Tucson
By
Amanda Gradisek

So I'd never been to the Southwest when I was offered a graduate package at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After the excitement of being certain that I hadn't just wasted a thousand dollars on applying for grad school in a fit of overly optimistic self-confidence, I got on Mapquest and tried to figure out where Tucson was. I pictured a movie in which people are trekking across the Sahara on camels and began to panic even more when I discovered that it was an hour's drive from Mexico. Having lived in Northern Ohio my entire life, my idea of an arid climate was living more than five miles from Lake Erie.

Now that I've been living in Tucson for about five months, I'm still trying to figure out what is going on with this place. Nearing 10,000 feet, the Santa Catalina Mountains provide the Northern border of the city, and their foothills provide a hideaway for all the people lucky enough to be making money from either Ratheon, a missile building plant, or the University. The other major "industry" in town is an Air Force base packed with planes loaded and ready to set off whenever our courageous leader gives the order to bomb this week's Middle Eastern scapegoat. Everyone else in Tucson works in strip malls-they must-because nearly every major street in town is ten lanes wide, lined with strip malls, and equipped with U-turn only lanes in order to make it possible to get anywhere. But if you're brave enough to venture more than a mile away from commercial heaven, you'll find yourself standing in the middle of the strangest land you've ever seen… that is, if you're a mid-Eastern flatlander like me.

The highlight of this area has to be the Santa Catalina highway, a road that creeps around and up the mountains to a so called ski valley, where the weather is always thirty degrees cooler than the sometimes unbearable valley temperatures. On the climb up, you'll start with the saguaro cacti and the palo verde, (that's the cactus you see in roadrunner cartoons and a ferny looking tree with thorns and a green trunk, for those of you who don't know), and you'll move through scrubby brush up to pines and aspens that change colors in the fall. For those looking to hike and climb, Mount Lemmon is a haven away from Tucson's urban sprawl. It's also the perfect quiet, dark place to watch a meteor shower on a fall night. For those looking for a view with less of a time commitment, there is Gate's Pass, which crosses over the craggy Tucson Mountains on the city's Western border. Crowned with the University of Arizona "A." the mountains are carpeted with the saguaro. Now protected due to some strange pastime of locals to shoot them or hit them with cars, they now seem to grow in abundance. Coming over the pass, you might feel like you've stepped into a Clint Eastwood movie-and in fact Tombstone is only an hour's drive-because there is little to see besides Old Tucson, an old studio for Western movies, and the Desert Museum. This last seems like an attraction you might pass up in order to take a nap or watch paint dry, but in fact this is one of my favorite places to pass a fall afternoon. The museum is really an outdoor zoo full of animals like javelinas, coyotes, mountain lions, and coatimundis, all native to the area. Wandering the sandy paths amidst flowering cacti and palms, looking at the mountains that make up the horizon as far as the eye can see, it's easy to forget how close the city is. Also nearby is Columbia University's Biosphere II, Kitt Peak Observatory, Kartchner Caverns, Mexico, San Diego, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas.

But don't get me wrong, the city's not all bad. Near campus, a street car travels the palm lined streets, where outdoor bars have cider on tap, blowing mist in the summer heat and boasting heat lamps in the "chilly" Arizona winters. The street car runs from the old stone gates to campus down to Fourth Avenue, which is lined with dance clubs, bars, art museums, craft stores, and natural food stores. Downtown can lay claim to five "skyscrapers" and several buildings bright enough to make you remember that this is the Southwest. An old Spanish Style church (that looks much like the San Xavier del Bac Mission south of the city dating back to the early 1700s) is perhaps the highlight of town. There's even a pedestrian bridge that looks like a rattlesnake. But in general, despite the bad rap that the Southwest gets for gaudy colors and tacky chile pepper decorations, things are different here. Houses look like they rise up out of the land, and most are only one story high. And except for the occasional offensively bright green lawn, residents respect the land, and don't place unreasonable demands on the water table.

When my family came to visit, the one thing they all said was, "it's different," and in fact it is. There's no plants here that will remind you of home-and that's including grass. Fuzzy cholla look huggable but are in fact a prickly nightmare. Watch out for rattlesnakes. I didn't really believe in them until one of my students came in with an arm as useful as a log and a doctor's note that said to "Please excuse Johnny. He was hospitalized after being bit by an eighteen inch rattlesnake relaxing underneath his car." Drink a lot of water or you might pass out-especially in the summer-and that means at least a gallon of water a day. When I hiked the Grand Canyon with my father and friends in the summer, we each drank about 8 liters of water and didn't have to break the seal for a solid three hours. And as hot as the summer gets, monsoon season is always just around the corner. Nearly all of Arizona's precipitation comes in the form of a one month period of hail and raindrops the size of ping pong balls in which Tucsonians panic and don't leave the house for fear of driving into a flood and falling victim to the "stupid law," which mandates that anyone stupid enough to drive into too much water and stall the car has to pay a fine. The monsoons will give way to fall, and now, in December, highs are in the mid-sixties. The clouds get caught up around the peaks of the mountains, and the rainbow of the sunsets is only broken up by the silhouettes of the saguaros.

So the next time someone says "Arizona," don't just think Fiesta bowl and dry heat. Come out and visit. If you're still not sure, you can always try it in the winter.