Preamble

There is no daylight savings time in Arizona. Having despised daylight savings time for years as the most malign invention of Mr. Franklin's career, Arizona already had my attention.

And then there is the desert. I adore the desert and Arizona has a great deal of it.

Not everyone likes the desert. There are places, remote, inhospitable, even ugly places in Arizona where there is land that is actually cheap. But ugliness is so subjective, isn't it? Are Glocks ugly? Edsel or Taurus? C or Cobol?

Now Stopwatchgirl and I were ready to build a house. And one day I ran across mention of this "rammed earth" stuff and I was good to go right then. Never mind that it turns out to be all expensive; it has more visual and tactile appeal than all the wood-frame subdivisions in San Bernardino County put together.

I kept thinking of Arizona in my growing curmudgeonliness and impatience with the hysteria of urban Americans. Where could one go to get away from people who think that anything worth doing is worth asking the government to force everyone else to do? Here in California, and seemingly in every urban center, politicians clamor for "reasonable" laws that have nothing to do with reason and everything to do with emotion, with made-up bogeymen, with a comfy and reassuring police state.

     The whole aim of practical politics is to keep 
     the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be 
     led to safety... 
               -H. L. Mencken
               In Defense of Women, 1923

Well. At any rate, we resolved to investigate this Arizona thing. I expected to be a little disappointed; people never turn out to be as different as stereotypes lead one to expect.

28 Agosto, 1999c.e.

SF -> SD -> Tucson 9am to 2pm

Surprising festival seating on Southwest. Having never flown SWA before, it seems peculiar. I worry that we might not be able to sit together, but no problem.

After a hop to San Diego, a yawningly long wait for the next plane and a hop to Tucson, we rent a stinky red Mirage and drive to the D&J homestead. D. is a pal of Stopwatchgirl's from way back and we impose.

It is August, it is Tucson, but it is not scary hot. It is awfully hot but not intolerable. We will hardly use the stinky Mirage's air conditioning at all, until we get back from the boonies to the heat island of Tucson. Apparently Phoenix is even worse at that heat island routine; all the asphalt, the physical infrastructure, soaks up heat during the day to save it for night so that the temperature doesn't drop as low as it would in an undeveloped non-heat-conserving area. The low temperatures in Phoenix are higher, the highs are higher -- who would want to live in that?

In the evening we head for The Marble Slab, an enterprise that sells ice cream smooshed on a marble slab. I am not an ice cream person, so I do not know if this is a good thing.

29 Agosto - sunday

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Sweat.

At least that's what it says in my notebook about today. The Desert Museum is west of Tucson. You drive out of town, through a low pass and down into this valley thick with saguaro. Thick like a forest with short, Gumby-like trees. Since it's August there's been lots of [pseudo] monsoon rain and everything is green. There are leaves on the ocotillo. It's an odd-looking desert.

Tomorrow we head to Cochise County.