The Back of Beyond

Last Friday we took a trek up to some property we own outside of St. Johns, Arizona. It was the second time I've gone there and the third time Bill has visited. St. Johns is an active little farming community in the eastern corner of Arizona about forty miles west of New Mexico. It's fairly high, around sixty eight hundred feet and is officially in the White Mountains. The hills are sparsely covered with small junipers and grass is sketchy. Even the cactus are few and far between. While the temps have been in the low Nineties around Phoenix, it barely reached sixty degrees the day we visited and the wind blew. I guess the wind blows a lot up there.

It's a part of Arizona that you could call desolate, or at least remote. Depending on how poetic you want to be. The first time we visited was four years ago when we drove out with my parents trying to find these forty acres Bill had bought on EBay. We didn't have a real good plot of the land and thought we'd found the area, rather than the actual acreage itself. There are few fences and fewer houses. Here and there, someone has parked an RV. And there are a few windmills for pumping water. Basically, in the four years since I've seen it, nothing much had changed. It's wide open spaces and windy prairies come to mind. So it is far different than the colorful mountains we live in now or the frothy breakers of the Pacific we left behind. I don't know as though I'd like to make a steady diet of this 'remote' part of Arizona for long.

I did discover one thing unique about this place. It didn't hit me right away. We'd been there for half an hour before it registered. Bill parked in a sandy wash that might actually have been on our forty acres and immediately we began finding pretty red iron pyrite stones. There was also some unusual white rocks that looked like dead coral, which I guess it is. Evidently, eons ago, this area had been underwater too. We were basically walking around with our noses stuck to the ground when it came to me: the absence of sound. I mean that literally. There was SILENCE. No highway noise. No barking dogs. Not even buzzing insects. It was dead quiet. No, I take that back. Every once in a while, you could hear the distant call of a bird. But in the middle of the day when we got there, even they were strangely quiet. You don't find that very often anymore, do you? The complete absence of sound. A lot of folks anymore even wear their Ipods for exercise or running around and aren't even aware of the regular sounds around them. But to be hit with complete silence.... Hmmm, it's almost eerie.

Well, after a while, a National Guard jet flew over and the air was crowded with that sound for a bit. Then I heard a quail call out for its family. But for the most part, it was just the rocks and the trees and the sigh of the breeze through the junipers' branches. And it sounded pretty good to me.

We found a lot of rocks. A lot of rocks with some type of jasper in it, stuff we don't find in abundance here in Superior. Bill found another streambed on the drive back towards town and we spent another hour poking around. To our astonishment, we found some lovely chunks of flower agate that had tumbled down from the surrounding hills. So it was a good day. A long day. And Chuy was a dustball by the time we got home. You couldn't pat him but that a cloud of dust rose up from his caramel brown fur. So, Chuy got a bath that night and then slept like a log. (Or one of those rocks.) And since it was about four hours each way, Bill and I slept pretty good that night too.

But the silence.... It's hard to ignore how profound that was.