Wind-sculpted Permian sandstone spires (~260 million years old), northeast Sedona, AZ
Life as a rolling seminar
Among the memories I harbor are two dozen or so I ‘d describe as indelible. One of them is from a late-August day three years ago. My son and I were leaving Sheridan, Wyoming in separate small cars, filled with his belongings. Devin had only recently graduated from Western Washington University in Bellingham and we were moving him to Denver, where he would start the next phase of his life.
Sheridan is just east of the Bighorn Mountains, a favorite destination, and as Devin led the way, driving south at freeway speed, his car disappeared over a rise. Losing sight of him, I was suddenly overcome with emotion, needing a windshield wiper for my eyes, for which there is no button.
There is a deep bucket of reasons for such a reaction, most of which have to do with what a decent, funny, and missable person he is. But some had to do with the moment—the last tangible day in the continuum from holding him after birth to giving him to his new world, post-college.
Northern Cardinal, gleaning a meal at Red Rock state park, Yavapai County, AZ
Devin would not exist were it not for his sister. Not long after Audrey learned to walk, I became very sick, very quickly on a day when she and her mom were out shopping. I was dizzy, weak, achy, and couldn’t breathe very well. I had a bronchodilator (albuterol) with me because I’ve long been prone to asthma and bronchitis. But the inhaler had no effect at all. By the time Connie and Audrey returned I was in deep trouble. I could barely make it to the car for a trip to urgent care. I was rapidly sliding into toxic shock from the same wickedly fast infection (strep pneumonia) that had killed Jim Henson (of Muppet’s fame) three years earlier. I labored to breathe, and the blood infection was excruciating. I’d had a very good life to that point, had married well, and had accomplished more than I could have imagined as an average student in high school. I thought about letting go. I’m quite sure I would have died except for the one thing I couldn’t let go of—I didn’t want Audrey to grow up without me, without a father.
With Audrey in our last minute together, soon departing on separate flights from Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport Tuesday afternoon.
Fast forward nearly three decades and Audrey and I are just back from Arizona and the Sonoran desert. It is part of our commitment to wander and explore together, to share the wonder of nature. To describe it as an escape doesn’t suffice, in that neither of us are running away from our city lives, so much as trying to keep our balance and broaden our perspectives. In nature that means the active practice of being alert and open to the precious (and sometimes perilous) experiences unfolding around us.
My now 31 year-old daughter (who is pursuing a master’s degree in art therapy) has had to confront her own traumas. Since her late teens she has been deeply engaged in civil rights, environmental and social justice issues, in large part, to her early involvement with the Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS). It just works out that both she and her brother have been valuable sounding boards as I try to get my head around the extant convulsions in our politics and culture. Devin reads and briefs me on legal filings and, a week ago, called to give me what turned about to be a two-hour seminar on the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria.
Curve-billed Thraser atop a saguaro cactus
As you may know from her writing in this space, Audrey digs deeply into the zeitgeist and grifter culture of the “mirror world”—the murky realm of baseless conspiracies that seduce large segments of our society. But the breadth of her attention is remarkable. As we were driving back from Sedona late Monday she delivered a lengthy, crisp critique of neo-liberalism—an evolving term that is probably best-defined as the liberal embrace of deregulation, free market capitalism, and (some would say) militarism that has largely prevailed in Democratic politics since the Clinton administrations. Suffice to say, she wants no part of it.
I’m too close to Dev and Aud to be unaffected by their anger, joy, and energy. The “retribution” Donald Trump promised his followers over the past year or so is broadly aimed at people whom we trust and admire and try to support. In the wake of last month’s elections, I hear disappointment from them, often in words I wouldn’t use near my mother (god bless her). But I don’t hear resignation.
The Sonoran wilderness near Catalina, AZ
Hikes in the desert, visits to the vortices
Phoenix, with a metropolitan are population approaching 5 million, is even bigger than I experienced it a couple years ago. It is America’s fastest-growing city in a state as short on water as it is long on impressive cords of mountains that rise above the Sonoran desert in all directions. Six months ago, one of America’s premier journalists, George Packer, wrote a powerful cover story for The Atlantic —“What will become of American Civilization?” that offers Phoenix and its natural and human environs as a microcosm of the American struggle against nature and our increasingly divisive struggle amongst ourselves. If you haven’t read it, I commend it to you.
We didn’t get to all the places I’d hope to visit in part because it’s winter, even in Arizona, and while the sun is bright it doesn’t linger this time of year. On Saturday we cut short our effort to get to a gnarly geo site near the Mexican border and chose, instead, to hike in a wilderness area outside the town of Catalina. It was a good choice, given that we wandered into a small pack of javalinas (they resemble pigs but are technically peccaries) dining on cactus. When startled, they would run about frantically, but then settle back to eating, or napping. Wild.
A javelina
We saved Sedona until our last full day together (Monday). Suffice to say it was a mixed adventure, though not unhappily so. I’m enthralled with the crimson geology—the brilliant, wind-carved pillars of hematite-infused sandstones. Ditto for Audrey, but Sedona is also a mecca for the spiritually-minded, with its vortices that are believed, by many, to offer healing and enlightenment.
She says she encountered a vortex while we hiked through the junipers at Bell Rock, a towering, bell-shaped sandstone butte between Sedona and the town of Oak Creek. An hour later she had her aura read at a coffee shop and then we shopped at a mineral store she’d heard about in northeast Sedona. One of the staff members is a poet in his thirties. When I jokingly asked if there was a stone in stock that dissolved writer’s block he quickly led me to it. It’s blue topaz, he said, and sure enough it was labeled as “writer’s stone.”
I bought it, along with an even bluer stone that caught my eye.
We’ll see how that works.
—tjc
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