It’s easy to be a kook in the American West. The distances between houses are so great that you don’t really care what your neighbors think of you. You don’t really have any neighbors.
Robert Paxton McCullough was an Arizona kook. While those of us with ordinary eyes can see only hot desert, he could picture a city. Standing on the courthouse steps in Kingman, Arizona, in 1963, McCullough purchased 26-square miles of desert at $75 an acre. Our visionary would build a shining city on a hill next to Lake Havasu, the artificial lake created by Parker Dam, on barren and hot desert land. Then he’d add London Bridge.
The parcel he bought that day had no roads going to it, no electricity and no water. This would be a problem to the average person. How could you get people to live on the Arizona desert where there’s no way to get there except by airplane?
To our visionary, that was not a problem.
McCullough believed every American should own an airplane and would do so in the future. He pictured Americans driving McCullough J-2 Gyroplanes instead of cars. Gyros were a cross between airplanes and helicopters. They could take off from an ordinary driveway. Although McCullough’s factories cranked out 200 J-2s, this was one of his few ideas that never made it off the ground.
By 1971 McCullough was taking out ads in magazines and on television to lure people to move to out to Lake Havasu City. He offered free flights to Arizona and all-expense-paid vacations in Lake Havasu City. Why shiver through another dreary winter in the Midwest … with your squirrelly baby boomer children in their Davy Crockett hats … when you could live in BEAUTIFUL LAKE HAVASU CITY! with a winter temperature averaging a balmy 70 degrees. (What McCullough’s ads didn’t say is it gets up to 120 degrees in summer.)
By 1978 over 137,000 people had taken free vacations in Lake Havasu City. Salesmen driving white Jeeps greeted them when they landed, and wined and dined them for a week. McCullough promised them jobs in his factories that made his chainsaws and outboard motors.
Yet he believed Lake Havasu City needed something more — something awesome cool! …. something Disneylandish! …. a great tourist attraction that everyone would talk about!
That’s when he decided to buy London Bridge and move it 5,285 miles to Lake Havasu City.
Meanwhile back in England, London Bridge was sinking into the Thames River under the weight of automotive traffic. The British were sentimental about their old bridge dating to 1831. They put it up for auction, but would not sell it to anyone planning to demolish it.
McCullough figured it cost $1.2 million to take the bridge apart and move it to Lake Havasu City. He doubled that, added $1,000 for each year of his life to come up with the romantic and winning bid of $2,460,000.
Every brick, light post, and decoration on London Bridge got a number before it was packed into boxes and shipped through Long Beach, Calif. At customs, McCullough declared London Bridge as “1 Antique.”
By now the children of Lake Havasu City were singing a new version of the old nursery rhyme … “London Bridge is coming here, coming here, coming here… London Bridge is coming here to our fair city.” Their parents didn’t believe the bridge story until they saw construction workers putting the bridge together. As an added touch, McCullough and a designer of Disneyland created eleven miniature lighthouses. London Bridge opened in 1971.
Today Lake Havasu City has over 54,000 residents. London Bridge is still an awesome cool attraction. As one historian wrote, the miracle of McCullough’s vision was not that he moved London Bridge, but that he could picture a city in a barren desert.
For more information on visiting Lake Havasu City, go to this vacation spot in Arizona!
“Mute,” Jane’s short story about a confused hospice clown, will be published in Image, a journal of art, faith and mystery.
Since two men called St. Lawrence are both Roman Catholic saints of cooking, it is confusing for us.
Now’s the time to clear up our confusion!
St. Lawrence holding his grill
Brother Lawrence with pots and pans
St. Lawrence of Rome should be the saint of grilling,as opposed to cooking. The Romans murdered this poor man by tying him to a grill and burning him to death in 225 A.D. He said as his killers were roasting him, “I’m done on this side. You better turn me over now.” It is no wonder that St. Lawrence of Rome is the saint of comedy as well as cooking.
The second St. Lawrence is very much in style now for two reasons. He is our first celebrity cook, and he invented his own version of mindfulness.
