Arizona: Feet & Sky (Days 1 & 2)

I was supposed to be in Tucson--but flight delays, broken gate bridges, and misdirected luggage make not for a unique story--so I'll just start at the part where I arrive safely at my friend's house in Tempe (Phoenix area), in the itsy-bitsy morning hours, after being awake for nearly a day-length. This new destination is an unexpected happening where I wheedled with Delta to send me here vs to a dismal Detroit hotel, and my Tempe friends were last-minute willing to receive me. 

 

When you miss your connection

My eyeballs were so tired my contacts felt like little porcelain cereal bowls under my lids. But! To arrive! To see cacti along the highway under the sinking orange moon! To put my hand in the manicured grass of the apartment villa, grounding myself after flying (a ritual beloved Peter Watson taught me).

 

I am not on one of my standard bicycle tours. Because pandemic. Because Matthew couldn't come with me due to his job. Because nobody wanted me to go to Mexico. But I am leaving Ithaca, heading towards the sunshine, a new xeric landscape, a near-month of my long-accumulated vacation time (that build-up was getting dusty!). I am taking my carbon road bicycle and my bike-friend Katie Math is joining me for some of the month. We plan to take epic road rides from Tucson into the surrounding landscapes. Then I will head back up to Tempe/Phoenix to be with Adorable Ann and her delightful husband, Ritwick.

 

But it's my first morning waking up not to slush, computer work, or habituated grey brain patterns that come from grieving the death of my mother, the pandemic, and heavy clouds. There are cacti and sunshine out here. My bicycle may still be at the wrong baggage claim long-lost in a different city, but I have some practical shoes and my legs. 

Foreshadowing of soon-to-be-location of practical shoes.

 

Adorable Ann hands me a gallon jug of water and her car keys, and instructs me to go hike Phoenix South Mountain Park and Preserve (a huge 16k acres, wilderness strikingly situated in the suburban spread of Phoenix area). After taking a giddy selfie next to the acacia (when was the last time I got to see one of those famous keystone desert species?!) adjacent to the car port, I ejected myself from the safe and quiet apartment grounds onto a speeding suburbia road. Tight fisted and determined not to die, I made myself take deep breaths as I merged into countless lanes of traffic. It feels like these roads are wider than they are long. 

 

Acacia selfie

All I want to do is get from here to there, and instead I am entering what feels like a high stakes drag race event. A low-profile BMW zeered by on the right as I steeled myself to make a left turn. On-ramps, highways, off-ramps, double-wide turn-lanes. Build the roads and the cars will come. Not a bicycle lane in sight. Welcome to car city. I was encased in this speeding hunk of medal flanked on all sides by similar hunks. I am a small town human who bikes everywhere, thank you very much. Everyone thinks bicycling is so incredibly dangerous, but driving on these fatty speedways feels way more deadly to me. 

 

Terrifying-to-me traffic and supersized roads

 

I drove past block after block of strip malls, parking lots, intersections the size of baseball fields, this great flat smear of a city. And then I saw the red craggy mountains from an over pass. I yelled WOW at the windshield and decided I was doing the right thing.

 

The hike started behind a warehouse… juxtaposed by saguaro cacti and a trotting coyote and a hummingbird, all of whom I encountered within 10 minutes of starting out. The coyote was small and yapped an echoing hello to another across a hill. I felt so bared and windy and exposed; sun and sky and rocks and no shade but a couple pillars of cacti. The sun felt hot but the wind was cooling; I could not imagine anything as physically pleasurable in that moment. 

Walking

 

Allegedly I am on a hike, although I am not making much progress, as I have to stop and look at every spiney lump and looming stalk. It's really amazing to let the concept sink in that there is functionally nothing I have to do, nowhere I have to be. All winter I have been as focused as an unblinking stare on productivity, writing reports, making lab hires, house searching, wedding planning, all through a veil of mind-altering Mom-loss sadness.

