“Yosemite’s mountains are calling me, and I must go back, ” John Muir wrote.
He’s right.
Yosemite haunts you with its beauty, until the memory of it gets into your mind so that you have to go back.
I was lucky enough to return to Yosemite, but I felt disappointed because it was raining.
After all, the reason you go back to Yosemite, as Muir said, “is to hear the waterfalls and birds and winds sing … and to get as near the heart of the world as you can.”
This is hard to do when you’re standing under a waterfall and getting soaked.
In fact, it was raining so hard that the Upper Yosemite Falls merged into Lower Yosemite Falls, creating one giant gush of water falling 2400 feet.
I climbed up to Glacier Point where the incredible view was so squishy and obscure with rain that the tops of the High Sierra disappeared into gray brume. I watched a dragon cloud slowly sneak up on a darkened peak until he embraced it with his gigantic arms and wrapped his fingertips around it until the peak itself vanished.
It kept raining and raining. I felt disappointed until I thought about Ansel Adams.
Ansel Adams was the first to photograph Yosemite. He took his pictures in black and white because they did not have a color process in the 1920s. I found out that when it rains, Yosemite becomes a black and white image. Now I could see it the way Ansel Adams did.
Ansel Adams had an intention of how every picture should turn out. “I had been able to realize a desired image, not the way the subject appears in reality but how it feels to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” He captures the beauty of the High Sierra in bold contrasts, dark and white lines, and white images of misting falling water. His Yosemite pictures are beautiful, emotional and unforgettable, even though they are in black and white.
Ansel Adams with the perfectionism of a real artist would sometimes sit in front of a mountain for hours, waiting for the right moment. But on that rainy day in Yosemite, it occurred to me that perhaps he was sitting there because he liked to, because he was listening to the waterfalls and birds and winds sing, and getting as near to the heart of the earth as he could.
Ansel Adams’ pictures are copyrighted so they can’t be reproduced here, but key collections are stored at the Center for Creative Photography here in Tucson.
The New York Times recently sent a photographer and writer to do a piece on Tucson architecture. Most of us in Tucson do not even know we have architecture, much less that we are living an “unsung architectural oasis” in a “dusty outpost on the fringes of the Sonoran Desert.” See Unsung Oasis.
Now the fellows who came here from where cement grows instead of cactus did not even pick my favorite examples of Tucson architecture –the San Xavier Mission, the courthouse, the credit union at Wilmot and Speedway, and the Tucson Barrio.
San Xavier Mission was built by Spanish padres and Native Americans. As you
can see, our beautiful mission was never finished and one tower still needs to be topped off some 324 years later but then, things move more slowly out here compared to New York City.
The other building that I personally think is a great example of Tucson architecture is the Vantage West Credit Union on Wilmot and Speedway.
Every time I go by this building I’m tempted to hang from one of its corners and see if I can tilt it up and down.
It looks something like a gigantic boat made of mirrors.
A lot of buildings in Tucson can look church-y, including the old courthouse.
I love all the bright colors intrinsic to Tucson architecture. You can really see them in the Tucson Barrio around 100 South Stone Street near downtown. I really love the Barrio’s neat doorways and windows.
However, the New York Times writer mostly liked Tucson architecture because of Sunshine Mile. This is a stretch of 1950s buildings on Broadway between Euclid and Country Club.
He may be on to something because when you walk along this street, you do feel as if you’re on the set of a Doris Day movie. The Times writer raved that “Tucson possesses some of the densest concentrations of mid-century Modernist architecture in the Southwest, although it’s hard to find.”
He means you have to find Sunshine Mile, for example.
I like the Sunshine Mile building that looks as if it sprouts chimneys when no one is looking.
Hirsch’s Shoe Store from 1954 and the Top Hat building are particularly cute, though the Haas and Solot buildings are more famous.
The Times reporter also wrote how he liked how Tucson “boasts more about its thrift stores than its hipster brunch spots” and that he liked Tucson’s “dry clear air and abundant supply of wizened drifters right out of Richard Avedon’s ‘In the American West’ …
… and “how deeply he enjoyed the ramshackle dispersion of the city.”
Is that high praise or what?
On behalf of wizened drifters in ramshackle cities everywhere, I say, “Thanks, pardner. You’all come back real soon.”
Usually I am standing by a vortex .. One of the seven energy votices in Sedona. Each one is sacred to the Native Americans, who have always called Sedona their home. They don’t go there to hike but rather for vision-quests or to work out their medicine.
The sky is always this bright turquoise and the rocks with their turrets and furrows are always this intense rust red ..
