07.20.19
An old Chevy S-10 sat in the gravel driveway. Faded blue and grey with the white camper shell. We showed up on a hill in northern Arizona in 1991 with nothing more than a split-pine trailer on wheels and 50 feet of limestone to drill through for a well. “Lazy Lariat Lane” wound up and over a short vertical climb to overlook the entire Verde Valley, sunsets and all. At night the stillness was so complete that the only sound would be the occasional hum of a lone semi-truck coursing past the exits a few miles away on I-17.
When it rained (which it rarely did until monsoon season) the air was thick with the smell of creosote bushes and dirt. When the monsoons came the thunderstorms rolled in from the north and shook the ground, great flashes of light silhouetting the red sandstone monuments in the distance. The washes would fill with muddy water for an hour, drain into Beaver Creek, and then dry out moments after the sun returned.
When we went camping, the kids piled into the back of the truck. We’d laid down a thin sheet of outdoor rug above the floor and cut around the wheel wells but after a few miles chugging uphill, even that became too hot and we’d plead through the window: “use another gear! slow down!” while we put our shoes back on and perched with bowed heads, bracing ourselves along the frame.
One week it was Arches National Monument. The next, a starlit desert horizon deep in the Mojave. It was the Grand Canyon, Zion, San Juan, Yellowstone, Painted Desert, Wupatki, Meteor Crater, Silverton, Aspen, the Blue Bells, the Tetons, Moab, or Jackson Hole. At 12 I’d taken such a liking to Jackson Hole that when we returned, I immediately drew up an official "Run away to Jackson Hole blueprint" which I hid deep in my closet.
There was always movement from a young age, whether intended or necessary. It began as the three of us: my two sisters and I, while mom worked endlessly to provide and gain the necessary training to work in the state parks. Just two years before the quiet hilltop in Rimrock, we were parked in the ranger residence quarters at Lost Dutchman outside Apache Junction directly in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains. At 7 years of age, my only interest was uncovering pieces of obsidian, finding and exploring abandoned gold mines, and the gypsy girl with the great heap of unkept hair that lived down the road in a community called First Water.
A year before Lost Dutchman we lived in Oracle on the park grounds as they began opening and renovating a turn-of-the-century mansion. My primary interest here was collecting minnows from the main cistern, luring mice into my live-trap, and building a "museum" with Aubrey in the old barn comprised of broken china, horse shoes, and fading apothecary bottles.
From time to time we’d stay over at Reevis Mountain School of Self Reliance in the hills north of Phoenix. Our friend Willy Whitefeather would show us how to find geodes and crystals, how to make fires from string and sticks and we’d sleep in one of the ‘yurpies’ with dirt floors somewhere on the property. My favorite memories from Reevis still revolve around anticipation of the great bonfire that everyone would help to build after dinner. Every hand pitched in with harvesting, cooking, crafting, and at the end of the long summer days around dusk we’d begin collecting wood. Guitars and harmonicas would accompany the great golden embers and I’d sit there staring into the flames like I still do, listening to the various stories of the current tenants and volunteers.
In the fall of 1993, two months into my freshman year of high school and already fed up with "the system" I conspired once again to run away. I’d just come off the bicycle ride from San Diego to Yorktown and sitting behind a desk with all the Sedona kids didn’t fit the bill. I became a ‘problem-student’; lashing out at faculty and ditching regularly to spend my time alone in the county library reading about far-off places. Even the librarians seemed to understand. I was desperate to live out some romantic story somewhere somehow, no matter where it led me…and I surmised the ‘rolling green hills of England’ would be a good start. I crammed a suitcase full of everything I imagined I’d need, snuck it on the bus to school, and snuck right back out during lunch.
At this point, mom was working at Red Rock State Park just a mile away. My plan was to hitch down to Phoenix Sky Harbor, snare the sympathies of an elderly couple headed for England, and hop aboard. If that didn’t work I’d just empty the suitcase, climb inside, and somehow check myself onto a flight bound for The Shire. It honestly didn't sound that complicated...
