Pima Canyon

"..thousands watch her briefest dance
but surely this won't last
the hibiscus can't bear cold" – Cold Mountain 7











By firelight we listed to Flamenco Sketches
as the wind behind us blew down
dusty graveyard of stones and Seguaro
and dove into the cool blue pool water
along the perimeter javelina scouted
as the witchy trumpet of Miles cried
up into the pink horizon for audience
close your eyes you'll hear the desert sing

Pima Canyon

"...a lost traveler here
looks in vain for the sky." – Cold Mountain, 6












Without the golden buds April
here is still held by dying winter
the backs of surrounding bluffs
stiff and dark like ragged coats
a few house wrens settle into
scarce pines above the bays
and the lonely lover of sunlit trails
waits inside lamp lit rooms

Pima Canyon

"Looking for a refuge
Cold Mountain will keep you safe..." – Cold Mountain












A brief walk last night around
the Council Ring at Arboretum
sent my mind back to Pima Canyon
so many circles of rock
and dry dust barely a person in sight
so when do you feel safest –
among the burr oaks or saguaro
or the highway full of metal ghosts

Pima Canyon

"The Cold Mountain Road is strange
no tracks of cart or horse..." – Cold Mountain










2

Take away the roads to foothills
and you have the bright green
flags of the thousands of seguaros
an untouchable landscape rough
by weathered rock every trail
an accident through blades of pear
through the cross thatched ochotillo
where one could learn to live again

Pima Canyon

"Towering cliffs were the home I chose
bird trails beyond human tracks..."  – Cold Mountain











1

Days of living among the Seguaro gone
fine green homes for trail birds
the Pima women used to sit around
their base and collect flowers for home
no true mountain freedom left
only trails mapped out with detailed guides
there's something of a truth gone-by
only found in the desolate rock bent desert

Inside the Catalinas

"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it." – Abbey, from Desert Solitaire











Finger Rock Trail up Pima Canyon
a perpetual fire of shades of green –
first thing you notice, the sequined
array of the Seguaro, the ochitillo –
prickly pear abloom by a yellow we forget

Stop and look into the thousand little
dens that line the seguaro – common wrens
hole up here, no doubt a subtle feast
from within gaurded against the sun

Foothills lined by gargantuan brick homes;
down below the city rises up from desert,
but all that seems possible up along the trail
as the bedrocks fan out in permanant waves
and the foot has to be careful,
watching, all the while, for crossing
creature from palo verde limbs

Cold Mountain knew the trouble
of cities. The ghosts of a million intentions,
caught up and could never see how
the trail of Finger Rock leads to a nothing
of sage and where the ochotillo
sprawls up like such a foreign fan

and reminds you that...

Inside the Catalinas

"If you had to choose the most romantic corner in the world, what corner would you choose? I know mine. It is a corner that has fired the imagination for three thousand years. It is a corner packed with stirring drama, touched by pathos and deluged with poetry...It is the corner that Homer has immortalized in the first great masterpiece of European literature. It is Troy."
– Richard Halliburton, from The Glorious Adventure








It's no accident that you find Wisconsinites on virtually any trip where there is regular sunshine. Hiking once along one of the more rugged trails in Vail, I had met only one person on the trail – He was walking down and I up. We spoke for a moment, just long enough to find out he had lived in Madison for many years. Head down to Florida, there they are again, bands of them; spend a little time in Arizona, and there they are again. It's not that Wisconsinites need to complain any more than Chicagoans, Minnesotans, or South Dakatans – they all have plenty to complain about as well, no doubt. But there must be something about being landlocked in general farm country with a winter season that, although itself might be withering a little in intensisty due to climate change, does offer up a long and dreary spring, the kind that sets people on their way... any where.

Halliburton had chosen Greece as his final destination in his Glorious travels; Edward Abbey made Moab Utah his most special and lovely place in the class Desert Solitaire. It seems it might be time for all of us to pick one of these. Heading to Tucson tomorrow morning early, well, I think I'll pick that one. Here's a few things I already know: there are nearly 300 days of sunshine located there in the desert. The Wisconsinite, fumbling around in April, comes to think that perhaps we get ten a year. Who knows? I know that Tucson has a range of mountains that I would like to live on, clean my eyes of precipitation for awhile, handshake a cactus, get so hot that I feel I might burst to flames, and jump into some blue pool so cool as to shock the skin off.

As with Abbey, who confided that it was not Moab itself, the city, that was his favorite, but of course the surrounding landscape, the outcrops, the wind swept rocks, his snakes under the cabin, that dazzled him, I feel the same of cities. I might be sipping a tequila in a Baja taco juke, but my eye is out there on the Catalina Foothills, following the contrasts of the blue sky and the brown earth. There is something we come to forget when we are bathed in the drip drip of beige back here in Cheeseland: the sun can make you heal, whether you are even looking for that or not. A comfort, even if temporary, envelopes you much like a childhood blanket, and most of what you run across out there on the city streets or the Finger Rock Trail, become compatible, unified, and you learn to love the world again.