Percival Lowell Observatory
by Jane St. Clair
Percival Lowell had this pigheaded belief that intelligent creatures lived on Mars. Without his vision, we’d have lost a lot of great science fiction. What’s more, we wouldn’t have found Pluto.
Percival Lowell was born into such a distinguished family that eventually they had a town named after them in Massachusetts. His sister invented prenatal care, his brother became President of Harvard, and another sister became a famous poet. Not too much pressure there.
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Percival was obsessed with astronomy. Everyone loved his graduation speech about the formation of the solar system. Nevertheless, Percival, being the good son that he was, gave up star-gazing and went to work at the family’s cotton mill.
After six long years he was unable to find fulfillment at the cotton mill. So, Percival took a few years off and traveled around the Far East.
When Lowell was 38 years old, he read a book about Mars that changed his life. The author of this book, Giovanni Schiaparelli, was an Italian astronomer who had been observing Mars for years. He believed that all kinds of canals covered the surface of Mars. His ideas caught the imagination of Percival Lowell, who decided to devote the rest of his life to his first love — astronomy.
Lowell came out to Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894 when it was still the Wild West. He set up his observatory on top of “Mars Hill,” picking that spot because it was almost 7,000 feet above sea level. At this time Flagstaff was a small town with very little light pollution. 
As things turned out, one of Lowell’s greatest contributions to astronomy was his common sense idea that it’s a good idea to set up your telescope high up on a hill far away from big city lights.
Percival Lowell believed Martians had an advanced civilization, but were in some kind of climate crisis. They were digging canals in order to tap their last source of water on their dying, drying planet, the water in its ice caps.
When Lowell published his ideas, Schiaparelli grew very annoyed with him. Something major had been lost in translation. “Canalis” in Italian means channels, as in natural waterways like the English Channel. Schiaparelli didn’t mean “canals” like the ones in Venice. Yet Lowell refused to correct himself.
However, his ideas did not annoy the public, in fact, 
people loved the notion of Little Green Men just one planet from earth. Lowell’s maps of Mars made astronomy so popular that Lowell became the Carl Sagan of his times. His books and maps inspired all kinds of science fiction books and comics about intelligent life on Mars.
Besides firing up the public about Mars, Percival Lowell’s other big contribution was the discovery of Pluto. He believed (wrongly) that the orbits of Neptune and Uranus were wobbling because another planet must be out there affecting them. He named it Planet X. Lowell also observed “spokes” on Venus.
However, he was only a little bit right. Neptune and Uranus weren’t wobbling. Venus did not have spokes. Lowell was seeing spokes because he was probably looking at the blood vessels in his own eyes, having screwed up the lens in his telescope. Nevertheless, fourteen years after Percival Lowell died, astronomers at Lowell Observatory did find Planet X, which they named Pluto. Pluto has since been downgraded to a dwarf planet.
I like to think that Percival Lowell was a friend of Daniel Barringer. Barringer lived just 30 miles east of Flagstaff, and was spending his whole life digging for iron in a meteor crater. Just as Lowell was wrong about Little Green Men and Planet X, Barringer was wrong about the Giant Meteor Crater. What a wild place northern Arizona must have been in 1900!
Today you can visit both the Giant Meteor Crater and Lowell Observatory.. Just the view of Flagstaff from Mars Hill is worth the trek up there.
You can sense the spirit of Percival Lowell and his intense curiosity about the entire cosmos as you visit his observatory and telescopes.
I think he’d have liked that Time Magazine once designated Lowell Observatory as one of the 100 Most Important Places in the World.
A little update (as if timeless topics like astronomy have updates):
On March 29, 2024, the Governor of Arizona declared Pluto to be Arizona’s official planet, even though Pluto has been downgraded to not-a-planet. Or if it is a planet, it’s been downgraded to only-a-dwarf.
Tags: Arizona
Bighorn Fire
by Jane St. Clair
On Sunday, June 6, in the morning, I went out to greet Pusch Ridge. It’s a daily ritual to me, along with wishing good night to the constellation Orion.
