Katarina to Catalina

That is no volcano. It is a hump of granite pushed up from below,
alongside a fault line; its neighbor sinking at the same time.

We live on the sink, on materials sloughed off from our risen neighbor.

It is a quiet neighborhood now; rarely an earthquake. Tram drivers ferrying us up into Sabino Canyon--one of the creases in the mountain range east of town--like to tell about a big earthquake centered in Mexico, in 1887, tumbled rocks down into the canyon. It was just one of the little, left-over shivers from what essentially stopped happening millions of years ago.

On early maps, published in German, what is now the Santa Catalinas was called Santa Katarina, perhaps named for Father Kino's sister's patron Saint.

There is a lost city under the Santa Catalinas, you know, a spectacular mine opened by the Spanish, where gold could be chopped out with a hatchet, where the church bells were solid gold, and which was sealed up by an iron door and rock. Mari and Jao and I had lunch at the Iron Door Restaurant atop Mt. Lemmon, but I am quite certain--lunch prices aside--that the lost city of gold is not to be found there, but hope digs eternal.

There may not be precisely a city of gold beneath the mountain, but there is a grass, bush, and forest fire worrying its way toward Mt. Lemmon. The road up the mountain was closed yesterday to all except residents at Summerhaven, who pay attention to such things.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson: it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work. Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog