A Season of Picnics

When we were young, growing up on the Northern California coast, my sister and I delighted in picnics. If we weren't going to school, then just about every lunch was best eaten outside. At that time, we lived on a ranch a mile away from the Pacific and Glo and I would carry sandwiches and cookies to "Fairy Rock" on a gurgling stream on our ranch and lay out our offerings there. If we were really fancy, we'd carry a bottle of water that would be poured into doll size tea cups, but usually we just ate our sandwiches plain. On week-ends, every week-end, our mother and grandmother would tote big picnic lunches to the boat landing my dad and uncle worked and another, bigger lunch would be eaten outdoors on Saturdays and Sundays.

My favorite picnic from my grandma was her cold fried chicken, with buttered white bread sandwiches and deviled eggs. Grandma always had a tin of cookies that was passed around. Her favorites were inevitably Snickerdoodles. My mother's were Molasses Crinkles. Both ladies made them weekly. My sister and I ate them all diligently!

As we got older, the picnics at the Landing continued but got more involved. Somebody, usually Mother, would make a big pot of chili beans. When my Aunt Dolores married into the family, her favorite (being's she was from a big Italian family) would be a big pan of Minestrone Soup. Aunt Dolores was a fan of Biscottini. So our education into being cookie connoisseurs grew too.

Picnics became more sporadic as I became a young mother and continued working in the boat landing. Bill and I liked to pack picnic lunches for our day offs when the boys were little and we'd fly somewhere or go fishing and there was always something stashed away to eat outdoors. In Baja, where we took our vacations, we had some great al fresco picnics with boiled shrimp with mustard sauce, buttered bolillos, tortilla chips and salsa. We never starved eating outside.

And this past winter season, whooping it up in Arizona, has seen its share of picnics too. Once again, my sister and I are reveling in the warm winter weather and trekking out to exotic desert-y areas with our husbands and .... packing picnic lunches. We've made it a point not to tell each other what we'll be bringing and only a couple of times, have brought the same thing. Usually, it's blocks of cheese (I've been a bit unhappy with the paltry choice of good cheese in Arizona! California got me spoiled, I guess.), some sourdough or tortillas or crackers, fresh grapes and apples or dried apricots and figs, sometimes a beefstick or jerky, once I splurged and made a gorgonzola focaccia that we swooned over. And we always top it off with some kind of cookies. Glo and I are big fans of butter cookies and oatmeal-raisin. We haven't made Grandma's Snickerdoodles yet.

So tomorrow will be another trek out into the desert to look at wildflowers and sample another picnic. The purply red fairydusters are in bloom as are the allium, also purple, some reddy purple clover type flowers, and the blue straw flowers I don't know their name, as well as the lupine and poppy. There's a lot of stalk-y type flowers blooming after the rains too, and more of them I don't know their names, just that it's fun finding new ones. So if I'm not too busy stuffing myself on picnic food, I shall take some pictures and show you What's What in my next blog.

Party Animal

Chuy is modeling a new pinto cowboy hat today. It's really fancy and has stars on the band and a nice elastic band under his chin so it won't come off easily. Chuy is less than enthusiastic about it. That's about as excited as he got with it. At least, he's suffering through with it and not trying to chew the darned thing off.

We celebrated Bill's birthday with a Mexican dinner at Los Hermanos. Most of us ordered the Machaca Chimichanga Deluxe, so here was a huge fried pork filled delicacy swimming in mounds of gaucamole and sour cream. (Hey, if you only indulge every other week or so, it won't show on your hips and thighs too much, will it?) Then we came back here for a decadent Mocha Cheesecake drizzled with dark chocolate coating to top off our arteries even better.