Ten minutes later I was walking down 89-A, visibly preoccupied with an awkward case of luggage, huffing along with determination, when Randy pulled up alongside and convinced me to put the whole idea on hold. I pretended to be put off by any suggestion that I was not prepared to carry out my plan but reluctantly agreed. I was young and full of the same wanderlust that follows me today. All I lacked were skills and direction; a dangerous combination in the great silent southwest. Ten minutes later we were at the ranger station.
We traded the S-10 for a used maroon Dodge Caravan. Some of my friends thought we were rich because minivans where still something of a new market in the early 90’s. As kids it felt like a luxurious boat (with a working tape deck) compared to the faithful can that’d taken us up and down so many highways. We piled in and stuffed the tents and backpacks in the very back, wedged below seats, or strapped down on the roof. We kept moving. Kept exploring. Kept living.
Things were never “perfect”. As teenagers we were all forces of nature, breaking at the seams physically and emotionally on a weekly basis, getting in trouble, experimenting with the wrong ideas over and over. Falling down, dusting off, getting back up. In our latter days though, I was keen to let slip that she’d have to take a little credit for at least some of my adventures. I’d been raised on Whitman, Abbey, and Thoreau after all.
I’d been drawn to the northern steps east of Sedona one summer when I was 12, convinced that something secret and sacred lie there waiting to be discovered by the right sort of explorer. I convinced my friend Spencer to pack his things immediately (including some cheese and water) and meet me behind his dad’s property in an hour.
We set off in a beeline over the high desert and made it about four miles before Spencer lost sight of the Grand Vision and we ran out of cheese. To this day I wonder what drew me so viscerally to the lower Mogollon Rim. Sometimes you just have to find out. Sometimes you just start walking toward "something".
Ambling back up the hill on Lazy Lariat Lane I turned around looking wistfully as the afternoon sun lit up the ponderosa and creosote in a great wave of amber and green. I dropped the pack in the room, somewhat dejected and slunk over to the smell of pasole in the kitchen.
“Well, did you find what you were looking for?” Mom asked. “I don’t know. Yes and no.” I replied with my face propped on my left hand. “There’s something out there.”
On our last hike we drove up through Jerome to a little spot on Mingus Mountain overlooking the valley again. She was already weak from the first rounds of chemotherapy but we made it about a quarter-mile through the shrubs and pines and sat down amidst the rocks and sand while a few ravens circled the edge of a wide overlook.
“There’s the trail down there” She pointed. “Remember when we did that?”
“Yeah, we ran all the way down to Cottonwood. Did we all do that?”
Randy laughed “We just decided out of the blue it’d be a good idea to run 5 miles down the mountain.
I was trying to picture myself doing this now. It was mid-October and I hadn’t even heard of the Pacific Crest Trail yet. It seemed like a long-gone version of myself. Running down mountains for the sheer joy of it?
Randy cut little pieces of cheese and apples and handed them to mom and I. We looked into the valley like looking through time. Almost every road, trail, and waterway out there we’d hiked, biked, swam, kayaked, and otherwise explored. To the west, over at Dead Horse, we’d planted about 40,000 trees one summer in the 100-degree sun, diverting flumes, collecting trimmings, and sticking them in long, muddy rows. It was supposed to be a reforestation project but when the funding disappeared, they thinned it out with trails and large ponds; the centerpiece of the park where friends and family can gather.
On my next visit I drove to the park late in the afternoon and walked slowly through and listened people laughing while kids ran about until a ranger kindly asked me to leave.
I came back to the old split-pine on the hill…now a great sanctuary with additions, landscaped gardens, walkways, and bird-feeders. Holiday pines planted and cared for in the front now towering thirty feet above the roof. The old redwood porch. The nails we set by hand. The prints we made in the cement foundations when the wheels finally came off.
