NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/travel/17120

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From: [e-mail] (mark.r.leeper)
Subject: Arizona and New Mexico (part 2 of 4)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 16:06:05 GMT
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=======================cut here to print===================



Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 17



move were three Indians: Juh, Naiche, and Geronimo.  But that's a
different story.

     About a mile and a half from the road, you can walk to Fort Bowie.
On the way you pass the old stage station that started it all.  There is
a ranger station next to the fort's ruins with a rather affable ranger.
Little more than the foundations and a few walls set in protective adobe
remains.  Yet the fort seems very big.  It also had some surprising
comforts, such as a steam-driven icemaker.  There are still angry
territorial battles going on here, I discovered, as a red ant bit the
back of my right knee from inside the pants leg.

     I asked the ranger if over the last few years more visitors were
showing more sympathy for the Apaches.  "Only the uninformed," he said.
He then talked for about ten minutes about how vicious the Apaches
really were and how the other tribes did not want them around.  They had
seized the land from the Athabascan Indians before them, etc.

     After a while we headed back.  The whole hike took about three
hours.  Further down the road we saw the site where the Apaches ambushed
a wagon two days after Cochise's escape.

     Our next stop was Chiricahua National Monument.  This is a park
full of rock formations and huge boulders stacked so they look like a
slight wind would topple the stack.  Actually that is a single piece of
rock when you see that a local volcano spewed the rock in columns with
more than one kind of rock.  Erosion removed one sort of rock and left
the other, leaving weird formations.

     There are many impressive sights, but I am not sure how to convey
them in a log.  Maybe Evelyn will do better.  We left this park about 5
PM and at 6:30 PM got to Tombstone.

     Evelyn had found a recommendation for a motel that is more like a
bed and breakfast.  It is just a private attempt at a motel and is more
like sleeping in someone's back room.  It is furnished much like you
would furnish a house.  It is two blocks from the center of Tombstone.

     As Evelyn says, Tombstone nicknamed itself "The Town Too Tough To
Die," but at sundown it gives a darn good imitation of dying.  What a
sleepy little burg!  There is one place to eat in town that we saw open.
Their Mexican food was pretty good by New Jersey standards, not that
that is saying much.  They couldn't survive in a state with a Hispanic
name with Mexican food that wasn't pretty good by New Jersey standards.
We tried a local brand of soda, "Doc Holiday" ("Double Barrel of Flavor"
and "A Real Blast").  (Note that the real Doc spelled his name with a
double L.)  The flavor was like Dr. Pepper.

     October 15, 1992:  The room wasn't totally comfortable.  To use the
air conditioner you had to blow the curtains all over the place, making
the room visible from the street, but some clever folding and tucking











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 18



with the use of a paperclip I had brought solved the problem.  You might
not think it, but paperclips have a lot of uses.  I put 25 of them on a
half an index card and keep that in my pocket calendar.  Many times they
have been useful.

     The room was actually pretty nice considering it was cheaper than a
Motel 6 (considerably).  It had a kitchenette, two wide beds, and a sort
of bunkhouse feel but lots of furniture and a lot of room.

     We went into town and ate at a restaurant called the Longhorn.  I
might have wanted to keep looking for the Brie or at least the Sharp
Cheddar, but I doubt we'd have found it.

     I should probably explain what the town of Tombstone did to itself.
On both sides of the main drag the buildings are pretty much as they
looked in 1881 when the gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place.  (Uh-oh!
I'm going to have to give more background info, aren't I?)  Of course,
the stores are all things like souvenirs, silver jewelry, etc.  It is
all tourist trap, of course.  What do they have of genuine historical
interest?  Nothing that is free.  They have the Arizona Territorial
Museum.  That is free and probably a nickel too expensive at that.  It
is a store front set up to look like the inside of a mine with various
displays, none explained at all.  Presumably we are looking at goods of
the period, but also there are items present that are clearly not from
the period.  I do not remember ever seeing an exhibit that so over-rated
itself by calling itself a museum.

     Then there is the O.K. Corral itself.  What can I tell you about
the famous gunfight?  First, if you have seen it dramatized in a film,
don't believe what you saw.  There have been a bunch of film versions
including HOUR OF THE GUN and GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL, both by John
Sturges.  There was John Ford's MY DARLING CLEMENTINE and lots and lots
of others.  And no two even tell similar stories.  That should tell you
that at most one film can have gotten the story right.  Experts agree
that one film does not exist.  The story just does not make for a good
film.  The high point of excitement is a two-minute gun battle towards
the middle of the real story.  It is probably the most famous gun battle
of the violent West, but it settled very little.  And the real story is
fairly complex.  Even now it is tough to assess blame.  The real
characters are painted in shades of gray.  Wyatt Earp is a lousy choice
for a hero.  This story has no heroes or villains.  It is a lot easier
to invent a new story than to tell the original.

     Let me tell you just what happened that one day.  Previously the
Clanton and McLaury families had been involved in activities on the
mossy side of the law.  The Earps had been attempting to enforce the law
in the most brutal and vicious manner they could muster.  There was a
lot of bad blood between them.