No, Chuy had to miss the restaurant dinner. But he loved having company. Mother and Dad came up from Casa Grande with Glo and Al and Tom came up from Apache Junction. So all of our family that's in Arizona shared in today's celebration. He performed all the of tricks he's learned so far: Shake; Sit; Stay; Fetch; Catch and a bit of Bang, Bang, You're Dead! but he's not fond of that one. He is fond of treats however, so will patiently endure when it comes to that one. Mostly he was just glad of having fresh blood around to play with. Even the puppy is getting tired of just Bill and me, I guess. Wishes he had some little boys around to play with. And like Chuy, so do I!

Road Hazard

We finally found some time for a ride today. It's been several weeks since I've been onboard the Harley. And Bill has only had a few solitary rides since we've been here. It certainly wasn't because the weather was lousy. It's not. It's even warmer today and was begging for one of the motorcycles to be ridden.

So we left Mr. Chuy on his honor in the house (he was a perfect gentleman-dog, thank you) and loaded up and headed to Globe. At first, we were going to ride the Deuce but we discovered the battery was less than full and it wouldn't turn the engine over, so Bill dashed upstairs to get the Road King's keys and we took it. I had time to unzip the liner out of the riding jacket and ended up leaving it half unzipped even up the hill. The air was more humid than usual and in the low Eighties, it felt soft and warm. Traffic was heavy going over the mountain into Miami and we got behind some Yahoo who must have thought he was leading a parade, drooping along about forty all the way down the hill with a great line of traffic behind him. There were ten wheelers and motorhomes along with cars and motorcycles in his parade. He kept up a slow progression and flashed his hazards all the way down the hill into Miami.

Once there, traffic split into two lanes and we found ourselves behind an impatient pickup pulling a trailer. At the second stop light, we found ourselves splashing across a liquid pool of what appeared to be cream colored latex paint. It splashed all over our bike and leathers before we knew what happened. Our first thought was that it was muddy water. It was so big it stretched clear across the double lane of traffic. But it was amazingly resilient.

It took two more miles before we found a car wash and pulled in to hose ourselves off. And once again were more amazed and upset when we found that the pressure hose and hot soapy water failed to budge the stuff! It was strewn up on the King's saddlbags, the undercarriage was practically solidly covered and the chrome exhaust pipes were thoroughly embedded with the stuff. It might as well have been cement for all it was going to get dislodged with a good pressure wash!

Both Bill's and my boots and lower part of our chaps were covered with it and Bill's jacket and helmet were messed up as well. Now, we were not only annoyed but upset as hell by what had happened.

"Isn't it illegal to dump paint?" I asked, plaintively, rubbing futilely at a spot on the seat.

"Not if you're not caught, I guess." Bill was pissed but he was being real good about it. I was raging for both of us! Tomorrow is his birthday and that's not how he wanted to spend it, scraping paint or plaster goo off his bike, one tiny speck at a time!

"I wonder how many other vehicles got plastered with it," I said. "There was a line of them."

"We'll go back and report it to the Miami police," Bill told me. "We probably won't be the only ones. In California, if this had happened, they would have closed the highway for a hazardous waste spill."

"Well, I find it hard to believe nobody knows anything about it! Paint this deep that gets splattered up on us this bad can't be an everyday occurrence!"

"It looks more like plaster the drywall guys use. Maybe a truck carrying a load splashed some out when they went through town. It's the color of thousands of houses down here though. They'll never be able to trace it down."

"The poor bike!" I mourned. Very darned little had been cleaned by the pressure hose. "But we better go report it."

It was almost an hour from the time we got 'splotched' until we returned to Miami to report it to the police. We were surprised to find the location of the 'crime' was only a block away from headquarters. And even more surprised to find that nobody else had reported it. A very obliging policeman walked across the street with us and inspected the bike. We told him in a rush what had happened and he had Bill fill out a property damage report. When Bill was almost finished,he suggested maybe we'd better try washing it off. We reminded him once again, that's what we had done immediately after it had happened and the damned stuff wasn't washing anywhere! He smiled and said he was sorry. Damned if he knew what the stuff was.