Brother Lawrence of Paris was born into a poor French family in 1614. Like our own Abraham Lincoln, he wanted to go to school and learn to read, but his family could not afford it. He joined the army and received a war injury that left him crippled for life. Brother Lawrence was a big heavy man, and now a bum foot made him even more clumsy and awkward. He took a valet job, waiting on tables and opening doors for rich people.
One day when Brother Lawrence was around 25 years old, he was looking at a tree sprouting in spring and felt a strong calling to join a monastery. He hoped the monks would let him work in their library, where he’d read and study and become an educated man. Instead, his abbot took one look at our clumsy humble Lawrence and assigned him to permanent kitchen duty.
I picture Brother Lawrence in the kitchen, as awkward as Peter Boyle’s monster in “Young Frankenstein,” tripping over boxes, spilling hot water, and breaking dishes. He was the kind of guy that other monks would tease.
Although Brother Lawrence felt disappointed to get kitchen duty, he made the best of it. “I shall have to find God among the pots and pans,” he said, vowing to keep his mind on love and God at all times. Like anyone who tries mindfulness, Brother Lawrence had a hard time concentrating. His mind kept jumping around in what Buddha called “monkey mind.” Ten years passed before Brother Lawrence reached his mindfulness goal, which was to experience God in every moment of the day –in what he called “Practicing the Presence of God.”
I picture the big guy chopping carrots and seeing cathedral stars in them. I bet he was full of wonder at the inside of an orange pepper, the beauty of a purple eggplant or the splendor of an orange pumpkin with beautiful yellow ribs. I bet he’d see the mushrooms dancing.
As sensitive and sweet as Brother Lawrence was, I bet he felt bad about taking the life of any vegetable. No doubt he’d apologize to a cabbage before he cut into it. I bet he heard the sound of the universe in the squeak of corn husks when he shucked them, and I bet that every time he cooked a meal, he prayed that the food would reflect his love for the other brothers, and God’s love for us all.
Modern people try to find work they love. Brother Lawrence tried to put love into grunge work that he got stuck with. As the Arabic poet Kahlil Gibran wrote and as Brother Lawrence discovered, the motivation behind your work is all that matters.
“It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy,
even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.”
Before Brother Lawrence died, his friends insisted that he tell them how he achieved mindfulness. They recorded their conversations into a tiny book that is a practical how-to manual for anyone who wants to try a mindfulness path to spirituality.
The funny thing is that Brother Lawrence’s little book became a classic. That means God gave him the very gift he always wanted – to be an educated, wise man.
In the spring of the year the Sonoran Desert goes from light green to yellow.
Everywhere you look you see yellow.
Spring picks up her color crayons and throws them all away except for one, and then she colors it all yellow.
Palo verde trees hang heavy with yellow, yellow falls all over their feet, yellow creates a carpet beneath them, as if it had snowed yellow snow. The yellow of palo verde trees against the bright blue Arizona sky is electric … so electric that you feel as if yellow fire alarms are going off in your head.
In the spring of year in the Sonoran Desert if you walk in the mountains, if you walk in the gray and black shadow mountains, suddenly you’ll see fields of wildflowers, and pop! They are all yellow.
All day long everywhere you look, yellow … the yellow sun lights up yellow wildflowers and gentle yellow wax flowers on the saguaros smiling and welcoming golden bees …
No one can explain yellow to someone who cannot see it. The dictionary says yellow is the color of ripe lemons, but what does that mean? Is the color of your ripe lemons the same color as mine? Just thinking about yellow, that is.
Mark Rothko, the American artist, made gigantic paintings of yellow. Once he painted a huge picture of a yellow square on top of an orange square… so everyone could see the difference between the color yellow and the color orange. Rothko’s idea is simple but yet it is profound in its own way.
In the Sonoran Desert the sky paints its own Rothko painting … the sky makes its own comparison of orange and red and yellow…
Then when it’s night a yellow moon comes out behind yellow clouds ..
