The Road to Ruins.

Big country, big skies, big canyons...

 I like to wander.  I could walk all day all alone and be in heaven though I seldom have the chance anymore. In my youth, however, I often would spend my entire day off in a different locale just wandering. Sometimes, I would get lost. Sometimes I would walk all day without seeing another living thing. Sometimes, I would stubble upon something wondrous. One such hike occurred while hiking in the wild country southeast of Camp Verde. It's a big barren land, cut by a maze of big canyons. To make a long story short, I like canyons, so I dropped into one to see if I could hike it all the way to the river. Towards the end, I walked around a bend and there stood one of the most amazing indian ruins I had ever seen. It was three stories and still had wooden beams poking out of the adobe.

 I was about to give up when I happened to
peer over the edge and... oh there it is.

Asking around town afterwards I learned that the ruin was known about but seldom visited. A lot of people knew of, had heard whispers about, but no one  seemed to know the exact location of them. Immediately people started asking me for directions. Now, backcountry secrets are not parted with easily. You don't just jump on the internet and post the Google Map with GPS coordinates (Yes I'm talking about you Mr. Outdoor Travel Writer--you whore of the backcountry), but if you're in the Inner Circle or you have someplace to trade quid pro quo, I would consider telling you.

I'm sure, at first, my directions were pretty accurate, but as the years passed they became increasingly vague. Something like,"Take that road off Fossil Creek. Take the first right then a bunch of left forks. When the canyon on your left starts to get really deep, look for a fence line. Follow the fence line to the bottom of the canyon. The ruin is around the corner..." Yeah. I'm sure anybody who ventured into that wild country with that intel found nothing but contempt for my backcountry knowledge.


So I ventured out the other day to see if I could rediscover it following my own vague directions. Like a lot of hikes I've repeated in recent years, I found the road was much rougher and longer, the trail about for times longer than I remembered and the descent into the canyon suicidal. Funny I don't recall that detail. But, though a combination of faint recollection and dumb luck, I did find the ruins. They have weathered the years a little better than my own mind.

Nothing sweeter than an old relationship rekindled.

These are all blocks of flooring from the second story. You can
see where the mud was layered on the sticks.

Detail from the second story. A piece of the
floor still in place in the corner.

   

Uniquely this ruin is constructed of smooth river rock. They had
to use a hell of a lot of mud to motar those stones, Probably why
it's aged so well.

The Senator's Highway

For my 54th Birthday, I wanted to do something I hadn't done, go somewhere I hadn't been and get away from the things that have become familiar. Though I've now lived here for over 30 years, what I love about Arizona is there were still many trips and places that fit that criteria. I finally settled on a glaring hole on my personal map: Crown King, Arizona.

Crown King is an old gold rush town located high in the southern Bradshaw Mountains. There are three ways to get there, a gnarly hard-core 4WD road from Lake Pleasant (Arizona's version of the Rubicon Trail); a 25 mile dusty, windy dirt road from the freeway halfway between Phoenix and the Verde Valley; and a 40 mile backcountry two track from Prescott that winds through the heart of the Bradshaw Mountains. None of the routes are convenient. To get to Crown King you have to really want to go to Crown King.

Passing the Buck

Our plan was to take the 40 mile route from Prescott and return via the 25 mile road and the freeway. It was beautiful fall weekend. As Debi's 4-Runner was having some electrical issues, we packed my pick-up and started out Saturday Morning. The road itself starts in downtown Prescott not far from the courthouse and the first few blocks were though the beautiful historic home district of Prescott. The victorian mansions there date back to a more prosperous time when Prescott was being considered for the territorial capital. Frtom there, the road winds up and out of town towards Goldwater Lake, Groom Creek and several campgrounds. Soon enough, however, the pavement ended and the campgrounds and cabins dwindled and we were alone in the woods.

At one time during the peak mining years in the late 1800s, the Senator's Highway was a major route that connected a multitude of mines, towns and mining communities. This was Arizona's Gold Rush and the guidebook we were using described many of the mines and town sites along the way. We missed most of them. Oh, we stopped and looked, but nature has roared back and reclaimed it all. In most places there was no sign that anything ever existed there.

