When We Walked on the Moon

For about ten years when I was a kid, my family rented a beachfront house on Lake Ontario for a week or two each summer. It was called the Speakman Camp, and I slept in the attic. The house had a black and white TV that pulled in one CBS station out of Watertown, NY (WWNY), and I think a couple of the Syracuse ones. Only WWNY had decent reception. I could be wrong, but I think it was from the Speakman Camp that I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in August 1964. And I know for sure that that's where I was when Mom, Dad, Steve and I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, 50 years ago today. It was a big deal, exciting and important. But the actual image was primitive and blurry, the sound muddy. It was amazing that anyone could speak to us from the moon at all, but it seems to me that I was a little disappointed.

Seven years later, my mom was divorced and I was spending that Bicentennial summer with her in Cape
Canaveral, Florida. We visited Kennedy Space Center, and I saw Mission Control. Even then, the technology that achieved this amazing thing was starting to look a little dated. I can't find a photo from that summer, so here are a couple of Polaroid shots from (probably) 1986.

Something that definitely happened in 1986 was the Big Trip. That was when John and I drove all over the country, up and down the East Coast and west to Arizona and California, looking for someplace it wasn't winter. We ended up in Tucson. A year or so after that, a friend of ours from Columbus Ohio, Mark Haverkos, invited us to visit him on the Hopi reservation. As I wrote in 2004:

Back in the late 1980s, a former next door neighbor of ours from 13th Ave in Columbus, Ohio was the hippie, holistic veterinarian to the Hopi Nation.  He lived in Polacca, Arizona, over by First Mesa. ...

The Hopi Reservation is in northeastern Arizona, basically surrounded by Navajo territory. From Holbrook on I-40 / Route 66, there's a road (SR 87) that goes north.  ... Just 13 miles north of the Holbrook exit is the turnoff for the Little Painted Desert.  A visit to this obscure Navajo County park is like a day trip to the moon.

The Little Painted Desert doesn't have the (relatively) bright colors of its more famous National Park namesake, which is south of I-40. The county park version is basically gray.  That just makes it look more alien. The ground is caked and cracked, and hardly anybody goes there.  The day we found the place, for part of the time it was just John, me, Jenny Dog, and a cow.  The cow didn't venture down into the dunes and craters, or whatever you want to call them, but we did. I don't know whether you can find him, but John is in the lower left picture above.  

I've been to that park once since then, and it didn't look the same somehow. Neither do my 30-year-old photos. I was going to scan some of them at work today, but I didn't have time. I ended up photographing the photos.

All these years later, any mention of the Apollo program reminds me of that day when John and I walked on this strange, moon-like landscape, with no other creatures in evidence except Jenny Dog and a skinny cow. I haven't found any evidence that the Apollo astronauts trained at the Little Painted Desert, but they were at such nearby sites as Meteor Crater, Hopi Buttes and  the Grand Canyon. They also blasted an area at Cinder Lake to make their own custom crater field.

Close enough.

Karen

Left: Astronauts Edgar Mitchell (left) and Alan Shepard on a geological field exercise near Cottonwood, Arizona, Paul Switzer Collection, NAU.PH.426.475, Center of Astrogeology, USGS, Photo No. 1170142PR, Cline Library Special Collections and Archives, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona.

May Flowers, Arizona Style

For the Round Robin Challenge: May Flowers, I asked to see fresh photos of flowers from this brand new month, if possible. Just in case I didn't manage any decent shots in May, I started a few days early, myself. But I'm happy to say I did get out for some actual flowers actually photographed in actual May 2014. Let's take a look!

I'm beginning to think there's a 90% rule in Tucson flower identification, as in, "90% of the floral hedges are oleanders." Here are some examples from the hedges lining the park behind St. Michael's:

The flowers don't look very similar, but the leaves do. The white ones are along the back boundary of the park, while the pink and red ones are along this hedge between the park and the library (and St. Joseph's Hospital):

By the way, about a minute after I took this photo (and these were all on the iPhone, hence the iffy quality), I stepped in a rut and sprained my ankle. Again. Not a bad sprain, this time.

