Turkey Creek Deep

Where are we? Where are we going?

TURKEY CREEK

El.: c. 5000’ 

From 1880 to 1884 a man named Morse had a sawmill on turkey Creek where he prepared lumber for use in the Copper Queen Mine at Bisbee. The timbers measured one foot in diameter, and Turkey Creek was the only place where timbers of such size could be found. Morse is said to have named Turkey Creek for the wild turkeys found along it.  

- Will C. Barnes, Arizona Place Names, revised and enlarged by Byrd H. Granger

When I look at a map of the state of Arizona, the more so a map of the entire United States — all of North America, a map of the entire world — I realize how small is the majestic expanse of Cochise County that I call my winter home. Though two valleys, the Sulphur Springs Valley and the San Pedro, stretch through it from north to south, and along the easternmost side of the former lie the Dos Cabezas, Chiricahua, and Peloncillo mountain ranges, most Americans have never heard of the Chiricahua Mountains and never visited the Chiricahua National Monument. Those who make the visit usually drive down from I-10, venture up Massai Point, and then leave. It’s understandable. Ours is a big country, and even a vacation of several months is insufficient to cover the West.

Just as there are two schools of thought about life experience in general, so there are two schools of travel thought. Basically, the question is whether to go deep or wide. Whether to sample as many experiences as possible, though it means each sample will be, of necessity, strictly limited — or to stay with one mate, in one line of work, through thick and thin, to settle down in one place (or a few chosen places), to sink roots, to go ever deeper. I propound no single, universal decision here for all human beings. The decision can only be made by each individual.

Long before I made my first trip to France, though, I knew what I wanted from being there. I wanted to live, in Paris, for the four weeks I had. That meant I would not see the chateaux along the Loire (I still have not and perhaps never will) or the Normandy coast or the glitz of the French Riviera. When it came right down to it, I did not even see Chartres Cathedral that year, reasoning on rainy days that it would be a shame to visit Chartres without sun coming through the famous stained glass windows — and, on sunny days, feeling it would be a shame to give up a single sunlit day in Paris! When the sun was shining, I could make a cup of espresso on the sidewalk last two hours, and when the weather was cold and wet I could milk a single museum entrance fee for an entire day. Shopping? On my income? Please! Being there was all I asked. 

Just so, now, I find a great deal of contentment in my quiet Arizona ghost town, building a personal Southwest home library and making small increases to the comforts of seasonal retirement housekeeping with additions to our simple kitchen — one day a beautiful used stock pot from a thrift shop, another, a fresh jar of mesquite flower honey for the table. Expeditions from the cabin to the greater world outside are not always grand adventures, either. Sometimes only mundane errands. And that’s all right, because we are not on a cruise — we are living here. 

But oh, those glorious adventures! 

A year ago we turned one day onto Turkey Creek Road, but the jarring washboard surface quickly convinced the Artist, who was driving, to turn around. This year our first venture took us as far as the first creek crossing, and that was a thrill. So when the Artist proposed on Wednesday that we should explore farther up the road, he got no argument from me. 

The dry wash behind and alongside our rental cabin only runs with floodwater during summer monsoons, when we are back in Michigan, so the very sight of a small stream of flowing water within the largely dry banks of the San Pedro River is a rare treat. Imagine, then, our delight over a roaring, rushing, tumbling, foaming creek! We could not stop grabbing for our cameras — and yet, I realize that no photograph will convey a fraction of our excitement, just as photographs of Paris from the Seine did nothing to prepare me for standing on a bridge, being there. We had been exclaiming with wonder at the beauty of our surroundings long before we came to a sign alerting us to prepare for a “scenic road” along the next five miles. The sign struck us as very funny, as if the road commission thought we might have been unaware of beauty ahead without the sign. And what of the beauty we had already enjoyed that had not been noted with signage? 

