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.