Feeling overwhelmed by distances recently, I parked my truck on Mars Hill where I could see the plateau as a game board instead of a web of gas-sucking, spine-sagging miles. A train snaked through downtown. Mormon Mountain hibernated with blue-shouldered grace. A half-hour of perspective from above nudged my glum mood a bit. It could be I was TOO pensive with the new year. I’d spread a folder of photos of me out on a table: sixty years of me peering from school IDs, credit cards, snaps from friends, and glory shots from assorted adventures. I studied that parade of photos for a clue about how the years add up, but I didn’t find insight.
There I am on Thumb Butte brewing Constant Comment tea with sunrise. There I am on Squaw Peak to fly a kite with like-minded friends. There I am on Weaver’s Needle in the Superstition Wilderness when my boss Bill Sewrey and I climbed it to spend the night with an April full moon. (We could hear my sister and friends below as they laughed around a campfire. It was an exquisite still night on ensolite pads atop an Arizona icon.) And there is the best shot of all on the cover of ARIZONA Magazine, that treasure trove of local stories that came with the Sunday Arizona Republic for decades. On the pinnacle called Tom’s Thumb seven of us are doing a high kick together like a chorus line in a Broadway musical or can-can dancers from a Paris stage. From nearby boulders, the magazine’s editor, Bud DeWald, had called out, “Do something!” We did, and he caught a photo of us looking like exuberant insects on a rock pickle rising out of McDowell Mountain Regional Park. The headline reads “Why? Because we’re there.”
Is it interesting or is it tedious to have me in your car on a drive in Arizona? I’ve been everywhere and certain rocks turn me into a garrulous old codger who babbles through stories that begin, “I remember…” That night rappel from the Praying Monk when my hair got caught in the carabiners. And climbing Camelback carrying Mark’s hang glider so he can launch into the wind. Hey, and do you know who Shaw Butte is named after? Let me tell you…
Not everyone finds these details fascinating, I know. Recently four of us headed south to taste wine in Sonoita and have a night at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee. Picacho Peak winked as we headed toward Tucson, but I held my tongue. I didn’t tell about the time I parked at the state park to find the trail to the top. I’d left the folk festival in Tucson exuberant from music and flirtations and had all day to get back to Flagstaff. I scrambled up with high energy and loved the cable below the summit where hand over hand hauling made me feel like quite the adventurer.
Driving by years later I thought of describing how two hawks had circled my happy viewing of desert, but instead I quietly drew Picacho Peak while my friends chatted through the miles. I added watercolor to make a blue sky and later sent it to my sister in Connecticut so she could have a dab of Arizona on her kitchen table. It’s how my face is different than hers, maybe: vistas of sky and mountains are caught in my smile, deepening my wrinkles with every decade.
And I am smiling now. I’m remembering that Tom’s Thumb is named after a hiking pal of mine, Tom Kreuser. For 30 years of my life I played with Phoenix folks who collected dirt roads to out-of-the-way places the way Flagstaff people collect river trips, or mountain bike loops, or breweries. Many of those friends still do that: lead trips, write guidebooks, collect summits in the Grand Canyon, camp a lot. Tom emailed me last New Year’s Day because he and his wife had walked up Piestewa Peak in the predawn. He sent a photo from the summit of a man beating a Japanese drum to welcome the first sunrise of 2014. It’s a brilliant image of grace with time passing. It reminds me that sitting with friends in high places can shape a heart that will beat out a resonant song for years and years. I’m a lucky gal to live in a landscape that holds stories in every direction. And there are more to come! Anyone want to go for a hike?
