine on the water makes him high.

If John Denver lived here in Arizona, where the sun shines 360 days a year — just think!  John Denver would have been happy all the time just because of all that sunshine.

I like John Denver because he could write exquisitely romantic songs. You fill up my senses like a night in the forest. Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms.  Okay, he and his wife got a divorce, but what a love he must have felt to inspire that poetry!

Let me be the end of your rainbow, Let me be the stars up above,  Let me be the one you dream of …  let me be the one that you love.

John Denver like so many of us who live out West came from somewhere else. He was born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. and grew up all over the country as an Army brat. But when he came West , he found out that…

He was born in the summer of his 27th year, Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before …

He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again ..You might say he found a key for every door …

So many new Westerners have had that experience. One day you look out at that gigantic sky and endless landscape, and you know you are home.

Although John Denver is often accused of being a cornball, the truth is John Denver had a dark side. He sang about flying away … just leaving the planet forever.

All of the days have gone soft and cloudy, all of the dreams have gone dry, all of the nights have gone sad and shady, she’s getting ready to fly .. Fly away …

John Denver sang about wanting to fly away, and he sang about feeling alone in the universe and being lost in its screams.

It’s a sweet, sweet dream … Sometimes I’m almost there  …. Sometimes I fly like an eagle  …And sometimes I’m deep in despair.

John Denver died alone in a small airplane. He was up in the sky, flying like an eagle …

when his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Monterey, 150 feet north of shore, south of Lovers’ Point. I like to think he found his dream there. I like to think that the sweet sweet dream was finally his.

If there’s an answer, it’s just that it’s just that way ……….  

John Denver

(1943 to 1997)

by Jane St. Clair

When I first moved out West, it was so hot and dry that I thought they needed a few good shade trees. You know, “the under the spreading chestnut tree where the Village Smithy stands-kind-of tree,” and  the “I think that I shall never see a poem as-lovely-as-a-tree” kind of tree.

Instead they had the saguaro, which did not even look like a tree 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. You have to respect saguaros because it takes so long to get one. They start out as babies as big as your thumb, and it takes about 100 years to get one arm, and more to get a bunch of arms.

Some people think they look like candlestick holders.

They are home to birds and all kinds of bugs and little wildlife things.They have dorky flowers that turn into little fruits. The natives know how to make food out of that. People here decorate them at Christmas,

And use their bones for fencing.

After a while, saguaros looked tall and stately to me. Dignified. Vertical.  And even noble.

Saguaros can look human, especially if you’ve been cowboying alone in the desert too long.

Hello, friendly Cactus Person.

And I liked the way they looked in different kinds of skies,

(even the skies I make up).

After a while, that could mean only one thing.

The desert had become home.

A cowboy/artist named Maynard Dixon once said, “The American West is the real deal. It is a spiritual space.”

Others have felt that way too. Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Theodore Roosevelt – each fell under the spell of magic cathedral mountains, endless skyscapes, fiery sunsets, and the black starry nights that touch you in your deepest soul places here out West.

But you have to be open to it.

When I first came here, I didn’t see these things. It was so hot that the water in my eyes dried up. The air smelled like old musky dust, and all the plants were dry and withering up. Everything needed a good rain, I thought. And I thought these people here could use some good wide shade trees like the ones back home in Illinois. Everything was dead-looking — it depressed me.

It took me years to understand the subtlety of my new desert home. That she really does have seasons but her seasons are very subtle. Spring does not come, like Shakespeare wrote, “with daisies pied and violets blue,” but rather spring here comes subtly in sugary pastels. All the dead plants were not dead after all. With almost imperceptible subtle slowness, they come back to life in spring.

I also did not know that a place with no spongy earth or carpets of forest moss, with no smells of wet loam and no warm spring rains could be full of new growth and germinating greenness. I did not know that the dry still deadness of the desert could suddenly surprise you with a host of poppies, and that the quiet pastels of cactus and creosote could suddenly give way to a field of dreams.

Palo Verde trees make yellow April flowers that beam against the turquoise sky, in a perfectly wild contrast, and then they drip delicate yellow blossoms on the ground. They stand so gracefully and beautifully! like a Tchaikovsky ballerina in a yellow tutu swirling and dissolving into his music.

Walt Whitman said of spring in the Midwest, “Oh wonderful, wonderful, and then again most wonderful!” He could become tipsy at the sight of it. He should have seen that in the Sonora, in April, warm soft winds come, bringing spring. I am finally able to see it everywhere.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”

But then again, she did not live in Arizona.
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NEWS FLASH!
Tucson is on Time Magazine’s 2023 List of Greatest Places in the World. One of fifty greatest places in the world, one of seven in the USA. How cool is that? Go here.

Tucson Rodeo
by Jane St. Clair

Tucson Rodeo is the biggest time of the year. Schools and businesses close, so everybody can cowboy up and go down to the arena.

The rodeo is decorated with cows, adding to the excitement.

Before the events start, you can buy a cowboy hat and a beer, or just some honky-tonk tourist souvenirs at the booths below the stands.

It costs plenty to get in so our noble cowboys can have a chance at a big purse. A real rodeo cowboy can make upwards of $20,000 here in just one event, but some events are so dangerous that they earn every penny and then some.

Tucson Rodeo has got clowns who pretend to fight bulls and lots of stunt riders …

These cowgirls compete for who can ride around the Coors barrels

and back the fastest.