     On Tuesday, October 25, 1881, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury were
peacefully in town.  Doc Holliday and Virgil Earp had both verbally











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 19



abused Ike and Tom.  Wyatt found McLaury and challenged him to fight.
McLaury refused.  Earp pulled out his gun and beat McLaury with it.  A
short time later Wyatt found Frank McLaury--Tom's brother--breaking a
minor city ordinance.  There are all kinds of conflicting accounts about
what had already happened that day and what was about to happen.  At
least by one account Virgil and Morgan Earp found Ike Clanton and
started to argue with him.  Virgil pulled out a gun and slugged Clanton
with it.  They dragged Clanton to the courthouse and had him fined $25
for carrying concealed weapons.  Tom McLaury entered the courtroom
cussing out the Earps.  Wyatt pistol-whipped him and threw him out.  An
hour later Wyatt got a message that Frank and Tom McLaury, Billy and Ike
Clanton, and Billy Claiborne wanted to see the Earps at the O.K. Corral.
The Earps and Doc Holliday went.  There was a three-minute gunfight that
left the McLaurys and Billy Clanton dead.  Morgan and Virgil Earp were
badly wounded.  Doc Holliday was slightly wounded.  The town sheriff
arrested Wyatt and the Doc.  Of course, there is a lot more to the story
both before and after the gunfight, but it goes beyond the scope of this
telling.

     This one gunfight is probably the best known two minutes of the
town's history.  In general, the town was probably no more wild than
most towns in the area.  It just had its moments.  We did see the famous
corral, though actually the fight was not in the corral area; it was
more in the back yard area that gave people a shortcut into the corral.
They have nine dummies standing there looking like over-dramatic images
of the gunfight participants.  Press a button and there is a recorded
description of the gunfight.

     Also on the main road is the Bird Cage Theater.  Notables like
Caruso and Eddie Foy had played there.  It was the center of
entertainment for old Tombstone.  Most of the entertainment seems to
have come from drunken cowboys causing trouble.  Once a production of
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN had a specially trained bloodhound chasing little
Eliza over the simulated ice floes.  A well-meaning drunken cowpoke
saved Eliza by shooting the bloodhound.  The cowboy spent the night in
jail and the next day offered both to pay for the dog and to give his
saddle horse as part of the payment.

     Of course, dogs weren't the only residents of the stage in danger.
There was a bullet-catching act where a magician would have an assistant
shoot blanks at him, then he would spit bullets out of his mouth as if
he had caught them in his teeth,  Stupid act for an audience like the
one in Tombstone.  Sure enough, one drunken cowboy tried to help with
the act by shooting more bullets to be caught by the magician.  Luckily
a friend recognized that it was anti-social to shoot at people and
deflected his hand.  They still call attention to the bullet holes in
the stage.

     The building actually served more than one entertainment need at
once.  There were two rows of box seats on each side with curtains.  For
a price you could get one of the hostesses to sit and enjoy the show











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 20



with you.  For a bit more you could get her to close the curtains and
provide her own entertainment.  The boxes on the side were the reason
the theater was called the Bird Cage Theater.  Also, the claim is made
that the theater was the inspiration for the song "She Was Only a Bird
in a Gilded Cage." The museum is full of a lot of exhibits of dubious
authenticity, like the curios of Pancho Villa.  They may be real, of
course, but they don't appear to be guaranteed so by anyone unbiased.

     Other buildings to visit include the bar owned by Big Nose Kate.
Kate went by more than one name.  She was known as Big Nose Katie Elder
or as Big Nose Katie Fisher.  Under the Clantons' thumb, she testified
that Doc Holliday had robbed a stage.  Later she ended up as Holliday's
mistress (some say wife).  I have never seen the film THE SONS OF KATIE
ELDER and have wondered if the name is just a coincidence.

     After that we went to Boot Hill.  That is some distance from the
center of town.  I did sort of a double-take on the sign announcing Boot
Hill which said "Boot Hill Cemetery and Jewish Memorial."  The sign
described more of what was inside but there was no further explanation
of the "Jewish Memorial."  While just about every other historic site
you pay for, Boot Hill Cemetery and Jewish Memorial is free.  You can
get to it only by walking through a souvenir store, but that is fine by
me.  All the more so because the woman running the place appears to be
Indian.  I don't mean to be racist about this, but it is nice to see an
Indian making a profit from all this.  We did buy from her, getting a
souvenir for our tchatchka table.  We walked around Boot Hill, finding
few familiar names but noting that all the Chinese were in one corner.
There was an arrow to the Jewish Memorial.  Our curiosity piqued, we
walked a fair distance down the hill and there really was a memorial
dedicated to Jews and Indians who have died of persecution.  The
memorial is only eight years old.  I am not surprised that a Jewish
memorial would show empathy for Indians.  I just was surprised to see it
on Boot Hill.  (Not that Jews were unknown in Tombstone at the time of
the Earps.  Sheriff Jim Behan had no use for Wyatt Earp and a big part
of it was a love triangle with a Jewish actress who came to town in 1879
and stayed.  Josephine Sarah Marcus was loved by both Jim Behan and
Wyatt Earp.  It is not hard to see why.  There is an extant photo of
her.  Standards of beauty change and pictures of women at the time
almost invariably seem not at all attractive today.  Josephine Sarah
Marcus's picture still is attractive (not to say out-and-out sexy) in
the 1990s.  "Josie" eventually married Wyatt.)

     Most of the names were unfamiliar on Boot Hill.  We did find the
tombs of the McLaurys and Billy Clanton together in one corner.  There
was also a tombstone to "John Dunlap killed by Jeff Milton."  This was
"Three-Fingered Jack" Dunlap, a bank and train robber.  The evening of
February 15, 1900, Three-Fingered Jack was one of five outlaws who tried
to rob a train outside of Fairbank, Arizona, nine miles from Tombstone.
They fired at express messenger Jeff Milton and shattered Milton's left
arm.  Milton was able to grab a shotgun and return fire.  Jack was hit
eleven times from one shot.  The others managed to drag Dunlap away and











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 21



put him in his saddle, but Jack apparently died anyway.  Hence the grave
we found.  (But I *love* having the right reference book at the right
time.  The above info came from the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS,
a nifty book by one Bill O'Neal.)

     Following that we went to Bisbee.  This was once the best known
city in Arizona.  It was the home of the Queen Mine.  The mine yielded
more than $2 billion in copper, gold, lead, silver, and zinc.  After a
walk around town, we took the mine tour.  You take a mine train 1500
feet into the mine and get a lecture on what mining was like.  There is
a discussion of the various drills that were used, how dynamite was
placed, and the bell codes that were used with the shaft elevator to
tell the operator on top where to position the car.  It was fairly
informative.

     After that we drove to Tucson.  We checked into our motel.  We went
out for Arabic food (falafel, tahini, hoummous, etc.).  Back at the
motel we listened to the second Presidential debate and wrote until we
got tired.

     October 16, 1992:  It was a real pleasure waking up and not having
to pack up the car.  We had breakfast at the motel (included in the
motel price).

     Our first destination of the morning was the Arizona-Sonora Desert
Museum.  As we approached, the population of saguaro (pronounced sa-
WAR-o) cactus seemed to increase.  We'd seen cactus all over, but not
much saguaro.  When most people picture cactus, saguaro is what they are
picturing.  It is the only breed of cactus I know of that is more than a
foot or so tall.  The tall cactus that is often in human-like shapes or
pitchfork shapes--that's saguaro.  And it does grow in lots of really
weird shapes and postures, although it is the older saguaro that is in
weird shapes.  Saguaro less than a hundred years old generally is just
the single column.  Saguaro is in a sense a parasite.  It will grow only
in the shade; it really needs for its seeds to fall in the shade of a
tree.  Eventually its roots will squeeze out the roots of the tree that
shaded it and it will kill it.  In a sense, both its shape and its
behavior are human.

     The Desert Museum is really a collection of small buildings and
open areas that make up a natural history museum and zoo of the flora,
fauna, and minerals of the desert.

     As we came in a woman was giving a talk on tarantula spiders and
showing one to her audience.  Toward the end she was trying to show that
the spider would crawl onto her hand.  However, the spider had other
ideas.  Evelyn suggested her hand might be warmer and stuck her hand
into the spider's box.  "I'd rather you didn't do that," said the woman.
"I'll second that," I thought.













Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 22



     Well, what sort of thing is at the Desert Museum?  Pretty much
everything you would expect.  There are exhibits of arthropods.  There
is a mineral exhibit--the most spectacular aspect of which most people
missed, incidentally.  That is a microscopic look at the minerals, many
of which were in brilliant colors.  You see gila monsters and snakes.

     As part of the earth sciences exhibit, they have seventy-five feet
of fiberglass cave to show you the experience of going through virgin
cave.  That is one thing that Carlsbad with its elaborate walkways
cannot provide.  As fake caves go, this is one of the best, far better
than Tiger Balm Garden in Hong Kong.

     The zoo aspect of the museum I tried to be mellow about.  I have a
real love/hate relationship going with zoos.  I love them and would
gladly vote to outlaw them.  They are, for the most part, cruel usage of
animals.  The animals you most want to see, in this case the black bear
and the cats (like mountain lions and bobcats), tend to be animals who
range over many miles a day.  Containing them to even the largest of
feasible enclosures is just not giving them enough room.  I am not
currently an animal rights advocate, but it sure wouldn't take much to
push me over the line.

     I said earlier that I didn't trust the Bird Cage Theater to have
the highest of honesty in its presentation.  The Desert Museum you would
think would have higher standards.  We passed an employee painting fake
green lichen on rocks.  Elsewhere we saw a camera crew trying to film an
uncooperative tortoise.  The tortoise didn't seem very happy about all
the intruders and equipment in his pen.

     Perhaps the most interesting exhibit is that of convergent
evolution.  They are pairs of plants that look very nearly identical but
in fact are from very different families.  Faced with similar
conditions, they solved the same problems the same way.  Typically one
plant will be from Arizona, and one from South Africa.

     Other features included an aviary, a cactus garden, an obnoxious
family with two kids fighting over a camera, a stone garden where kids
and Evelyn could look for minerals (special salting upped the odds of a
successful hunt).

