by Jim Malusa
“You need tribal authorization to take a picture on the reservation.”
Including this building? I need a permit?
“It’s sacred.”
She doesn’t mean the cinder block, but the mural. It depicts the O’Odam symbol of life’s journey, the man in the maze.
A car pulls up—did she call for backup?—and a man in a knit polo shirt asks, “Can I help you?”
I explain—just a photo—but he says, “No, you need to ask the artist.”
Who is, of course, not available. The mural is public art, but I’m not the public they had in mind.
I’m nine miles west, riding past thirty-foot-tall saguaros and squashed road-toads, before I understand: it’s not the photo, but the asking.
For the longest time the O’Odam lived thinly, in a place where few others could survive. Harvesting cactus fruit, hunting rabbit and deer, and farming melons, beans, and squash, they were married to the seasons and the quick-moving summer storms they counted on to flood their fields. This kinship with the land is now an eco-fantasy of sustainable living that nobody is willing to live.
Such is the O’Odam’s dilemma: to be the color of the land, but no longer of the land. They favor the Ford Taurus or the pickup truck, some of which sport a custom front plate of an air-brushed warrior on horseback against a gory sunset. They drive considerately, giving me wide berth. Still, I keep an untrusting eye on my rearview mirror. Every few miles is a roadside shrine, a wooden cross with paper flowers, to those who crashed, generally drunk. It’s an unsavory consequence of the local prohibition: you’ve got to drive off the reservation for a drink.
The sky is black as mold, but it’s not raining. A tip-toe tarantula chooses the right moment to cross the highway. The wind carries me up a long grade, the sloping bajada of the Quijotoa Mountains. An enormous sloppy nest of twigs is tucked between the arms of a saguaro so perfectly suited for this purpose that it’s been a hawk’s nest since I was a teen, peering out the window of my parent’s Impala station wagon at this very cactus. A few miles beyond is the Gu-Achi Trading Post. I could buy a man-in-the-maze wristwatch, but instead I pick up a free copy of Diabetes Forecast magazine and learn what happens when people eat too much fried food.
America is swimming with temptations. I’d planned on another night on the reservation, in the pass where a spinning windmill promises water, but the wind is irresistible. I’ ll make seventy miles today, all the way to the off-reservation town of Why. The promise of a beer lands me in the XY Bar. On the tube is Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. It’s set in the Old West of cowboys and Indians. Dr. Quinn is a knockout, and I join the O’Odam at the bar to watch the show.
THE ROAD TO AJO slips between a pair of plateaus, two flat-topped mountains of gray rubble stained with sulfurous yellows and poison purples. Hundreds of feet high and dramatically gullied by erosion, they might be declared a national monument if they were not mine waste.
“Ajo: World’s Largest Tailings” says a postcard at the Information Center. Another card toots, “Ajo: Where Summer Spends the Winter.” None say, “Ajo: Where July Is Unspeakable,” but it’s true. The closer to Death Valley, the meaner the desert.
Copper Hills Real Estate is next door. “We’ve got homes from fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand,” says Edie Cargill. She’s fifty-eight, speedy, in a denim dress. I ask for an overview of the town, and she shows me a wonderful aerial photo of Ajo, showing every tree and road.
“Here’s the pit. They’re never going to fill that up.” She points to a grid of houses on the brink of the open pit mine. “This was Indian Town. And this was Mexican Town. The picture is from the seventies, before the mine closed, when Ajo was a very segregated town.”
Presumably the rest of Ajo was Whitey Town. The old plaza of date palms and arched arcades with red tile roofs looks Spanish but was built by the Phelps Dodge Mining Company. They built the Curley School, too, with its domed bell tower. Phelps Dodge built Ajo. And after copper took a dive, they sold Ajo.
The Ajo Copper News survives. I read it at Don Juan’s Café while my waitress Marta eyes my coffee cup and asks, “Un poquito más?” An ad from Edgy’s Repair Service reads:It’s too bad my competator is
so mentally deficient as to have
to resort to phony ads in the
local paper. He should better
use that money to advance his
skills in a trade that would take
him off the drugs.