It surprised me to see that Pusch Ridge was on fire. I felt sad, like you do when you see a friend in trouble.
Yet the Bighorn Fire, as the fire fighters named it, was darn interesting. Interesting in the way natural processes are, like a spider spinning a web or a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. I couldn’t stop watching it. I wondered if other people stood where I was standing now and watched a fire on this very same mountain five thousands years ago.
Probably.
The Bighorn Fire keeps spreading. People in Tucson keep track of it, like you keep track of numbers in the corona virus. 13,000 acres burned, 5% contained. 27,000 acres burned, 15% contained. Today the fire still marches forward in its relentless way. After more than three weeks, the numbers say we’re at 115,000 acres burned, and 45% contained.
Fire fighters tell us it’s dangerous out there because the Bighorn Fire hides inside deep canyons. Big planes survey and then come back to drop red retardant over it. This makes red patterns all over the mountain range. They look like the artist Cristo made them.
The Big Horn Fire is not eating up houses and garages and such. When it got near the town on top of Mount Lemmon last week, fire fighters diverted it away from property. At this time firefighters have had to evacuate only a few communities. The fire has killed over 3000 saguaros and many other trees and plants. It is blackening whole sides of the mountains.
Sometimes you can see flames, especially at night. The fire fills the mountains’ canyons and crevices with smoke like giant witches’ cauldrons. Sometimes smoke goes straight up in the air. Other times it goes up in little puffs on top of one another, like a series of ruffles.
But sometimes it’s just one big blue fog. The air smells like a burnt-out fireplace, while all the smoke makes it hard to breathe, especially with a mask on.
I am watching Pusch Ridge, knowing it’s not over. A bolt of lightning caused the Big Horn fire, not careless campers or smokers or anything like that. The fire is part of nature.
We are praying for rain, like the people who lived here so many thousands of years ago. Somehow I have the feeling that everything will be all right. And this mountain, like so many other things right now, will one day go back to being himself.
To see how Pusch Ridge is on a normal day, go to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Tags: Tucson
Tucson Barrio
by Jane St. Clair
“I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods,” Truman Capote once wrote.
But when you do go back to those places, they look different — even though your overall memories of your city can be accurate. For example, sometimes I think of Manhattan, where I once lived. I remember the Art Deco style, its skylines, and its crowded streets. If it were music, it would be Gershwin.
I remember Chicago, as Carl Sandburg wrote, with big shoulders and a tougher edge to it, with its tall beauty standing against the shores of Lake Michigan.
San Francisco is strangely western and eastern to me all at once, with its Victorian pink ladies standing in front of the modern age, almost as if Victoria is refusing to budge.
A city’s past, its geography and climate, its architecture and its setting are what you remember about it.
Tucson is about desert, an extreme climate, adobe brick, and its long long history.
Although you think of the American West as new, Tucson is one of the oldest cities in the United States.
In the 1770s Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were doing their thing back East. Yet people here had already built the presidio to protect them against the Apache. Tucson was then part of Mexico, and stayed that way until 1854. Meanwhile for the next 100 years, the Tucson Barrio with its unique abode houses kept growing into a large neighborhood south of the city’s center.
In the 1950s, in the name of progress, the city fathers of Tucson tried to bulldoze the Tucson Barrio to make way for skyscrapers. There was a fight that ended with leaving part of the Tucson Barrio still standing, including the Shrine of El Triadito, now a historic landmark.
Today the Tucson Barrio is a really interesting and vibrant neighborhood, probably one of the most diverse American neighborhoods in terms of income. All kinds of people, wealthy and not so wealthy, have moved into the area and are restoring the buildings, painting them vibrant colors while keeping their architectural integrity. I love their boxy lines, and the way their bright colors contrast with the West’s big turquoise sky.
Someday, when I am drawn back to the places where I have lived, I’ll remember Tucson in terms of these bright and wonderful adobe houses standing in front of slick city buildings. It’s a unique and wonderful image, and it defines Tucson.