     The last things we saw were the aviary, the cactus garden, the
aquarium, and the inevitable book and souvenir shop.

     Nearby is Saguaro National Monument.  It is just a big natural area
with a concentration of everything else we have been seeing,
particularly saguaro cacti.  Since the shapes of saguaro are weird and
random, they are interesting to see.  It is very unusual to see healthy
saguaro.  Most have either holes from birds pecking or other blights.
Maybe it is the natural condition of something 200 years old to be
constantly riddled with diseases and infirmity.  In a sense it seems
just since you know each saguaro killed its benefactor--the tree that











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 23



shaded it when it was small--and now the little guys are licking the
saguaro.  You have the whole plot of a melodramatic gangster movie like
SCARFACE in the life of the saguaro cactus.

     We took a nature walk of a half mile but were disappointed.  We saw
two small lizards and a few birds, and the only other animals we saw
were insects.

     From there we went back to Tucson.  I was starting to look a bit
shaggy and we did want to make a social call this trip, so I wanted to
get a haircut.  While I was doing that, Evelyn was scanning the
newspaper and noticed that GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS was playing and she
wanted to see it before it disappeared.

     Of course there was little point for me to write a film review
since it could never be posted in reasonable time.  What incredible
luxury!  To see a major first-run film without having to write a review!
And the film turned out to be right down my alley.  I love an intense,
angry drama.  This one was riveting.  While covering the same territory,
this is a better play than DEATH OF A SALESMAN.  In DEATH OF A SALESMAN
the system is just mildly uncaring for the salesmen.  Here it is
viciously intent on squeezing the salesmen for what they are worth and
then throwing them aside.  Miller's management are stones, Mamet's are
pimps.  Actually, I have been surprised at how many good films have come
out this year.  It is still a small percentage, but there are many more
unusual and risky films coming out.  Even with the vast majority being
pap, there are still more good films being made.  One summer had FAR AND
AWAY, UNFORGIVEN, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, and a few
more that are as good but don't come to mind.  That's pretty good.

     Dinner was at Po' Folks, a pretty good chain.  Relatively cheaply
you can get an all-you-can-eat vegetable side dishes dinner.  Good idea.
We hit a grocery and headed back to the hotel.

     October 17, 1992:  Free breakfast at the motel restaurant.  Then
into Tucson to see the University museum.  We got to the area early and
walked around the town and the campus.  It certainly is a nice-looking
campus.

     We went into the Arizona State Museum on the University of Arizona
campus.  Here I am expecting a stodgy institution for the serious study
of Indian anthropology.  I get in and a panel explains that humans and
dinosaurs did not live at the same time.  Who would be coming to a
museum like this and still think that dinosaurs and humans were ever
contemporaries?  Another panel asks why we bother studying anthropology.
The explanation they give is:  "1) It is interesting.  2) It is curious
[whatever that means].  3) [And here is the explanation of why we really
study cultures.]"

     I am not sure what it means to say that the study of other cultures
is "interesting" and "curious."  It seems to me a defense, not an











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 24



explanation.

     Anyway, the museum is mostly about Stone Age man up through
contemporary Indians.

     You see pottery and Stone Age tools and weapons.  There is a nice
diorama showing Neolithic peoples bringing down mammoths.  They then
segue into prehistoric culture in the Americas.  The earliest people in
this area were Indians called the Hohokam.  Nobody knows what they
called themselves.  "Hohokam" is Pima Indian language for "The Vanished
Ones."

     In the Indian culture they have woven bowls in a "Man in the Maze"
pattern.  The Man in the Maze is Iitoi.  He was the only human to
survive the Great Flood in Pima myth.  This was the flood that ended the
last age and brought the modern age.  I don't have the full myth, so I
don't know why Iitoi is portrayed as being in a maze.

     The collection includes terra cotta statues of animals.  Perhaps
one of the most interesting pieces is one whose explanation is not
given.  It is a piece of stone carved into an "H" with one stem about
half the length of the others.  I think it is given a religious
interpretation.  That is the explanation given to anything
incomprehensible found in archaeology.  Since religion is the one area
in our society where rationality is not required and where logic
supposedly need not apply, it becomes easy when we find the
unexplainable in other cultures to assume it is the result of religious
irrationality there.

     One thing worth seeing is a mammoth with a spearhead.  It proved
that Native Americans were in this continent at the time of the mammoths
11,000 years ago.  That settled a long-standing controversy.

     The museum also shows crafts of modern Indian peoples, including a
step-by-step explanation of how pottery is made.  There is a mezzanine
with more Indian artifacts and some wildlife displays.

     When we left we stopped at a bookstore in town and while we didn't
find anything to buy, I did find a fairly interesting booklet, 120 pages
long, called "Voters: Check This Out."  It is a voter's guide to
propositions s/he will be voting for on November 3.  Now they are none
of my business, but they are really interesting to read anyway.  You
always find two or three that are pure common sense.   On the face of
them they cannot possibly fail.  But somebody will be richer if they do
fail.  These are the ones that spur the most controversy and in the end
they haven't a hope of passing.