Well, it was a far cry from what would have happened in the Environmental Green Empire of California. And I've been touting Arizona these past two months for being such a free place to live, compared to the confines of California. So now, I guess I'll have to amend it a bit. Yes, Arizona is a freer place to live. But we spent the 'free' part of our afternoon trying to scrape paint off our chaps and leathers and cooling pipes of the Road King, and I gotta tell you: we're going to be riding around blending in with ninety per cent of the houses we see. This stuff ain't coming off!

Ghosthunter

I had a visit from a ghosthunter yesterday. It's not every day that a ghosthunter calls at your home. And it's not a typical occurrence to get to speak to one. But I did. And it was spooky fun, just the same. Currently, he's not an active ghosthunter. He started a unit of ghosthunting while he was in college and has a good bit of notoriety because of it. He told me his full name so I could Google him and darned if he doesn't pop right up there. Since he isn't actively ghost hunting now, why did he come to my home for a visit? Well, he's a security device technician and was there to install some widgets on the windows so if we had an Unwanted Visitor who tried to get in, it would set off our alarm.

He said he had visited our home once before, last summer, after we'd been broken into at Memorial Day. He came back to install a loud siren on the roof and our friend Tom was there to let him in. I asked him if he got any 'vibes' from our front room.

"I didn't today," he said, "but I did last summer. Your house felt old. Or at least like there was a lot of activity there. A lot of people. That kind of thing."

"It's not that old," I defended. Actually, the house is younger than I am, built in 1956 and since I was built in 1949 that's probably why I think of it as a new house. "But there's a lot of history in this area and that may be why it feels like there's a lot of souls or spiritual presences around."

I told him a bit about my early attempts at channeling and receiving information. He was more of a pragmatist.

"I'd like to prove there's a definite link between what the scientists know and can point to definitively and what the spiritualists believe. We're getting better at it all the time with more specialized equipment. And there's lots of proof in some of the better digital recorders and thermal units out there." He launched into some highly technical jargon about some of the equipment they got to use when he was in the ghosthunters association back in Chicago. I could dimly understand what he was talking about. Technical stuff is fine but I believe more from a gut level sort of thing.

He commenced to telling me about a Victorian house they had studied one night at the insistance of the owner who felt it was haunted by Al Capone. He said they recorded a powerful E.V.P., a loud intense whisper on a digital recorder that was screaming for Amanda to get out! Out! OUT! The hairs stood up on my arm. (I find other people's ghost stories so much more interesting than my own.)

"Did you find out who Amanda was?" I asked, breathlessly.

"Nope. Never did. But we found out later there was a fire in that house. So we figured that urgent 'shout' must have been for Amanda to get the hell out!" he grinned. "I'm a big fan of E.V.P.'s."

Hmmm, I've never actually recorded an E.V.P. And I've never actually seen a ghost either. But if I had to choose, I believe I'd rather record the E.V.P. than see a spirit. Just me, mind you. I have no qualms about talking to spirits on the other side and sensing their information or the signs they give me to see. I've even felt sensations they want me to feel, at times. But whenever I hear of my friends or loved ones having actually encounters with those who have passed, like seeing them I mean, then I get shivers down my spine and the hairs on my arm stand up. That's just me.

So we chatted for a few more minutes, and I urged the young man to spend a bit of time writing down his experiences for it would make a grand book. He's got one cohort who has a show on Sci-Fi of ghost hunting and here he is in the Arizona desert installing security devices for those of us trying to protect our assets.

You never know who you'll meet, do you?

Coincidence?

On our sunroom wall hangs a New Guinea war mask from the Sepik River region. We bought it from a villager on a trip we made there in 2000. It worships the crocodile king, one of the Founders of the tribes there and it has a tortoise on its headdress. When we returned home to California, we hung it our living room wall but the mask didn't seem happy there. There was no 'spark' to it. After a year or two, I took it down and relegated it to a corner of the bedroom, dark and unhappy, until we bought the house here in Superior and put it in with the things to be moved here. It was one of the first things we put up when we moved in three years ago. As soon as Bill hung it on the wall, we got tingles down our back. The warrior mask was happy. It gazed upon Apache Leap mountain and it wasn't going to budge off its wall. It seemed a curious thing to me at the time. How could a mask from a far off land like Papua New Guinea find happiness in a copper mining town of the Southwest? Evidently, it's not so far-fetched.