An 1800s Rangers Residence at the halfway point

The road wasn't bad at all. Just a couple spots where we need some high ground clearance. And traffic on a beautiful weekend wasn't terrible either. We saw a dozen or so ATVs, sand rails and dirt bikes, a half dozen Jeeps and maybe four or five other trucks and SUvs. Most of those we saw around midday. Though the road wasn't bad, I still had to concentrate, watch for rocks and oncoming traffic.The road was very narrow, there were some steep edges and many blind corners. The key to this kind of driving is patience, but after several hours, fatigue started to kick in and I  began to lose my focus. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, I was thinking about a cold beer and a place to camp.

The road, however, winds in and out of ponderosa forest and then high chaparral--thick brushy, rocky expanses of steep mountainsides. As luck would have it, about the time I wanted to stop, we were into a long stretch of hot, shadeless, steep, no-camping chaparral. Just as I was thinking I'd have to drive all the day to Crown King that first day, the road dropped into a little canyon and we found a lovely little campsite in a beautiful grove of ponderosa.

Ah, shade, a camp chair, a shot and a beer. Happy birthday to me.

A couple more ATVs zoomed by, but soon we had the entire place to ourselves. We sat up and watched the moonrise and had a wonderful, quiet evening.

The next day it was a fairly short drive up a steep mountainside, some rockhounding, and then into Crown King. We had lunch in the wonderful 1800s saloon there. The place had a terrific vibe. All the doors were thrown open. And people sat o n the porch sipping beers and sharing their tales on how they got there.  We talked to one couple who were "testing" out their brand spanking new FJ Cruiser on the 25 mile graded dirt road into town. We were encouraging and didn't have the heart to tell them we'd just come 40 miles over the mountains from Prescott in a 15-year-old Ford pickup with 200,000 miles on it. But that was Old Arizona. The way the state was when things were wide open and everything was more of an adventure. And people were friendly.

I'd finally made it to Crown King. And it felt like home.

Work hard.

Love true.

Live simply.

Be humble.

Top Ten Ways to Annoy Your Butcher.

1. Get angry at me for things I have no control over. I don't set the prices. I don't select the brands. I can't order brands we don't carry and I don't write the ad. One of my favorite sources of anger is when they put something like a whole pork loin on ad, then show a picture of an expertly roasted rack of pork carved and decorated with little booties and some poor SOB shows up actually expecting to get a cooked crown pork roast for 99 cents a pound. Really? (sigh)
2. Grill minimum wage workers over precise cooking instructions for complicated , expensive meals. Come on. I don't know if you realize this or not, but we can't afford to buy half the shit you do—king crab legs, lobster tails, filet mignon, sea bass, etc--let alone be expert in the preparation of it (most grocery store “training” boils down to “wash your hands and don't steal anything”). A little thing called Google, people. Use that $500 smart phone in your pocket and a little f@$king common sense.
3. Ring the the @^%$# bell and then not know what the @#%$ you want. This isn't the Mercedes showroom, I'm not going to twist your arm to buy some ground chuck. You either want it or you don't. Same with indecisive people (“I don't know what to have for dinner”) and people who can't make a six dollar purchase without consulting with someone on their cellphones.
4. Cellphones.
5. Mosey on up to me when I'm filling the case and ask, “What kinda deals you got today, buddy?” Do you want me to stop what I'm doing and recite you the entire ad, or can I just hand you a circular like everybody else? Or, here's an idea, look at all the pretty colored signs hanging above the case.
6. Try to negotiate the price. What is this #^%$ Abu Dhabi? This isn't a garage sale or a flea market. The price is the price. It's set by suits in Suit Town and there ain't nothing I can do for you. See #1.
7. Call for stupid reasons (especially during rush hours). Hey, I really enjoy stopping what I'm doing, putting down my knife, washing my hands, drying them and then taking your so-so-vital call. It's like taking a little break EVERY TWO MINUTES!And if it's something like, “Um, I bought a roast a couple, um, weeks, ago, and um it doesn't look so good. Is it, um, still safe to eat?” or “I'm going to be in the store in a couple hours and I was wondering what kind of steaks you have?' I'm going to hang up on you. Not really. I can't. But I'm hanging up on you in my mind. Special kudos, though, to the ones who call during the rush to ask “What kinda deals you got today, buddy?”
8. Ring the #&^%^&$%#$ buzzer when I'm standing right there. I may not have noticed you yet but a clearing of the throat or a shuffling of the feet will get my attention. Ringing the buzzer in that situation is like shouting at me. I'm a stressed man with sharp knives. I do not like people yelling at me.
9. Expect preferential treatment because you namedrop. I hate just about every #^^%#ing executive in the company so telling me you're golf buddies with him is just going to get you spit in your hamburger. Not really. Maybe.
10. And the final, sure fire way, to really, royally, piss-off a hard working meat-cutter is to waltz into the meat locker in your suit and tie and clipboard and proceed to tell me how to do my job and why I am not living up to corporate standards. I'm a stressed man with sharp knives; are you really yelling at me?