I crawled up on the deck railing and pulled myself onto the roof the same way I did as a teenager and walked quietly over to the south side and sat down on the edge with my feet dangling and gazed listlessly toward the mountains until the stars began appearing one by one.
When it rained (which it rarely did until monsoon season) the air was thick with the smell of creosote bushes and dirt. When the monsoons came the thunderstorms rolled in from the north and shook the ground, great flashes of light silhouetting the red sandstone monuments in the distance. The washes would fill with muddy water for an hour, drain into Beaver Creek, and then dry out moments after the sun returned.
When we went camping, the kids piled into the back of the truck. We’d laid down a thin sheet of outdoor rug above the floor and cut around the wheel wells but after a few miles chugging uphill, even that became too hot and we’d plead through the window: “use another gear! slow down!” while we put our shoes back on and perched with bowed heads, bracing ourselves along the frame.
One week it was Arches National Monument. The next, a starlit desert horizon deep in the Mojave. It was the Grand Canyon, Zion, San Juan, Yellowstone, Painted Desert, Wupatki, Meteor Crater, Silverton, Aspen, the Blue Bells, the Tetons, Moab, or Jackson Hole. At 12 I’d taken such a liking to Jackson Hole that when we returned, I immediately drew up an official "Run away to Jackson Hole blueprint" which I hid deep in my closet.
There was always movement from a young age, whether intended or necessary. It began as the three of us: my two sisters and I, while mom worked endlessly to provide and gain the necessary training to work in the state parks. Just two years before the quiet hilltop in Rimrock, we were parked in the ranger residence quarters at Lost Dutchman outside Apache Junction directly in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains. At 7 years of age, my only interest was uncovering pieces of obsidian, finding and exploring abandoned gold mines, and the gypsy girl with the great heap of unkept hair that lived down the road in a community called First Water.
A year before Lost Dutchman we lived in Oracle on the park grounds as they began opening and renovating a turn-of-the-century mansion. My primary interest here was collecting minnows from the main cistern, luring mice into my live-trap, and building a "museum" with Aubrey in the old barn comprised of broken china, horse shoes, and fading apothecary bottles.
From time to time we’d stay over at Reevis Mountain School of Self Reliance in the hills north of Phoenix. Our friend Willy Whitefeather would show us how to find geodes and crystals, how to make fires from string and sticks and we’d sleep in one of the ‘yurpies’ with dirt floors somewhere on the property. My favorite memories from Reevis still revolve around anticipation of the great bonfire that everyone would help to build after dinner. Every hand pitched in with harvesting, cooking, crafting, and at the end of the long summer days around dusk we’d begin collecting wood. Guitars and harmonicas would accompany the great golden embers and I’d sit there staring into the flames like I still do, listening to the various stories of the current tenants and volunteers.
In the fall of 1993, two months into my freshman year of high school and already fed up with "the system" I conspired once again to run away. I’d just come off the bicycle ride from San Diego to Yorktown and sitting behind a desk with all the Sedona kids didn’t fit the bill. I became a ‘problem-student’; lashing out at faculty and ditching regularly to spend my time alone in the county library reading about far-off places. Even the librarians seemed to understand. I was desperate to live out some romantic story somewhere somehow, no matter where it led me…and I surmised the ‘rolling green hills of England’ would be a good start. I crammed a suitcase full of everything I imagined I’d need, snuck it on the bus to school, and snuck right back out during lunch.
At this point, mom was working at Red Rock State Park just a mile away. My plan was to hitch down to Phoenix Sky Harbor, snare the sympathies of an elderly couple headed for England, and hop aboard. If that didn’t work I’d just empty the suitcase, climb inside, and somehow check myself onto a flight bound for The Shire. It honestly didn't sound that complicated...