Our wonder did increase as we penetrated farther into the forest, however, I must admit. It didn’t feel as if we were climbing, and yet we must have been gaining elevation, because there were more and taller and different species of trees as we went along, with mountain rocks much closer to our ever-narrowing road. 

Only many miles in did we reach public land of the Coronado National Forest, which, like the Marquette National Forest in Michigan, consists of discontinuous pieces of land in the Pinaleño, Chiricahua, and Dragoon mountain ranges. Beware of bear, and watch out for water and fire debris and rock slides, signs warned. 

What ruins lurk behind this alligator juniper?

Ruins of stone cabin lost in forest fire

There were other cabins in the forest land, obviously still rentable, and yet we saw no signs that anyone was staying in any of them. There were deer here and there, but no other human beings. Well, fine! When the rocky road reached a campground, it seemed incredible that there was not a single tent in sight and no picnickers at the tables, either. We left our car and settled down long enough to eat a simple late lunch and enjoy the creek (at our very feet!) before deciding that the air was already very cold and would quickly grow colder as dappled sunlight retreated up the mountainside. Short winter days are even shorter in the mountains, nothing at all like prairie evenings or the late afternoon light on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

Reluctantly leaving Turkey Creek, we sped east to the Mustang Mall and returned to the ghost town by way of the Kansas Settlement Road, looking across the valley to what looked like a big, dark storm over the very mountains where we had spent our afternoon. We arrived home before sunset (as splendid in the east as it was in the west) and were delighted to have visitors before darkness fell. It was another deeply satisfying day in our little corner of the world. We did not drive all that many miles, but most of them were deliciously slow.

Looking west

Looking east

Enjoying evening visitors

Talkin' Dirt Today

My curiosity regarding the new novel American Dirt, already piqued, got another boost, given discussion on NPR this morning. As the Chicago Tribune noted, 

Cummins is not being criticized because she is a non-Mexican person writing about the Mexican experience. She is being criticized because she is a non-Mexican person writing about the Mexican experience poorly. 

What I suspect -- and can only suspect, not having received an ARC and so not having yet read the novel -- is that the author, Jeanine Cummins, wrote the best novel she could but wasn’t the original and brilliant writer that demanding, discriminating readers were hoping for. If this is the case, I have to feel a little sorry for the author, awarded a huge monetary advance, yes, but now publicly castigated for being a poor writer. I’m sure she would have equalled Shakespeare had it been within her power. 

Often (how often I couldn’t say) it is the marketing division that drives a decisions to publish at all, as well as how big a budget a given book will get: the higher the expected profit figures, the more generous the advance. One speaker on the radio called American Dirt something like (I don’t recall exactly and have to paraphrase) an exciting and entertaining potboiler, which is my clue to expect something like The Help or Gone With the Wind -- that is, a novel expected to be a huge popular bestseller though probably unlikely to be a literary prize-winner or future classic. Again, if I’m right about this, it’s no surprise that a publisher would fork over a huge advance. And Oprah loved the book! (So did Stephen King.) Remember, Oprah also loved The Help and even chose to bring it to the screen. And I love Oprah — don’t get me wrong! I would say, though, that her reading instincts often line up with easily accessible stories, which is to say memoirs and fiction within the reach of the popular imagination -- though sometimes, it’s true, she convinces average Americans to stretch their imaginations. 

At any rate, as controversy rages over American Dirt, there are the usual “two sides” arrayed against each other in the popular media, one group crying out against cultural appropriation, the other objecting (just as loudly) to censorship and political correctness. There are also those who critique the book on its literary merits. What I anticipate with greatest curiosity, however, is a widening public conversation, with as many different voices as they are in the American reading public, the kind of public conversation that grew out of discussion of The Help  (see here and here) and was, to me, much more interesting than the novel that sparked the conversation. Because we do need to hear from many more previously silenced voices in the American public forum.

