With a good dose of apprehension manifesting as some low-level tension on the verge of aggression, we are nearly ready to go. It’s Saturday morning and instead of being ready beforehand like we typically are, today we had to tend to a lot of last-minute details prior to our departure. Consequently, we are getting out later than I might have otherwise desired, but at least we are forging ahead with our first nights away from home in over half a year. While sitting here at my desk a minute before heading to the car, there’s not a minor amount of ambivalence about going through with this. Pandemic conditioning has had its impact, but we can do this.
It takes about 45 minutes to get far enough away from home that I can start relaxing, which then allows Caroline to crack open Magic Mountain and get to reading me some Thomas Mann. We are down to the last 150 pages of this 720-page tome and hope to put a good dent in what remains while we are out on our little sojourn.
Passing through Miami yet again, it was time for lunch we pulled up to Guayo’s El Rey restaurant for a great carne asada that we shared at a nearby picnic table in the shade. You might remember that we came out this way on a day trip for my birthday, hoping to eat here but had to go to Guayo’s on the Trail down the road in Globe, except they weren’t serving carne asada then nor on my solo trip a month ago. Today, we hit pay dirt.
Smoke blankets the landscape as wildfires take their toll on the Southwest. The pallor of the sky, though, doesn’t dampen our enthusiasm to be out here now that we’re seriously underway. For a quick minute, we thought we might be stymied in our effort as an overhead sign warned us of a road closure outside Globe, which was our direction. Fortunately, it was the way north and not eastward, so we were good to go, as a detour in this area would have added 5 hours to our driving at a minimum.
The photo above was taken on the San Carlos Apache Reservation and, while a relatively non-descript image, it shows that every street into the reservation has a security person at a small shack ensuring that everyone who enters is a tribal member due to the worry of outsiders bringing COVID-19 into their lands.
Our plan of visiting Mt. Graham today had to be put on hold. The plan is instead to visit on Monday on our way home. For one, the smoke was pretty heavy, but more than that, we had told our hosts that we thought we’d arrive around 4:00, so it was apparent we’d have to give up on that visit.
After getting into Duncan right on time and being greeted by the inimitable Clayton of the Simpson Hotel and possibly the alter ego of one Don Carlos, we were quickly falling into the familiarity of being awed by this man’s wisdom and wit. Somewhere between referencing Oswald Spengler and Marcel Proust, he quite correctly repeated a quote from Heinrich Heine that reads:
Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in the lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies–but not before they have been hanged.
With our hosts wishing us a good dinner, we were soon on our way out again, back the way we’d come, for a 38-mile drive to dinner in Solomon. We were heading to La Paloma restaurant for more Mexican food because the nostalgia of a great meal is a powerful draw to return. Along the way, we stopped to take the first selfie of ourselves since April 26th, when I posted a photo of us in our matching face masks that Caroline made us before the industry of artful masks exploded. Our dinner did not disappoint.
The serenity found in a place that is nowhere is unmatched when the forces of man-made chaos are kept at bay. The wind can blow, hail can fall, and lightning bolts from above can threaten one’s existence, but the machinations of nature often arrive with such astonishing beauty that, more often than not, we have to give the world around us a pass for its occasional tantrum that disrupts our well-being.
A cascade of delight is available out here for those who desire to see what is just before them, but first, we have to acquire a sense of what it is we need to feed our souls. For us today, it is the palette, the eyes, the memories, and a dry river bed with remembrances of sandhill cranes flying overhead this past January. I don’t mean to imply that the memories have to come from previous visits to the area but from the collective memory of a life lived in the search of the unseen and unknown. Until you see something a second, a third, or multiple times, how do you know you’ve really seen what you think you have?
Love is not found in singular glances, although it can first arise from a simple gaze upon just about anything, but we must look again and again, reach out and touch, smell, and bring into our sense of expanding emotional knowledge that inspires our love to conquer our reason, thus becoming a part of ourselves. Repetition of familiarity is key, but it can also be a curse should you come to believe that you now know this thing, person, condition, or possibility. Certain knowledge is a kind of death of potentiality, and it is the uncertainty of what one might find that brings us back to stare into the eyes of a loved one or into the sunset as we’ve never seen it before, though we may have already seen 10,000 sunsets before.