Written by Edgy
Small-town friendliness isn’t the only reason people live in Ajo. A front-page story compares not only the lower cost of living in Ajo relative to Tucson, but the lower cost of dying. “It costs less to be buried in the Ajo Cemetery than nearly any place else in the state.” Better yet, it’s a classy place, with one gravestone featuring a “400-word copper wire epitaph.”
The cemetery, like everything in Ajo, is only a few blocks away. It’s big and barren. There are graves marked by polished granite benches, and graves marked by heaps of stones. Baby graves. His-and-hers graves. But no copper grave.
Leaving, I pass a woman tugging at a stupendous weed, a sprawling four-o’clock, beside the cemetery gate. I stop to help, but by her lonesome she rips it from the earth and heaves it into the back of a pea green 1973 Ford Ranchero.
“Been yanking since 1987, but it’s God’s blessing.”
She’s old enough to be my mother, trim in brown knit pants, nylon windbreaker, white nurse shoes, and hair by Clairol.
“The copper grave? Block 1. See that shed? Right there. Protestant blocks to one side, and the rest are Catholic. Mexicans, too, because they are most always Catholic. The copper words I thought might be interesting to put in the paper one day, but then I read them and thought, Not this crap. You’re welcome to look for yourself.”
I can’t find it. She drives up and points it out. “People think it was his wife that made that up, but it was his secretary. My parents are over there. Husband, too. Spot for me reserved, although Phelps Dodge stopped taking reservations before I took over in 1987. Somebody had to take care of the place. I asked them, and they signed over the deed.
“Now I had to get someone to run it. Got one man from each church—not a woman, because I didn’t want any arguing with me. Men are supposed to run it. But the president, well, he’s moved off to Mexico. I’m the secretary-treasurer.”
By now I’ve forgotten to read the copper epitaph. I ask, Secretary-treasurer of what?
“The Ajo Cemetery Association. Incorporated!”
Is it true that it’s the cheapest in the state?
“I imagine it’s the cheapest. It’s free. We ask for a $100 fee, to help maintain the cemetery. Got two boys working for us, and the others paying off their community service. The $100 is not mandatory. It’s so we can keep the place up—$700 a month for water! I’ve made a fair bit of money with my cookbook fund-raiser—sold three thousand copies, bless the Lord. I wanted to name it the Ajo Cemetery Association Cookbook, but the reaction was pretty quick: The dead don’t cook!”
Secretary-treasurer Roberta Nixon came to Ajo in 1950, when she was twenty-one. “I didn’t find out about Jesus until I was twenty-four. Didn’t know who the Holy Trinity was, didn’t know who was crawling around up there. My girlfriend told me. She told me, Roberta, you’re going to hell. And I said, Oh I’m not without you, because you’ve done worse. We’re all sinners.”
For the first time in three days, the sun is peering through a break in the clouds, low on the western horizon. The mine tailings catch the rays and ignite in mineral colors.
“Ajo is a beautiful place. Let me show you something. Before you go.”
We walk lightly among the graves. Roberta never stops talking.
“Since my husband died I’ve been praying for a good man I could love like my two daughters, except maybe a little more. Never would have had them if the pill had been around.”
She stops at a double plot. “There’s my father and mo
ther.”
The headstones are engraved with flowers, clouds, a rainbow, and the words, “Life is a rainbow of beautiful memories.”
“After my father died I told my mother, That headstone doesn’t remind me of you. And she said, ‘We just want people to think we were happy.’ ”
Next door is Bill, her husband. Roberta explains how he died at home, how the last thing he asked for was a squirt of Chloraseptic Sore Throat Spray. “When I go, I want a bench here. My husband wasn’t a Christian, so I want it inscribed with something for the both of us: Joy shared is doubled, sorrow shared is halved.”
She waves to a passing family in a minivan. “Nice to visit. Of course the dead are gone. These are just their shells. We loved their souls, not their shells.”
But Roberta misses the body, too. She hovers over her husband’s grave, and for once is silent. The mine tailings glow like a sacrament in the final light.
“Hard to believe he’s been gone since ninety-eight.”
1998? It says 1997 here.