Just Out the Door and Down the Road

This morning’s sky confirmed the forecast I’ve been seeing on my phone for several days: we’re in for a rainy day — and that’s not bad. A day of rain now and then damps down the risk of fire, a good thing in the high desert. The prediction for the next nine days following today’s rain is for mostly sun with a few clouds. Today we're in for an all-day soaker. Fine.

We made an afternoon expedition on Saturday to the spectacularly beautiful Chiricahua National Monument, where crowds I expected to see on a holiday weekend were largely absent. Absent also (and this was a real blessing) was the strong, cold wind we normally encounter up on Massai Point. Although the air temperature kept dropping as we wound our way to the 6,870-ft. peak, and we saw increasingly larger patches of snow along the narrow, winding road, sunshine was absolutely glaring when we reached the high end of the road, and on a strategically placed bench, looking out over the astonishing hoodoos, across the 40-square-mile playa and surrounding Sulphur Springs Valley to the Dragoon Mountains seventy miles to the west, we were out of even the slightest breeze and content to soak up sun to our hearts’ content.

After five years, I’m finally getting some light grip on the geology of Cochise County, Arizona, and the sky islands of this basin-and-range country. At least, I think I am, but don’t quiz me. Instead, correct me if you think I’ve gone astray. 

To understand the formation of the Chiricahua range, we have to go back twenty-seven million years and the movement of tectonic plates those 27,000,000 years ago, when the molten core of the earth was much more active and closer to the surface than it is in Arizona today. Back then a dense oceanic plate of basalt was overridden by a lighter plate of granite (the North American plate, moving west in true though still prehistoric North American fashion), and as the resulting collision (friction?) increased both rock and water temperature, the former melted as it mixed with the already molten mantle. 

Just south of the Monument (which in itself occupies only a portion of the entire Chiricahua range) are the remains of what is known as the Turkey Creek Caldera. There a magma chamber broke through the earth’s crust and spewed burning gas, ash, and lava over 1,200 square miles in an explosion estimated to be five to ten times larger than the historic Krakatoa eruption in 1883. 

Turkey Creek is so calm and quiet today that it’s almost impossible to picture the nuée ardente — scorching rain! — that flew upward from the prehistoric volcano and flowed outward at over 100 miles an hour as a burning avalanche! In time, of course, the magma cooled and hardened, forming a rhyolite bedrock over eight hundred feet thick. And that and similar eruptions were the birth of the Chiricahua mountains.

But basin and range land is not created by volcanos alone. Once the dramatic volcanic events are over and plate movement slows down, everything gradually cools, and it is then that the cooling masses of rock, slowly but irresistibly, shove against each other, faulting, tilting, and lifting some segments up, while the surrounding basins sink. The creation of Arizona’s sky islands, then — these fault-block mountain ranges that rise up from a nearly level sea (though 4,000+ feet above sea level) of grassland and desert — was very unlike that of the folded Appalachians with their more gradual slopes. 

Nor, however, is faulting, tilting, and rising the end of the story, because subsequently comes the much slower action of weathering. Wind and water (in liquid and solid form) take starring roles in the weathering story but achieve their dramatic effects at very undramatic speed.

Formed by case hardening caused by the amorphous silica left behind after precipitated water evaporates off the surface of the rock formations, pinnacles in Chiricahua National Monument were formed by the freezing and thawing of water during the last ice age approximately ten thousand years ago. 

- William Ascarza, Chiricahua Mountains: History and Nature

Sculpted rhyolite makes for stunning scenes in Chiricahua, where jointed columns of rock invite “the entry of water, instigating chemical and physical weathering.”

Less spectacular but as much a part of the geologic story as the hoodoos are “solution pans” and “slot canyons,” the latter “forty times deeper than they are wide” (Ibid.).

We do not always think about it when admiring mountain hoodoos and the other rock formations we find so amazing, but weathering is a relentlessly ongoing process, continuing in our own age, day by day. Saturday there were pockets of snow in the mountains. As sun reached some of them, that snow melted, and meltwater sought out cracks through which it could descend to creeks and rills headed for the playa. Perhaps that ultimate destination would not be reached, but water would push its way along as far as possible, carrying with it occasional small bits of rock and stone. 