Sometimes I look up and see the red rocks cast an enchanted jagged outline against the sky .. rocks that have this magical quality to form a dreamscape you’ve seen before .. You get deja vue the first time you stand there … even if you know you’ve never been there before … because you are looking at a place that exists and has always existed somewhere inside you … A place of “Then sings my soul… How great Thou art …”
The New Age People say a vortex is where the earth’s energy is more concentrated, and it is supposed to awaken you. The word conjures up a volcano shape and a whirlwind of energy — funneling and fierce.
The vortex at Bell Rock actually has a funnel shape …
While the Cathedral Rock vortex looks like this …
Another vortex sets near the entrance of Oak Creek …
Boynton Canyon vortex has Kachina Woman jutting out like this ….
When you stand in a vortex in Sedona, all you may feel is a lightening up … it may just be a slight feeling of relaxation … as if you are being carried along weightlessly …
I have been to Sedona many times .. And once I even went there in a dark gray rainstorm. At first I felt disappointed until I went out walking and I could see that…. even without its colors, Sedona is just as magical and just as enchanted, but in a different way.
Yet it is the colors that always call me back. They are a kindergartner’s colors .. a primary crayon box of bright red, green, yellow and blue.
I have always loved the way the ocean is ever-changing and moving so that it hypnotizes and yet at the same time relaxes your mind. To me, she has light feet and dances the samba. But now I live in the mountains, and they are more sober than friend-ocean. They play great thunder music – symphony, not samba.
My own mountain is called Pusch Ridge but that is such a prosaic name for a huge everest that looks like a gigantic dinosaur.
I am not the only one who sees this mountain that way. A Feng Shui master took one look at Pusch Ridge and proclaimed him to be a dragon protecting our valley. Like China we too have crouching tigers and hidden dragons in our mountains. A dragon protecting your valley, though, is considered very very lucky.
He is never the same from day to day or even hour to hour. At sunrise he wears a halo.
At sunset he turns bright red and then fades to black.
During monsoon he is green; during dry heat, he is brown. In some lights he is purple mountain majesty;
in others he is maroon with a white top of snow.
Sunlight and moonlight can drop into his holes or a cloud can turn parts of him into gray umbrage.
I greet him every day. I love him. I trust him. Like friend-ocean, he is eternal and forever.
If he could speak, he would say like the Navajo people do in their Blessingway ceremonies:
In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty
–Navajo Blessingway Ceremony
Henry David Thoreau once said it is wise to fall in love with your own small and special piece of real estate. He had Walden Pond, but I think he would have loved Pusch Ridge.
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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.
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.
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
An architect once told me that when you design a building, you think in terms of the perfect size –and the perfect size is you! You’re the perfect size! Anything taller than you looks high, and anything shorter looks low.
I remembered that saying the last time I saw the Grand Canyon. If I’m the perfect size, then the Grand Canyon is WAY BIG.
How big is the Grand Canyon? 277 miles long, 18 miles wide and one mile deep.
As Bill Bryson said, You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it — indeed, you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it! The Grand Canyon is WAY BIG.
Even when you suspect it’s just a few more steps in front of you, the Grand Canyon always surprises you. It’s unexpected. You just don’t expect to see a gigantic gash stretching for so very long and cutting so very deep into the earth. If you stand on the canyon’s ledge, the Colorado River looks like a tiny little stream, and you can’t even see the hikers below, much less coyotes. It’s like a mountain in reverse — a mountain that left the earth and left a hole.
It’s the “Oh Wow” moment, and it’s very quiet. The Grand Canyon is a silent place, a place with very little movement, except for the occasional raven who sky-dances with the Canyon’s strange wind tunnels. The colors of the Grand Canyon are quiet too, nothing gaudy, just pastels in purple, russet red, browns, and greens.
The Canyon has amazing colored layers that are perfectly horizontal — the whole panorama is a series of beautiful horizontals — all done in perfectly straight lines because water formed them, and water never lays crooked. The Grand Canyon is perfectly formed.
J.B. Priestly said you feel when you are there that God gave the Colorado River its instructions. The Canyon is all Beethoven’s nine symphonies in stone and magic light.
The Native Americans called the Grand Canyon by the name “Ongtupqa,” and they made pilgrimages to it as a holy place. It is a holy place, a place to experience transcendence and meaningfulness.
John Muir, an American hero who helped create our National Park System, said, “The Canyon seems like a gigantic statement for even Nature to make all in one mighty stone work. Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and size. But the colors, the living, rejoicing colors, are chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven!”
Amen, Brother Muir.
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.
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
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
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.
but how it feels to me and how it must appear in the finished print.” He captures the beauty of the High Sierra in bold contrasts, dark and white lines, and white images of misting falling water. His Yosemite pictures are beautiful, emotional and unforgettable, even though they are in black and white.
