High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [10]
Calle Ventura marks the entrance to another state, where on a fine, still day your nose can compare the goods from three tortilla factories. From here the sidewalks roll, the walls crumble and shout with territorial inscription, brown dogs lie under cherry Camaros and the Virgin of Guadalupe holds court in the parking lot of the Casa Rey apartments.
Across the street stands the post office, neutral territory: mailboxes all identical, regardless of the keyholder’s surname, as physically uniform as a table of contents. We are all equals in the eyes of the USPO, containing our secrets. I grab mine and scuttle away. The trip home takes me right back through all these lands again, all these creation stories, and that’s enough culture for one day, usually.
I close the door, breathless, and stare out my window at a landscape of wonders thrown together with no more thought than a rainstorm or a volcano can invoke on its own behalf. It’s exactly as John Muir said, as if “nature in wildest extravagance held her bravest structures as common as gravel-piles.”
From here I begin my story. I can’t think of another place like it.
MAKING PEACE
When I left downtown Tucson to make my home in the desert, I went, like Thoreau, “to live deliberately.” I think by this he meant he was tired of his neighbors. For me the problem wasn’t specifically my neighbors, whom I loved (and it’s a good thing, since our houses were so close together we could lean out our bedroom windows and shake hands), but the kids who spilled over from—and as far as I could see, never actually attended—the high school across the street. They liked rearranging the flowers in my front yard, upside down. They had art contests on my front walk, the point being to see whether a realistic rendition of the male sex organ could be made to span the full sweep from sidewalk to front door. They held very loud celebrations, daily, on my front porch. When my brain was jangled to the limits of reason, I would creep from my writing desk to the front door, poke my head out, and ask if they could turn the music down. They glared, with So What eyes. Informed me this was a party, and I wasn’t invited.
The school’s principal claimed that kids outside the school grounds were beyond his jurisdiction; I was loath to call the city police, but did (only after the porch party ratified a new sport involving urination), and they told me what I knew they’d say: the principal ought to get those kids in school. My territory was up for grabs, by anyone but me.
After some years had passed and nobody seemed to be graduating, I struck out for Walden. My husband and I sold our house, collected our nerve, and bought four acres of rolling desert—a brambly lap robe thrown over the knees of the Tucson Mountains, a stone’s throw beyond the city limits. There was a tiny cabin, which we could expand to suit our needs. I anticipated peace.
Like a pioneer claiming her little plot of prairie, I immediately planted a kitchen garden and hollyhocks outside the door. I inhaled silence, ecstatic with the prospect of owning a place that was really my own: rugged terrain, green with mesquite woods and rich in wildlife. No giant penises waiting to impale me when I threw open my front door. Only giant saguaros. Only bird song and faint hoofprints in the soil, evidence of wild creatures who might pass this way under cover of darkness.
Sure enough they came, the very first night: the javelinas. Woolly pigs. They are peccaries, technically, cloven-hoofed rooters of the New World, native to this soil for much longer than humans have known it—but for all the world they are pigs. I pressed my face to the window when I heard their thumping and rustling. Their black fur bristled as they bumped against one another and snuffled the ground with long, tusked snouts. I watched them eat my hollyhocks one by one.
Pioneering takes patience. I thought maybe that first visit was some kind of animal welcome-wagon tradition in reverse,