And on the other side of the mountain from where we found our sheltered bench, wind was doing the work it does night and day.

Because of weathering, all the sky island peaks have been worn down from their original height, and the valleys — recipients of eroded mountain material — have gained in elevation. Today’s rain is a geologic drop in the bucket, but each raindrop, each snowflake, contributes to the cumulative effect.

The Artist and I never view Chiricahua with jaded eyes. Every visit feels like the first time, so unusual and fascinating and mentally challenging are the sights. For me, though, the presence of tall, green trees is almost as exciting as the rock formations. Down in our winter ghost town we have only mesquite and netleaf hackberry, whereas in Chiricahua there are beautiful alligator juniper, Gambel oaks, Douglas firs, and stately Ponderosa pine. We are so very lucky, we tell each other, to have all this natural beauty practically in our backyard! It doesn’t even have to be a day trip: half a day gets us there, gives us time for a walk and a picnic, and gets us back to our own Dos Cabezas, which are, literally, in our backyard, so that coming back home at the end of the day is never a disappointment.

Back in Michigan, where we live maybe a mile from the glory of Lake Michigan, we don’t see the water from our windows, but neither do we pay lakeshore property tax or worry that rising lake levels will carry off our home. The closest road to the Lake is private, so we have to take a little ride to get to a beach, but it isn’t all that far, and on mornings after stormy, windy nights we can hear the waves from our front door. Thus it is well within our reach, that glory — even closer than it was when we lived in Kalamazoo and I occasionally needed a 100-mile evening round trip so I could walk on the beach to unwind after a day of work at a job I did not love.

I was lucky even in my girlhood, when the house my parents bought for our move from South Dakota to Illinois was on the last street of a subdivision, out beyond the city limits, with a working farm across the road to the west. How hungrily and greedily and gratefully, too, I watched thunderstorms and sunsets in that open expanse from our enclosed front porch! 

South Dakota, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona. Fields, lakes, desert, mountains. Just outside the door or maybe a little way down the road, open spaces and natural beauty have always helped me breathe deeply and filled me with peace.

Sources: 

1. Ascarzs, William. Chiricahua Mountains: History and Nature (Charleston, SC: Natural History Press, 2014)

2. Gilluly, James; A. C. Waters; & A. O. Woodford. Principles of Geology, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1959).

My Beautiful Things

Male peacock at Holy Trinity Monastery, St. David, AZ

Years ago, the first time I ever visited a U.P. friend in her house, I came back out, bubbling over with enthusiasm, to the car where the Artist had waited. “She has rocks everywhere, hand-made quilts — books, of course — even a wasp’s nest!” He asked, “Does she have objets de vertu?” The phrase was French but not familiar to me, and I asked what it meant. “Beautiful things,” he told me. I was taken aback (why was he even asking?) and protested, “I already told you she has a wasp’s nest!” 

My Upper Peninsula friend had a kitchen full of her home-canning projects and a living room overflowing with books. Out on her porch were numerous wind chimes. She had chickens! I found her world enchanting, chickens included, because just as Amy March envied girls with nice noses, I always envy girls and women with horses and/or chickens. Chickens, whether beautiful or not (and chickens do vary in looks), all make those lovely, soothing, soft clucking sounds. And my grandmother had chickens, so there’s that, too.

Male in full display mode

I’ve never yearned for peacocks, but we enjoy seeing them at Holy Trinity Monastery south of St. David, and the males were in full display on our last visit, where we lingered to watch them. If only this male had displayed against some background other than green shrubbery! Well, the monastery is always a peaceful place, as it should be, away from the larger world’s hustle and bustle. — Not that our ghost town winter is characterized by hustle and bustle, except for bombardments of daily news, and even those are easily left behind, simply by walking out the door and into the quiet desert. 