Coldplay knew these things when they sang … “Look at the stars… Look how they shine for you and everything you do ..Yeah, they are all yellow .. they are all yellow…”
A traveler went all over the world to see holy places like Bethlehem and Mecca .. And yet it was this traveler who said that Kitt Peak was the most spiritual place he’d ever visited.
The beautiful mile-high mountain has great serenity, grace and peace about it, as if it were a natural cathedral. The Tohono O’odham nation, upon whose land Kitt Peak sits, recognize it as the holy place that it is –for it is where their elder brother deity resides. Their creator deity lives on Baboquivari Peak, the sacred center of their cosmology. You can see Baboquivari from Kitt Peak’s fabulous summit.
Kitt Peak has the earth’s largest collection of telescopes so you’re seeing this strange mix of high-tech meets mountain wilderness. As you drive up the mountain, the telescopes first look like a field of little R2D2s.
But they are much bigger than Star Wars droids. The Mayall telescope has an 18-foot dome, and it’s so huge that you can see it from 50 miles away.The equipment is crisp and white against the big blue Arizona skies, and it holds all the promise of a sea voyage on a crisp blue day in a white clipper ship.
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The various telescopes have different jobs. Some are solar telescopes that make the sun look like a gigantic red fireball with fire flares darting around its edges. But oh! the pictures the night telescopes can make! Pictures of impossibly beautiful colors and amazing shapes! Pictures of billions and billions of stars in billions of galaxies, billions of light-years away!
You can go inside some of Kitt Peak’s gigantic telescopes and watch them operate in perfect mechanical symmetry.They move in a high art form, the kind Stanley Kubrick captured perfectly in his movie 2001 when he made intricate technology dance in perfect synchronization to soaring orchestral music.
Plato said, “Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” I think that is what makes it a beautiful and benign science. It reminds us that our small planet is part of something beyond ordinary comprehension. It is a science where there are no national identities, no boundaries .. just purity and universality. It is the place where science touches the spiritual.
Vincent Van Gogh understood that intersection because he said once … I have … a terrible need… shall I say the word? … of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.
A Starry Night (courtesy of Vincent-Van-Gogh-Gallery.org)
I like to go out to the Saguaro National Monument because it is a lonely place. Because it changes in different lights and in different seasons so that it never is the same. Because it is a forest unlike any other forest. Because there is nothing else like it.
The Saguaro National Monument may be called a forest but it is nothing like your idea of one, a forest with a green canopy of leaves over your head and soft mulch under your feet. Green forest is noisier than the Monument –your walking makes noise, you hear birds singing and the rustle of animals moving about – furry big-eyed animals with faces like humans. The smell of green forest is lush and green, especially after a rain, when you smell the sensuality of wet earth.
The Monument forest is nothing like that. It is more open. It is more still. It is more wilderness. It is just as much about the spaces between the cactus trees as the trees themselves. The spaces enable you to see the shape of each cactus –its arms, its vertical ways. The spaces make this forest quiet.
The Saguaro National Monument is also about light and how light makes the saguaros change color. In sunset the whole forest turns red. In twilight the cacti can look golden. In winter when it snows, the saguaros turn gray.
I love the way saguaros just stand in stoic silence, even in broiling desert sun. You can learn from their silence. As Eckhart Tolle writes in his book, Stillness Speaks, “We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals know. We have forgotten how to be. We have forgotten how to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: here and now.”
“Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no form,” Tolle writes, “but then, it is not really a thing, and it is not of this world.”
The saguaro already knows these things and can teach you them.
We go into wilderness silence to find ourselves, and instead we find something greater than ourselves when silence speaks. We realize only that we are part of something bigger than our individual selves.
John Steinbeck described the still wilderness experience something like this … One time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, and he found he just has a little piece of a great big soul. A wilderness is not any good because a little piece of a soul is not any good unless it is whole, unless it is with the rest of the great big soul …
The other day I came across a machine that gives out ice cream.
Hi there, Mr. Tall Redwood tree!