Later that day, when I visited my dad, I photographed a few small but interesting flowers outside the Memory Care unit, this time with my Canon:

That was all on Thursday. On Friday morning, I took a moment in a bank parking lot to get you some real Arizona specimens. This is a Yucca. I think it's a Soaptree Yucca, which is native to Southern Arizona.

And I really should show you the Arizona State flower, which was in the same parking lot! It's a little early in the season, but here are the flowers of the Giant Saguaro!

All in all, I think I did pretty well for someone who doesn't even like flowers!

Karen

Please check out all this week's entries:

Linking List
as of Saturday, May 3rd, 2014
1:41 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Round Robin: Green and Growing

As usual, when I posted the topic for this week's Round Robin Challenge: Being Green, I had vague but ambitious ideas for what I personally was going to post. No St. Patrick's decor for me, no random green objects. No, I was going to show you that the desert can be green! At least, that's what I think I was thinking!

The desert near Biosphere 2, outside Oracle, Arizona.

But March is not the greenest time of year for Arizona, and my drive with Dad up to Oracle, Arizona last weekend was not the greenest area to drive through. Besides, my iPhone ran out of storage and my Canon was acting up, and the sun was in my eyes. No, really, it was. I got almost no decent shots that day, certainly nothing especially green.

 Gates Pass, March 8th, with an impatient motorcyclist speeding away.

I did a little better the week before that, photographing Gates Pass while driving it - which is not the safest thing in the world to do!

So, anyway, tonight I was looking around for something green indoors, and I happened to notice our little jungle of indoor plants against a midcentury modern pair of matching curtains. That would have to do, I thought. 

But in case that wasn't good enough, I added my dragon bank that I've had since 1970, and a teal clock.

Still, my photo archives can usually be counted on to give me what I want. Here is a shot taken at Saguaro National Park East on June 1, 2013.

And another one taken at the bird feeders in Madera Canyon on June 8, 2013. The big black bird is a wild turkey.

Is that green enough? If not, I'll try to do better after it rains.

Karen

Now let's see all the green things!

Linking List
as of Sunday, March 23rd, 2014

Karen - Posted!
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Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

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Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Round Robin Challenge: Looking Ahead

For this week's Round Robin Challenge: Looking Forward , I asked to see photos looking forward, preferably metaphorically as well as visually. The topic reminds me of that old Johnny Nash song:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright, bright Sun-shiny day.

Wouldn't that be nice!

But the problem is, we usually can't see the road ahead very well. It may be full of twists and turns, so that the view is intermittent at best...

 

..and the drive may be steep and hazardous.

Sometimes the signs are frankly confusing, and it looks as though no progress can be made at all.

The path may be narrow, and lead straight into the weeds.

It may lead somewhere dark and dreary...

...and, of course, into life, a little rain must fall.

 

Even if the musical cue is The Who, and I can see for miles and miles...

...it comes to a vanishing point. I still can't see the destination.

I have a choice to make, and I can't see the road ahead very well at all. That is, I can see the road I'm on, but it's kind of harsh and rock-strewn, and not much fun at all. Is there an intersection up ahead? Dare I turn off? Would the new road be any better?


Karen

Linking List
as of Saturday Jan 11th, 1:34 AM

Karen - Posted!
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http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

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Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Round Robin: True Colors of Autumn - in Southern Arizona?

As I was saying this morning, for the Round Robin Challenge: All Natural Colors, I asked to see photos of natural materials, presented with colors as close to what our eyes see as possible. I was so exhausted after a very long day that I didn't post an entry last night at all, and this morning's entry was a rush job. But this afternoon I took my Dad for a 90-minute drive down to the Nature Conservancy's Ramsey Canyon Preserve. I freely admit that half the point of the trip was to photograph autumn leaves in their natural colors!

Ramsey Canyon is southeast of Tucson near Sierra Vista, Arizona. It's on private land owned by the Nature Conservancy, at the end of a narrow paved road. You have to go through the gift shop and pay a $6 fee to hike the trail...

