Scary and Beautiful

There is, so far as anyone knows, just one jaguar living in nature in the United States. He was photographed, again, recently, not by an idiot sitting on a log, but by a remote camera. The jaguar has a name--El Jefe--dubbed by school kids who call themselves "Jaguars", too.

There is something magical, something exhilirating, knowing that a gorgeous, very powerful, wild cat lives a few miles outside of town. It is much more comforting than imagining that he lived here, in town.

Also, yesterday, in the course of looking for a lumber store, here in town, I deliberately drove through the Barrio Viejo simply because it, too, is beautiful. I may have wandered beyond its formal boundaries, but I found the kind of things I had been looking for.

In the heart of Tucson--in its real heart--there are very old homes, once the target of urban removal, that have survived and have been given new life; something like El Jefe, southeast of town. El Jefe has been threatened, too. A big, now Canadian-owned copper mining firm wants to dig up the foothills where El Jefe roams. (That the Canadians now own the mining rights is not a comment about Canadians: it is a comment about what we value, and what we are willing to sacrifice. I like Canadians. I hate open pit mines.)

And I love the color of the small corners of Tucson that owe their ancestry to those other cultures that make the world more beautiful; something like a jaguar doing what jaguars have always done: a little scary, and beautiful.

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