A Post in Pictures - Trail Head or Tail

On a too hot Saturday in late March, my son spotted something moving stealthily just off a trail in Usery Mountain Park and said, "Look, it's...", and a friend and I suddenly became like two giddy tourists astounded at their good luck in finding a celebrity while visitng that celebrity's native city. We oohed and ahhed, exclaimed in delight, congratulated each other on our good fortune, and clicked our cameras just two feet or so from the notorious individual's face. Said individual was not pleased with our attention. He attempted to slink beneath a bush. When that only had us bending over him, he demanded we keep our distance with an all too famous signal, a solo instrumental of warning.

  It all began with a morning hike. A lot of good, strange, very dangerous things do begin that way, I find. We were having a grand time, because it's nature after all, and nature never ceases to be a celebrity to humanity, especially the farther we grow from it. Everything too was in bloom except the saguaros. There were plenty of cactus flowers, yellow budding bushes, and there was a breeze - thank God for that! Without it the weather would have been oppressive (yes, in March).

The best thing was that I discovered a new place in this state to love. (I'm proudly collecting those places like marbles in a jar since my heart expanded to fit Arizona about a year and a half ago.) True, I  regretted we were not back hiking South Mountain at first, but then on the gentle winding trails in Usery Mountain Park, I found the true beauty of the Sonoran Desert with all its plant life diversity, and I knew South Mountain couldn't rival it. And I found a couple of famous individuals that I really associate with the West. Actually make that three....uh, four.

One of them was this gracious gentleman. His friend kindly gave me permission to take his picture. He and the scenery both were very photogenic.

A Horse With No Name

Another was this odd fellow, Sauron Saguaro I called him - The One Eye.

Oooohh...scared you, didn't I?

But the one that really gave us chills of excitement was this one:

Can't see a bloomin' thing, can you? Well, if you peer very hard into the center of this photo, you'll find a diamond pattern. Look to the far middle left, and you'll see a pattern of white and black lines. It's a rattlesnake, my friends, and the black and white lines are the end of its tail, the rattle. I was never so thrilled in all my life to see one. I could have gotten a really good picture of this famous reptile, but I would have had to let him strike me. You can understand, I'm sure, how I might not have been so happy about meeting him at that point. 

It was only after he rattled at my friend and I a few times and moved into a very decisive position that we had the good sense to walk away. My friend's little girl had cried in real fear when we spotted our celebrity, and her father swiftly lifted her into his arms. I apologized for making such a fuss over the snake and promoting this fear, but my friend assured me by saying:

"Oh, she's only scared because I talked to her about snakes before we came and warned her to stay on the trail."

Huh. Talked to her kids about snakes, warned them to stay on the trail? I had done neither. The most I had said in concern before the hike was, "Honey, did we remember the hot dogs?"

Silly novice hiker.

I made up for it, though, by obsessively reminding my kids after that close encounter to stick near, stay clear of bushes, and not to let one pinkie toe stray from the path. I had to amend my motherly failure, and, by heaven, I did my duty as paranoid parental figure forthwith.

Good thing, too. We ended our hike and drove to our chosen picnic spot where we could cook those hot dogs I was so solicitous about before our adventure. When we merrily emerged from our vehicles, an uneasy middle-aged man in the truck next to us pointed and said, "Be careful. There's a rattlesnake under that table."

No way! Rattlesnakes appearing twice in a hike to the same people? But sure enough. He was enjoying the cool concrete in the shade, and I got this really great picture of him for you.

Of course, the commonsense fellow in the truck watched us parade about the table for our shot, and his eyes plainly spoke what he thought about our mental deficiencies.

"You know what they say, don't you?" our grey-headed sage asked, not even a foot of his dangling near the potentially treacherous desert floor from his open cab door. "Where there's one, there's usually two."

Yes, but we weren't too bothered. We'd already seen the other one. Still, after snagging this prize picture, we drove off to a different picnic site where the rattlesnakes had the decency not to show themselves (instead snickering at us quietly from beneath their bushes) while we ate our hot dogs, salad, potato chips and cookies.

We wrapped up the hike by playing in the playground. Yes, adults, too. There was this really great four-seater see-saw there, and the parents all got on and tried to mildly hurt each other on a kiddie ride; as my friend said, This is what you call extreme sports once you become a parent. We were laughing it up and had little idea what the kids were doing. They could have been playing with rattlers, feeding their leftovers to coyotes...or getting smacked to the ground by another kid on a swing, which, it turns out, my two youngest were. My daughter was okay after walking in front of her swinging friend, but my poor little son got rubber burn on his face, and by his wails I was swiftly brought back to real life, cursing myself for another deficiency in parental responsibility.

So the hike wasn't peaceful, and it certainly wasn't danger or accident free, but it was beautiful and mostly enjoyable, and on the drive back into town I got to laugh again at a ludicrous sign on the side of a mountain. I suppose it's meant to direct snowbirds (retired out-of-towners who come here each year, fall to spring) to the main part of town or, perhaps - just perhaps, it's meant to direct foolish people like me to the nearest hospital with the best chance of treating that snake bite.