...but there is no charge for sitting on a bench behind the gift shop, watching the bird feeders and drinking in the beauty and the cooler mountain air.

 

I hadn't been there in about a quarter of a century, despite it being one of the top 15 birding spots in the entire country. Today I wasn't really focused on seeing their 15+ species of hummingbirds, their Elegant Trogans, their Chihuahua Leopard frogs or black bears. I didn't even bring binoculars. That's okay, because this isn't the season for most of the birds that frequent the canyon. The only one I even saw was a single wild turkey outside the preserve itself.

 

The photography was a little tricky. The late afternoon sun shone through the trees, making the scene either too dark or too light. Almost everything here has been edited on my computer to brighten colors and reduce glare.

Still, I think these are pretty close to what I saw!

Autumn leaves are few and far between in Tucson. We don't have the climate or the native species for it. I'm pretty sure even the oak tree species in Arizona don't change color. But when I Googled Autumn leaves Southern Arizona, I found pretty much what I expected to see. Driving into the mountains takes me to a cooler, more colorful climate! We're past the prime fall leaf season by at least two weeks, but I think the drive was worth it - even if my dad was bored and asking to leave about a minute after we arrived.

Please scroll down for my other RR entry of the day, and then check out the other Robins' entries!

Linking List
as of Saturday, November 16th, 7:27 MST

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Karen - two entries posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin


Karen

A Prisoner of Conscience

Today I drove my Dad up Mount Lemmon. There was an Octoberfest at Ski Valley at the top, but when Dad saw the $5 parking fee he declined to attend at all. So we made a brief detour to Marshall Gulch beyond Summerhaven, and then drove back down.

On the way down, we turned in at the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Area, but the gate was closed perhaps a hundred yards in. There was a fire in the area in July, and apparently it is not yet safe for visitors to return. The prison camp ruins are still accessible, but we didn't stop for that. I have previously taken pictures, though.

As we turned toward Tucson, I tried to tell my dad about Gordon Hirabayashi, a college student who committed civil disobedience in response to racist policies (curfews, interment camps and a required loyalty oath) applied to Japanese Americans during World War II. From what I've read, he actually asked to have his sentence for breaking curfew extended so that he could serve his sentence at the Federal Honor Camp on Mount Lemmon, where conscientious objectors, deserters, and illegal immigrants were put to work building Mount Lemmon Highway. The government refused to pay Hirabayashi's way to Tucson, so he hitchhiked here and showed up at the camp. Even then, they didn;t have the proper paperwork to incarcerate him. They sent him back down the mountain, where he took in dinner and a movie before returning when they were ready for him. Hirabayashi later argued his case before the Supreme Court and lost. It wasn't until the Reagan era that the government finally admitted wrongdoing in the wartime anti-Japanese hysteria and apologized. Hirabayashi became a sociology professor, and attended the renaming of the prison camp ruins in his honor in 1999. He died in early 2012.

Great story, but my dad wasn't listening, partly because he has a cold and his ears are stopped up, so he was extra-deaf today. But after I dropped him off at his place and drove away, I was pleased to hear Gordon's story retold on the local radio show Arizona Spotlight late this afternoon. They were supposed to post something about it online, but they haven't yet done so.



Karen

Round Robin: Surrounded by History

For this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge: History!, I asked to see anything historic, with a number of suggested ways to interpret that term. My inspiration was a recent trip to Ft. Lowell, which I've photographed before for this Challenge. We'll get to that in a moment. But I'm also reminded tonight of a walk I took in Lucerne, Switzerland when I was 15 years old. All on my own for a few hours (maybe my brother was with me; I dont remember for sure) during a family bus tour of Europe, I walked over an old wooden bridge on which were painted frescoes of the Danse Macabre. I absolutely loved it. Part of what impressed me was that that bridge was older than the United States. Arizona as a state is especially recent - it was the last of the lower 48, coming in on February 14th, 1912, just over a hundred years ago.

