Because I still have family and friends in the city where I was born, it’s easy for me to be a winter connoisseur of Phoenix back yards. In this back yard, my head rests on a pillow in the shade of a grapefruit tree while my belly and legs and feet bake in afternoon sunshine. Birds squeak, a girl behind a block wall beyond the alley squeals while her daddy cuts a board and hammers a nail, and a foot-high broccoli plant in a nearby garden gathers light into floppy rabbit-ear leaves. A curve-billed thrasher alights on a wooden fence and cocks his head while he examines my body stretched out in the brown grass.
In my journal where I described the moon behind a row of icicles last week, I now draw the curve made by two rows of laundry that cause the clothesline to sag. I add the shape of a large, very old orange tree. The fruit looks like orange Christmas ornaments. An airy buzz at my left elbow leads my eyes to a stalk of waxy pink flowers rising above 50 aloe plants entangled in stringy Bermuda grass. A hummingbird locks on the blossom, retreats, returns, drinks, hovers. Vanishes.
For many people in Flagstaff, Phoenix is that obnoxious city to drive through on the way to the airport. Some enter if there are friends to see or shopping to accomplish. But most friends tell me Phoenix is a bad collection of look-alike shopping centers. A water-guzzling wasteland. No heart there. Good for movies maybe. And Trader Joe’s of course. Ballparks, too. But no soul.
On any January Sunday afternoon, no doubt the airport is thronged with people catching planes in and out of lives. I’m sure the aisles of the shopping temples teem with eager consumers. Maybe there isn’t much soul, but there sure is a lot of jogging, bicycling and outdoor play.
You know that craggy purplish mountain that catches your eye if you enter Phoenix on the 51? It is named Piestewa Peak. There’s a 1.2 mile trail to the top. When I was in high school it was called Squaw Peak and I would leave my 10-speed unlocked at the bottom, climb to the top and sip Tang with the sunrise. I’d see no one and I’d daydream about one day walking north across the empty desert all the way to Cave Creek.
Three friends and I chatted our way up that trail this morning. But it was like bobbing along in a river of pilgrims. Hundreds and hundreds of people climbed and not because there was an advertised event. Phoenix people walk up Piestewa Peak in droves. It is a rocky exercise machine, I thought, as I watched people rushing by with buds in their ears.
As I walked, I mused that Phoenix is where I first learned how to seek a trail, and how to savor full moon rise. My older brother, an avid hiker, tutored me in how to put my feet on the planet to measure the distances that matter in my life. In the ’70s he and his buddies in the Arizona Mountaineering Club of Phoenix climbed to the top of Mt. Humphreys to spend New Year’s Eve camped on Arizona’s highest point. After the recent pine cone drop downtown, I looked up at that moon-flushed mountain and imagined them there. I pictured them spent and flushed with success, eager for sunrise. While it might have been largely an adventurous exercise in learning to use an ice axe for self-arrest, it was certainly also an inspiring way to start a new year.
On a morning’s walk in a new year, a sweating jogger panted thank you as I stood aside to let him pounce on by me. As I panted on the edge of the trail, I thought about learning to trust the sweet air of high places. Further along two women in matching purple T-shirts added thank you and thank you for letting them go by me in a rush. I thought, here is where I learned to push through panting to go up and up. On top of a peak in a desert city, among dozens of spent hikers, I listened to a tiny burst of Queen from a stranger’s iPod and thought, here is where my mountain life began.
