inglorious wanderer

T he audiovisual presentation about saguaro cacti at the Saguaro National Park  Tucson Mountain District visitor center characterized these 50-foot creatures as gentle giants and our ancestors.   With hands outstretched and  silhouettes of what looked like a whole community of mobilized people, saguaro cacti are said to be so named from a mispronunciation of a  Papago word.   The Papago   word may have been Subaipuri, who knew?  From 1691 to 1767, friars of the Catholic religious order called company of Jesus, more commonly known as Jesuits, established and operated Catholic missions in what is now Arizona and Sonora. It must have been that day when one  Padre Pio,  while visiting a village, noticed one odd-looking plant, that to him was almost blasphemous and sacrilegious, an index  finger flipped to the heavens!  So he asked an indio, "Como se llama esa planta?" The local,  a Tohono O'odham who...

The theme song of the  musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is unforgivably cringy.  I couldn’t help bringing it up, perhaps to humor the memory of Priscilla who died more than seven years ago.  Priscilla, was never a discontented mother nor a regimented wife. Neither had she anything to do with drag queens or a dilapidated pink bus stuck in the middle of nowhere in some Australian desert.  But inspired by the musical, I thought of Priscilla as I drove into the heart of the Sonoran Desert just  north of the US-Mexico border. “Hey lady, you lady, cursin’ at your life You’re a discontented  mother and a regimented wife  I’ve no doubt you dream about the things you never do But I wish someone had to talk to me like I wanna talk to you.” It was Priscilla who first told me about saguaro and  organ pipe cacti as we walked around the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.  She  considered the desert  her sanctuary...

A meander is a winding curve of a river or a road. To me, the Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona is one meander of a wonder.  Interestingly, an article by Tas Walker, a biblical geologist from New Zealand  suggests that this  spectacular  geological wonder along  the Colorado Plateau near the Arizona-Utah border is carved by a Noah’s flood kind of a phenomenon.  On a quick Google search, results point out that Noah's flood probably happened off the coast of Turkey around Black Sea some 7,500 years ago. I can only remember the  illustrated book I read as a child: Noah’s Arc. The story was about the time God got angry at all the wickedness in the world that he ordered some ethnic cleansing himself. God asked Noah, a righteous man who had no criminal record,  to build an ark out of a cypress wood with all his godly specifications. After the ark was completed and all the  other instructions were followed to the letter, God sent the rain that last...

Mukuntuweap National Park would have sounded as fascinatingly Native American as Yosemite National Park. To the Southern Paiute ( pronounced as pa-ee- yot) tribe of Native Americans living in what became Southern Utah, Mukuntuweap meant either “straight canyon”  or “straight river arrows”. The traditional Paiute name for the canyons surrounding the Mukuntuweap National Monument is Oawingwa (likely pronounced as wa-wing-wa) which refers to a place where the stream flows. It was Isaac Behunin, a Mormon renegade whose family was one of the early settlers of Utah and who built a home in the upper area of the Virgin River in the late 1800s who is credited for giving the former Mukuntuweap National Monument and its surrounding canyons its name:  Zion. Zion is a Hebrew word meaning refuge or sanctuary. Behunin believed that “a man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as in any man-made church”.  In 1909, President William Howard Taft used the A...