My Virginal Foray into the Southwest
Up until the time I went off to college, I’d never been much of a traveler. My sister was always the one who was going places. She went to Europe thrice, two times on a Summer Abroad program with Berry College, and once for her honeymoon, and twice spent summers traveling around the country. The bug hit me kind of late. I got my feet wet when I went off to Oberlin College. Having been the ending point for the Underground Railroad, and having admitted women on an equal basis with men as early as the 1830s, the school represented the antithesis of the conservatism I’d felt all my life in my native South. In graduate school, I accompanied one of my roommates from the Spanish House at the University of Alabama on a road trip one Christmas break to his home in San Salvador, El Salvador, and I later took out a student loan so I could go back for six months for independent study in the Spanish language. But all of these moves represented only temporary forays into distant and exotic lands. None of them suggested any sense of permanence. I still remained closely tied to my old “stomping grounds” of northwest Georgia. The three girlfriends I had during that time all hailed from Alabama. Then I got a call one day from my best friend from college. We’d kept in touch over the years. He’d come to see me once when I lived in a creepy old boarding house in August, Georgia, which is another story. He was working on his Doctorate of Philosophy in Optical Science at the University of Arizona. He wanted me to out to Tucson to have Thanksgiving dinner with him. I know it’s hard to believe these days, but I actually made enough as a graduate teaching assistant to afford the trip.
When he first came to pick me up at the airport, I remember first being impressed by the vast expanse of sky. I suspect that this is generally what strikes someone coming to the Southwest for the first time who has grown up in the shaded lands and overgrown skies of “back East,” whether the Southeast, Midwest, or Eastern seaboard. The angle of light and cast of shadows are different. The sun feels different, too, maybe because you actually feel it, without the heaviness of humidity.
The desert wasn’t nearly as barren as I’d expected. To the contrary, it was lush with a variety of plants and animals. I took an immediate and enthusiastic interest in what they are called: mesquite, palo verde, ocotillo, saguaro, cholla. I loved the fact that what little Spanish I’d retained over the years applied readily to the landscape. These days I am surprised at my students who have lived their entire lives in the Southwest and don’t know what plant gives the Sonoran desert its unique, almost chemically pervasive scent when the monsoons are rolling in over the desert, their purple and rain-laden clouds visible for hundreds of miles. It’s the creosote, in case you don’t know, a plant that spreads in rhizomes across the hard, baked earth, often hundreds of years old, though not nearly as big, imposing, or noticeable as the mighty saguaro, the icon of Arizona. On the part of the animals, and the reptiles, too, for that matter, lest we forget them, there are the javelina, Gambol quail, Gila monster, tarantula, desert toad and tortoise, jackrabbit, scorpion, mule deer, and the once ubiquitous coyote–none familiar to a Southeasterner.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised at the apparent disinterest of my students in their natural environment. Maybe you need to come from someplace else to appreciate fully the place in which you find yourself situated. Or maybe they perceive the desert as so “tamed” that it is no longer relevant.
The next time I came out was to play the hammered dulcimer at my friend’s wedding the following June. Only when I had to endure my first summer in the Southwest did my unbridled enthusiasm for the region wane.
