Well. Here she was, far from Manhattan, in an Inn built by a Kentucky-born, erstwhile Manhattanite named Isabella Greenway. Isabella attended Miss Chapin’s School in New York City but ended up as a force in Tucson. She became a horse-wrangler, an airline-owner, and a New Deal Democrat. Arizonans elected her to the United States Congress in 1932.
She had also wanted to create a place where travelers to the wild West could have “privacy, quiet, and sunshine.” She did so. The Inn rose in 1930 on the edge of Tucson, a town of 32,000 people.
Now, because of the work of her hands, the Arizona Inn sat on fourteen acres in the middle of a city of over half a million people. And here it remained: elegant, rich in history, private, quiet, and full of sunshine. This January day the high would be in the low 70s: “Mostly sunny, nice and warm.”
She knew the climate numbers and oddities. Astonishing: about 286 days of sun a year in Tucson. Summer “monsoons.” High desert winds at times, especially in the springtime. Dust, sandstorms. Heat. She thought overall it would be a good setting for a Bedouin. Wind, sand, and stars.
Sophie’s anticipation of sun here, day after day, was fervent. Years ago, when she had moved from the Pacific Northwest to Palo Alto it had been like coming out of a cave.
The Arizona Inn. Such a fine place, Sophie thought, from which to consider her move.
A clatter. A man two tables away from her disrupted the silence, dropping his knife onto his plate.
She studied him. He flushed and contemplated the errant knife for a moment; then he picked it up and started buttering his waffle.
Sophie wanted to walk over to his table and speak to him. She was struck with just how exact his hand movements were: how had a knife ever slipped through that man’s fingers? A neurosurgeon? Or a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve? He was partially bald and had the short beard and composed face of Ben Bernanke all right.
She wanted to say, “Excuse me, sir—is it Ben?—but what, really, does getting hurt mean up against moving and perhaps even risking one’s life. A number of us, for example, had a close encounter yesterday. Say this person had brought our plane down. Would we have had worse fates had we stayed on the East Coast for the rest of our material lives? What do you think?”
But she might ruin his breakfast, this man in a striped dress-shirt. Maybe he wanted to be left alone after all those grueling years in Washington what with all the sucker punches he took.
Sophie had always avoided being intrusive but lately she felt like intruding on the whole world. Was it out of loneliness? She publicly denied loneliness all the time.
Certainly it could not actually be Ben himself, could it? What would he be doing in a place like Tucson? Perhaps he was sick and tired of the east and its formalities. Perhaps he liked hearing strangers’ stories and their speculations. He was waiting for a good western yarn. If so, she would not ruin this man’s breakfast after all; he would set his knife down without a sound on the shining rim of his plate, turn eagerly to her, listen, and then speak his mind while his waffle cooled.
He had been waiting for interesting questions at breakfast all his life, he might later confess to her. But flashing diamonds announced the arrival of a wife, his wife, who said in a loud voice, “Max, my dear! You were up early. Why didn’t you waken me?”
And Sophie’s moment was gone. The man was not Ben. He was Max. The waiter came with her check.
Slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French, Japanese
She went from the dining room straight into the Inn’s library, as grand and gracious a room as she had seen anywhere in the world. This was the Wild West?
Bookcases lined all four walls and rose to the ceiling. She started scanning a shelf. She expected to see Riders of the Purple Sage next to Blood and Thunder next to Gathering the Desert next to Coyote Waits next to Desert Solitaire. But the first book she noticed was Moby Dick. She pulled it out and held it up close to her face. It smelled like dusty figs.
Here was Moby Dick in a hotel in Tucson. A pilgrim from Nantucket or from Falmouth left it? Mysterious: like finding whale bones in the desert. A remnant from ancient inland seas where it once lay stinking, beached among the sand dunes.
Like herself? She had actually been feeling bloated. She was no wraith to start with, but she could tell she was gaining weight. Was it the growing nub of a tumor somewhere, in some dark and secret place, drawing blood to itself for nourishment? Or was she just eating too much?
She went to the front desk. “May I take this book from your library back to my room? I will return it,” she said.
“Of course.” The clerk lifted a hand and gave an almost imperceptible nod as if to say, be my guest.
She wanted him to say something else. Right at this moment she loved having anyone speaking to her.
“And I’m taking this coffee with me as well.”
“Of course,” he said with no trace of impatience, and again he lifted his hand and fluttered it and waved her on in what she fancied was an abstract gesture of absolution.
Except for saying “Of course,” he wasn’t talking. Well, she had a book under her arm.
The story of her life: arming herself with literature. Her husband, Richard, propped up next to her in their bed one late night, had said: “Look at this.”
“What.”
“What do you see?”
“Our cast-off pajamas.”
“What else.”
“What.”
“This bed is overflowing with books.”
Sophie went back to her hotel room. It was Sunday morning and she heard muted church bells. At least some people here and across the country were in churches or had been in churches and synagogues last night. Some were at this moment opening bibles and reading the passages a hundred different ways. Some were totally baffled but were too timid to ask any questions. Well, she was not going to church.