Peahens are beautiful, too, in their quieter way.

But birds, lovely though they be, are leading me away from my subject -- the one I have not even begun to address -- which is: my own beautiful things. 

Cheap, modest beauty

Things I buy for myself are rarely new or expensive, particularly during my winter seasonal retirement, when five dollars on a non-necessity is a splurge that comes straight out of the grocery budget. I have to think very carefully before taking the plunge. Crucial question: Is this something that will give me lasting pleasure? Last year I splurged on an unframed painting at an estate sale, something I still look at often and enjoy, and the latest self-indulgence this year is another painting, this one a complicated Chinese scene from the past, appearing to represent an important dignitary arriving by horseback (in a village, perhaps?), preceded by an entourage to announce his arrival. I particularly like the little black dog cavorting in the background at the upper left. I like the touch of whimsy and the real-world feeling that little dog adds to the scene.

Not one of those subtle, understated and exquisite nature studies from a Japanese master, still this work charms me and will, I’m sure, continue to do so. In the same vein, I recently bought four small Navajo sand paintings, their artists identified by name and photo on the backs. These, of course, have spiritual significance, as well as aesthetic excellence, and they could not be more at home here in Arizona, so how could I resist? 

(Fourth is over my desk.)

And with the newly acquired Chinese and Navajo works, the walls of my little reading and writing corner are full, so now, shelves full of books (beautiful to me), writing tablets stacked on the desk, ephemera and mementoes tucked into the frame of the mirror, art on the walls, boots (when I’m not wearing them) propped in the corner between bookshelves (one pair) and (the other) perched high above, the entire corner gives joy to my soul. All of these are material objects. All beautiful to me, each adds to my happiness and contentment, and I love them in ensemble, both night and day.

Little Women: The Book and the Movie

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 

"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 

"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 

"We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.” 

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Alcott's novel is very formulaic, and the formula repeats over and over — when the four sisters are together, whatever the topic, each takes a turn speaking: 1, 2, 3, 4. Yet the overall effect somehow works, at least it did, when we were young, for those of us who grew up with the book. And while I don’t know what the experience would be for a sophisticated reader coming to the book for the first time as an older adult, I find I can re-read it now and be seduced all over again by the March family, even as I am aware of that repetitious, somewhat stilted formula. It’s because Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, for lifetime fans of Little Women, are real girls — always were and always will be. Where the magic comes from, I cannot say.

Why is it, though, that every girl who reads the book identifies herself as Jo? A recent NPR segment began by asking callers to say which girl they identified with and why, but the question had to be quickly discarded, as no one ever saw her girlhood self as conventional Meg, vain Amy, or shy, stay-at-home Beth. No, every girl-reader-become-woman claimed to have been, in her mind, as she read the book, tomboy-writer Jo, whether or not she’d been a tomboy (or even wished to be a boy) or hoped to be a writer when she grew up. Why?

I had occasion to reflect on this question some years ago, when one of my sisters and I had an exchange on the topic. I’d been amazed that she saw herself as Jo! Who, then, pray tell, did she imagine I would be? I was the oldest, but I was no Meg! Puzzling, I have come up at last with a two-pronged explanation: 

(1) Jo was the bookish sister. An aspiring writer, she was naturally a voracious reader. Girls who read Little Women were, obviously, readers themselves. In my family, three sisters (as were our parents) were all readers! Ipso facto, we were all Jo!

(2) Readers see an author’s fictional world through the author’s eyes, even when that author isn’t one of the characters. Little Women is written in the third person, but Jo is clearly the author’s alter ego. So it’s Jo’s head and heart we inhabit as we read the story. How could it be otherwise?

Moving from page to screen, there have been more than twelve adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s classic girls’ story, beginning with silent film versions in 1917 and 1918. I’ll have to watch Katherine Hepburn again as Jo (1933), but just thinking of Hepburn you can see why she would be a natural in the role. By contrast, whoever saw June Allyson as Jo (1949) ought to have had his (and I’m sure it was ‘his’) head examined. 