The Best Christmas Present.

There's an art to gift giving. The perfect present is is one that is both unexpected and indispensable. It's gift says I know you better than you think I do. Or even I know you better than you know yourself. I've been fortunate. I've received more than my share of great gifts in my lifetime.

A few, though, stand out. Early in our marriage my wife surprised me with a leather bomber jacket. I had wanted a leather jacket all my life but had never told anyone. I loved that jacket—and wore that sucker out in a few years (ripped it on a barbed wire fence, left it in the rain, kept it in the jeep until the dye faded to white). One year Matt gave me a little pocket multi-tool that turned out to be the perfect size to slip into a pocket or a fishing vest. I used that a lot until it was lost—like all things seem to disappear in my fishing vest. A former boss gave me a leather bound journal--which became my lifetime hike log. My brother gave me a stainless steel thermos which kind of baffled me at the time, but quickly became indispensable. I was a crushed a couple years ago when I dropped and broke the cap. It was the perfect size between small and large—and I have not found anything to replace it.

I didn't know I wanted or needed any of these things—until they became irreplaceable and deeply intertwined with my life.

The best present I ever received , though, was the last one I ever got from my mom and dad. It must have been the last year I lived at home in 1983. It was a Black & Decker tool set from K-Mart that contained a circular saw, a jig saw and a drill. At the time I was a college graduate slacker working at McDonald's and mass-mailing resumes to ad agencies across the country. The gift of tools was both unexpected and maybe a little bit wishful on their part. I promptly put them back in the box and forgot about them.

Flash forward to today. Those three tools have followed me my whole life. I have used them on and off again for thirty some years. They haven't wore out. They haven't failed. I can't think of anything else I owned back in Michigan that is still with me today. They were the perfect gift both practically and symbolically.

All a parent can hope for is to bestow upon their child the tools to succeed in life. Do that, and you've given the greatest gift of all.

Merry Christmas Mom and Dad. Thank you forever.

Oh! Christmas tree!

My cramping hand clutched desperately for the flimsy limb in the top of a forty-foot pine tree, swaying in the first winter gusts of the year. Hanging on for dear life, I uttered a silent prayer that I would survive—preferably with all limbs and head intact. Of course I already had doubts about my head. After all, what in the hell was an out-of-shape, overweight forty-five-year-old man doing in the top of a giant pine tree anyway?Bear attack? Wilderness panic? No, my friends, it was something much more insidious and frightening. Christmas spirit.

           Those of you who know me are probably already shaking your heads. My reputation as a devoted Scrooge is long and well deserved. People I don’t even know stop me in the store in the middle of August. “Only five more months ‘til Christmas,” they chuckle merrily as my eyes bug out of my head. Everybody knows I hate the holidays. But as I getter older, I also seem to get a little wiser. All this hating is not good for the soul. Hating things you can’t change is pointless and self-destructive. Instead of hating Christmas, maybe like old Ebenezer and the Grinch, I could learn to love it. So after the Great Thanksgiving/Smoked Turkey/ Home Inferno (see earlier blog) I decided I’d actually put up some lights this year.

It had literally been years since I had bothered to put any up lights. I had no idea what worked and what didn’t and the whole mess looked like an octopus eating spaghetti in a string factory. Naturally the few that were easy to untangle where the ones that didn’t work. The ones that worked I managed to drop and shatter many of the bulbs. Hours went by. Finally, through persistence, cannibalism and redneck technology, I was able to cobble together several working strings of lights.