     Suppose, to take an example, it has never been made illegal to turn
stray cats into meat pies.  Now somebody wants to do that in a state I
will call Fritz.  All of a sudden you discover there is an organization
you have never heard of before called Fritzians for the Preservation of











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 25



Cats, and ironically it wants to defeat the initiative to change the law
in Fritz.  They will claim that there are already too many cats around
and it is making life miserable for all the cats.  Stray cats are
turning mean and turning on other cats.  Also, they carry diseases that
are infecting other cats.  To protect cat rights it is desperately
important that we continue to turn stray cats into meat pies.  Further,
the bill would be an absolute disaster for the state of Fritz.  The
wording is so loose that it will mean the veterinarians will no longer
be able to treat cats.

     Then there is the spectre that this really is just the thin edge of
the wedge of cats' rights radicals.  Their real agenda is to make it
illegal for farmers to protect their sheep from bigger cats of prey.
The proposition will end up costing Fritzians billions of dollars.

     A huge multi-million dollar campaign will go on television telling
people about the nasty future in store if the proposition passes.
Billboards on highways threaten that the state of Fritz will be totally
bankrupt hiring the extra law enforcement necessary for this totally
unneeded bill, a bill that goes far beyond what any other state has done
about the problem.  Veteran congressmen will make statements that
passing the bill will be playing right into the hands of the Japanese.
Not only that, it will send half a million jobs to other states.

     In the end, the citizens of Fritz vote overwhelmingly that they
want stray cats turned into meat pies.  It's the American way.

     I have seen this exact campaign waged time and again over no
smoking areas in restaurants, over deposits on soda bottles, over
banning steel-jawed traps, over banning dangerous insecticides, over
protecting forests.  They always work on the assumption that we are
totally powerless to control side-effects of laws.  Occasionally this
campaign fails and the proposition passes.  Come back in two years and
ask the people about the bill and they are really smug that the
proposition has worked so well in their state and other states have been
too stupid to pass similar bills.

     In Arizona the current proposition is trying to ban particularly
vicious animal traps.  Common sense says yes, so those who want to use
those traps have rolled out "the campaign."  The American way of life
depends on steel-jaw leg-hold traps.

     Our next stop was the Casa Grande National Monument.  This was the
first protected United States national site.  It is a Hohokam building
35 feet tall and estimated to weigh 3000 tons.  The Hohokam migrated
north from Mexico back around 300 B.C., before the border was so heavily
guarded.  Within about a thousand years they'd occupied large sections
of what is now Arizona.  They were engineers to rival the Egyptians.
They built the biggest prehistoric canal system anywhere.  They
introduced barley and cotton to this area.  They used the lost wax
process for making jewelry.  Of course, the Europeans would use the same











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 26



process when they thought of it.  It just took the Europeans a few more
centuries to think of it.

     Some time around 1250 the Hohokam started to disappear and by 1400
they were gone entirely.

     While they were around, they had canals twenty feet deep and eighty
feet wide and would have a town just about every three miles on the
canals.  One of those towns was built around Casa Grande. It is four
stories of mud and caliche, with ladders to get from floor to floor.
Holes in the walls seem to be measuring periods of eighteen and a half
years through their view of the sky.  There is a ball court where they
would play games with a rubber ball.  Also there are several other
buildings whose purpose is not currently known.

     We continued on the road to Phoenix.  Our first stop was the Heard
Museum.  This is an art museum but it is almost exclusively an Indian
art museum.  You see baskets, jewelry, and pottery.   There is a hogan
to enter and a huge collection of kachina dolls.  There was a guided
tour almost as soon as we arrived, and we took it.  It was clear that
the woman running the tour respected Native American customs, and may
even have performed many of the rituals.  What was unclear was whether
she understood them herself; if so, neither she nor the museum explained
them well.  Many of her descriptions included unexplained terms.  When
the tour was over, we were invited to see local Indians do tribal
dances.

     There were two things very wrong with this presentation.  The first
is that, like many things in the museum, the dance was under-explained.
Its significance was not explained, nor its syntax.  More on that later.
We arrived after a second announcement of the dancers, fifteen minutes
after they supposedly had started.  Even then, it took then about ten
minutes more.  The music was made by two boys and two men.  The two boys
had instruments called rasps; one of the men had a water drum--sort of a
bowl inverted over a tub of water.  One of the boys on the rasp wore a
surfing T-shirt.  This seemed inappropriate.  A man came dancing in with
a deer head tied to the top of head.  For about five minutes he shuffled
around the floor, presumably imitating a deer in the manner of Indian
dance.  By this point some of the audience starting tiring and leaving.
Then the dance had to stop because the deer head was not properly tied.
For five minutes the water drum man was trying to tie the deer head back
onto the dancer.  By this point about half or two-thirds of the audience
had walked out.  Evelyn and I decided to leave also.  As we were leaving
I could see the tour guide from earlier giving a dirty look to people
who were leaving.