Today, I went uptown to get my hair cut. The beautician is lively lady, about my age, and married for more than forty years to her high school sweetheart. We have a good time discussing things while she cuts my hair. Today, she started talking about the Native Americans and their inability to drink alcohol. I commented that it was the same way with the Australian Aborigines. She agreed and told a story about her husband getting accosted by a drunken Aborigine one time. I asked her where that occurred and she said Cairns. I laughed and said, yes, Cairns was where we had run into Aborigines too. Then she said her husband worked for a mine that sent him to Indonesia and she had visited him there.

I was awestruck. "You didn't go to Irian Jaya, did you?" I asked. "It's on the same island as Papua New Guinea."

"I certainly did!" she agreed. "And it was the strangest place I've ever been. Why, when I got up that first morning and looked out the window, what did I see but this man walking down the road wearing a penis gourd!"

I whooped with laughter. "Did you visit the Spirit House too? And see their thirty foot phalluses?"

"Oh my, yes!" She covered her face with her hands while she laughed harder. A woman sitting across from us and getting her hair colored and who obviously had never visited the likes of Papua New Guinea had a puzzled smile on her face. What were these women discussing?

"I cannot believe you've been there too," I told her. "I had no idea this was such a small world."

"My dear, the copper mine industry goes all around the world. There aren't that many places where it is mined. It is one of the biggest mines in the world in Irian Jaya. So that is why the miners go there. That's the way it is." She shook her head but kept smiling.

And so it is. There aren't that many copper or gold mines in the world. This happens to be the same good region for those valuable ores. Maybe that's why our New Guinea mask was so happy to reacquaint himself with the same sort of mountains he'd come from. He recognized a kindred spirit in the mountains. I might just be being fanciful but as my grandson Sage says, this sort of weirds me out! Small world, indeed!

Small Town Terrorism

Our crime committee is getting down to the nitty gritty these days. A hard core group of between twelve and fifteen of us are now meeting once a week to hash out a host of items. The end of the month is a week-end festival in town called Apache Leap Days. The Crime Free Superior group is going to have a booth to get the word out to the community that we mean to do things in a different way and to recruit more members. We're selling raffle tickets for a kid's bicycle and we're going to have information and sign up sheets for our citizens' group: Volunteers In Police Service.

The biggest hurdle we've bumped up against in this basically small town of four thousand souls is a Biggie all right. It reeks of Old World politics or crime ridden neighborhoods of big cities. I certainly never expected to find it in this pretty little town. But it's here all right. The other night we heard story after story about it. It's name is Retaliation.

I don't know how long it's been going on. But Retaliation seems to be the word on every body's lips and why the public at large is loathe to tell the police what they can plainly see happening on their streets and sometimes even their door steps. It was said that mothers and fathers of grown children won't even turn in their own kin because they are afraid of their own family using violence against them. Employees witnessing criminal acts while they are working refuse to give details because they are afraid of being beat up, or worse and/or their property vandalized or destroyed. Retaliation seems to be the poison that is vaporizing this community when it comes to getting rid of the bad guys. And it has got to be stopped.

The chief of police told us that the word we've got to get out to the community is that Retaliation will not be tolerated in Superior any longer. That we've all got to be good witnesses and stand up for the victims that come forward to testify against these small town thugs. It is only when the bad element sees the good folks step forward and say, "Stop this! This isn't the way it's going to work anymore!" that we can get back to the way things should be.

