Category: Places

Parker, Arizona

We stopped in Parker, Arizona, on the drive home from Phoenix.

We visited the Colorado River Indian Tribes Museum, which has artifacts from the Mojave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo peoples. Carol and I have been reading The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman, a book about a White girl who was adopted into the Mojave tribe in the 1850s, so I was particularly interested to see a Mojave bark skirt on display, presumably similar to the one Olive Oatman would have worn. In the gift shop, they were selling a Red Sox blanket, and I asked why. “Jacoby Ellsbury plays for the Red Sox,” said the pleasant young man at the cash register. “He’s enrolled in the Colorado River Indian tribes.”

Carol went to a thrift store. I stopped to admire the engine facility of the Arizona and California Railroad, a shortline railroad that runs from Phoenix to Cadiz, California, and owns a bridge across the Colorado River.

Carol hugged a saguaro in a public park in Parker.

We drove across the Colorado River, and on the other side we stopped at the tiny U.S. Post Office for Wyatt Earp, CA 92242. Of course we mailed some postcards, making sure they were hand-cancelled with that distinctive name.

Scalper

We were walking down by the Comerica Theatre in Phoenix when we saw two middle-aged men, both white, riding bikes in circles on the sidewalk. One of them was riding a Dahon folding bike with 20 inch wheels. Carol has been looking at Dahons on Craigslist, so she asked the man how he liked the bike. The other man rode towards some people walking towards the theatre and asked if they wanted tickets, and then I noticed the man we were talking to had tickets in his hand. He knew a lot about bikes, and, like Carol, he regularly checks Craigslist for used bikes. The two of them compared notes on bikes they had seen for sale recently. He advised Carol not to get a Dahon, because they’re poorly made.

We got to talking about Phoenix, and the man on the bike said there just wasn’t much going on in downtown Phoenix. Restaurants, for example — he grew up in Portland, Oregon, where within a few blocks he had an unbelievable number of choices of restaurants, but in Phoenix there aren’t so many choices, and many of them are chain stores. I asked if there was any kind of bike culture, and he said there was not. not only that, but he said cars had no respect for bicyclists, and he had had more than a few close calls. What about jobs? we asked. His friend rode up at that point, and said most of the jobs in Phoenix were service jobs, paying seven-fifty or eleven dollars an hour.

Someone walked up looking for tickets, and the other man turned away to talk with them. The first man said he had come to Phoenix in the late 1990s, and he gave the impression that he wished he had never left Portland. One thing about Phoenix, he said, was that even though wages are low it was cheap to live here. But that meant it was hard to move anywhere else, hard to save up enough money to move away. You could feel stuck here, he said.

But he did like monsoon season. We asked what that was like. He said that it came in July and August, and you’d look up at the sky and see dark clouds moving in, and soon they’d cover the sky, and then there would be thunder and lightning everywhere, heavy rain, water running a half inch deep on the streets, then in thirty minutes it would all be over. He said it was worth seeing, and it was something he’d never seen in Portland.

Then some more people walked up looking for tickets, so we said good bye, nice talking to you, and went on our way.

Downtown Phoenix

Once it got cool enough to go out for a walk, Carol and I strolled over to find Lawn Gnome bookstore on 3rd St. between Roosevelt and Garfield. Along the way, we stopped at Bodega 420, a neighborhood store that carries a little bit of everything: locally produced food, canned food, ice cream, loose tobacco, condoms, playing cards, etc. We chatted with the owner, Adrian Fontes, a lawyer who runs the store in his spare time.

Adrian on the front porch of Bodega 420.

Adrian told us about the art fair that takes place on first Fridays next to his shop: artists, music, food trucks. He took us to the front porch of Bodega 420 and pointed out JoBot Coffee, some art galleries near by, the new apartment complex going up down the street, and Lawn Gnome Books. Adrian, whose family dates back over three hundred years in Arizona, said he lived for many years in Denver, and told us it was hard to leave there to return to Arizona. But now he’s excited to be in Phoenix: everyone’s from somewhere else, the city isn’t set in its ways, there’s room to innovate.

We wandered down the block to Lawn Gnome Books. I found a used copy of short stories by Joanna Russ, and Carol found The Hobo Diet, a book by someone who lived as a homeless man for five weeks in Las Vegas. Carol started talking with Billie Speece, one of the people who worked at the bookstore.

Billie in Lawn Gnome Books.

Among many other projects, Billie runs letter writing workshops at the bookstore. Years ago, Carol had been part of the Letter Exchange, and she and Billie talked about rubber stamps and mail art. Billie showed us some of the envelopes she makes from recycled paper, stitching the seams with embroidery thread. She said she is part of the Letter Writers Alliance; she added that recently AARP contacted her about her workshops.

I bought one of the handmade journals Billie sews together, using paper taken from damaged books, paper that has one side blank. One of the pages in the handmade journal I bought reads in part: “I wish Gertrude were here…. I wish she could see the man God is building on her foundation.” Another page reads: “Foods high in vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.” Carol just said, “What are you going to do with your journal?” I said I didn’t know; maybe I’ll just keep it.