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At left is a picture of a Corona Virus pinata. I think we’d all love to give it a good whack.
For more pictures of the Tucson Barrio, go to 1 -2 -3 Southwest Doors.
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Tags: Tucson
Tucson Museum of Miniatures
by Jane St. Clair
When I was a little girl in Chicago, my dream was to grow up and be the tour guide at Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse. I just knew I wanted to spend all day by that dollhouse.
But the Museum of Science and Industry did away with tour guides and replaced them with recorded messages.
Although technology dashed my dreams, I grew up anyway, as most people manage to do. Luckily, we moved to Arizona, home of the Tucson Museum of Miniatures.
And what an enchanted place it is! They have not one, but 500 DOLLHOUSES! 
Each one is its own little fairy tale.
You get not only castles for your princes and princesses, you get little houses for elves. Gnome rooms. Bridal salons for brides the size of Thumbelina.
There’s a magical tree with windows where you can peek and see how fairies live. A forest of Kewpie dolls.
A Christmas village that goes on and on under silver trees.
Then there’s the floor made like a window that surprises you with miniatures under your feet. Miniatures everywhere is the motto here!
I like how you can find celebrities hanging out here like Scarlett and her Rhett, Geppetto and Pinocchio.
But what I like best is how you get to remember being six years old when dollhouses fit you better than the bigness of the adult-controlled world.
The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has the official name of Tucson Mini-Time Machine Museum of Miniatures. 
That’s a nice name for it, because so many of the little dioramas and dollhouses are tiny representations of other eras. A 1920s Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A 1940s tenement building with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweetheart. A white Christmas interior from the 1900s. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s.
The museum also has enchanted tiny places full of gnomes and wizards, pink toy stores, and fantasy castles.
The makers of these little enchanted places have given us a fairy tale, so we thank them for that. We thank them for filling our eyes with wonder again.
It reminds me of this poem by Lewis Carroll:
Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.
To plan your trip to this museum, click here. A lot of people don’t know that you can find fairies in the Arizona desert. To learn how to do that, click here.
Tags: Arizona · Jane St. Clair · Tucson · Uncategorized
Canoa Ranch
By Jane St. Clair
The thing about Canoa Ranch is how big it is. It once spread out over 330,000 acres along the Santa Cruz River about 35 miles from Tucson. At its peak, it was home to over 80,000 head of cattle.
Besides being unusually big, Canoa Ranch was unusually sophisticated. Many of its cattle were purebreds –some even imported from Scotland. Its wealthy owner hired architects to design his ranch house and other matching buildings. It’s not every ranch house that gets a write-up in a fancy architectural journal.
Canoa Ranch peaked when the cattle industry did, between 1940 and 1960. Back then about 80 families lived out there. One of them was the Giljava family, with little Raul shown here with his parents. Raul Griljava grew up to be a U.S. Congressman who has represented his district of south Tucson for over 14 years.
For decades the Manning family owned Canoa Ranch. The story goes that Levi Manning and one of his fraternity brothers from the University of Mississippi let loose an elephant from a traveling circus. As the elephant terrorized their town, Manning’s mother told him he’d better “Go West, young man” before the police caught up with him. He came to Tucson and became a millionaire as well the town’s mayor. There he built the mansion now known as “Tucson’s Downton Abbey.”
Manning also put Canoa Ranch together, which he eventually handed over to his son.
In the 1970s because Americans turned to white meat and vegetarianism, the cattle industry began to decline. Canoa Ranch declined along with it. For years its buildings lay in ruins until the Pima County Park District bought about 5,000 acres to preserve as an historic site. Parks and Recs restored not only buildings and fences, they also filled in the dried-up lake.
Canoa Ranch tells not only the Manning’s story but also those of the Mexican families and cowboys who lived out here. These were the people who did the dangerous work of ranching in what can be a hot cruel county. The Pima Park District is preserving their homes and lifestyles as well as the wealthy owner’s.
It’s easy to imagine the cowboys and the vaqueros working in this giant corral during round-up, blacksmithing in the huge tack room, building these thick fences from logs during winter, and settling down in the bunkhouse at night.