Where to put them? I could decorate the front of the house but we never go out there in the evening. Who was I trying to cheer up? The neighbors? Hell no. Those people wouldn’t even help a guy fight a fire at one in the morning. No I was trying to cheer myself up so I strung them around our back patio. The end result was kind of nice, but a little lacking… Then I started to eye the giant pine tree that dominates our backyard. The previous owners had bought a live Christmas tree one year and, when they were done, planted it in the middle of the yard. The thing is now a Sequoia. It’s home to all sorts of critters and birds. I’ve seen whole flocks of birds fly out of it. Rodents, rabbits, stray cats and, I think, a couple spotted owls live in there. We once lost a dog for a week in this tree. El Chupacabra and Bigfoot party in there once and while.

So anyway there I am standing on my back patio holding a string of Christmas lights and eyeing the tallest pine tree in Arizona. The rest I guess is predictable.

I strung together all the remaining lights that still worked, climbed atop the roof of my house and tied a rock to the end of the lights. Thus I made a giant rope of lights and proceeded to attempt to lasso the pine tree. Surprisingly my plan worked. On my second or third toss I managed to snag an upper limb. All that remained was to climb down and carefully wrap the string of lights around and around the tree. Of course this proved more difficult than it seemed. The string of lights kept snagging on lower branches and required careful looping and swinging of the lights to lay them in place. Imagine a giant jump rope. My wife and son came out and helped me for a while—even though I’m quite sure they thought I was absolutely nuts. That’s the kind of sport they are. When someone in your family is borderline deranged, you learn to humor them.

Things were pretty much under control when she went back into the house. I was making progress. Just one remaining snag… I stood on the top of a stepladder to get a better angle, started swinging my jump rope string of lights and made another beautiful loop up into the tree exactly where I wanted. It landed on a large nest in a branch directly above me. It was perfect shot—except the nest it smacked turned out not to be a nest. More of a hive really. A giant beehive. Suddenly there are about four million bees zooming towards my head. Something told me there weren’t going to sing me Christmas carols.

Those who believe that man was never meant to fly has never stood atop a step ladder while being attacked by a swarm of bees. I don’t actually remember jumping from the ladder, but suddenly I was halfway across the yard and I still hadn’t touched the ground. I can honestly say I have never moved faster in my life. I would’ve won Olympic Gold if beehive sprinting were an event. I was halfway down the block before I even slowed down.

Carefully, I slowly crept back into the yard and snuck into the house when the bees weren’t looking. There I waited them out. Then, just before dark, I went back outside and finished the job. With the satisfaction of a job well done, I plugged the lights in and stepped back to view my masterpiece.

The top of tree did not light up.

Unbelievingly, I carefully looked to see if the top string got unplugged. Nope. It was plugged. They just didn’t light up. I couldn’t believe it. After all that work… It was incredibly depressing. I couldn’t go to sleep that night. Then, when I did, I dreamed of exploding lights and laughing bees. The next day I got up and went to work. But all I thought about where those lights. On the way home that night, I bought two more strings of lights, drove directly home and started unwrapping the tree. I pulled down every strand of lights off that @*&%#$ tree and climbed back on the roof with a new lasso.

The problem was, after a day of meat-cutting, my arm sucked. The first toss missed the tree entirely. The lights sailed past and flew to the ground with giant crash. An entire string of lights was smashed. Undaunted I hooked up a new set and tossed it again. Another bad toss. This one went left and low. Way too low. Unfortunately it hooked on the tree good and when I tried to retrieve it, I ended up snapping a string in half. Now I’m angry. In a matter of minutes, not only have completely undid all my work, but I’ve wrecked two strings of lights in the process. I was so mad I briefly considered picking a fight with bees. Instead I went in the house and yelled at the dog.

I brooded on those damn lights until my next day off. It happened to be Arizona’s coldest day in five years but I didn’t care. I went to the dollar store and bought ten more strings of lights. The tree was getting decorated—whether I lived to see it or not. This time, however, I knew I had to throw caution to the wind. This time I was going to climb to the top of the tree myself.

I don’t know what kind of pine tree it is exactly, but the thing is thick. I got out my aluminum extension ladder and found that, fully extended the ladder barely reached from the outside of the tree to the tree trunk—about five feet off the ground. Oh well, that gave me an avenue into the tree. From there I began to climb. There were so many tree branches, however, I had to worm and contort myself upwards. There were massive piles of dry pine needles everywhere—and they infested my hair, my ears, my clothes and even my eyes. Pine sap soon covered my hands and clothes. As I got towards the top of the tree, a cold wind began blowing. My hands started cramping from clutching the branches. The tree began to tilt backwards from my weight.