Photo credits: Carol Steinfeld

Sonoran Desert

We drove into Arizona towards Phoenix along Interstate 10. We knew we had entered the Sonoran Desert when we saw giant saguaro cacti along the side of the highway. A roadrunner ran quickly across the highway in front of us, moving so fast I didn’t have time to touch the brakes before it was lost in the brush on the other side. The Sonoran Desert is a beautiful place.

Halfway Phoenix from the California border, the sprawl began to replace the desert: tract houses, malls, light industrial buildings, the occasional agricultural field, a golf course here and there.

In large part because of its beauty and lushness, more Arizonans live in the Sonoran Desert than in any other geographic region of the state: more than three-fourths of our total of four million people. This crush of bodies, with the pressures they impose on the desert’s modest resources, is the state’s most ominous problem. — Lawrence Cheek, Arizona (Compass Travel Guides, 1995), pp. 34-35.

Transit of Venus

I’m taking a break from work here at the Palo Alto church, and watching the transit of Venus. I’m projecting an image of the sun using a pair of 7×25 binoculars mounted to a tripod. I have a white card set up about six feet from the binoculars, resulting in an image that’s approximately five and three quarters of an inch in diameter. The optics in the binoculars are not particularly good, and there’s enough chromatic aberration that I don’t get a particularly crisp image. Nevertheless, I can clearly see the shadow Venus is casting as it crosses the sun; on this projection, it’s approximately three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, and at this time about one and three sixteenths inches from the nearest edge of the sun. The card I’m projecting the image on is eight and a half by eleven inches oriented horizontally; the earth moves such that I have to readjust the binoculars every sixty or seventy seconds in order to keep a complete image on the card.

Venus does not appear to be moving in relation to the sun. I suppose if I sat out here long enough, I’d be able to see some relative motion; but the transit is going to take four hours, and I don’t suppose I can take that much time away from work.

And yes, the transit is a pretty amazing phenomenon to watch, even with my crude projection device.

Corrected per Erp’s comment.

Crash

Last night, Carol and I were out for our nightly walk. We were talking about the various challenges and problems of the day, when we heard a crash behind us. We both spun around, and saw something had happened two or three blocks back along San Mateo Drive.

“Dan!” said Carol. “Do you have your cell phone? you better call 911.”

It looked like a motorcycle had crashed. It looked bad, but I was reluctant to call 911, only to have them get mad at me because it was only a fender bender. We started jogging towards the crash; I punched “911” into my phone and was ready to hit the send button; but before we had gone a block, we could see that a police car had already arrived at the site.

By the time we got to the crash site, we could see a cop standing over someone lying on the sidewalk, shining a flashlight on whoever it was. Her police car was parked so as to block two and a half of the four lanes of San Mateo Drive. The motorcycle was lying on its side a hundred feet down the road from where the person was lying, and pieces of it were scattered across the roadway. Then it looked to me like the cop stood up suddenly and took a step back.

Soon, another police car arrived and parked next to the first police car, and the first cop moved her car and parked it across the other end of the block. Then two more police cars arrived. We started walking away, wondering why there were so many police cars coming. I called out to the first cop as we walked by, “We heard the crash but we didn’t see anything”; and Carol added, “But there were no other cars.” The cop, in a shaken voice, replied, “No, it was a solo.”

As we walked home, we talked about what we had seen. Why had that cop arrived at the scene so soon? Had she been chasing the motorcycle? It looked like they were treating it as a crime scene; was the motorcyclist dead? Two fire engines went down San Mateo Drive towards the crash; then another police car; then, at long last, an ambulance. We had completely stopped talking about the various problems and challenges of the day; the crash had put things into a different perspective.

There was nothing in the news about the crash. Tonight, we walked by the crash scene, but we couldn’t see anything. We’ll probably never know what really happened.

Cell phone

“What happened to your phone?” said the saleswoman sympathetically. She was holding my cell phone between her thumb and forefinger, because it was dripping wet.

“It went into the laundry,” I said.

“Oh, your poor phone,” she said. “I’m going to turn it off so it will stop vibrating.” It wouldn’t turn off, so she took the battery out.

She got me a new phone, but had difficulties with the computer. The other salesman came over to hep her out. He looked at the phone. “What happened to your phone?” he said sympathetically.

“I was doing laundry,” I said. “Then I was like, Where’s my phone? It was in my pants. I opened the washing machine, it was full of water and going goosh, goosh, goosh; I reached in to my pants pocket, and there was my phone — bzzzt — vibrating continuously and totally dead.” I had them both laughing.

I asked the man if they were on commission, and he said they were. I apologized that they weren’t going to make much of a commission off my new phone. He said it was OK. I admitted that I used to be in sales. We got to talking about commissions, building relationships, meeting targets, all the things that salespeople talk about. Both these salespeople obviously followed the soft-sell school of sales. I like soft-sell salespeople: they’re easy-going, they have good people skills, they’re relentlessly positive, and they like to talk.

While we were talking, the man walked the woman through the process of updating my account. When we were done, I asked her if she was new. She said she was. “You’ll do great,” I said, “you have a good sales personality.” And I wasn’t just being an upbeat optimistic positive salesperson: she will be a good salesperson. We all said goodbye, and I walked out into the sunshine with my new phone.