The Deserts in the Details

February 28, 2010 Sunday Road trip USA

            It’s 4 in the morning in Tucson Arizona.  I can’t sleep so I thought I’d write.  We found ourselves a cheap hotel to hold up in until a coffee shop opens tomorrow.  There is a humbling rainstorm raging outside.  There nothing quite like a rainstorm in the desert.  It less falls than lashes out, like some shy kid who’s been holding it in for years and suddenly without warming explodes, pouring out years worth of suppressed emotion all at once.  The best thing about rain is that it promises to transform the desert.  Dry gulges might tomorrow be rivers, plants will come alive, and if where very lucky we may catch it in bloom.  It leaves us with a dilemma. Our plan was to look through a couple of Tucson fantastic galleries and museums, or should we drive into the desert to see the natural splendor?    

The trip since Big Bend has been at little disappointing.  We didn’t make the Carlsbad Caverns in time to go in Friday and we hadn’t covered enough ground to stay over so we pushed on to Roswell New Mexico.  It was also somewhat of a let down.  The town is bigger than we had expected.  In fact, strips of stores and hotels have spread to the north of the original centre covering over the “Incident Crash Site”. 

It Seemed Like a Good Idea when I was Making the Antennae

 Much of the old town is gone or in a sad state of repair.  In truth I was hoping for more of a freak show in neon that I had seen on TV but a las; most of the folks were just ranchers and dairy farmers.  Two notable exceptions: the guy at the late night Alien curio shop.  He had an encyclopedic knowledge of his towns’ history and you could tell he was just bursting to talk about the U.F.O. crash and conspiracy.  He had weird hair that look like Barbie hair and a bald patch the size and shape of a egg on the right front side of his head, no doubt from the probe; Jen thought perhaps a flaw in his alien disguise.  

Roswell Street Lamp

Oh yah in the half hour or so that he kept us there describing everything about Roswell he didn’t blink once, not once!  The guy at the U.F.O museums was a bit off too.  He had memorized the postal codes of all of North America.  “ I have all of Canada and the U.S.A. and most of Mexico.”  He knew where we came from by our postal code.  He was a lot like Raymond in the movie Rainman, weird eyes, looking at you and away from you all at the same time.  So, it was a little kooky, but not X-Files kooky.

Roswell Window Front

Which puts us in Tucson.  There is so much to see here in the southwest but time and resources will not allow us to see even a fraction. Check out the Arizona sunset, it felt as though we were driving under an ocean of fire.