High in the Superstition mountains Boyce Thompson nurtures palm trees and delicate herbs. Australian outback and tropical trees. But the best are the cacti. All kinds of cacti. And succulents. And chapparel. And trees. Saguaros and Palo Verde seem to dominate and the cholla are mysteriously allowed to grow right up along the trails. This still surprises me, with all of the cholla scare tactics I've heard since I was big enough to hear. They supposedly have invisible "feelers" that sense your presense. You don't have to touch a cholla to have it's hooks take hold. They will jump right out and find you, double barbed so that they become one with your skin.



One of my favorite parts of the park is a long walkway lined with pomegranates. A wall of pomegranates. Some burst open, feeding ground to birds and bees. Others waiting patiently to share their fruit. Arizona is ripe with pomegranates. A complete treat.



In honor of Rebel Down Under, I posed at the entrance to the outback. The gum trees/eucalyptus made me a little wistful for home. The Red Gum might be my all time favorite tree. At home they're sentinals for Mission San Luis Obispo de Telosa. Here they were gorgeous walkway shade providers, white trunks dappled like sun reflections on a ocean bathing whale.



Of the cactus family and extended familes, the ocatillos are my favorites. Boyce Thompson has a bench with an ocatillo shade structure. And I wish I had one at home, too.

At Robert's there were five Border Collie puppies, eyes not even open, but already with names. Teeny, the largest of the bunch and the first born is my cousin Solomon's favorite. He's hoping to keep her. Mom has her eye on Una, whose name was changed to Zora (short for the spanish word for skunk as well as the nickname of my grandfather's favorite boxer) the first day we were there. She might be driving back out in the middle of december when the pups are weened to bring Zora to the California Coast. Take her from the Sonoran desert to the Pacific Ocean.

We extended our trip and extra day. With so much time spent on the Safford-Morenci trail and all of the stops along the way, we missed out on quality Grandma and Grandpa time. Grandma made tortillas and Grandpa began to string the chilis into ristras. Grandpa's eye sight is failing him -- in fact he can't see much at all any more, just light and dark and images on the outside of his peripheral vision. Yet he strung and strung and strung the chilis.

Note: most people have to wear gloves to do this. But grandpa's hands are tough -- either from being a full-blooded Mexican or just from stringing thousands maybe millions of chilis in a lifetime.

Meanwhile Grandma was in the kitchen mixing up the flour, the water, the oil and the baking powder. She let the dough sleep (covered all cozy) and then she divided up, only to flatten each diskette into a beautiful tasty tortilla treat.

The last stop of the day was to see the spot where Nana was buried. My mother had fond memories of her. All I really remember was playing underneath her treadled sewing machine which she used her entire life. The cemetary is in Solomon, on top of a mesa. Most of the graves are unmarked except for the piles of stones that cover the gravesite. Nana's site had flowers and a headstone. Her husband is there. Their first born son. And their baby granddaughter, aged two months.

Strange: their first born son was Robert Figueroa. Their baby granddaughter was Ann Marie Figueroa. And here I was in the middle of a cemetary with the sun going down looking at these two graves with my uncle Robert (Figueroa) and my mother, Ann Marie who used to be a Figueroa. Spookiness abounds!

All was somber but the view was beautiful. Long stretching valley up to the Black Hills and at that time of day the shadows are long and the sky is still a rich blue. Cayotes sung in the distance and it was time to go home.

Getting to Duncan we past the town where Sandra Day O'Connor grew up. A land of cattle ranches and small, hyper-modest houses. But this is what this part of Arizon is: the land of no pretenses. Or so it seemed to my outsider's eye. In Duncan we stopped at a farm that had a truck full of pumpkins and a barn full of chilis and potatos and gourds. We petted a very skinny, lonely puppy. We got three huge sacks full of Agro and Pico chilis and we were on our way again.

We were starting to worry about time. It must have been four o'clock already. We still hadn't got the chilis and it would be a bit of a drive out to Duncan still. The sky was amazing with dark clouds and light clouds and sun bursts.

