Arizona Journal, Day 1

In the north, the mountains.

Above the buses and sidewalks, above the shoppers and dogs, above the cacti and willows and cowboy drunks, the Santa Catalina mountains. They're there like a recurring dream or the idea of something: God, your mother, someone’s death. Irreducible, eventual.

I flew into Phoenix Thursday night around 9:30. The interstate down to Tucson was crowded with trucks. We sped past a landscape of degraded genericness: gas stations, strip malls, fast food joints, each highly lit and marked with aggressive particularity. I peered out the van window at the full moon and tried to imagine this land as it was fifty years ago, desert. Gorgeous austerity. Even when we reached an empty stretch of highway, lit towns and exurbs hovered at the fringes of the horizon. We were always on the edge of somewhere.

I’m doing a two-week stint at a writers’ residency in Tucson, Arizona. A and K, the women who run it, are lovely. Last night I went out with them to Grill, an all-night joint on Congress. A two-man band played rockabilly. The snaggle-toothed singer, his face framed by sweeping, pencil-thin sideburns, played the guitar and worked the drum with his foot. His face contorted with effort as he sang. Two women at my table got up and danced together beautifully, one smiling, the other solemn. When the band took a break I talked to a woman with a fedora perched on her messy blond hair. She told me that Tucson is a vortex, a center of energy. You’ll meet a person and realize, that was the person I was meant to meet. All the people I talked to had the same mystical feeling about Tucson, about its lively shambly quality and friendly creative folks. I guess the ones who don’t have that feeling, leave. I listened to them with a sense of longing and disbelief.

The colony is housed in a historic Mexican compound at the end of a busy, artsy strip. A and K have renovated the whole place themselves, lovingly outfitting each cottage with thrift-shop furniture and artwork by friends. Outside, cacti and palm trees edge winding paths strung with colored lights. It’s really wonderful. You’ve got to come here, people!