by Jane St. Clair

Sequoia trees are colossal beings and yet they have a softness about them. Their bark swirls in a deep red soft pattern, and even their leaves look soft and furry. You might expect a “don’t-mess-with-me” hostile energy from such giants — but instead their spirits are calm, peaceful and majestic. It’s as if these trees, the largest and oldest living things on earth, have nothing to prove to anyone. They seem completely happy. Their peaceful energy makes you feel as if you’re in a cathedral where only beauty, hope, joy and the celebration of all things great and wonderful takes place.

The main thing about sequoia is that they are tall. You look up and they are tall as far as your eyes can see. They also have gigantic widths. People use to drive their cars through certain of their trunks in the Sequoia National Forest until the park rangers became more ecologically-minded.

Sequoia have enormous feet. Their feet are so big that they look like dinosaur feet. Some sequoia have dark green feet, others have red.

The oldest sequoia are over 5,000 years old which means they were already 1500 years old when Moses was alive, and 3000 years old when Christ was born. The Sequoia forest has survived fire, drought, insect hordes, floods, avalanches, and even tourists.

I like what John Steinbeck wrote about sequoia:

Redwoods seem to be out of time and out of our ordinary thinking. The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It is not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which shifts and varies under your eyes, –no—they are not like any trees we know. They are ambassadors from another time. The vainest and most irreverent of men goes under a spell of wonder and respect in the presence of the sequoia.

For information on your visit to the Sequoia National Forest this year, see Sequoia National Park.

If you like nature essays about trees, try The Noble Saguaro and Me and In My Next Life I’ll be a Tree

Jane’s essay on Emily Dickinson placed in the 2015 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest. See “The Colonel Catches A CatFish”. Read Jane’s funny flash fiction in The Reject File “Husky.” Jane’s story “The Man Who Liked 1959” placed in a contest from Twisted Road Publishing and will be included in a print anthology of stories from that publisher.

Yosemite National Park with its waterfalls and mountains and trees is the place where you stop wanting or needing anything more. It’s where you’re meant to be. When you’re in Yosemite, you keep looking up and wondering, “How can any place be so perfectly and elegantly beautiful?” … I’ve fallen in love with Yosemite National Park and the way John Muir writes about it.

Yosemite in the Words of John Muir

No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned.

Here stands Nature’s cathedrals, hewn from the living rock, almost conventional in form, nobly adorned with spires and pinnacles, thrilling under floods of sunshine as if alive like a grove-temple …

No where will you see the majestic operations of Nature more clearly revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things than in Yosemite.

Nearly all Yosemite is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming company, full of God’s thoughts,a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and eager enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginning abounding in the first lessons of life, mountain-building,

eternal, invincible, unbreakable order, with sermons in stones, storms, trees, flowers and animals brimful of humanity.

The sublime rocks were trembling with the tones of the mighty chanting congregation of waters gathered from all the mountains round about, making music that might draw angels out of heaven …

This was the most sublime waterfall flood I ever saw — clouds, winds, rocks, waters, throbbing together as one. … In Hetch Hetchy Valley and the great King’s River Yosemite, thousands of rejoicing flood waterfalls were charging together in jubilee dress. And the winds were singing in wild accord, playing on every tree and rock, surging against the huge brows and domes and outstanding battlements …

As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.

Jane’s essay on Emily Dickinson placed in the 2015 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest. See The Colonel Catches A CatFish

Read Jane’s funny flash fiction “Husky” The Reject Pile

For information on how to become one of the five million people who visit the Grand Canyon this year, see The Grand Canyon National Park.

by Jane St. Clair

Death Valley has this bad-ass reputation. The Hottest. The Driest. The Lowest spot in North America. It’s got Hells Gate and Furnace Creek. As you drive toward Death Valley, signs warn you — “Extreme Heat”  … “No gasoline for miles” … “You don’t want to go there” … “Are you crazy? Go home already.”