She thought of Wallace Stevens and his creation of the woman of unbelief. All Sophie needed was an orange and the cockatoo.
On the desk sat a lamp, her tablet, the slender curves of her silver earrings; and now the coffee cup, the book.
She opened Moby Dick. She was on her own; book or no book, she felt the strangeness of the hotel room. No one to whom to talk. I am probably out of my mind to have moved west again.
The borders of the pages were a light mustard color as if somehow the sun had penetrated, shining day after day into the margins and fading them. She read the introductory “Etymology,” and the “Extracts.” She thought of turning to someone and saying, “I, like this narrator, could also qualify as a ‘late consumptive usher to a grammar school’ or as a ‘sub-sub-librarian.’” There was no one to whom to tell this.
Then she began “Loomings.” The familiar text steadied her. She stopped reading when she got to the end of the chapter, which ended with “endless processions of the whale” and with that “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”
She no longer needed the round-shouldered clerk so badly. She was not alone. The text was the familiar shadow of a person and the person was somewhere on the move if not running back and forth with wings folded over its eyes.
Her first thought then was not, however, “Call me Ishmael.” Instead of calling me Ishmael, call me whomever. She could re-write Ishmael’s comment on the beginning of his adventure, coming as it did “as a solo between more extensive performances”:
Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States
DESERT VOYAGE BY ONE WHOMEVER
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN [sic]
She opened her laptop and began to write, not without irony, a miniature memoir of a Desert Voyage; she could splice her own thoughts right into Melville’s phrases:
Call me Whomever.
A few years ago, I too, like Ishmael, decided to sail about a little. In my case, I quit
the cities of the American east coast; I waved a sorrowful adieu to the Manhattanites, the Washingtonians.
I had not much money in my purse, being no Warren Buffet, but this perhaps would prove an advantage. Lack of a fortune would not daunt me.
For I had, in the East, grown grim about the mouth. I felt the approach of death. I found myself wheezing and when I inhaled, whistling. I was growing weary of bringing up the rear of strategic-planning funerals, corporate or academic. I sometimes felt like stepping into processions and methodically knocking the mortar boards from certain heads, the briefcases from certain hands.
The East seemed like a smart, dark, suited fly. And I wanted to leave it for “the wine-red selvage” of the American West. The place many other countries loved to love.
Just look at the CruiseAmerica motor homes parked all over and surrounding the eastern and western slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French, Japanese, Brazilians, Australians, Italians; people hoping for Cowboys and Indians and finding some; and also finding, near Lone Pine, the remains of the Japanese internment camp called Manzanar.
The “western clearing,” Emerson wrote, was “yet unsung.” Sailing around in that sandy clearing and whistling a tune would not be a bad life in my older age.
I would not go sailing as a cook—though that might have a come-hither effect on all sorts of hungry males. No—though I was a good-enough cook for family and friends. I know what to do, if not with plum-duff and boiled mutton, at least with garlic and onion. If that kind of man women dream of—the odd man who can cook and is willing to cook for anybody—is at this moment cooking breakfast for fisherpeople on some glorious beach, I would wager that he is using garlic and perhaps a little lemon and celery salt.
And I, Sophie, join with Nawal Nasrallah who brings to our attention the command of al-Hasan bin Abi-Talib, a grandson of the prophet Muhammed. In her Iraqi cuisine cookbook, she quotes this grandson. He tells us to sit with others at dinner for as long as you want, “for these are the bonus times of your lives.” These are the bonuses which we may embrace with light consciences.
Still, I would not go primarily as a cook, much less a hostess. Neither would I go as a tourist or a retiree. Retire from what into what? The sailor who preceded her might have said, “Let us strike ‘retiree’ from our languages, snip it right out of the dictionary. The very word brings on the mumping mood and may make tipplers, depressives of us all.”
Well, I would go as an old salt and a common sailor; as a scrub familiar with the grinding music of holystones on the deck, which I am convinced turns out to be the music of the writer.
I, Sophie Nordlund, wanted a sense of space, of the spare, of scarcity, even. Where else but in the bilious, spewing American West. I too was tormented in my last years with an itch for things remote and paradoxical; I wanted to sail forbidden dunes and land in barbarous gulches.
I loved mystery. I knew what I would do: write a mystery before I died. Laptop, journal, pen.
I would write mysteries, detective stories but tell no one about it. Maybe I could be like Christopher Foyle in “Foyle’s War”: I loved the way Michael Kitchen said, “Ah,” and “Right.” Mostly mum. At any rate, I would go scribbling like a silent BloKart across the sands if I could find the wind for it.
Why have so many felt a mystical vibration when first they crossed the Continental Divide, either in their Outbacks or looking down from 737s. Leave Sedona and its vortices to the Sedonans; the Continental Divide is the thing—the place where people take, as it were, their first real breaths.
Why did the man, the Jewish Jesus go to the desert to confront his real-and-metaphorical devils? And why, why, did he stoop to write in the sand?