Ten minutes later I was walking down 89-A, visibly preoccupied with an awkward case of luggage, huffing along with determination, when Randy pulled up alongside and convinced me to put the whole idea on hold. I pretended to be put off by any suggestion that I was not prepared to carry out my plan but reluctantly agreed. I was young and full of the same wanderlust that follows me today. All I lacked were skills and direction; a dangerous combination in the great silent southwest. Ten minutes later we were at the ranger station.
We traded the S-10 for a used maroon Dodge Caravan. Some of my friends thought we were rich because minivans where still something of a new market in the early 90’s. As kids it felt like a luxurious boat (with a working tape deck) compared to the faithful can that’d taken us up and down so many highways. We piled in and stuffed the tents and backpacks in the very back, wedged below seats, or strapped down on the roof. We kept moving. Kept exploring. Kept living.
Things were never “perfect”. As teenagers we were all forces of nature, breaking at the seams physically and emotionally on a weekly basis, getting in trouble, experimenting with the wrong ideas over and over. Falling down, dusting off, getting back up. In our latter days though, I was keen to let slip that she’d have to take a little credit for at least some of my adventures. I’d been raised on Whitman, Abbey, and Thoreau after all.
I’d been drawn to the northern steps east of Sedona one summer when I was 12, convinced that something secret and sacred lie there waiting to be discovered by the right sort of explorer. I convinced my friend Spencer to pack his things immediately (including some cheese and water) and meet me behind his dad’s property in an hour.
We set off in a beeline over the high desert and made it about four miles before Spencer lost sight of the Grand Vision and we ran out of cheese. To this day I wonder what drew me so viscerally to the lower Mogollon Rim. Sometimes you just have to find out. Sometimes you just start walking toward "something".
Ambling back up the hill on Lazy Lariat Lane I turned around looking wistfully as the afternoon sun lit up the ponderosa and creosote in a great wave of amber and green. I dropped the pack in the room, somewhat dejected and slunk over to the smell of pasole in the kitchen.
“Well, did you find what you were looking for?” Mom asked. “I don’t know. Yes and no.” I replied with my face propped on my left hand. “There’s something out there.”
On our last hike we drove up through Jerome to a little spot on Mingus Mountain overlooking the valley again. She was already weak from the first rounds of chemotherapy but we made it about a quarter-mile through the shrubs and pines and sat down amidst the rocks and sand while a few ravens circled the edge of a wide overlook.
“There’s the trail down there” She pointed. “Remember when we did that?”
“Yeah, we ran all the way down to Cottonwood. Did we all do that?”
Randy laughed “We just decided out of the blue it’d be a good idea to run 5 miles down the mountain.
I was trying to picture myself doing this now. It was mid-October and I hadn’t even heard of the Pacific Crest Trail yet. It seemed like a long-gone version of myself. Running down mountains for the sheer joy of it?
Randy cut little pieces of cheese and apples and handed them to mom and I. We looked into the valley like looking through time. Almost every road, trail, and waterway out there we’d hiked, biked, swam, kayaked, and otherwise explored. To the west, over at Dead Horse, we’d planted about 40,000 trees one summer in the 100-degree sun, diverting flumes, collecting trimmings, and sticking them in long, muddy rows. It was supposed to be a reforestation project but when the funding disappeared, they thinned it out with trails and large ponds; the centerpiece of the park where friends and family can gather.
On my next visit I drove to the park late in the afternoon and walked slowly through and listened people laughing while kids ran about until a ranger kindly asked me to leave.
I came back to the old split-pine on the hill…now a great sanctuary with additions, landscaped gardens, walkways, and bird-feeders. Holiday pines planted and cared for in the front now towering thirty feet above the roof. The old redwood porch. The nails we set by hand. The prints we made in the cement foundations when the wheels finally came off.
I crawled up on the deck railing and pulled myself onto the roof the same way I did as a teenager and walked quietly over to the south side and sat down on the edge with my feet dangling and gazed listlessly toward the mountains until the stars began appearing one by one.
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