Abandon all hope all ye who enter here.

Its roads seem to go on and on to nowhere.

And yet Death Valley is eerily beautiful in its own way with its amazing rocks in strange formations you won’t see anywhere else. The Native Americans in Arizona say that every rock as well as every plant, animal and human has its own Kachina or spirit. I finally understood what they mean by Rock Kachinas for the first time in Death Valley.

At Zabriskie Point you can look up and see these bizarre white rocks, so white in the noon August heat that they blind your eyes. One rock shaped like a majestic white shark sails forward into the sky —

while others knoll and fold and peak like folds of luxurious cloth to form a beautiful three-dimensional abstract work of art.

This strange foreboding place lets you see for miles and miles and reminds you that the space between things is just as important as the things themselves —

–and that a simple substance like salt can be very beautiful.

Death Valley is home to a thousand species of plants and a thousand kinds of animals, but on that soundless still day in summer when I went there, I heard no birds singing or animals burrowing or leaves rustling or any of that. I wondered how this expanse of whiteness could provide cover for coyote or puma — two of the creatures that call this place home.

If anything, Death Valley has a spooky quality where unexplained events occur — such as rocks that slide by themselves, perhaps propelled by poltergeists.

And yet despite the spectral qualities and loneliness of this landscape, I think I would go there again and I think I could learn to love this fearful and fierce place, and to agree with the seeker who said, “How can we feel so much fear in the face of these rocks and mountains when they are at once so wonderful?”

For more information on visiting Death Valley National Park in California, see Death Valley National Park

Updates: Carbon Culture Review has a terrific issue on the intersection of technology, art and literature– Read Jane’s piece ScreenBytes

Wising Up Press has just published a new book about relationships between brothers and sisters – Jane’s piece “Talking Berkeley Down” is included. See SIBLINGS: Our First Macrocosm

Read Jane’s funny flash fiction “Husky” The Reject Pile

by Jane St. Clair

I was only in Tucson a few months when I heard the horrible story of the oleander and Boy Scouts. Now this story is not for anyone who gets scared easily! So if that means you, you better stop reading right this minute!

The story goes like this:

About twenty years ago, a troop of Tucson Boy Scouts was camping on Mount Lemmon. It was summer, and the Scouts like everyone else in Tucson had climbed up the mountain to escape the heat.

Night was beginning to fall. The Scouts pitched their tents and built a campfire. They broke off sticks from oleander and Boy Scouts made them into skewers to roast hot dogs.

The next morning EVERY SINGLE BOY SCOUT WAS DEAD!

Some died from eating the wieners, and others died from just inhaling the smoke of burning oleander.

OLEANDER is that POISONOUS!

If you touch it, YOU DIE. But these city slicker Boy Scouts were from New York or some such place and did not know any better.

DON’T EVER TOUCH OLEANDER! or else!

The only problem is oleander grows all over the parts of Arizona where people live. The plant grows tall –up to 20 feet– and it’s big and green and full of flowers. It’s not picky about heat and water in a land of lots of heat and no water, and in a land with no big green plants full of flowers.

This means is … OLEANDER IS EVERYWHERE! …. YIKES!

This week I tried to find the oleander and Boy Scouts story in old newspapers. I couldn’t find it. That bothered me because by now I’d heard this story many times. Storytellers always tell it with great drama and a catch in their voices.

The thing is the story of the oleander and Boy Scouts is not true. It’s urban legend, even though people tell it not only in Arizona, but also in California, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Asia, the Mediterranean and anywhere that oleander grows.

The story probably dates back to a troop of French soldiers wandering around Spain during the Peninsula War of 1809. They were stealing food and camping near Madrid when they used oleander sticks to roast raw meat. The next morning 12 were dead, and 5 were deathly sick.

The oleander and Boy Scout story has staying power because its warning serves a purpose. Oleander is poison. It only takes an ounce of its leaves to kill a horse, and even less to kill a child.