Actually, it was kind of fun.

Then another gust of wind blew me back further. A bee buzzed around my head. I knew it was time to get the job done and get the hell out of there. Clutching the tree trunk with one hand, I attempted to tie the end of the string of lights around a branch as high as I could reach. Easier said than done. The wind started blowing the top of tree back and forth. I started to get seasick. Three bees buzzed around my head.

Finally I just wrapped the string around a branch three times, knowing full well it wouldn’t hold and shinnied, fell, tumbled down the tree and hacked my way out. Finished, I didn’t even bother turning the damn things on to see if they worked. I just plugged them into the timer and walked away.

Later that night, after the dinner table was cleared and the family was settling down in the living room, I asked my wife to take a little walk with me. It’s freezing out, she said. “Come on just out to the street and back.” We walked out into our cold, dark neighborhood and walked out to the street. “Wow.” The tree was lit up from top to bottom. We stood and admired it for a long time.

“It’s beautiful, “ she said and then turned and uttered the words that sent shivers down my spine. “But it makes the rest of the yard look dark. Maybe you should…”

All across the neighborhood, a terrible scream echoed through the night.

--December 2006

Christmas KISS (Keep It Simple, Santa)

Christmas KISS: Keep it Simple, Santa.

People, I'm sure, get tired of hearing of me bitch about Christmas. Every year I invariably look forward to, then dread, and then am disappointed in Christmas. It's a pattern, I realized, that deserves some inspection. What is it about Christmas that bums me out so much? Is it the hard work? The money spent? The rampant materialism? The overt commercialization? The religious/political posturing?

No, I've concluded. All of those things are evident everyday in our decadent and decaying world. No, what really bugs me about Christmas is all the little chores and obligations that are forced on me against my will. None of them particularly onerous, but when combined, tend to ruin my zen. In short, Christmas is one giant complication in my otherwise simple life.

No, it's not the materialistic greed or over-commercialization of Christmas that bother me. If you've got the money to spend, spend it. There is definitely a satisfying element to finding the perfect gift—something you know will surprise, touch and inspire someone you love. My problem is when your spending becomes this herculean feat of epic contortion and complication wherein not only do you become mired in stress and conflict but your self-inflicted vortex of hopeless, romanticized idealism begins to suck poor innocent clerks, cashiers and yes, meat-cutters into your impossible passage to perfection.

I enjoy working. I don't mind when it's busy. I even enjoy taking a special order for a roast of a particular size or shape. What I hate, what I absolutely hate, is when somebody wants, needs, demands something we don't carry. Then it becomes a huge complication. We have to take the request. we have to make phone calls and inquires. We have to work out a price, then contact the customer back. We have to call back and make the order. Then we have to schedule the pick-up and then figure out how to sell the rest of the oddball product in order to make a profit on it (usually doesn't happen). Times that by a dozen and you have the makings of a ruined day.

Now this is just me. I know good business is built on that kind of above and beyond customer service. And people with great managerial skills handle these kind of complications on a daily, hourly basis. I know that. But it ain't me, babe. I am happiest in work (and life) when I am focused a a single task. When I am working hard and fast and “in the groove,” I am in a good place. Christmas orders and questions interrupt the groove.

To many people, this is just life. Complications are necessary in the pursuit of perfection.

It occurs to me that this is what ruins Christmas for a lot of people. We make these huge efforts to make sure everything is perfect. We over commit to a dozen little rituals, traditions and obligations. We go on some quest for the holy grail of the unattainable... and are disappointed when we can't find it. This is what a lot of us do in life. I was fishing with a friend the other day at a lonesome high mountain lake and he looked over at me and said, “how does it get any better than this? And why do I never have time to do this? We've done something wrong with our lives striving to pay for stuff that does nothing to make us happy, tied down to jobs that make us miserable, when all it takes to make me happy is a forty dollar rod and reel.”

Exactly right. Amid the hustle and bustle this season we all need to take a breath, think about what really makes us happy and focus on the little things of the season that we enjoy (Christmas lights, sappy movies, Irish Cream and mistletoe in my case). Don't stress if the post office loses your package, you couldn't find the right color sweater, you forgot to mail Aunt Edna a card or the butcher bungles your order for Scandinavian caviar. Take a deep breath and, when in doubt, keep it simple, Santa.

And, yes, the butcher wouldn't mind a new rod and reel.