But it doesn't mean this place doesn't have much history. I've showed you the ruins of Casa Grande, which go back much further than that bridge in Lucerne. Indigenous peoples were all over this land a very long time ago. Then came Padre Kino and, separately, the Spanish conquistadors, and eventually the Anglos arrived. And in 1953, an architect from Switzerland, Josias Joesler, designed the church I attend and am employed by. It was one of the last of many well-regarded projects he did here in Tucson.

Let's start with Ft. Lowell. Now it's a park, but its main claims to history are the ruins of adobe buildings from the fort that was active there from 1873 to 1891, and a little museum.

Now it's well inside the city limits, but back in the day it was miles away from Tucson on horseback. Officers' wives looked forward to their shopping trips into Tucson, which wasn't exactly the Big City, and still isn't.

Among the people stationed there during the fort's brief heyday was a surgeon named Walter Reed.

Yeah, okay, maybe that's not the most fascinating history ever. Let's venture 70 miles southeast - to Tombstone!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I took my Dad down to Tombstone on Labor Day weekend, pretty much on the spur of the moment. I was planning to go to Bisbee, but Tombstone was on the way. As we drove through there were people in costume standing around and I thought, never mind Bisbee today! As we got out of the car I heard gunfire - but it turned out to be only where paying customers could watch it. No matter.

It turned out that Tombstone was hosting a Redezvous of Gunfighters that weekend.

And there were all sorts of characters wandering about!

I even saw Bat Masterson, who left town months before the gunfight that made Tombstone infamous.

Of course the gunfight that Tombstone is famous for took place at the OK Corral - except that it didn't. Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday faced off against Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy and Ike Clanton in a vacant lot and alley behind the corral, and on Fremont Street. But as at least one writer has noted, that doesn't look good on a move marquee..

 The front of St. Michael's, 60 years after it was built.

I'm in the middle of promoting and preparing for St. Michael's 60th Anniversary. As I mentioned above, it was originally designed by a rather well-known architect named Joesler, who liked a "romantic revival" take on Spanish Colonial style. I've just started going through church archives and digitizing old photos and documents. I obviously didn't take any of those 1953 photos (I was only 6 years old, and living in Manlius, NY!), but if you're interested in history that goes almost exactly 60 years in Tucson, Arizona, you may want to scroll down for a peek at some of my recent entries. Then take a look at the other Robins' historic photos!

Karen

Linking List
as of Saturday, September 21st, 2013
1 AM MST

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.ca

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

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Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Travels With Frank #1 - Tombstone

Okay, this is where I try to start blogging on a regular basis again. For several years I've mostly just used Facebook and someimes Tumbler, and generally only blogged here for the Round Robin Photo Challenges. But I'm going through a time in my life that is both stressful and interesting. I need an outlet, and the discipline of writing on a regular basis again, and a place to keep a log of what's going on in my life that I can crib from if I ever write that threatened autobiography. In short, I need a blog. How fortunate that I already have one! (Actually, I have a number of them. But this is the one that still gets some use!)

So.

My dad in February, before the beard came off.

If you follow me on Facebook, or even if you just read my Round Robin entries, you probably know that my Dad, Dr. Frank E. Funk, moved to Tucson in February 2013. It was not his idea, and he didn't quite realize he was coming to Tucson to stay. My stepmother, Dr. Ruth Christy Funk, had died on June 1st, 2012, and in the months that followed it became clear that his ability to live safely in his own Wilmington, NC condo was greatly diminished. Dad has dementia, and unskilled, round the clock care at home was getting to be both expensive and insufficient to his needs. So, after a stint in the hospital during which we thought we were going to lose him, we closed up his house and he came here.

By here, of course, I mean Tucson, not my house. He lives just a few miles away, in a memory care unit at Cascades of Tucson. The people there are friendly, caring and competent, and the location is extremely convenient for me, being close to both St. Michael's and my home. It means I can make up for all the years that I hardly ever saw him because we lived 1500 miles from each other. Now I see him daily, even if it's just for 15 minutes on my way home from work. And on Saturdays, we go out together for "lunch and adventures."