It does not take a metaphysical professor to know that meditation and desert are wedded forever; it does not take a metaphysical professor to lead you to that twinkling sand. Why let him or her be your leader? You may need a companion from time to time or the unearned grace of a grizzled stagecoach driver full to his eyebrows with stories, but you do not need a leader. You can go out on your own.
You can be afloat and totally free, I am tempted to say. But like that nineteenth-century sailor, I know my Muses would in the future order me about some when I wrote: make me jump from thorn to thorn or build my nest in the living dead-center of a cholla. Orders can be unpleasant at first, especially if you come from an old established but now defunct banking family in the land or have been lording it over students as a country schoolmistress, making the beefiest fraternity brothers and the thinnest young Greenwich women stand in awe of you. The transition is indeed a keen one and requires that same decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.
The invisible police officer, the border-patrol person in the airy form of a Muse with her sniffing canines who has the constant surveillance of me; who secretly dogs me; who influences me in some unconscious, unaccountable way—this police person could perhaps better answer than anyone else why the woman in me as opposed to the mouse in me, had concluded to move to the desert and write a mystery.
—Sophie Nordlund and Herman Melville
She stopped writing. Let it go, Sophie thought. Ugh. Stop this typing, this riff, this—stuff.
She looked down at her hands. The skin that stretched over the blue of the veins seemed impossibly thin. She looked at her wide, gold band and at the clear polish on her short nails.
She thought of the dog who had barked on the airplane yesterday; it proved to be the pet of a little family. A father, a mother, a baby. As they had all departed the plane in shocked silence, the baby had started crying. The baby was angry, furious, unstoppable. The baby would cry all day, all night, forever. Eventually, Sophie got a look at its scarlet face.
All that she no longer had with her. Through the years babies and families and dogs and cats had been washed or blasted right off her deck by wave after rogue wave. Richard had died; Isabelle had grown up; she couldn’t count how many of her pets had died or wandered off—Valentino, Artemis, Yaki, Chloe, Portia, Sybil. . . .
But as the stunned passengers filed through the gate waiting-area, the baby continued to screech. The sweating father straightened from his task of reassembling the stroller and said something to the baby’s mother. The baby paused, gasping for breath; the dog started whining.
As she passed the young couple, she had heard the mother hiss at the father and then say, “Shut up; will you just shut the fuck up, for God’s sake.” The dog fell silent.
Sophie stood still, taking in this scene. The father glanced over at her and said, “What are you lookin’ at? Jesus.”
Now in The Arizona Inn, Sophie looked around the room. She wished for something to break the silence. If she had a cockatoo, maybe it would start rasping its storm-gray mandibles together, putting a razor-sharp edge on them.
Basin and Range
Sophie had chosen to live south of Tucson and a little east of Green Valley. She was quite close to Madera Canyon, which lay between Mt. Wrightson and Mt. Hopkins—these were in turn part of the Santa Ritas, near the northern edge of the fabled Sierra Madres.
She knew that the southerly mountains were alive with the walking, thirsty—what? Illegals? Immigrants? Undocumented?
People. As the sun set and the nights grew chill she imagined these persons lighting small fires for warmth. How could they sleep one wink, facing cold in the winter and snakes in the summer? They hoped they would preserve their lives or their stashes as the case might be.
Though she had earlier flinched at the word development she had actually found one. Its boundaries enclosed arroyos, an ancient cemetery, nature trails, architectural digs, and a covenanted xeriscape philosophy.
It bordered on the Santa Rita Experimental Range where desert flora and fauna were studied and protected. In the future when people spoke condescendingly of developments, Sophie would ask, “What kind of development?” It was ju
st like people saying the word “God.” Which god did they mean? What did they mean when they said “liberal”?
There was a tiny sunroom off her bedroom, mostly glass. From it, to the east-southeast, she could see the Experimental Range, Mt. Wrightson, and Mt. Hopkins. The Rincons stretched away to the northeast.
She had read her John McPhee and others; she had learned that this area was not merely desert but mountainous desert, part of the Basin and Range province which comprises almost all of Nevada, western Utah, southeastern California, as well as portions of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The USGS webpage says that it has “…a characteristic topography that is familiar to anyone who is lucky enough to venture across it.”
Sophie now considered herself one of the lucky ones. Ancient stretchings, thinnings and crackings produced a pattern of linear mountain ranges and dropped valleys.
In her new home, walking up one of these mountains or sky-islands is like traveling from Mexico to Canada: start at scrub desert with prickly pear and creosote bush and end high above in an alpine forest. A microcosm of North America. Her own dropped valley-floor showed characteristics of both Sonoran desert-scrub and semi-desert grasslands.
She had not been prepared for the richness of the mere view at the back of her house. Here it was all privacy and quiet, a miniature Arizona Inn. The sunroom off her bedroom, she decided, would be her study. She would add to the glass doors and the windows by hanging small mirrors, so they reflected the out-of-doors. This would risk glare as she worked, but she would try it. She would run a desk down the length of the one wall that contained no glass.
The Crossings Page 2