I did find a 2007 article from a newspaper in Yorba Linda, California. The city fathers were deciding whether to ban oleander because of its threat to horses. I got a kick out of a comment someone posted at the end:

“Do you remember the horrible incident in California years ago (actually, about 20 years ago) where a group of Boy Scouts used oleander twigs to grill hotdogs and marshmallows over a campfire? Several of the boys and one of the Scoutmasters died as a result. I would never plant oleander. It’s a beautiful plant, but it is really, really toxic.”

For more information on oleander and Boy Scouts, try snopes.com
July 2015: Read Jane’s funny flash fiction “Husky” The Reject Pile

by Jane St. Clair

Arizona like everywhere else can be weird. After you live here a while, you understand weird Arizona and things like swamp coolers, sand sharks, jackalopes and ghost towns. As a service to humanity, we will now look at what’s myth and what’s just weird about Arizona.

Gila Monsters
This mystical lizard has amazing pink and black markings, and you appreciate its beauty right up until the moment he hisses at you and sticks out his long ugly tongue and then bites your arm like a bulldog. He holds on for dear glory, and people go into Emergency Rooms with Gila Monsters still hanging on them (or so the tale of Weird Arizona goes).

Politically Incorrect Gas Station

Mistletoe

You probably believe mistletoe is romantic greenery that you hang from your doorway at Christmas as an excuse for a shy lover steal a kiss. Not true! In Weird Arizona, mistletoe is a parasite that kills trees, although its main job is to create scary Tim Burton Forests.

Ostrich Farms and Ostrich Races

It is absolutely true that weird Arizona has ostrich races.

Paul Bunyan’s Statue in Tucson

Since only cactus grow in Tucson, it’s weird that we have a statue of Paul Bunyan in the middle of our town. I mean, he’s all about LUMBER, right?

Car On A Stick In the Rain

Arizona Civil War Battle

Arizona is exactly Scarlett O’Hara territory, but nevertheless it’s true we had a Civil War Battle. Guys dressed like Grant and Sherman with cannons, rifles, and tents re-enact the Battle at Picacho Peak the Battle at Picacho Peak every March.

Hillary Car Not on a Stick And Not in the Rain

The Phoenix Mystery Castle
London has Buckingham Palace and France has Versailles, but Weird Arizona has the Phoenix Mystery Castle, decorated with skeletons and anthers and the world’s ugliest pipe organ.

Ghost towns and Desert Debris of Weird Arizona
Nothing ever dies on the desert – things just get abandoned and lay there and slowly turn to dust. Arizonans abandon whole towns, especially once the mine closes, creating ghost towns.

Here’s a jail leftover from Wyatt Earp days.

Best Skies Anywhere and Thunderhead Clouds

Though some other states call themselves Big Sky Country, Arizona has the best skies anywhere. Thunderheads are beautiful. It can be dry at your house and raining across the street. Thunderheads are amazing.

The Grand Canyon
When the Native Americans warned some wandering Anglos that they would soon come to a big canyon, the Anglos said, “Don’t worry – we know from canyons – we’ll just cross it, no problem.” Guess what?

It was a big big canyon, unlike any in the entire world. The size, scale, nobility and beauty of the Grand Canyon will overwhelm you –you owe it to yourself to come and see it.

For more on weird stuff in Weird Arizona and all over the United States, see Weird USA.

by Jane St. Clair

Yes sir, Pardner, here at Old Tucson Studios you can return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the daring and resourceful riders of the plains

led the fight for law and order in the early West.

Hi Ho Silver and Away!

Back then you knew the good guys from the bad guys! Men were tall and strong and grunted in one-syllable utterances as they rode their fiery horses at the speed of light in great clouds of dust. Back then women were women in their dance hall dresses –women of the Wild West who spent all their time crying and waving good-bye to men!

