Some of you looking at a crack in a rock think, “Treasure?” Others of you cringe, thinking, “Snakes.” Or perhaps you consider weight, balance, rock integrity and think, “Handhold.” Rocks beg me to climb them, to use friction and muscle to ascend. Where did I learn that?
It is a Sunday afternoon in the early ‘60s in Phoenix and cars go up and down Central Avenue as families look at the tall buildings or stop for a bag of McDonald’s hamburgers or sit down at Bob’s Big Boy if Mom and Pop are courageous enough to let their children sprawl and squirm in a booth—and look. There goes the Rukkila family in a ’54 Chevy Bel Air, cruising to a Ramada in South Mountain Park. There Mr. Rukkila pulls bags of ice and a big metal tub out of the trunk and the twin girls carefully carry the six-packs of sodas; if your little fingers slip and drop the cardboard on the cement, there’ll be an explosion of soda and glass you’ll never forget. Small hands bury Barq’s root beer and Pepsi bottles and cans of Shasta in ice cubes. They’ll taste so sweet after climbing rocks while the Finns gab.
Finlandia Foundation picnics bring together Finnish ex-patriots and descendants of those who came from the old country. Those Finns know how to throw a good party in the warm Arizona sun so far from the snowy land where ancestors hugged trees. George Antilla makes the mojakka, a stew stirred for hours in a big pot then served with hardtack and others set up a record player to play funny songs and polkas. Oh good, someone has baked the braided sweet bread, nissua, with its tangy taste of cardamom. I’m torn between listening to my father greet and tease others with his fluent Finnish or drawing closer to the row of old women who wear blue and black and sit with their big hands in their laps, heads tilted to each other with astonishingly nimble syllables leaping and jumping off their tongues. But they are old people, all those Finns and my parents, and my brother has already climbed to the high point in the tumble of granite nearby and my sister is not far behind. I dash off too, my hands and knees eager to explore narrow cracks into nooks and crannies on the ocotillo-kissed hillside.
A lifetime later I realize a hunger that still pulses through my hands and feet like a magnetic force might have come from those childhood afternoons of scrambling. But listen, my memory coaxes, to those sounds where the palo verdes and mesquites waved. Finnish songs and blunt retorts in a language I don’t speak. I blinked in the bright sun and examined the lined faces of Finnish elders and found rock there, too, faces full of silent determination between bursts of stories. When I got older I’d see the Karsh black and white photo of composer Jean Sibelius and recognize rock in the set of that jaw above crisp collar and tie. I looked up words in a Finnish-English dictionary, and discovered the word for rock is the same word in both languages. Rock. “Kivi” is the word for the stones heated in the sauna where water hisses into cleansing steam, but where you put your hands and feet to climb? Rock is rock.
I must have my time outdoors climbing on rocks like I must have the hours of reading books, the mornings of writing in journals.
And what richness to have decades of life in Arizona with other rock seekers: shared rappels from the Praying Monk, pilgrimage to the top of Weaver’s Needle, picnics on great flat slabs along trails in canyons, group photos of sweaty triumph on top of Picacho Peak and Tom’s Thumb. Such sweet ensolite-padded camps we made on stone pour-overs where water trickles at Badger Springs and creamy rock smooths out wall to wall in the throat of 29 Mile Canyon. Sigh. Writing it I am ever so close to leaping from my chair, getting out the door, driving to here or there for that rock, or that one. Isn’t it a big plum of wealth to know a state so well that there are specific rocks to return to again and again for good company. That slab for sitting at the top of Piestewa Peak, the curves of granite with a view of the dam on Watson Lake, a water worn bulge under a giant sycamore in Bear Canyon in Tucson. But what if I could find the very first rocks I scrambled on as a child? Though more than 50 years have passed, I want to feel again my small heart throbbing to find a window made by juxtaposed boulders.
On my next drive south, headed to the Tucson Festival of Books, I impulsively scoot off the interstate to look for the Ramada at South Mountain Park in Phoenix where I first learned to ignore scrapes on my knees in pursuit of topping out. Everything looks smaller, of course, and greener. The palo verdes are bigger. I’d forgotten that curious paleness of light and the dark slabs that look like the backs of whales. A particular hillside in the distance teases me down a mountain bike trail to a Ramada no longer in use. I find it! The cement benches where the old women used to sit are crumbling. But the tumble of granite boulders nearby is unchanged. Clumps of hardened pudding still show flakes just big enough for small fingers and toes in canvas tennis shoes. The feeling of gritty purchase against my palms delights me as I spiral up to the top where I once looked down on festive Finns. And yes, I find the window where we raced each other to be first to climb through. On the ground again I catch my breath, sitting with closed eyes, trying to hear voices. I should have brought a cold clammy bottle of root beer for my hands. Air passes through the up thrown arms of nearby creosote bushes. Desert breath is such a feathery caress against my stiff Finnish jaw. In my shirt pocket are two rusted bottle caps I found in the gravel of the dry wash. I touch them and smile.