“Really? Why, I’ve never looked. You’re right! Got to get that changed. Susan, she made that. She’s just a mess. Bless my soul, I’ve got to pray for her.”
Before I leave, Roberta asks me to please send my kids to church. She’s praying for me, too.
NORTH OF AJO, the saguaros are slimmer. I’ve dropped a thousand feet since Tucson, and lower means hotter and drier. The foothill palo verdes are not only smaller than their relatives back on the reservation, but they’re farther apart from one another—say, a six-foot-tall tree every twenty feet. With their spine-tipped branches, each one bristles with a simple message for the deer and other nibblers: back off.
There is no wind this morning. The static clouds look like rolling pins. A small yellow butterfly is dead on the road, one wing inexplicably intact and looking like a Post-it note stuck to the asphalt. It’s the only roadkill, so the vultures are patient, not bothering to break their huddle in a dead ironwood tree along Ten Mile Wash.
I’m weary of a desert without the sun, but there is blue hope on the northern horizon. To the east and west are barbed wire fences with the same sign posted every hundred yards:Danger! Peligro!
U.S. Air Force Bombing and Gunnery Range
They mean it. A jet comes low over the volcanic knob of Hat Mountain, pulls up hard just before the highway, and releases a bomb directly overhead. I flinch and swerve, as if I can outrun the thing. But the bomb, like the jet, continues to gain elevation. Unlike the jet, it has no engine and after it reaches its zenith follows a trajectory that ends with an orange flash and a tower of dust. This rewarding bit of calculus enabled the pilot to hit a bull’s-eye two miles away, without flying over it.
The desert as target: it’s one way to use a land that has long been deemed useless. “A typical desert is an area of wasteland,” wrote D. A. Hufford in his 1902 Death Valley, “whose use mankind has not yet discovered.”
But mankind long ago discovered how to use the desert. The Sand People, the Hia-Ced O’Odam, lived a life of pure movement on the lands that are now the bombing range. They lived so lightly that the government did not recognize them as the rightful caretakers, and they were not granted a reservation. Landless, the Sand People now live in nearby towns, nomads no more.
Meanwhile, a combination of bombs and cholla cactus keeps out most folk. Outside the bounds of the air force range, the ranchers are reduced to a half-dozen diehards, beaten down by the facts of drought and the earnest meddling of save-the-desert folks like me. Occasionally a distressed cow wanders onto the bombing range. With joints of cholla cactus hanging from its tail, the desperate beast is looking for grass or mesquite pods but finding only creosote, the keynote shrub of the Southwest. A wispy bush with little shiny leaves as tasty and nutritious as tar tipped in turpentine, the creosote is a chemical bomb, and it’s left alone.
A cow would be better off following me forty-three miles to the Gila River. With a watershed reaching into the conifer forests of Arizona, Mexico, and New Mexico, the Gila was the only perennial stream to cross this desert and reach the Colorado. That was before the canals took its water to feed the fields of dense green. Some are alfalfa, but most are cotton, being worked by green John Deere 7455 Cotton Strippers that cost over a hundred grand each. The machines steer themselves with guidance systems that follow the laser-leveled furrows. The driver’s job is to turn it around at the end of the field.
I’ve never seen farms quite like these, all mechanics and drivers and a pilot who graciously pulls up his crop duster before its wing nozzles lay a shroud of pesticide over me. Like pennies that only a child would stoop to pick up, cotton bolls in drifts line the roadside. The air itself is cottony, plumped with moisture from the fields. The canals are filled by pumps that are run by power lines heading north to the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant. It’s the most powerful nuclear facility in the United States, conspicuously sited on a creosote plain above the Gila River valley. Before I even contemplate a photo, a young guard behind the chain-link fence says, “Don’t be taking no pictures. Not after the terrorists.”
His name is Walter. His badge says, “Unarmed Security Guard,” which seems an admission of vulnerability well beyond the call of honesty. If I were hired on I might have to wear a badge that says, “Ticklish Security Guard.”
“Palo Verde is a no-fly zone,” says Walter. A pair of fighter jets shriek overhead. “Except for the F-16s.”