You can go into the huge tack room and see exhibits of branding irons, saddles and other ranch equipment. Also, you can tour the owner’s house where Manning, who like every other rancher in the world, hung a picture of his horse over his fireplace.
Since some buildings still have old furniture, clothing, dishes and even toys, you can get an idea of life out there without electricity, TV, radio, or even good libraries. I loved the porch made with tree stumps where the foreman and his family would sleep on hot summer nights.
Today Canoa Ranch’s buildings are crisp and white against the bright blue Arizona sky. It almost feels like spending a day by the ocean, all blue colors with bright white sails cutting white angles and lines. Likewise it makes you remember times past and the reasons why we love the Old West.
To plan your visit to the historic Canoa Ranch, go here.
One of Jane St. Clair’s short stories is a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books fiction contest.
Tags: Uncategorized
by Jane St. Clair
The tall saguaro are strange plants indeed. Oaks and maples and such trees have great spreading armsfuls of leaves but saguaro trees are streamline. Saguaros have no leaves that rustle, no branches to hang on when you climb your way up to the top. They never change with the seasons except for their flowertops.
They have no bark, just smooth green skin that is exposed and exquisitely pleated and pocked with foreboding needles.
A saguaro forest has a certain silence about it. No crunching of dead leaves under your feet, no wind sounds of crackling branches, and no crinkling noises of leaves answering the wind back. You won’t hear the gentle rushings of forest animals or catch their eyes staring back at you, like the frightened deer trying to hide by standing still as a statue, the squirrel checking out your whereabouts, or the songbird cantillating a signature song.
A saguaro forest is still and silent. The giant trees stand as steadfast tin soldiers placed there in eternity by some gargantuan commander. They stand in their perfect postures in their squadrons of perfect formation, always at attention, never seeming at ease .. And your eyes can follow the great battalions of them as they go marching up the mountainsides.
It takes a while to understand their seriousness. These are beings that have stood steadfast for centuries.. since before the American colonies. This forest was here during the Civil War and the Great Two World Wars of one century past, and I have the sense that they will survive with or without us.
They are steadfast. They stand just as still when snow falls on them, and hold just as still when silly spring flowers dance nearby. You don’t hug them, you respect them.
In the dusk the saguaro forest can have a pinkish glow.
At sunset its trees become black obelisks.
Saguaro Forest
Despite the capriciousness of seasons and the light changes of the day and night, they are steadfast and still.
Their silence bestows solitude and makes you feel peaceful.
Peace to you too, sister and brother saguaros.
For more of Jane’s homage to saguaros, go to here and also here.
“Daddy Making Dancing in the Kitchen,” a short story by Jane St. Clair, was a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Fiction Contest for 2020.
Tags: Tucson
Tucson Murals
by Jane St. Clair
Tucson murals are all over town. I just love graffiti —but oh those murals!
Big, brassy, colorful — and they take you by surprise. You walk by a restaurant with a cute little courtyard, and WHAM! there’s this image of this couple right next to it. A couple with an Aztec serpent.
No one expects Tucson murals just to pop up at you as you’re strolling along town but that’s what they do. How about whales in the desert?
Or the agave woman who adorns a warehouse — of all things.
Turtles riding bicycles with a cowboy and a beautiful senorita? Why not!
Tucson murals make ordinary things become extraordinary. This beautiful one is at El Rio Community Center.
The Farmer John mural is old and fading. It’s painted on what was once a slaughterhouse, probably to remind us that these cows were content before they ended up at this place.
You can’t help but picture the artists who made these murals, and how they climbed up on ladders and painted their visions all over walls so much bigger than a regular canvas in a museum. It must be a lot of work, but aren’t we glad they did it?
I like the lady with the big heart near the NoTel Motel on Miracle Mile. She looks as if you could tell her any secret whatsoever, and she no-tell.
This big beautiful girl is flirting between a street and a garage, and really! Doesn’t she bring a smile to your face?
