Tucson 2011

Our first month of four is finished, and we are already a little tired of the dust and dryness of the desert.  Then we landed in Tucson Mountain Park.  Wow!  We are camped amid the saguaro and other cactus, surrounded by mountains and peace.  At sunset we see “purple mountains’ majesty” looming above us.  This is pure Sonoran Desert, the main habitat for the majestic saguaro which grow a foot higher every ten years and don’t develop their iconic arms until they are 60-70 years old.

Teacher friends Alice and Jerry took us to Tumacacori, a ruined mission near Tubac south of Tucson.  We also were in awe of Mission San Zavier del Bac, a restored, still active mission founded around the same time in the late 1600’s by Fr. Kino.  The O’odham native people in the area found themselves subjects of New Spain, then Mexico, then the United States without ever moving. 

A visit to the Arizona State Museum on the U of A campus made chillingly clear what we have been learning in New Mexico, at Chiracahua, and here, how ruthlessly the native people were exploited, massacred, and removed from their ancestral homelands.  We have seen how tribe after tribe was comfortable in their way of life and then forced onto reservations, where the conquerors tried to educate them in foreign ways and fed them poorly.  If the natives had been left alone on their land, the US would not have had to provide for them.  They had been doing just fine.

Teacher friends Joan and Dave took us to the Tucson Gem Show where we were awed by huge geodes of amethyst and other mineral spectacles.  I had to buy a pearl/mother of pearl pendant, of course, since I forgot my jewelry at home for the winter.  Marie in Silver City helped me find some rings and earrings, and we set some stone pendants, so now I have jewelry to wear.  Don teases me that I forgot my jewelry at home deliberately so I could buy replacements, but honest, I didn’t.

The Desert Museum just up the hill from our campground in the desert is a fantastic place to see all kinds of desert life—plant and animal.  We even saw some organ pipe cactus which was great since we have decided not to go to the Organ Pipe Nat’l Monument due to that area being a funnel of illegal activity crossing the border with Mexico. 

The raptor free flight of Harris hawks enchanted all of us.

We crossed paths again with Jean and Ron from the Las Cruces Habitat build, and went out for pizza at the Open Range, a little place out in the desert—way, way out in the desert.  They don’t serve alcohol, so we took a six-pack.  The pizza was huge and loaded with just everything, including a few too many jalapenos, but oh, was it good! 

Tucson and Phoenix get much of their water from the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away.  The water’s ph damages the city’s pipes, so they run the water into ponds where it soaks down to replenish the water table before being pumped up in wells to serve the city.  The ponds are carefully monitored so the water percolates down rather than evaporates.

Saguaro National Park gave us a glimpse of petroglyphs and  lovely walks in  the serenity of the desert.  It is definitely growing on us.  

The saguaro sometimes take almost human shapes.  The native people respected the desert and the saguaro as symbolic of the generations of ancestors before them.