I have to pause here and tell you, I never dreamed this basic struggle of Good vs Evil, the Light Souls against the Dark Souls could be playing out in a small mining town in the Sonoran Desert in this twenty first century. I mean, if this had been Tombstone, perhaps, a hundred and thirty years ago where the Bad were running amok and you didn't know if the lawmen were the good or the bad, then, I'd believe you. But I really, really thought things were different now. Well, duh! I'm fifty-eight years old and you can call me naive, for I never would have bet things were this bad here.

Our group has been told by others that they've tried to change things, and sorry, it doesn't change. They've 'been there-done that'! I know. I know: it's hard to change things when a group of Newcomers swoop into town and decide to 'clean it up'. The Old School folks don't especially relish a band of Do-Gooders changing things. But we're going to give it a shot. We certainly don't aim to piss off the locals, those good law abiding folks who have had to live with such a slimey underbelly of fear and lawlessness all these years. But I really feel that this little band of "Do-Gooders" might just change things after all and bring about some change. It's going to take a lot of work, but I'll keep blogging on now and then about this group and let you know if we pass or fail.

Unexpected Surprise

We wanted our Boonie trip into the desert to be a special on Saturday. My niece, Lavon and her husband, Dan were visiting from Vermont and we wanted to take them and their family into the desert and show them an extra special day. Dan had never visited Arizona before and this trip was a fast one: arrive on Thursday and depart on Monday, so the one day Boonie trip had to show him a good time!

We departed for Battle Axe Mountain around eleven, in two cars. I was driving the Ford Explorer with half the crew and Bill took Dan, Lavon and Al in the FJ Cruiser. We were armed with rock hammers, canvas collection bags, binoculars, guidebooks on birds and wildflowers and rocks, cameras, ice chests with drinks and cheese and deviled eggs and snacks galore. Oh yeah, lots of 15 and 45 sunscreen too. The weather was perfect: mid-eighties, no clouds and the wind, light, if any.

Last Wednesday, Bill and I scouted out Battle Axe as a likely spot. As soon as we spotted the carpets of golden poppies blooming up its flank, we knew that "THIS" was the spot we'd bring Dan and Lavon and the girls to see a springtime Sonora desert. Dan was anxious to try his hand at gold panning and in the canyon at the bottom of the mountain was still a gurgling brook just waiting for the gold pan.

It took a bit of an effort to get both cars as far as the canyon. Fact is, there is a nasty boulder that needs to be straddled some half mile shy of the stream. The Ford Explorer could not muster up enough clearance to giddy-up over it, so after some manuvering, which involved watching my poor faithful car almost hung high center, Bill climbed in it while Al, Glo, Dan, Lavon, Kim and I pushed on the hood (the youngest girl, Jenny, was busy holding Chuy) and it finally eased backward off the rock. Bill backed it into a clearing, we unloaded the picnic goodies and transferred them into the Cruiser, then half of us hoofed it the rest of the way to the clearing for the picnic. No, I'm sorry, I forgot to take pictures of the almost stuck car. I remembered that after we'd gotten it free.

On the walk down the streambed, though, Glo and I stopped frequently to take pictures of the towering cliffs and mountains above us. They were beautiful besides the poppies, the sun was hitting the red rocks just perfectly. Towards the top of Battle Axe, nearly four hundred feet above, there were some unusual cactus formations (I thought) but couldn't think what kind of curly cue cactus they might be. As we reached the picnic place, we ran into a couple on four wheelers and they asked us if we'd seen the bighorn sheep. Really? Where? They pointed to the top of the mountain. What I had thought was curlycued cactus was the horns of a bighorn sheep peering over the edge at us. We grabbed the binoculars and spotted nine of them. They were busy checking us out just as were were busy getting a look at them.

They spent the next hour or so scrambling all over the peak. They were a lot more mobile on it than I would ever be! We took movies and pictures of them. Bill even climbed the neighboring bluff and got a better 'birds eye' view of them with his camera. So that's the pictures I'm including here.

I would never have guessed we would find such a surprise for our Vermont relatives. If we'd planned it, we wouldn't have found them. So it's really the unexpected that makes the best surprises!