bloody gulch.

Those stalwarts of all Mesa-dom, the women at I Heart Mesa, asked me to write an Arizona-themed piece for their blog. I did. Here it is:

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher, a lovable woman whose skin was strongly reminiscent of alligator flesh, initiated a program to broaden her students’ limited horizons. It was her idea for our class to correspond with another fourth grade class—nine- and ten-year-olds just like us, except from a strange and exotic place. That’s what she told us. I imagined receiving envelopes with elaborate postage stamps on them, stamps featuring the tiny, unframed portraits of crowned monarchs the likes of which my scant decade of life experience as an Arizonan child would hardly allow me to conceive. I wondered how we were to communicate with our pen pals, considering that they probably wouldn’t speak very good English, and I didn’t know a lick of Swahili (or Burmese or Gaelic or whatever wacky native idiom our counterparts would employ). However, it was to my utmost chagrin when our teacher ultimately informed us that the exotic place to which she had alluded was to be Moundsville, Ohio.

My elation dashed, I found little to talk about in my first letter. I figured life in Moundsville was probably pretty similar to life in Mesa—modest homes arrayed in rows, gathered around churches, schools and parks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So in my letter I asked about favorite television shows, recess, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and what their grocery stores were called in Ohio. When I received my pen pal’s first response, I was a little surprised. The student, whom I will, for lack of actual recollection, refer to as Martin, didn’t answer a single one of my questions. (To this day, the void that is my ignorance regarding eastern Ohio supermarket chains still lingers.) Instead, his letter consisted of one wild, misguided inquisition after another:

“Are there ever gunfights?”
“Do you have a rattlesnake as a pet? Has it ever bit you?”
“Is your house a cactus?”

In no more time than it took me to read these questions, I developed a very poor opinion of the Ohio public school system. I mean, what kind of school produces fourth graders that are unable to tell reality from Hollywood fiction? How ineffective the local educational process must be to allow nine- and ten-year-old children to still harbor such cretinous notions. Even to me—a peer—Martin’s obtuse perception of Arizona seemed laughable. Did he realize that it was a mailman that dropped his class’s letters off at our modern, air-conditioned elementary school? Or did he imagine his letters sandwiched between dozens of dusty others, placed within the dark confines of a cracked leather satchel that bounced rhythmically across the lap of a Pony Express man riding horseback along ill-defined dirt roads lined with cow skulls and intersected by tumbleweeds, en route to places with names like Vulture Creek or Bloody Gulch?

I responded to Martin. I let him know that Arizona wasn’t the cryogenically frozen Wild West that he hoped it to be. I assured him that, no, I had never seen a gun fight, nor did I work part-time cleaning glasses at a saloon, nor did high noon have any particular significance except to indicate lunch. I did my best to convince him that I was a normal kid, interested in shooting hoops, playing video games, pulling pigtails, and planning the construction of elaborate forts that typically turned out to be a rotten sheet of plywood leaned up to a concrete block fence. After a few more letters from Martin, all of which lacked the enthusiastic curiosity and southwestern drawl of his first, the correspondence between the two classes fizzled.

And then a few years ago, more than a decade after my correspondence with Martin from Moundsville, I was in a grocery store parking lot. It was a windy day, one of those Arizona days when the whole sky looks pink like an impossibly vast mass of spilled grapefruit juice. I noisily wheeled a cart of processed food across the asphalt and towards my car, my pants pocket made musical at every step with the jumping of loose coinage. The cart’s front passenger side wheel was disagreeing so vehemently with the direction I was trying to push that I almost missed it when it happened. Between me and my Honda Accord, silhouetted in the bright pink sky, before the backdrop of the Superstition Mountains, rolled a tumbleweed. With each bounce and roll it left a trail of small, dried and crackling branches to memorialize its path. It looked out of place, the way it tumbled across newly paved asphalt, passed the still-bright yellow paint striping and hybrid cars parked in rows—like a phonograph amidst the plastic and aggressive-looking stereo equipment in the home audio section at any big box retailer.

I wanted to take my cell phone from my pocket and capture with photographic evidence this unique clash of old and new worlds. I wanted all to share in the anomaly that was the tumbleweed in the Fresh n’ Easy parking lot. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and aimed it. Through the viewfinder I again noticed the mountains just a few miles off—the Superstitions, with their stark precipices and their brown-turned-purple hue in the pre-evening. Beyond the parking lot and the adjacent road, up to the mountains’ first subtle inclines there was really nothing, just cacti spread with seemingly no pattern across otherwise bald earth. I wondered, wasn’t it these very mountains that served as the setting for a legendary Dutchman’s lost goldmine? There’s gold in them there hills. That’s what my dad used to say when we drove along US-60 past those mountains on our way out of town for the weekend. What’s more, I thought I’d heard that the famous Indian Geronimo—whose name I had sung playfully many times in my youth, holding the last syllable for seconds on end while jumping from high dives or while throwing oversized rocks into canals—was known to gallivant upon those mountains. I kind of recalled learning in school about a cave there in which he obscured himself while eluding the U.S. army. As the wind caught and emboldened like a sail of a tiny boat the plastic bags in my cart, I mulled it over and realized that, yes, I had heard each of those stories all while growing up and each did indeed refer to the Superstitions just a few miles away. Then I remembered that the road that goes past those mountains—Ellsworth Road—leads right to the remnants of a historical gold-mining town, portions of which were known to have been abandoned due to recurrent hauntings. I’d been there once as a kid. I remembered the town as a fully functioning tourist site, with an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, a saloon (complete with those dwarfish swinging cafe doors), mock gunfights every weekday at high noon and twice on weekends, and handle bar mustaches as far as the eye could see.

By this time, I’d now been lingering in the parking lot, trailing the tumbleweed with my cell phone camera, absorbing the view of the desert-scape, for what a casual observer would likely characterize as an abnormal amount of time. I thought to myself, “Holy crap. I live in a place with tumbleweeds. Tumbleweeds! And saloons. I live in a place with innumerable cacti. Lost freaking gold mines. And gunfights every day at high noon and twice on weekends.” I stood a moment longer and continued to watch the tumbleweed labor on southward. Now, it was the asphalt and the finely manicured green grass in concreted planters and the hybrid cars and the Auto Zone just north of the Fresh n’ Easy that looked out of place, not the tumbleweed. It all seemed to interrupt the generally dusty, cow-skull ambience created by the nearby herd of saguaro cacti and the looming Superstitions. Perhaps if the nearby Auto Zone had been rumored to be a haunted Auto Zone, things would’ve jived better, I thought. I was fairly certain, however, that no such rumors existed.

Lest my milk warm unnecessarily, I resumed pushing the cart towards my car. But I am pretty sure that on my way there and almost without trying, my legs starting to bow ever so slightly. The rattling of change in my pocket sounded less like currency and more like the tinkling of spurs at my heel. I could see how Mesa could just have easily been named Bloody Gulch or Cow Skull Trail or whatnot.

And now, I kind of want to write an amendment to my original response to Martin. I’d apologize for all the times I’ve chuckled when the thought of his obtuse little letter crossed my mind. I’d confess that as I’ve come to know my home, I’ve come to realize that his conception of a wild, western Arizona was at least as real as my conception of Arizona as a suburban haven of normalcy. I’d explain that part of what makes this state awesome is that my house is literally closer to a lost gold mine than it is to a public library, roller skating rink, or Thai restaurant. And I’d let him now that, yes, there are at least nine gunfights a week.