     This was certainly a case where there was plenty of blame to go
around:
     1. The audience was being rude.  No doubt about it.
     2. The Indians were not taking the ceremony seriously.  They were
     not prepared.  If this really was a ceremony they had performed











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 27



     many times, why didn't they know how much in advance to set up?
     Why didn't they know how to tie the deer head on securely?  Does it
     show proper respect to have one of the boys in a funny T-shirt?
     3. The museum is the real culprit here.  I have invited non-Jews to
     see only one Jewish ceremony, the Seder.  The reason I picked that
     one is because the ceremony itself is self-explaining.  ("These
     bitter herbs we eat, what is the purpose of them?  It is because
     Pharaoh made our lives bitter in Egypt.")  Performing the ceremony
     is explaining it.  And a *full* explanation would have been the
     difference between a meaningful cultural experience and a whole
     audience watching a man shuffle and grunt with a deer head tied to
     his head. I am not prepared to accept the logic that something is
     good just because it is Indian.  These people who run the Heard
     Museum remind me of the people in the movie SERIAL who seem to have
     adopted Indian ceremonies because it is politically correct and the
     flavor-of-the-month.

     Other features of the museum are a half-hour slide show in which
they introduce you to the area, their ceremonies, and their social
problems (one woman's mother didn't like it when the woman wanted to
marry outside the tribe).  There is a fifteen-minute video called "Myth
of Changing Woman" about a ceremony roughly equivalent to a bas mitzvah.
There is a hands-on section for children that has something to do with
recognizing where an Indian design decomposed into C-shaped figures and
U-shaped figures.  I thought it didn't teach very much about Indian
culture.  The Heard Museum could have served the local Indian population
better.  There was also a temporary exhibit about the art of Maori New
Zealand.

     That done, we got our motel for the night and a little family
business.  We visited my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew.  We went
to a Moroccan restaurant called The Moroccan restaurant.  The appetizers
were very good, but the main course was indifferent.  The belly dancer
was very good, as good as any we'd seen in Egypt.  But her style is one
no longer tolerated in Islamic countries, particularly those where the
fundamentalists are in control.

     October 18, 1992:  Sunday morning in the Phoenix area.  There was a
waffle house right near our motel, but we decided to look around for
another place to eat.  We were on a busy road; it should have been easy.
Just no breakfast places showed up.  Half an hour later we gave up and
went back to the waffle house.  It was pretty mediocre.  Our first stop
was the Champlin Fighter Museum.  This is a museum dedicated to the
fighter plane ever since its inception World War I.  This is the home of
the American Fighter Aces Association, according to the AAA book.

     Actually the active ingredient is two large hangars of fighter
aircraft.  They must have on the order of eighty fighter aircraft.  They
have American, French, German, and Italian fighter planes.  They have
SPADs and Fokkers and Sopwith Camels.  They have Messerschmitts and
Spitfires and Mustangs and a bunch more.  They also have a Soviet tank











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 28



they must have gotten cheaply.  Not all of the planes are for real--some
are reproductions, but if your thing is seeing how aircraft have
evolved, that's okay.  There is a room devoted to machine guns also,
some for fighter planes and some not.  And there are cases displaying
hand arms.  Most peculiar was a German machine gun with a curved barrel
for shooting around corners.  General Dynamics and General Electric--
both arms manufacturers--have provided half-hour videos on the history
of fighter aircraft.

     I don't remember if there are similar museums at Wright-Patterson
in Dayton, Ohio, or at the Air and Space Museum in Washington.  There is
a similar museum outside London at Croydon (that is an RAF museum, I
think).  There is also a Battle of Britain museum a few yards from the
RAF museum, and a similar museum in Brussels.  But I admit I am like a
kid when it comes to airplanes.  I love 'em.

     Out next stop was the center of Phoenix.  We'd been to Phoenix for
the World Science Fiction Convention in 1978, but had heard that the
Civic Center Plaza was completely changed over since then and that it
was covered in order to avoid the heavily beating sun.  That was
apparently the plan at one point, but it never happened.  The Civic
Center Plaza hasn't really changed much in fourteen years.  One thing
that is new is the Arizona Museum of Science and Technology.  This is a
museum right off the Civic Center Plaza.  My first impression was that
it seemed to be a particularly good science museum.  Any such exhibition
is usually made up of two kinds of displays.  There are the dull and the
swamped.  It is a problem particularly if there are a lot of kids in
competition with you since 1962 when they stopped teaching the etiquette
of lines of queues.  I guess I grew up believing in the principle of
seniority in queues.  We called that FIFO, or first-in-first-out.  Today
the rule is MAFS, which stands for most-aggressive-first-served.
Anyway, here they have cut the size of the museum by cutting out a lot
of the dull exhibits.  Most of the exhibits are the kind that would be
swamped, like computer quizzes, automatic blood pressure measurements,
automatic stress measurements, and a stand-inside box of mirrors.  A
huge gravity well lets kids drop coins in and lets them orbit around a
funnel until they finally fall.  Then there is a place where the visitor
can build a catenary out of blocks and stand it up.  Then there are the
two whisper horns.  The science center is really very tiny but it has
its share of interesting exhibits.

     We passed up an opportunity to see Arizona's other major science
exhibit, Biosphere II. You may have read about it.  It is an entirely
self-sufficient community.  It gets nothing from the outside world but
sunlight.  It gives nothing to the outside world.  In order to survive
the people inside have a very sparse diet, but it is sufficient.  When
you live there you live in a world of your own, divorced from the
outside world.

