back in Arizona

On the road again... well not really but just off the road and back in Arizona. The drive from Oregon to Tucson, Arizona, can be done by several routes. The shortest is south through California, across that state from Bakersfield to Needles, then angling across the state of Arizona to Tucson. Most of the drive is monotonous, tiring, hard on the back, and boring. Did I mention monotonous?

I started traveling between these two states when I was 21 and can't even begin to say how many times. Suffice it to say when I began, there was no I-5. Twice it was on a bus, not a trip I'd recommend. Then there was the time coming up when heavily pregnant, with no air conditioning, and in the hottest days of the summer.

The first time down I-5, it was barren, with nothing alongside the freeway. When we drove down last week, agriculture was covering almost all the formerly sagebrush and grass covered ground. This was totally due to water-- canals. Those canals are changing Arizona too and little by little all the previously barren lands are being plowed and planted. I don't know if that is good or not. I heard on one of the talk radio programs (one of the ways to make the miles pass down through California) that the United States is a large exporter of food; so guess it's good-- except I keep thinking where are all the creatures who used to live on these lands? I think the same thing when I am in Tucson as that is also developing and changing so that it's hard to recognize it as the city I first saw 42 years ago.

I usually dread the drive down, put it off until it just can't be put off longer and it's only when I get into Arizona that I feel the love swell up to remind me why the Sonoran Desert spoke to my soul first time I saw it and it has never quit. Why is it that things I love so much, like the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, have to be over a thousand miles apart?

Every time I come down, I am surprised at the growth. So much of the desert where I have hiked, looked for minerals, picnicked, painted, and savored is disappearing under the wheels of progress. As our population and that of the world expands, I can only be grateful I saw all of this before it was gone. I recognize change is part of life, some of it is very good, but it is also inevitable. Fortunately for me no way can they golf or farm those hills; so some will remain-- unless they start building housing developments and resorts in them...

All of these pictures were taken along the freeways somewhere between Quartzite and Casa Grande at about 70 mph-- no I was not driving-- where at least for now the land is still open and mostly undeveloped. The hills and sky change every mile. Every year there is the time of seeing the first saguaro. I actually saw one in Parker but since it was planted, it didn't count.

I suppose to someone who is conditioned to green and treed slopes, this country might not seem pretty, but to me it's mystical and beautiful. I love seeing the angles of the mountains, the way the purple changes with the light, and the sky overhead that goes from placid to stormy. When I get to the Sonoran Desert, the drive changes from one that I am tolerating to one that I am excited about what I am seeing and feeling.

Then there is the sky. Words don't do justice to describing this constantly changing and expansive sky. The first night here, an Arizona sunset provided the perfect coda to the symphony of sky and mountain that I had been enjoying all day.

(Please take a moment to expand these pictures. Since I was posting so many, I made them small and small doesn't do these hills justice.)