across the river and into the cactus

I'm really starting to like Arizona. I never met an Arizona I didn't like. The first encounter took place when my family and I drove through on I-40, moving west from Tennessee to California in 1999. I thought Flagstaff was absolutely gorgeous, and the desert after (though New Mexico was redder and a bit prettier). When I started going to North Dakota State, I cut through the Virgin River Canyon on the I-15. That was extraordinarily pretty; it made me feel I was right smack in the middle of a Western...or better yet, Star Wars. My bestest best buddy John and I went road trippin' through AZ a while ago, and saw Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff again, the Grand Canyon, and Kingman. Each region was stimulating in its own way, like the five different paintings that make up The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. And now, first thing in 2010, my family and I piled into the Hummer and headed east for my great aunt and uncle's trailer in Benson. I have a few things to explain first, so let's get that out of the way. First, we left on January 2. We were going to leave on January 1, but Mom developed one bad-ass migraine not long after we left the house. Her head was pounding and she was sick to her stomach. It didn't help that the Hummer smelled funny. We figure somebody must've spilled a bottle of men's cologne in there before we rented it. Second, we had a Hummer. We weren't originally going to rent a Hummer. My family hates Hummers. If this was Arkansas, we'd probably be having a family feud with them. Hummers are exclusively driven by jerks, dorkwads, buttheads, roadhogs and dweebus maximi. These people tailgate frequently, always pull up next to you when you're trying to make a right and need to see down the goddamn road, and invariably bully you from lane to lane. When passing in a Hummer, the driver always manages to incorporate a contemptuous flourish into the motion of his massive machine as he switches lanes. That's beside the fact that Hummers are $50,000 slices of show-off anyway, the flashy bastards. Pop actually rented an SUV. We needed to take some bulky stuff with us (more about that later), and an SUV was just the ticket. But, come the day, the rental car company was all out of SUVs. Well, shucks! So they gave us a Hummer instead, at no extra charge. All of our stuff fit into it, so we didn't complain. Besides, this would be our chance to test-drive one and see for ourselves why they sucked so bad. These relatives we were going to visit were my father's aunt and uncle, Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb. They live in Ohio, and contract-farm out to the neighboring homesteads, but they're inveterate snowbirds. To escape the brutal Ohio winter, they light out for southeastern Arizona from November to March, living in their $40,000 trailer. All clear? So there we were, January 2. We got up at an ungodly hour (criminy, I think it was 6:00 or something). We iced up the coolers, added some bottled water, and loaded those into the backseat of the Hummer. Then we took off (we were already packed from yesterday). It's a lovely, lovely drive east through the desert on the old 247, from Lucerne Valley through Yucca Valley and down to Interstate 10. But I dozed through most of it. We stayed on the 10 only a little while. We had business in Palm Desert. There's a zoo there that we're particularly fond of. We're regulars, you might say. It's called the Living Desert. Don't base your opinion of the place on its website, or whatever photos that Google might offer up. You have to go there. Seriously, book a flight to Palm Springs and do it. Palm Springs is a nice town (and Palm Desert, and Indian Wells, and La Quinta, too). Very pretty, it is. It's hoidy-toidy as all get-out, of course; all the movie stars and millionaires have their winter haciendas there. But it's pretty to drive through nonetheless. There are lush lawns, green golf courses (with real grass), handsome stucco houses with red tile roofs, sports cars tooling down the well-kept streets, clean-and-uppity shopping districts, hip restaurants and laid-back bars, plus a bazillion palm trees. All of this is set against the starkly beautiful Coachella Valley, its rock-strewn, jagged mountains rearing themselves against the bluest of skies. (As you might've guessed, I had my head hanging out the car window like a dog during the drive through.) But Palm Desert itself hides a greater treasure, a jewel in the sand, the Living Desert. It's basically a zoo for desert animals. And when I say "desert animals," I mean ordinary average garden-variety critters you might see outside my kitchen window, like coyotes and bighorn sheep and roadrunners; and I also mean wacky, exotic beasts like fennec foxes, caracals, warthogs, giraffes, ostriches, mountain lions, coatis, Gila