As for Winona Ryder (1994), sorry, I did not care for that version at all, though I realize it introduced a whole generation to the story. I became near-apoplectic at Jo and Professor Baer kissing in the balcony of a theatre! So wrong, so very wrong! Nineteenth-century PDA among the genteel, aspirational, theatre-going poor? Hardly! Besides that, the chapter in which the kiss takes place is called “Under the Umbrella”! Jo and the professor kiss under the umbrella after he tells her that all he has to offer are “these empty hands,” and she puts her hands in his and replies, “Not empty now.” I seem to recall I didn’t care for Susan Sarandon as Marmee, either, but as I’ve never wanted to see that film version a second time I cannot give a detailed critique. 

Because of my feelings about the 1994 film, I was nervous at first about seeing yet another adaptation. Now, after only my first viewing of Greta Gerwig’s version (which I’m sure I will see again many times in the future), I find myself agreeing with another audience member I overheard telling companions on the way out of the theatre, “I’ve seen three different movies made of ‘Little Women,’ but this is my favorite.” 

The dialogue at the top of this post opens the story of Alcott’s Little Women. In the new adaptation, the pre-Christmas complaint scene is moved and solutions the sisters find in making and/or purchasing modest gifts are omitted, but Gerwig does what she does so gracefully that I cannot object. The all-important introductory visit to the Hummels is there, intact. And that brings me to something the film adds that a book cannot: strong, big-screen visuals that put the viewer not only in the heart of the family but also in a geographical/historical context. I found myself devouring outdoor and street scenes and interiors of houses, as their world became as real to me as the sisters themselves. 

I did wonder, early on while watching, if someone unfamiliar with the story would find the time shifts confusing (there is nothing faintly like that in the strictly chronological presentation of the written book) and have difficulty catching all the dialogue when many voices were speaking together. My own movie-going companion, the Artist, never having read the book, was that very person: unfamiliar with the story, he did have difficulty catching everything that was said and making sense of all the time shifts. Well, I told him, I was completely lost the first time I saw (never having read) the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but I certainly wouldn’t change it. And I wouldn’t change Gerwig’s “Little Women,” either.

So many of the scenes from the book were there, just as L.M. Alcott wrote them, such as Amy falling through the ice when she follows Jo and Laurie after having burned Jo’s manuscript. Laurie’s proposal and Jo’s refusal: that scene, too, was straight from the book. I know the written story so well that I was aware of every addition or subtraction or substitution, but they were masterfully done, and I felt the story flowed along seamlessly. 

I’m still thinking about the ages of two characters, however: Laurie and Professor Bhaer (the latter generally referred to by his first name in the film). Both appeared much younger to me than I would have made them. I am coming around to accepting boyish Laurie, but Friedrich I can’t help wishing older and maybe not so handsome, more as he was in the book — though the actor’s very winsomeness makes it hard to complain about his looks!

The Artist asked me if the mother had been as much a background figure in the book as she was in the movie. I hadn’t thought about that before, but I think the answer is yes. She appears from time to time to offer sympathy and guidance, but it is the sisters themselves who form their own world, as young people always do, as each generation does.

In the car on the way home, I found myself telling the Artist about parts of the book that hadn’t made it to the screen. For instance, I loved the way they reminisced about the childhood game they played when small. “Backstory?” Yes. They played at being pilgrims, from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and as children would carry little bags of “burdens” that tumbled down the stairs when they reached the “Celestial City” at the top. Approaching womanhood, their burdens change: Meg hates being poor, Jo’s patience is tried by her work with demanding Aunt March, Beth struggles with near-crippling shyness, and Amy can’t help envying “girls with nice noses.” She so wants a classical nose!

They are so real to me, the March girls. Do you know them, too? What do you remember most? Or did you not care for them at all?