Old Tucson Studios or Hollywood in the Desert played a big role in creating the Legend of the Old West. Hundreds of movies and TV shoes were made here, and stars like Val Kilmer, Steve Martin, Paul Newman, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, Liz Taylor and of course the Duke himself (John Wayne, you pilgrim, you) acted right here where you are standing right now.

As you walk around Old Tucson, you get deja vue because you have indeed seen this landscape and these buildings all before – in productions like Tombstone, Hombre, Bonanza, Gunfight at OK Corral, and many more.

The town is not a town in that fewer than half of its 75 buildings are “practical,” meaning that they have rooms in them. Thirty-two buildings, including the Mission, are just walls — one-dimensional facades. When you see how tacky and small the town looks in real life, you really gain respect for the stars’ acting ability.

Old Tucson has a steam locomotive named “The Reno,” a stagecoach and a tiny fake river that can look miles long and fathoms deep. Amazing! Old Tucson is a party for kids who ride the carousel, stagecoach, miniature railroad, and semi-scary mine cars into a dark copper mine. They can also pan for gold and pet some jaded goats and a pony, and one done-it-all rooster.

The coolest thing about Old Tucson, though, is here you see adults getting paid to have fun all day. The coolest job on planet Earth must be that of an Old Tucson stuntman. These dudes get to shoot it out and duke it out in gun duels and fake fights that include incredible falls from tall buildings.

The only problem is the fake fights take the glory out of it.These men slug it out without any physical contact, and the guy who falls three stories lands on a mattress.

Old Tucson once had an enormous sound stage full of costumes and souvenirs, but it burned down in 1995. They still have a pretty good collection of posters and costumes, even John Wayne’s costume is here from Rio Bravo.

How cool is that?

So cowboy up and get on down to Old Tucson.

Hi Ho Silver and Away!

by Jane St. Clair

Once a year the butterflies come to Tucson Botanical Gardens . I love to watch them, although I have a friend who won’t do that. She believes that they are unhappy and beating their wings and fluttering like maniacs trying to escape through the windows.

I don’t think so.

I think fluttering is what just what butterflies do.

Butterflies just flutter around all day. They would flutter in or out of cages. They just flutter. They fly and flutter in straight lines, in circles and from this to that and they do it all day long.

They flutter all the time and you can’t figure out any rhyme nor reason for it.

Butterflies seem to have a lot of leisure in them,

which is shocking when you consider that they were once hardworking dedicated caterpillars who first had to eat all the time to get fat and ripe, and then they had to build their cocoons, which was a lot of work too. Then it was even more hard work to get out of the cocoons and get to be butterflies, who now basically just flit through their days. George Carlin once said caterpillars do all the work but butterflies get all the publicity.

I am sure butterflies flutter and flit around in no particular pattern or meaning. Emily Dickinson once confessed that she could not trace a design in butterfly wanderings either, although she thought perhaps clover understood them. Butterflies look as if they are having a good time all day long for they are so very light, as if they take life lightly too. They get criticized for not being hard-working like bees and ants, for laying around and goofing off –it’s as if they’re getting away with something,

but after all, they are butterflies and that’s just what butterflies do.

I like them just the way they are.

It is so hard to take their pictures for butterflies won’t hold still, and this is frustrating because they are so beautiful and live such short lives, they deserve to have their pictures taken! The delicate patterns on their wings in all those colors and those swirly lines and circles! How exquisite is that? But they don’t take themselves or their beauty seriously enough to hold still for their portraits!

I love the way they slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –They open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening, but to me, butterfly wings look more like the fans beautiful geisha girls use. Open! Snap! Shut! Snap! Open! How cool is that?

They are so much like flying flowers that their name could be flowerfly, but I like their real name better. The real name has a lilting music to it…. butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… all day long… butterfly… and yet one more time butterfly …just the way you are… butterfly.

by Jane St. Clair

Kokopelli plays the music of the Sonoran desert and that is why you see him everywhere in Arizona and all over the American Southwest. He is our happiest symbol, jumping out of everywhere like a leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day or Santa Claus in December. Kokopelli lives in the great mountains, and his music is magic as he floats his prayers to the sky with his flute.The music of Kokopelli brings rain and flowers, babies and prosperity to the people of the Sonoran desert, and that is why we love him.

