Heart Earth - Ivan Doig [23]
Plainly this desert climate was a more complicated proposition than we had thought. My mother and father started working at the weather in earnest, telling each other that a little cloud cover now maybe was no bad thing, shade in the bank, so to speak, for they'd also been hearing about the local summer temperatures that would by-God-bake-your-eyeballs. Cross that stovetop if and when we came to it, they took turns maintaining, and in the meantime maybe a little cloud cover...
Then they woke up one morning to the desert under snow.
Sure been having the weather, my mother jabbed onto paper to Wally. Make you think you're in Montana.
Make you think your mental compass needle was off course for more than just that day, in fact. The snow vanished as spectrally as it arrived, but the climate we sought here stayed elusive, chill and rain in its place. My father couldn't take life easy too much longer, particularly in this uneasy desert spring, and nights now, he and my mother talk things over. The possibly not too distant end of the war. The way Arizona is sorting itself out to them and isn't. Hammers are in song in Wickenburg as they were in Phoenix, the subdividing of Arizona an idea that has occurred to every boomer at once. But what are the prospects for people such as us? Wickenburg aside, there did exist a ranching Arizona too, where they grew something besides blisters on dudes. My father had his eye on the comfortably western town of Prescott—favorably named—in the veldtlike cattle country across the Hieroglyphic Mountains. The Grand Canyon puzzle more and more becomes my own enterprise as the two of them put up their pieces of "I wonder if" and "What we maybe ought to" into the air of our future.
Quite a gabfest, my mother puts down in her desert chronicle to Wally and ultimately to me, and I am surprised when I find she doesn't even remotely mean hers and my father's. The old miner did all the talking, just about.
But yes, the miner. Guerrilla cattle aside, our only caller at the cabin.
Before realizing dudes and tourists were the real lode, Wickenburg originated as a goldstrike town, and prospectors still were tramping around in the hills trying to hit the yellow rainbow again. I dream our miner upward from his visit to my mother's recording pen on the twenty-second day of March, 1945. Story-become-person, he comes refusing to look like a desert oreseeker is expected to, other than a few missing finger joints. Instead of shag and beard he sports a precise white mustache like a sharp little awning over his mouth, and a snowy pompadour he keeps in place by lifting his hat straight up when he takes it off in highly reluctant acknowledgment of my mother, womankind. Or maybe he is simply uncorking everything stored up since he last kept company with anyone besides himself in his shaving mirror.
In windjammer style he fast sets us straight about the war (England is who we ought to be fighting) and about the president (Franklin The-Hell-No Roosevelt, in the miner's indignant rendition of the person who took the nation off the gold standard).
Wide-eyed I wait for the battle to erupt over President Roosevelt, great voice that strode out of the radio