 

I walk and reflect how I miss Mom, not that she would be with me on this trail even if she were alive, but that I would be texting her pictures and receiving loving, concerned reminders to apply sunscreen. I'd send her a picture of my thrifted sun hat and I know she'd be proud of me for wearing it. There's something dear about a mother that you can tell her any little boring thing and she will be disproportionately excited about it for you. I was disproportionally excited to be out here under the huge sky. All those years I blogged unquestioningly, knowing there was one very important person who was going to--without doubt--enjoy what I had to say. And now I don't have that. I've had to ground myself and focus to try and put this entry together. But I'm doing it. 

 

When you see all these new forms of existence, and you've been in Winter for so long, where life is covered and still, and you just want to inventory every life you see, all giddy. I don't know who anybody is yet, so I entertained my walking thoughts by making up names:

~South-leaning Thumb Cacti

~Pillar Cacti

~Sunshine Aster

~Stick Figure on-a-stick Cacti

~Fish-tank Coral Cacti

"Sunshine Aster"

 

I am very taken with Saguaro shadows

The trail kicked up and down along a blowy ridge, views of the city to my right, wilderness to my left. I came to a place called 'Fat Man's Pass', a narrow passage between two huge boulders that you either squeeze through, or find an awkward way around or over. I needed to turn sideways and take my backpack off to make it through, rock scritching against my back and front. I felt like a child, testing limits, exploring and playing. After, I sat in the rare shade cast by the huge boulders, and to my enormous delight a live-in-the-flesh certifiable fat man came along! He was with a group of ladies, all speaking French. Of course I couldn't understand them, but I could indeed understand them; there was much giggling, conferring, and pointing as he approached. I left at that point, even though I was extremely curious. 

Fat Man's Pass

 

I ended up walking 8 miles out there. I can still remember when I used to think a 4-mile hike was long. And I did this alone too! There is so much satisfaction in finding your current version better able to take on the world than your previous version.

 

This second Tempe morning I woke up at 4:30 am, my Eastern Standard Time legs eager to play again. The speedways were a little less frightening before dawn, but I still breathed huge relief when I arrived at the trailhead for Camelback Mountain. Which reviewers on Google Maps said was "extremely taxing" and "not a beautiful hike but a beautiful climb", and "great views, but a haul." It was just over a mile at 17% grade. I faced a looming stack of red boulders. If my dear Matthew had been there, he would have explained that this is less than what I've done with him in the Adirondacks, but as it was, I felt sufficiently intimidated to be excited about going up.

 

Pre-dawn Camelback start

 

 

I took stretching steps up those red scrabbly rocks, sometimes hauling myself up a railing, sometimes playing mountain goat, the meditation of choosing where to step. There was no flat walking: only Stairmaster. I have memories of such steep hikes in my past: shaky legs, labored breathing, tired and grumpy, shin splints. Thanks to Matthew, the greatest walker in local history, and my friends in "Club Foot", and begrudging squats in our living room, I was feeling better about my hiking self. I'd done those squats all pandemic winter, staring out the grey window, wondering if this work would one day serve me. And now here I was at the top of a little mountain in the sunshine, in a place I've never been, feeling as easy as one of the billion-dollar Scottsdale villas below. 

 

Diabetes cake with a view

 

I know I've worked well when I eat a small handheld diabetes cake and don't even feel sick afterward. I didn't even feel like I ate anything, in fact. I just felt amazing. This diabetes cake was molasses and raisin. Pleasure unbounded. 

Ogling the pockmarked red rock at Camelback

 

 

Sitting up there was like playing around at the natural history museum and looking at a diorama with all these toy sized houses, warehouses, streets, and tiny lines of creeping cars. I watched the aircraft take off from below, waiting until they reached eye level as they slanted up into the sky. The trees look like tiny emerging seedlings, and the other mountains off in the distance are like oil paintings. All of this feels like an oil painting. It's amazing I'm here.

 

Needless to say, I'm feeling happy and novel and like an old self I haven't known in a long time. I'm so grateful to be here. 

From the top of Camelback