A little disclaimer: I, Hillary, the writer of this blog, in no way promote trying to take pictures of or attempting to get close to any kind of poisonous snake, nor do I advocate letting your children see by your actions that you think venomous reptiles are cool.  Be safe, my friends.

End of the line, end of my rope, end of the world as we've made it

I've started to take the road less traveled a couple days a week now, religiously. And I don't speak about the road in my mind; that was always a strange, meandering path that only I could ever fully be friends with, and I venture down it continually. No, I'm speaking about my now firm habit of driving to the end of the line, just like in that Traveling Wilburys song, only...not in a train.

The road less traveled begins after picking up my daughter from preschool. Her brother's asleep, and I've stopped fighting his habit of dropping out of the bustle just as we go to pick her up. Instead I've taken to ambushing friends to watch the car while I dash in to fetch my little girl. I tell her to be very, very quiet (we're hunting wabbits), and then I throw some snacks and coloring books her way over her sleeping brother's golden head, and we start out.

I have a minimum of 45 minutes to kill. I could park and read, but inevitably my little guy will wake up, and then I'll have to pitch my newspaper aside with all due haste at that first cry and hush and drive, hush and drive, hoping to heaven he falls asleep again. So I drive the whole time. I drive in a minivan with a poor engine, squeaky brakes and a bad turn radius down a promising road, hoping to reach its end and always hoping for a good result. If the road just happens to have a fetching view of my beautiful behemoth, South Mountain, it's a bonus.

South Mountain as viewed from the south

(Yes, I'd probably prefer being home writing during my mischievous toddler's naptime, but it's a no go. He no longer makes the peaceful trip from carseat to bed without turning into a little goblin of malcontent. And I can never do without that peaceful midday break.)

Sometimes I'm disappointed with where the road leads. It ends behind a shopping complex or in the private roadway of some manufacturing facility or it curves and merges with another thoroughfare. Once I was scared, because I took a lonely road west, and I had a fantastical feeling it was going to smack into the side of some sheer and intimidating mountains. Instead, the street merged onto a highway headed south into the emptiness of this desert where the Sonoran plants thin out and things get plain and ugly, and there were no stoplights anymore and no streets to turn around on, only a few fast, soulless vehicles going around my hesitant van. For the world, I couldn't comprehend where they were headed to clutch civilization's last straw. For my part I felt I was being swept away from all human warmth, from my family and my home, led astray out of Phoenix by a highway from which I couldn't escape. On that day, at last, I ended up turning aside onto an Indian reservation's private lane.

Sometimes, though, the buildings drop away, and it's not at all scary when the stoplights become less frequent. The saguaro rears its proud head, other cacti dot the brown earth and the desert scrub kisses the road. The pavement is lonely, and the road noise keeps my young one asleep. Best of best, I'm driving toward more mountains, and I just might reach their flanks before I have to pick up my eldest kids from school, or at least before my baby wakes up. As for my precious preschooler, I glance back her way in the rearview, wondering if she's satisfied with the silence, the books and the journey and whether the scenery captivates her at all.

I found the foothills of South Mountain on a naptime excursion. There the road ends; here the hiking trail begins - no wheels, just feet please.

I had hoped in such a way to approach the mountains behind South Mountain. They little resemble its friendly, expansive slopes. I don't know their names, but I look at them and think Sheer Rock; they rise with purpose from the earth's floor, peaks like arrow heads. Their color is different, less earth tone, more sky reflecting blue. To reach them I began on a fairly young highway which turned into a road with human construction on the north and nothing but desert to the south. Stands of trees with yellow blossoms lined the middle of the divided street, stark against the smoky grey of the mountains and the unusually overcast sky.

I drove west (it's my new east) until I saw an all too familiar reflective barricade with a sign that read The Road Ends and No Stopping. The mountains were still a long way distant, the end of this road several miles shy of my destination - wilderness.

Dad off the ground, way off the ground

On the turn around back to the highway, I contemplated  power lines, their tall towers far removed from the road and their poles adjacent to it. I recalled how my parents told me that on the day Mom went into labor with me, Dad was out seeking work, and he found it in building power lines across these Western United States. That was also the day he stopped shaving and began growing out his hair, because he worked "light to light" and was often exhausted with no inclination to maintain a smooth face or a cropped mane. I never see power lines against the vast open sky or silhouetted against mountains without thinking about my Dad hanging out way above the earth with a smile on his bearded face, about the stories he told of that dangerous work, some hilarious and some sad, and of the great friends who shared it with him. The names of those friends inhabit legend for us kids because of Dad's storytelling.

A drive to the end of the road is a perfect retreat for exploring the wilderness of such memories and reflections. So thank you, my little son...for the nap, the memories and another quiet drive to the end of a line.