     If this works out they will set up Biosphere III.  It will be
exactly the same but on Christmas and Easter drunks will come to try to











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 29



burn the place down and rape the women.  Then it will be a perfect
replica of the Jewish village in Ukraine where my great-grandfather
lived.

     After the museum we stopped for an ice cream cone, then continued
with the final museum of the day, the Pueblo Grande Museum.  It is a
preserved archaeological site in the middle of Phoenix.  There is a
mound with the remains.  There are the remains of a wall and a small
village.  This site was originally thought to be a temple because it
wasn't completely understood.  This is just one of many Hohokam
dwellings near their canal eighty feet wide and twenty feet deep.

     The Pima Indians came to this area about 1450 and replaced the
Hohokam.  Pima legend says they were led from the east by "Elder
Brother."  No one is sure who Elder Brother was, but I suspect the Pima
made each other paranoid by saying, "Elder Brother is watching you."

     There is also a small museum at Pueblo Grande.  More artifacts, and
there is a nice children's exhibit.

     Then back to the motel.  Dinner was at a local Thai restaurant, the
Siamese Cat.  Very good.

     October 19, 1992:  Breakfast at a local restaurant called JB's.
Good muffins.

     The first part of today was uneventful.  We took Route I-17 north.
Gradually we began to see less desert and more trees.  We left the main
highway to visit Prescott, home of the Smokis.  Smokis are a society of
whites like the freemasons, but they have adopted Indian ceremonials.
They have a museum of Indian artifacts which was supposed to be open but
wasn't.  Instead we went into the center of town and walked around.

     Evelyn saw a Bead Museum.  It was actually a come-on to an ornament
store, but it had a large room that was exhibits of beadwork and
ornaments from all over the world.  I am not an enthusiast of beads and
ornament, but whatever floats Evelyn's boat.

     As we moved further north, there began to be more pine trees.  We
passed through Flagstaff and continued on to the Grand Canyon.  We
parked at the Visitors Center and walked to the rim.

     Now a lot has been said about the effect of seeing the Canyon for
the first time--how it dwarfs a person's ego.  The movie GRAND CANYON
talked about that.  So do some of the guidebooks.

     So I got to the edge and looked down and ... nothing.  What I see
is a very big geological formation.  It is interesting that it is so
big.  It is an interesting fact that at the base the rock is older than
life is on this planet.  Does it shake my image of myself that it is so
big or covers so much time?  No.  I think it is like the age-30 crisis.











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 30



Sometime around when you hit age 30, I have heard, everybody suddenly
hits a crisis when they realize that life is finite and that they are
going to die eventually.  They realize a big fraction of that life is
already over.

     Perhaps I have a different psychology than other people, but even
when I was ten I knew that I was through with at least an eighth and
possibly a sixth of my life.

     As a mathematician and perhaps as a science fiction fan, I am used
to thinking of very large numbers, if great expanses of time and space.
The Grand Canyon does not give me any new perspectives.  It is a big
piece of geology and geography and that is all I see in it.

     As a mathematician I have discovered a piece of new mathematics.  I
discovered facts that were true before the Big Bang, long before the
Canyon was formed.  They are facts that are true as far as the universe
goes, not just across the Canyon.  And I was there, the first of my
species.  I was the first to know these things.  No, I am not lacking in
sense of wonder when I see the Canyon, but there is more wonder in
mathematics.

     This is not to say the Canyon isn't impressive.  Even a squirrel
who was passing by stopped and for about three minutes just looked out
over the Canyon.  Even a squirrel is impressed.

     How do I describe the Canyon to someone who hasn't seen it?  You
have a huge crevasse seventeen to twenty miles wide and a mile deep.  It
is full of mesas with flat tops level with the rim walls.  Then there
are other columns that started the same but were worn down to points.
When you can see a mile down, there is the bright green Colorado River.

     One thing really mars the natural beauty.  I think consciousness
has been raised to the level that nobody drops candy wrappers or film
boxes.  The trail is pretty clean except ....  Smokers just seem not to
believe that cigarette butts are litter.  There are butts on rocks and
on paths.  There are signs, but to no good.  On one lookout point there
was a crevice going down a foot or two.  At the base was a solid square
foot covered with cigarette butts.

     We followed a trail three-quarters of a mile to Yavapai Museum and
lookout point.  The Canyon is so vast that the view is very little
changed after a three-quarter-mile walk.  The museum tells you a little
local Indian lore.  One of the creation legends (I assume it is Hopi) is
that there were two gods: Tochopu (who was good) and Hokoma (who was
evil).  Now Tochopu had a daughter Pu-Keh-eh.  Tochopu wanted his
daughter to be the mother of all humanity.  Hokoma tried to prevent it
by creating a flood to destroy the world.  But Tochopu knew from Ronald
Reagan that a rising tide lifts all boats, and put his daughter in a
floating tree bark.  Thus Pu-Keh-eh was saved but was alone in the
world.  There was, however, the Sun and she conceived with it and had a











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 31



baby boy.  That worked so she conceived with a waterfall and had a girl.
From them all the people are descended.