I was surprised to see a sign on it that said,”Like Us on Facebook,”
as if you could be friends with an ice cream machine on Facebook.
Then I thought about Martin Buber’s beautiful book, “I and Thou.” Usually I only think about this book when I am in nature, but someone it fit the ice cream machine situation as well.
Buber’s work isn’t easy to read, especially if you try to “think” it rather than “feel” it. His book is like scripture that way — very poetic, very intense, and only difficult if you don’t open your heart to it. You feel and do Buber rather than read him intellectually.
Buber has several really revolutionary ideas that seem more relevant today than when he wrote them a half-century ago.
His big idea is that we either experience or encounter. Most of the time we are in our ego-mode, and we simply have experiences.
Hi Quail!
We experience everything as an “it,” the way an ice cream machine is. We depersonalize everything and name it all “it” or that which is other than me. We slice and dice things. We make them useful. We give them purpose. The “I-It” way of viewing the world is not bad because it helps us survive. Yet the “I-It” experience is what makes us feel alienated and crazy all the time. We never feel part of our own world. We’re always walking around alone and detached, and figuring out how to use the people and things we come across.
Hi, Beautiful Rock Formations!
On the other hand, when we encounter another being as a “you” or “thou,” we feel something akin to love.
Hi Mama Bobcat!
We feel that our own spirit is the same as the “thou” of the person in front of us. We sense a cosmic force that is always with us, the force that Buber calls love. We can have I-Thou encounters not only with other human beings, but also with animals, flowers, rocks, the sky … whatever. Every I-Thou encounter connects us to something other than ourselves. Every I-Thou encounter opens our hearts to the ultimate encounter with the “Thou” of the universe, the God of Love.
The friend who first gave me Buber’s book had battled polio, which left him with a withered leg. He felt that those people who stared at his withered leg turned him into an “it,” rather than a “thou.” He wanted people to see him as a thou, as a person, and not as the guy with the peg leg.
Hi-Thou Ice Cream Friend!
My friend taught me that when we perceive someone as different or put the person into some category, we lose the I-Thou encounter that is so important, even vital, to our souls.
So going back to the ice cream machine … Maybe this machine makes people happy on a hot Arizona day. They look forward to seeing him, they appreciate the cold wonderful treats he gives to them. They think of him as a thou, even as their friend. I think Mr. Buber would like them back.
El Jefe came up out of Mexico to the Santa Rita Mountains to live just north of the city of Tucson, Arizona. He walked across the border — El Jefe’s not one for fences.
The Tucson Jaguar made the 130-mile journey by himself, but then, he is a jaguar and jaguars like to be alone. This animal is now the only known living wild jaguar in the United States.
El Jefe (“The Boss” in English) is afraid of nothing for he is on the top of the food chain and prey to no one. There is no animal his jaws can’t take down. He stalks and ambushes his prey with a bite-force that is the most powerful in the New World. The Tucson Jaguar can bite through the armor of an armadillo, and we now know that he kills black bear.
We also know that El Jefe has been living in Tucson for at least five years because hunters, hikers, and ranchers have taken hundred of pictures of him. Some have seen his enormous paw print. It looks like that of a mountain lion with four toes without claws, but his heel pad is much bigger.
When biologists from the University of Arizona and other agencies tried to capture El Jefe on film with temperature-sensitive cameras, he eluded them. Finally in February 2016, the Center for Biological Diversity took the very first video of this magnificent cat. He is walking near water, which is typical of jaguars who like to live near rivers and in the rain forests of South America.
El Jefe lives a solitary life. He moves around in his beautiful muscular stealth way in the hours of early dawn and dusk. His spots are called rosettes of all things, and he is the only big cat that can roar. He roars to warn his competition to stay away from his territory.
Once American jaguars roamed from Colorado to Texas, as far north as the Grand Canyon and all the way west to Southern California. Now all we have left is El Jefe, the Tucson Jaguar.