Kokopelli belongs to the Anasazi people — the Hopi, the Zuni, the Hokoham, the Sinagua and the Mogollon. You can find his ancient traces where the four corners of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado meet in the Navajo nation. Kokopelli’s petrographs are ancient, perhaps as old as three thousand years.

Some say Kokopelli is an insect with dragonfly antennae. Some say he is priest of rain, a trickster, a fertility god. One story is that the first Kokopelli was actually a traveling salesman whose humpback was really a sack of wonderful goods, and that it was Kokopelli who came from Mexico and brought the Anasazi people the first seeds of corn — a gift of magic! He had girlfriends in every village, and that is how he came to be a symbol of birth. We would say she turned up pregnant. They would say she met up with Kokopelli.

Kokopelli is a shape-changer that leads the human beings out of dark consciousness and into enlightenment.

When Kokopelli discovered that the Ant People were living in darkness, and he led them to the Yellow World full of spiders. Then they descend into the Blue World where Kokopelli loses his ability to play his flute.

There Kokopelli teaches the human beings how to plant seeds, hunt and share with one another. Together they dig a hole that shows them the sky. Water leaks on them but not on Spider Women who spins a web to make the hole dry.

Next Kokopelli leads the human beings to the Green World where the Cloud Spirits shoot him with lightning. Even with the lightning hitting him, Kokopelli manages to play his flute. The Cloud People split open his skin to make his wings form. He asks that the Ant People join them in happiness and light, and he teaches them to follow the Great Spirit. That is the way upward and out of darkness.

This is the way you find your wings. This is why we love Kokopelli.

by Jane St. Clair

One of the weird things about Tucson and other Southwestern cities is that they have dry streams, dry creeks and dry rivers. It has to rain hard for them to fill up –this is the Sonoran desert, after all. Most of them are dry all the time.

The neat thing about living near a desert wash or dry creek is that –even though it’s dry nearly every day of the year– it attracts animals.

I have often seen a herd of javelina in our desert wash, especially in the morning, and although they have a bad reputation for charging after you with their tusks, I rather like them. My dog, who is a simpleton, thinks they are our friends.

Javelina are strange hoofed creatures, mostly blind and objectively ugly, although I think their babies are adorable.

But I digress.

The wash also is a watering place for bobcats, quail, rattlesnakes, lizards, rain toads, packrats, and an occasional puma on the occasion of rain. But I digress.

Recently it rained so hard that our wash filled up and ran like a real stream back East. It made this rushing swirling sound I had not heard in months, and I’d forgotten how beautiful and restful that sound is.

I decided to go down to the Rillito River to see if it were running too.

Tucson’s Rillito River is ordinarily a dry patch of abandoned waterway where dogs run and joggers exercise. Normally it’s a park.

But on the last occasion of rain, the Rillito River filled up and you actually needed the bridge over it on River Road. The water was running so fast that it looked as if it would uproot a few trees.

I had forgotten the sound of mighty rushing waters, the way it cascades and rushes over rocks and makes its bubbly way downhill — you just don’t see that in the desert. I had forgotten the sound and movement and urgency of it, and its hypnotic ways that carry you along with it. Within a day, both the wash behind the house and the Rillito River were back to being patches of empty dry space in the desert, a place the fishes had abandoned eons ago when this whole area was under water.

But the rain did make the desert washes so beautiful.

Now it’s warm and dry again so that the sound of rushing water has become a memory. Now all that’s left for the javelina and quail and other desert animals to do is to wait for the next rain.

. . . . . .

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It’s Rodeo Week in Tucson! See Jane’s Rodeo Post and official information on 2015 rodeo