What I really like is when a work of art grabs you when you least expect it. Here’s the agave lady as seen from a downtown parking lot.
Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach once said, “Sometimes life crushes you down and beats down your soul, but art reminds you that you have one.” Thank you, beautiful artists of Tucson, for the lovely reminders.
To find the Tucson murals here with nifty essays about them, go here.
Tags: Jane St. Clair · Tucson
September 27th, 2019 · No Comments
The Oracle on Oracle Road
by Jane St. Clair
I have always wondered if there really was an oracle on Oracle Road, in Tucson, Arizona. An oracle like the ones they had in the ancient world where a medium dispenses psychic truths. If they don’t have an oracle on Oracle Road, then why did they name it that?
It turns out there is an oracle, but it’s a small town about 35 miles north of Tucson. You drive down Oracle Road north toward Biosphere past Bub’s Grub Texas BBQ and eventually you’ll find little Oracle, AZ.
For miles all you see are the typical Western wide open spaces and the big bright Microsoft sky. You can’t capture it with your camera, because pictures (like the one below) are horizontal,
and the wide open spaces are all around you, dwarfing you into insignificance within the bigness of desert creation. It’s just land, lots of land, with an occasional massive boulder in the distance, and silhouettes and shadows of the Catalina Mountains cutting puzzle pieces into the sky.
Oracle, AZ does not look like Tucson. For one thing, it’s at a much higher altitude. You get big green trees and grass there. What’s even neater is that it snows in Oracle. It never snows in Tucson (and when it does, people like me blog about it).
Oracle, AZ has 
real charm. It’s not like your average town. It doesn’t have a Main Street with stores, post office, coffee house, and courthouse. Instead you just drive along the road and you pass by the library, school, a few little stores and restaurants, and the Oracle Inn. The real town, with its houses and 3600 people, is hidden behind various roads leading from the main street. In that way, it reminds me of Brigadoon, the town that appears every thousand years. You really expect Oracle to rise up and appear out of nowhere, and then do its disappearing act again.
This little community dates back to 1911. The famous playwright Edward Abbey got his mail from the Oracle post office. Buffalo Bill Cody actually lived there, and here’s his house, which may have been nicer when he lived there.
Oracle is home to many artists and art galleries, partly because it’s a cheap place to live.
You can spend a pleasant day in little Oracle, AZ. You’ll want to visit Oracle State Park, tour the old ranch house there, and go hiking. Then you’ll have lunch at the Patio Café, an amazing little shop that serves fancy gourmet meals made from home grown foods.
In the afternoon you can mess around in the art galleries and antique stores. Be sure to see the old motel with units shaped like little Swiss chalets something you’d expect on the old Route 66.
Yet the best thing about this place is the beauty of its wide open spaces and sky. As the song goes, on a clear day, you can see forever, and you can see who you are.
You can see forever and ever and ever more.
Tags: AZ
The Spirituality of Sunset
by Jane St. Clair
As a young man, Abraham Lincoln took to walking around cemeteries at twilight. Now this sounds morbid to us, but back then, it was a very sexy thing to do. When you looked at a sunset in a vast horizon as you walked in a graveyard at twilight, you were in the sweet spot between day and night, life and death. If you wanted super romantic, you meditated in a cemetery at twilight when autumn leaves were falling. Then you went home and wrote poetry. Today people think Ryan Gosling in “LaLaLand” is sexy, but back then, it was Abraham Lincoln at sunset in a cemetery (especially in autumn).
Yet there is something about watching a setting sun that is highly spiritual and romantic. You see this out West here in Arizona where our sunsets are so fabulous.
I love Andrew Lloyd Webber’s words from “The Music of the Night” because they capture the feeling of the spirituality of sunset.
“Nighttime sharpens … heightens each sensation ..
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination…
“Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor…”
And that’s it, exactly. Webber is exactly right!
“Night unfurls its splendor ….”
Then Webber asks you to “Turn your face away from the garish light of day …” And boy, that’s true in Arizona where we have 360 days of strong sunlight! Sunlight so bright that by sunset, it is garish – so now we’re ready for something softer… But before night, the gorgeous splendor of sunset.
“Turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light …
And listen to the music of the night…”
Webber is so right. Because you can see music in these colors, even sunset colors that don’t match at all but yet work together in such splendor —there is a spirituality of sunset, a time when “silently the senses abandon all defenses…”
It’s when “you start the journey to a strange new world…”
Perhaps Webber means the world of dreams, the place he says is “where you leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.”
I am watching a sunset now, thinking of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beautiful lyrics and Abraham Lincoln’s soulful solitary walks.
It’s beautiful here in the mountains of Tucson. I don’t think you need the graveyard thing or autumn leaves to get the spirituality of sunset if you are within the power of now.
I don’t think you need operatic music because this sunset and this moment are enough.
It’s enough now to listen to the music of the night.
For a funny but beautiful tribute to our lovely Abraham Lincoln by artist Maira Kalman, go here.
Tags: Arizona · Arizona photography
Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona
by Jane St. Clair
In 1971, Glen Frey was on his way to Arizona’s beautiful and mystical town of Sedona. He was twenty-three years old, seeking love and peace, when his car broke down in Winslow. He was stuck in Winslow for an entire day, hassling with mechanics and waiting for auto parts.
Like everybody else back then, Glen Frey wanted to be on the road. The particular road that everybody wanted was Route 66.
She was America’s great Mother Road, the one you took from Chicago to California, the one with all the crazy tourist traps like the Meteor Crater and motels shaped like teepees. Winslow was the town on Route 66 that marked the beginning of Native American country, and where you stopped before you got to Flagstaff. If you saw the movie “Cars,” Winslow was the model for the town of Radiator Springs.
Most of that long day Frey was just standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. The best moment he had, and probably the only good one, happened when a beautiful girl drove by in her flatbed Ford. And my oh my, how they flirted.
Frey never forgot her, and immortalized the moment in the lyrics of the iconic Eagles song, “Take it Easy.”
Part of this brilliant song came out of Frey’s seeing the girl. However, it was Jackson Browne, Frey’s buddy and guitar friend, who wrote the music and other lyrics. Browne had already nailed the epic chords at the beginning of “Take it Easy.” He had already written the lines about seven women. “Four who want to own you and two who want to stone you, and one who wants to be a friend.” Browne got stuck on that line.
Then Frey gave him the lyric, “Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona, Such a fine sight to see, It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford, Slowing down to take a look at me.”
The rest is rock and roll legend.
“Take it Easy” was the first cut on the Eagle’s debut album, and their first single. It shot up the charts the summer of 1972, landing in Billboard’s top spot where it stayed Number One for weeks.
It’s still such a great song. 
It captures the Zen sense of just letting things unfold even when you think everything’s going wrong. And there’s that awesome line that sticks in your head, the one about, “Don’t the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”
About five years after “Take It Easy,” the town of Winslow was in trouble. A great big highway was replacing Route 66. What’s worse, Interstate 40 bypassed Winslow, removing a big source of their jobs and money –tourism.
Winslow’s town-fathers got an idea to save the town. They noticed that hundreds of people were stopping here to find the corner where Frey wrote the lines to “Take it Easy”. How about building a “Standing on the Corner” Park, right in the middle of Winslow? And that’s exactly what happened.
There’s nothing to do in the Standing on a Corner Park. It’s got no swings or seesaws or sandboxes. It’s just about standing on the corner of old Route 66 and Kinsey Street. It’s a place to dream about a beautiful girl in a flatbed Ford.
The town-fathers commissioned a statue of a man with a guitar who looks a little like Jackson Browne. When Frey died in 2016, the town added a statue of him as well.
Today over 100,000 a year people come from all over the world to the Standing on a Corner Park in Winslow, Arizona.
Jackson Browne and the Eagles raised lots of money for charities they loved, like clean energy, Artists for Peace and Justice, and Farm Aid. Yet one of the coolest things they ever did was help the town of Winslow.
To listen to “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, go here.
Tags: Arizona