Only a mile north is downtown Wintersburg. It’s a general store next to a large siren atop a pole. A placard reads: What You Should Do In Case of An Emergency. But everyone knows: if Palo Verde blows, lick your finger to test the wind, and flee upwind.
The wind is out of the southwest, at my side as I turn northwest and cross Interstate 10. On the bridge I chug the orange juice I picked up at Wintersburg and take a five-minute census of American interstate traffic. The result: fifty-two big trucks, thirty-six pickups/SUVs/vans, and twenty-four cars.
Satisfied, I take Salome Road, climbing by degrees out of the creosote and into the cactus hills. This is the old, pre-interstate route, ignored by most drivers. The greasy rumble of diesel trucks falls behind. When I’m twenty miles down the road, the sun drops behind the mountains, turning them into silhouettes like two-dimensional cutouts.
I find a track into the desert, carefully picking my way between platoons of chest-high cholla. Each is so densely spined it appears to be covered with fur, which is why some call it the teddy-bear cholla. In form it is a tussle of limbs and joints assembled with less-than-usual care, for the cholla has every intention of falling apart. Each knuckle that drops to the ground is a ticket to a new home, capable of rooting and starting anew. Gravity alone is the usual transport, but most hikers sooner or later look down to discover a clump clinging to their cuff or calf, which it seemingly leaped onto without invitation. Hence its other name: the jumping cholla. Each spine is invisibly but viciously barbed, so removal of the offending piece requires special care. Sometimes this means pliers. Always it means a vocabulary typically not used in the presence of teddy bears.
I scare off four cows—miserable scrub cattle eking by on mesquite pods and luck—with a yell, and claim as my own a smooth pavement of little stones fitted like puzzle pieces. The only big stone is actually a tortoise. Step by step it lugs its house of bone across the pavement, while chewing a leaf with the slowest mouth in the west. The moment it spots me it halts and withdraws into its shell.
The evening, the night, the sunrise: not a breeze, not a sound. In the stillness of the first light I sit up and see that the tortoise is still waiting.
“THAT’S A VERY BIG BEAR,” says the bald man with a goatee. We’re seated over eggs and hash browns at the breakfast counter at the Salome Café, staring at a velvet painting of a muscle-man in a feathered headdress. He clutches a rifle, poised to take action against the mythical desert grizzly. Perhaps it is a trick of perspective, but the bear appears to be an easy hundred feet tall.
The b
ear is a joke. So is the sign by the door, “Coffee Boiling Hot.” The town of Salome is a joke, but that may be as its founder intended. His name was Dick Wick Hall, and in 1906 he bought a piece of land along the dirt road from Phoenix to Los Angeles. He liked the place and loved the desert, and his genius was in realizing that others didn’t. Hall put up signs: “Smile. You Don’t Have to Stay Here But We Do.” He mimeographed a fake newspaper, the Salome Sun. By 1925 it was a nationally syndicated column, carried by twenty-eight newspapers. You can still buy the collected columns, so I do, and read about his pet rattlesnake, Lizzie.
When the Hotel Business gets Too Quiet,
Old Lizzie helps us to Start a Riot;
She crawls out onto the Auto Campground
And Sings to the Tourists sleeping around—
And you ought to see the Tourists Flock In
And Fight for Rooms at the Blue Rock Inne.
A framed article in the café mentions Hall’s “untimely death” at age forty-nine but doesn’t explain how. “They say he was shot by an irate husband,” says my waitress, “but they also say that that’s what Hall said.”
Another joke. I ride off, to ask around. Salome is mostly an aluminum village of mobile homes, gleaming like mica under an enthusiastic sun. The lady at Outback Realty doesn’t know how Hall died. She sends me down the road to a shop brimming with a hundred variations on Hall’s favorite fiction: the frog who hopped around the desert in asbestos sandals, never finding water. I buy a frog postcard and a frog Styrofoam beer cooler, and ask the lady behind the register how the frog sales are going.
“To tell the truth, I’m not a frog sort of person. I felt an obligation to the town and Dick Hall.”
She spies my bike. “Do you sleep outside?”
Whenever I can.
“What about the scorpions?”
I give her Mr. Hall’s line: A scorpion is just a lobster who has lived in Arizona a long time.