 Today, for example, I decided to drive him to Bisbee, Arizona, there to see the historic town and a giant open pit mine. But Tombstone was on the way, and we got there just as shots were ringing out from the gunfight reenactment, and the town was having a big Labor Day Weekend Rendezvous of Gunfighters. Needless to say, we never made it to Bisbee.

Now, the fact is, Dad didn't actually enjoy visiting Tombstone today. I asked him whether that was fun, and he simply said "No." It was too long a walk for him, and I don't think he really grasped the history of the place, much less cared about it. But he had ice cream at the oldest continuously-operated restaurant in Tombstone, and rode on a stagecoach for a narrated tour of the town, and got to do some people-watching.

The part he really likes is the long drives. He enjoys seeing the mountains, watching the clouds build up, keeping an eye on my driving and, mostly, reading the road signs, business sign and licence plates. The drive from Tucson down to Tombstone is a fairly spectacular one, with mountains and desert and several historic towns along the way. There was also a big, dramatic storm on the return drive that we watched but didn't need to drive through. So that part of the day was a success.

Karen

Round Robin: Those Who Are Gone - Sort Of

When I posted the topic for this week's Round Robin Challenge: Gone, I wasn't thinking of the prehistoric culture known as the Hohokam. I was thinking more along the lines of 1950s architecture and signage for Tucson businesses that aren't there any more. Something like this:

(Click once on any photo to see a bigger version.)

But last weekend, in my continuing quest to find fun things to do with my Dad, I decided to drive him to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, about an hour northwest of Tucson, not quite on the way to Phoenix. I hadn't been there since 1986, when John and I first came to Arizona. (Well, actually, John lived in Arizona as a kid. But I'd never been here before.) One of the many memorable places I saw in the very memorable year was the adobe remains of a large abandoned Hohokam settlement, named in Spanish for the "Big House" - Casa Grande - that still stands above the half-buried walls of the rest of the ancient city.

These are truly the remnants of something important that is gone - long gone.

The people who built Casa Grande are a bit of a mystery. We call them the Hohokam, which more or less means "all used up" in the O'odham language. Nowadays the preferred term for the Hohokam and other ancient peoples of the area, the Anasazi and the Mogollon, is ancient Sonoran Desert people. We don't know what the Hohokam called themselves. Their civilization lasted over 1400 years, with irrigation of the desert, crafts and trading - but without the wheel or the written word. They are thought to be the ancestors of the Tohono O'odham nation of Southern Arizona and several other tribes - and evidence of their own ancestors goes back thousands of years before Christ. Rather romantically, they used to be known as

"Those Who Are Gone." But obviously, with their descendants living around Tucson, the Gila River of Central Arizona and elsewhere, they aren't truly "gone." They've just moved! And wouldn't you, in a persistent drought so bad that even your clever irrigation couldn't sustain the crops anymore?

Now, hundreds of years of abandonment in the desert tend to be fatal to the integrity of adobe walls. You've seen my pictures of the Ft. Lowell ruins, and they're less than 150 years old!

Add to that the tourists who stopped by for a few hundred years after Padre Eusebio Kino discovered the Casa Grande ruins in 1694, and, as often as not, carved their names in its walls.

Clearly, something needed to be done, and something was done. In 1890, the U.S. Government began to shore up and repair the ancient Big House, and  and "in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside one square mile of Arizona Territory surrounding the Casa Grande Ruins as the first prehistoric and cultural reserve established in the United States," according to the National Monument's web site.

 In 1932, that modern-looking steel roof was constructed over the ancient house, ruining the aesthetic but helping to preserve what was underneath it. According to Wikipedia, there's a pair of owls living in the roof now.

The ruins extend far beyond the Big House itself, though. In a wide area around it are foundations of other buildings - entire compounds, including ball courts! Some of these are still visible. Others have corn planted over them. They're not gone - just buried.

Now let's see what else is gone!

Linking List
as of Midnight MST,
Saturday, August 24th, 2013

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/mavarin

Jama
Sweet memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis

http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

And it's not too late to show us what's gone from where YOU are!

Karen