I watch his beautiful glowing eyes and his muscular tawny body, and something about him is bright and burning. The Aztecs, who had elite Jaguar Knights, believed something similar about the jaguar too. They believed the jaguar gave fire to humankind, and that seems right to me. El Jefe has a light about him, he has a splendor wonder … or in William Blake’s words, a fearful symmetry.
Drawing by William Blake
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Like people everywhere, we who celebrate Arizona Thanksgiving have much to be thankful for, such as the election is over. Thanksgiving here is unique in that you can eat your dinner outside on a picnic table, just like a Pilgrim. This made me think about other neat things to be grateful for about Arizona like the months of October through April, and that the last two surviving jaguars in the United States live in our state.
I’m also grateful for the beautiful way the Anglo, Mexican and Native American cultures come together here.
I’m grateful for amazing sunsets every single afternoon, and the beauty of a zillion stars against unpolluted black night skies. I’m grateful for the vastness, silence, grandeur and solitude of the Sonoran Desert.
So as the song goes –when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad– I simply remember my favorite things about Arizona. Other times I just think about them for no reason.
I love to lie on the ground and look at clouds. It’s not for everyone –there are people who don’t like clouds. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen them look at a bright clear sky and say, “Hooray! Not a cloud in sight!” which is hard for me to understand because some of my best days on this planet have been spent watching clouds. But as Jane Austen wrote, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
Because I’ve spent many lazy days looking skyward, I never agreed with Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Clouds don’t look lonely to me at all. They look as if they are having a great party up there, just dancing along in elaborate formations with all the precision of a medieval cotillion.
I love all kinds of clouds … the slant ones… the big puffy ones … the ones who walk the straight and narrow. Some are little tufts in the sky like playful wafts of smoke from the pipe of an old man amusing his grandchildren, while others form lines so straight and horizontal that they look as if they’ve been drawn from an architect’s red pencil.
I like all the familiar forms a cloud can make and the ones you can imagine that they are– like seahorse and face-in-the-moon clouds … the Puff the Magic Dragon clouds and the ones shaped like ducks and giant caterpillars.
I like the way clouds can take all day to build up to a thunderstorm. I like the way they hide in the crevices of mountains, softening the look of harsh grey rocks, and then emerge like smoke from great smoldering fires within their captors’ deepest cauldrons …only to later light up the sky with a rainbow.
I particularly love the thunderheads you see out West. If you climb up high enough and look down from hundreds of feet so that you can see for miles and miles, you’ll see rain coming from a thunderhead that causes not even a sprinkle just a foot away.
But I do think that even non-cloud people agree that clouds are everything when it comes to fabulous Arizona sunsets. You need those clouds to create those fabulous colors and form those beautiful horizontal patterns like gigantic Navajo rugs in the sky. Otherwise your sunset is just plain vanilla.
And even non-cloud people know that Western landscapes would be dull without them.
Philosopher John Lubbock wrote, “Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like a violin. Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water and watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” Just saying.
and would do so in the future. He pictured Americans driving McCullough J-2 Gyroplanes instead of cars. Gyros were a cross between airplanes and helicopters. They could take off from an ordinary driveway. Although McCullough’s factories cranked out 200 J-2s, this was one of his few ideas that never made it off the ground.
Why shiver through another dreary winter in the Midwest … with your squirrelly baby boomer children in their Davy Crockett hats … when you could live in BEAUTIFUL LAKE HAVASU CITY! with a winter temperature averaging a balmy 70 degrees. (What McCullough’s ads didn’t say is it gets up to 120 degrees in summer.)
McCullough figured it cost $1.2 million to take the bridge apart and move it to Lake Havasu City. He doubled that, added $1,000 for each year of his life to come up with the romantic and winning bid of $2,460,000.
Their parents didn’t believe the bridge story until they saw construction workers putting the bridge together. As an added touch, McCullough and a designer of Disneyland created eleven miniature lighthouses. London Bridge opened in 1971.
For more information on visiting Lake Havasu City, go to this vacation spot in Arizona!