monsters, the majestic Arabian oryx, and all that good stuff. Seriously, it's amazing. It was even more amazing when we went, because they had an enormous (and I do mean ENORMOUS) toy train diorama set up for the holidays. It was vast, vasty vast. Spread over an area the size of a house, full of mountains and forests and stations and highways and even a small Bell helicopter with rotors that were actually whirring, the diorama stood for all to see. Steam trains and diesel locomotives huffed and puffed and chugged their way along the tracks, over canyons and bridges, through valleys and tunnels, past forests and sawmills and parking lots. It was some neat stuff. Then we just toured the park. We got to see the giraffes this time. I didn't remember them being so big. We also saw bighorn sheep. The last few times we've been (in the blasphemous heat of summer) the sheep have stayed out of sight. This time, they were tentatively making their way from rock to precipice to precarious perch, heading down to the back corner of their enclosure (a rocky hillside) to get some water. The Arabian wild cats were up and pacing back and forth, hungry, it seemed... The meerkats were taking turns doing sentry duty and knocking each other's lights out... The American badger was huddled in his den, busy sleeping in... The warthog was rooting around his pen... ...in fact, not much was going on. A lot of the animals were either still asleep (in their dens or in the open) or were just sort of pacing around waiting to be fed. That's the funny thing about getting to a zoo just as it opens, I reckon. The animals haven't properly woken up yet, but neither have they tuckered themselves out. They're just getting their day started. It was interesting to see which ones were active and which ones weren't. The coatimundi strolled right up to his enclosure walls, looking at me and making the weirdest sort of squeak... The caracara was fairly bouncing from branch to ground and back again; the rock hyrax was a furry blur in his cage. But the African wild dogs were completely zonked out, and the zebras were too busy munching hay to take much notice of us. The Mexican wolves were nowhere in sight. We also wandered through the wilderness preserve... ...several expansive aviaries... ...and, as you'd expect from a desert, some lush gardens and nurseries. Zoologically and botanically satiated, we departed the premises. Harlan had a leopard-print water bottle for his girlfriend and I had a brand-new pocket watch ticking away at my hip. And so, we climbed back into the beastly Hummer (which, we noticed, was somewhat cramped, but rode exceptionally smoothly). We shunted sideways into La Quinta and had a lovely luncheon in the Beer Hunter Sports Bar (ha ha, nice play on words there). The waitress only had eyes for my brother. He is ruggedly handsome, with chiseled features and a bad-boy gleam in his eye. (But what am I, chopped liver? Sure, I'm pasty and flabby. But so's the Pillsbury Doughboy! Everybody looooooves him!) My folks egged Harlan on, encouraging his cool, authoritative image by giving him the check at the end of the meal. Then we got on the road and spent the next five hours on I-10, heading into Arizona. We crossed the Colorado River at the border and were suddenly in cactus country. Massive Saguaros poked out of the desert on all sides, looking like signposts or waving, skinny tourists. The most fearsome rock formations loomed on the horizon, again making me feel as though I were visiting another planet. I thanked heaven it was winter. Had it been summer, I probably would've melted onto my seat. This being winter, however, the temperature was a balmy 72 degrees, and a delightful zephyr refreshed us as we made our way further into the wastes. By and by, after dark (and a missed dinner) we reached Benson. We had a little initial difficulty locating Bob and Barb's trailer. They had given us directions to their trailer park, but not to the trailer. But we found it, said hello to aunt and uncle (and their adorable new collie, JJ, whom I fell in love with inside of ten seconds). Then Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb showed us our trailer. This was basically a mobile home, and admittedly more plush than most mobile homes one sees, having a loft and all (behind the railing in the picture), and with a complete kitchen, bathroom, and master bedroom...but still, it was a trailer, and a good deal less spacious than it looked. All the same, I liked it. I had expected to be living in a sardine can; this was an unexpected surprise. A plush couch, a comfy armchair, a bathroom you could actually turn around in and a stove were also much appreciated. With that, Bob and Barb donated some bedding to us, and we turned in for the night. Tomorrow...there would be a cowboy shoot. In Tombstone. The roughest town in the West.