     We drove to Hopi Point for sunset.  It is hard to tell if sunset
should have been spectacular, but it really wasn't.  Well before sunset
the entire canyon was in shade.  Given that, it was no more spectacular
than sunset is anywhere else.  Of course, there was a raincloud directly
above that might have caused some of the shading.  Off to our right it
was actually raining.  As the sun cleared the overhead cloud, the sky
turned yellow and the raincloud and rain to our right turned bright
yellow.  The effect was quite beautiful, but the presence of the Canyon
was irrelevant.

     It was a long drive back to Flagstaff, about ninety minutes in the
dark.  We grabbed the first motel we could, then dinner at El Chilito, a
Mexican restaurant.  The food was just okay, but the bottled green chile
sauce was powerful.

     Across the street was a grocery store converted into a huge used
bookstore.  This we had to see!  Evelyn and I had agreed we would not go
to used bookstores and buy books irrelevant to the trip.  One of us kept
his word and one of us broke hers.  It would be indiscreet to say who
each was.

     Back at the room we watched the CNN replay of the final
Presidential debate.

     October 22220000,,,, 1992:  We were up early and packed up.  We wanted to
stay in Flagstaff for a few more nights, but not at the Starlite Motel.

     We had a light day planned.  After breakfast we headed for Tuzigoot
via 89A and Oak Creek Canyon.

     It starts out as piney forests and suddenly My God! you're into
breathtaking landscape.  It is absolutely beautiful.  Some locals have
called this "the Grand Canyon with a road."  Huge cliffs by the side of
the road, red and yellow from the oaks, red rocks, dramatic formations,
grand scale.  Driving is slow because we keep stopping to take pictures.
There have been some Westerns shot in this area and the town it leads
to, Sedona.  But movies cannot do it justice.  I can think of other
parts of the world that have a beautiful look, but the American
Southwest has the greatest average beauty over the greatest area of any
place I have visited.

     I was telling Evelyn I'd love to live in this area, just as she was
pulling into the driveway of a real estate agent.  "Hold it.  Aren't we
being a little hasty?" I said.  Actually, she was just pulling in so we
could get a picture of a nice rock formation behind the office.  As we
drove, we were listening to Jerome Moross's score for the film THE BIG
COUNTRY.  That was actually set in Texas but had a lot of big canyons
like this ride did and it fit just perfectly.  Sedona itself knows that











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 32



it is in some of the most beautiful country in the world and makes the
most of it by being very touristy.  It is somewhere between what they do
in Tombstone and what they do in Monterey.

     There were five prehistoric peoples in the Southwest.  Nobody knows
what they called themselves, but we called them Hohokam, Anasazi,
Sinagua, Mogollon, and Salado.  In the Grand Canyon area the predominant
tribe was the Anasazi.  Around Flagstaff the tribe was the Sinagua.
Unlike the Hohokam, who did amazing engineering of irrigation canals,
the Sinagua farmed, as the name indicates, with almost no water.  In
1065 the Verde Valley near what is now Sedona was populated with
Hohokam.  That year the Sunset Crater in the north near the Grand Canyon
erupted.  The ash fertilized the surrounding area and made it
particularly good for crops.  Many of the Hohokam moved to the area and
Sinagua moved into the Verde Valley and about 1150 the Sinagua started
building the pueblos in the valley.  The Sinagua stayed in the valley
until the early 1400s and then left--nobody knows why.

     Tuzigoot is an entire village centered on a pueblo two stories high
built on a hill a hundred and twenty feet high above the Verde Valley.
While the ceilings are now gone, entry to rooms was via the ceiling and
ladders.  There were seventy-seven ground floor rooms in the pueblo.
Found at the site were axes, bowls, grinding stones, baskets, and
jewelry.

     The Sinagua believed there are six directions, each ruled over by
an animal.  Up is the eagle, down is the mole, north is the mountain
lion, south is the badger, east is the wolf, and west is the bear.
Travel in some directions would require supplication to the right
animal.  Eagle rarely got anything out of this.  Life at Tuzigoot was
hard for the Sinagua.  42% of the bodies found buried at the site were
under nine years of age, 24% were nine to twenty, 29% were adults under
forty-five, and less than 4% were older than forty-five.

     We stopped at a grocery for some odds and ends, then continued to
our second site, Montezuma Castle.  The name came from a wrong initial
guess that the Aztecs had build it.

     The Castle is five stories and twenty rooms built right into a
cliff face.  Nobody is quite sure why they built into the cliff.
Perhaps it was more defensible; perhaps it just gave a good view.  The
creek that ran by it was an added inducement.

     While we were walking I saw some movement on the ground and zeroed
in with my binoculars.  Evelyn saw me and zeroed in also.  There was a
head coming out of the ground the size of a squirrel's, but a golden
brown and with teeth like a beaver's.  I was pretty sure the size,
color, and habits were wrong for a beaver.  Evelyn thought it was a
baby.  I described it for a ranger.  It was a gopher.











            Mark Leeper
            ...att!mtgzy!leeper
            [phone]