I asked Robert how he met Barbara A. He said once, in his early twenties, or maybe before then, someone told my dad and him that they should meet a couple that lived out on the Gila. So they drove out of town, down towards train trestles that cross the Gila River, along a mesa where the night sky must hold the world's largest deposit of stars. Barbara lives on top of the mesa now, instead of at its bottom (a flood had gotten them, too). A house she built completely by hand -- her hands. Stone walls and large windows and a living room she never got around to enclosing. So to this day the living room is still just a concrete-poured floor and one stone wall and a view you can't really peel yourself away from.

My mom loved this. I think she squealed.

"Wouldn't it be great to be here during a thunder and lightening storm?" my mom said, crossing her fingers that this would happen at that very moment. Barbara and Robert tried to tell her that Arizona was in the middle of a drought. That no rain was expected. That the dark clouds that were forming in the western sky surely wouldn't pass by the mesa.



But they underestimated the power of my mother's crossed fingers. First there was lightening and then there was thunder. At first it was miles away and then it was closer and then closer and then inches away and then upon us. Big rain drops fell. Monster rain drops. An-entire-storm-in-one-raindrop-sized raindrops. Ten drops and your shirt was wet. One hundred and you were certifiably soaked.

This is of course when we decided it was time to leave. But leaving Barbara's is no easy feat. Number one, it takes four-wheel drive just to get up her driveway. Number two, we had parked the truck on the other side of the trestles, on the other side of the Gila. So we piled into her truck and she slowly inched down her driveway. When it came time I jumped out to open the gate ("6 foot rattler lives in these rocks!" says the sign on the post. I proceeded with caution.). When we reached the trestles the rain had stopped and the sun had come back out. A double rainbow reached from one mesa to another. The nopal glistened with fresh rainwater. And the steam made its instant evaporation evacuation from the train tracks. It was hard to say good bye.

Clifton was similar to Morenci. A "mountain" town, the Frisco River meanders through its main avenues. In 1983 God seemed to punish the striking copper miners double and the Frisco River swelled over its banks. A wall of water, six feet tall is the account I read, marched through the town and left acres and acres of mud in the houses, in the stores, in the businesses. It's hard to overcome a strike and a flood. I don't think the town was ever the same again.

In the old train station is the Art Depot. Robert's work is often available there. We stopped by and one of the artists was getting ready for a show, taking down pictures and baring the walls. I caught a classic Mirror Project photo there: the artist in the mirror and her work on the glass case.

From Highway 70 Robert pulled onto the Safford-Morenci Trail. Atleast I think that is what it is called. It's a fifty mile maintained dirt road that used to be the only connection between the two towns. Nowadays it's a scenic route, though I'm not sure many people know about it. We saw ocatillo, cholla, nopales, yucca, agave and the mandatory saquaro stands. An old volcanic core keeps watch and the road is bordered by ancient volcanic flows.



We ran into the coolest bull I have ever seen. Snow white with curly cue bangs ("a real cow lick," said Janet when I showed her the picture) and big, huge hanging bull balls. Ha. He stood at the side of the road and doubledogdared us to step out of the truck. So instead we just stopped and I took my picture from the truck's window.



Midway you can see Morenci shining in the horizon. Morenci is an old copper mine. My grandfather worked there as did my dad and Robert and most of the men they knew and boys they grew up with. The house my dad grew up in has long since been covered up. That was Old Morenci and it was once a booming, company town. But in 1983 an immense strike happened and the strike carried on for years. And people retired, left, moved on. Still, from the road, the current mine seemed to glisten in the distance like one of the lost Gold Cities the conquistadors looked for hundreds of years before.

The next morning we set out to buy chilis in Duncan. We figured we'd be gone two hours. Probably two hours. Maybe three if we stopped here and there.

It took us eight.

Driving out of town I saw three cyclists and from afar I could make out trailers on the back of their bikes. And sure enough, as we got closer and then drove past them, I could clearly see that these were BOB trailers. Robert pulled a U and we stopped the truck. I got out and waited for the cyclists to catch up to us.

"Can I take your picture?" I shouted to the first cyclist, a woman.

"Sure!" she shouted back.

"My friend invented BOB trailers," I told yelled.

"In San Luis?" she asked loudly back and I told her yes.

"I went to Poly," she hollered to me and I said I did too and we both agreed it was a very small world.