But the most famous event is the buckin’ bronco. Ride em cowboy!

This event is timed in terms of seconds, as are most Tucson Rodeo events.

R0pin’ is harder than it looks and sometimes that little doggie gets the best of even the most skillful cowboy.

The most dangerous event is bull riding because the bull can come back at you if you fall off.

Here a cowboy went down, and his foot got caught in the stirrup

and he got hurt badly enough

so that they had to get the medics.

But he got a big round of applause for getting up and walking home.

Rodeo is so many things – a time for a cowboy to strut his stuff —

Show his skills at ropin’ and ridin’

And win him some money too.

Everybody’s got some cowboy in them — which is why rodeo will last forever!

Happy Trails to you, and y’all come back next year!

by Jane St. Clair

June, 2013 … I wrote that a few hours after the terrible shooting in our neighborhood of Gabrielle Giffords and five other Tucson people. So much has happened since then. The shooter turned out to be a desperately ill young man from an extremely nice family. Their ordeal is ongoing. Gabrielle Giffords resigned January 25, 2012 from Congress to concentrate on her recovery, and now works for causes she feels passionately about, such as gun control.

There is a bumper sticker here in Tucson that reads: Gabrielle Giffords continues to inspire. I think we all feel that way.

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Tragedy in Our Tucson Neighborhood: Gabrielle Giffords Shot!

January 8, 2011 Our Safeway grocery store here in Tucson is in a complex of nice little shops behind a big, now empty Blockbuster. In the past few years the complex has gotten more upscale — and a lot of old-timers think it’s now too rich for their blood. Safeway itself got remodeled a few years ago and now has a fancy coffee shop, gourmet cheeses and a wine section.

On a typical Saturday morning, the complex is crowded with shoppers. There is a really cool bakery where you can get fresh coffee and a Danish and sit outdoors, but only the snowbirds from Michigan think it’s warm enough at 55 degrees to do that. Locals are all bundled up in winter coats, as they go in and out of Safeway, pick up dry cleaning, hit the hardware store, and buy fresh flowers in the same complex there.

At 10 o’clock this morning, Gabrielle Giffords, our representative in Congress was holding a hand-shaking session at Safeway. Lately, not a lot of people come to these things, although a few thousand showed up at her debate at the University of Arizona last fall and a few of her town hall meetings were packed when everyone was concerned about health care legislation.

At 10 o’clock this morning, the unspeakable happened. A gunman shot Gabrielle Giffords in the head, along with 17 other people. Five, including our representative, are in critical condition at University Medical Center. Six are dead — one was a talented federal judge; one was just a little girl.

Our representative, Gabrielle Giffords, always seems like one of those lucky princesses that the fairies bless at birth with beauty, brains, and wealth. Her family owned a chain of tire stores here in Tucson, and she was brought up with many advantages. At age 32, she was the youngest person elected to the Arizona state legislature, and then became one of the youngest members of the United States House of Representatives. Beautiful, 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.

We are shocked, stunned, and heart-broken by this violence in our neighborhood. It is unthinkable and impossible that such a thing happens on an ordinary Saturday morning behind a backdrop of impossibly beautiful pink and purple mountains and turquoise sky.

Already extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are blaming and accusing one another, forgetting that peace begins within each of us. If you want peace and a less violent world, start by quieting your own heart. Start by praying for Gabrielle Giffords and her family, and the 17 victims and their families, and for the mentally ill boy who did this terrible crime.

Jane St. Clair
Tucson Arizona
January 8, 2011

by Jane St. Clair

Cowboys have symposiums, which is a fancy word for gathering together to share songs and stories and such, and maybe do some roping and riding. This is what the Western Heritage Cowboy Symposium in Sonoita, Arizona was all about this weekend.

Cowboys live their lives in a lonesome way on horses and outdoors all day in the wide open spaces, and maybe that’s why they like to gather together from time to time with others who understand what they’re talking about.
Cowboys are used to making their own entertainment with stories and guitars, anyway, without computers and televisions and DVDs.  Okay, there is such a thing as a cowboy riding while talking on a cellphone, but this here article is about the romance of the West, so we’ll play that down even though we’ll allow a picture of it.

Cowboys sing about little moons that smile over mountains, and stars that dance in black night skies.

They sing about the smell of cattle flesh searing during branding,

and little doggies with tears in their eyes after they get caught in barbed wire. They sing about desert days so hot that your pony refuses to keep going, and desert nights so cold that your feet freeze in your boots. They sing about going into Nogales and how good Mexican food tastes, and how beautiful the senoritas are, and how hard it is to say goodbye to your Mexican amigos and hit the trail once more.

Cowboys sing about trusting your compadres as if your life depends on it because it does. They sing about how being dog tired at the end of the day makes you appreciate things other people look down on — like a mess of beans seasoned with coffee and chili peppers, a little whiskey and your bunk under the stars.  They sing about a life led outdoors under the sun, in the rain and snow, under a sky too big to understand.
A day at a cowboy gathering makes you think about what it must be like to be a grounded human being, someone who has real work to do not paper-pushing, and someone who shares his life with nature and animals.

Without cowboys, there’d be no American West.  We celebrate cowboys, the real working ones of today, and we celebrate their art and poetry and music.

Happy trails to you and keep riding, cowboy.