TUCSON AFTER THE SHOOTING: To go or not to go?

by Eric Lucas

It was just an ordinary neighborhood Safeway until a heavily armed lunatic showed up with a pistol. What happened next was disastrous.

I’m speaking, of course, of our local Safeway in Ballard, Washington, where I live—but you thought I was talking about the store in the Tucson foothills where an unbalanced young American gunned down six people and tried to assassinate a U.S. congresswoman. What happened at the Ballard Safeway was “milder” but in its own way illuminating, and the irony struck me because both places are well known to me. I visit Tucson a half-dozen times a year and wrote a guide to the city for a major global internet site. I am very fond of both places. I buy great heaps of toilet paper at the Ballard Safeway; at the Tucson Safeway, I help out my dad by loading up sacks of salt for his water softener.

You know what happened at the latter store, so let me describe the scene at the Seattle one when a member of the “open-carry” movement decided to saunter about one day last year. These are Americans who believe the way to assert the right to carry firearms is to, well, do so, even when you are shopping for toilet paper. Who knows when a TP bandit may strike? So Messr. Six-Gun clumped around, pistol strapped to his thigh, severely alarming everyone in the store. Our neighborhood is not a gun-totin’ place. He departed without shooting anyone, preventively or otherwise, but the incident provoked a storm of controversy on the chat-boards at our neighborhood website. Hundreds of comments flew back and forth; about 80 percent wanted to vote Mr. S.G. off the island.

Ballard is a wonderful place and I urge all to come visit—great restaurants, nice people, fresh salt air off Puget Sound, and believe me, you are very, very unlikely to be shot.

I’d say much the same for Tucson.

Lost in the coverage of the Tucson catastrophe is the fact the city is a marvelous place to visit. Its cuisine includes a unique local specialty, the Sonoran hot dog, which uses onions and chiles to meld ballpark frankfurters with North Mexico culinary styles. Its many first-class resorts include one of America’s finest spas, Canyon Ranch, and a distinctive selection of family-owned guest ranches. The Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum is among the world’s leading natural history facilities. Tucson’s cultural climate makes it Arizona’s most progressive community. It’s the heart of the Sonoran Desert, a lovely and interesting Southwestern landscape that is surprisingly lush because, even though it’s an arid ecosystem, it has two distinct rainy seasons a year.

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Many happy returns

by Eric Lucas

Oh, how I love new places, new tastes and smells and sights and sounds. Just this year, I have discovered hot, amber sabia chiles in Tucson, peaceful historic beguinages (cloisters) in Bruges, the warm chartreuse water of Kanaka Bay in British Columbia, the mind-bending apocalyptic canvases of John Martin in London.

Love, love, love. But.

While we’re admiring the snazzy glamour of new discoveries, let me bring on stage the simple wonder of happy returns.

It was while visiting Tucson last week, dipping into the pool at dawn with my wife Leslie, that I had second thoughts about the siren song of newness. Not second, exactly; call them revisionist or retrospective. I was enjoying something I have often done before, in the exact place I had been many times. Hundreds of times, in fact, have I slipped into this exact pool, which is framed by subtropical plantings and the stern, cactus-clad heights of the Santa Catalina foothills behind, burnished by the fierce, loving sun of the Sonoran Desert.

A morning breeze feathered the mesquite fronds of the desert woods just yards away. A hummingbird buzzed by. Spent bougainvillea blossoms laid their vermilion origami on the surface of the water. A Gila woodpecker whacked a roof tile. The summer-warmed water was 85 degrees, both cleansing and comforting. Tendrils of overnight thundershowers curled by nearby escarpments, and the monsoon humidity lent the air a silken touch.

“Doesn’t this feel like Tobago?” asked my wife.

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Arizona Shoots Self in Foot with Concealed Weapon

by Marla Finn

A few hours before the big earthquake of '94 hit southern California, at 4:35 AM, on the morning of Martin Luther King's birthday, my husband and I had just come from a late showing of "Schindler's List," on the 3rd Street Promenade, in Santa Monica. On our walk home, we sobbed at the unjust horror of how our people had been singled out and taken down by the insane policies of one crazy man, and how long it took the world to do something about it. We had just fallen asleep when the quake hit, and it was so intense, at a whopping 7.1 magnitude, that our first thought was the Nazis must be coming to get the rest of us.

Once the ground stopped shaking, my husband and I decided to toss our two young daughters into the car and head for more solid ground, in our neighboring state of Arizona. In many ways, it proved to be a wonderful place for our kids to continue their growing process. Our neighborhood was like the fifties.

There were kids everywhere, dashing from house to house happily, with lots of sunshine and pristine swimming pools to play in.

Arizona's unbelievably backward political environment has always been a source of big laughs for us, having moved to this ultra conservative state from liberal California. We have daily reminders of how ridiculous the lawmakers here are, from the likes of John McCain, the now "Un-maverick," JD Hayworth, who puts his foot in his mouth every time he opens it, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who thinks pink underwear and green baloney, served in tents in the middle of the 120 degree desert, gives him the right to think of himself as god's earthly truant officer. 

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Arizona and the Ethics of Travel Writing

by Jules Older

Travel writers aren't famous ethicists. If we aren't cavorting on some pristine beach in the Caribbean, we’re scarfing down lamb chops at some snooty restaurant in San Francisco.

But every once in awhile, we get to flex our moral muscles. And I've just come from my workout at the Ethics Gym.

I started pumping iron when Arizona’s governor signed what the papers are calling “the most restrictive immigration bill in the country” and which I’m calling, “the Up against the wall, Brownie!” law.

And heading for her signature is a second bill. This one will require American presidential candidates to prove — to the Arizona Secretary of State — that they were born in the USA. So, come next election, President Obama could be kept off the ballot in Arizona, since nothing will ever convince the hardcore that he’s not a Commie-Muslim from Kenya.

The papers call this the “birther” bill. I call it the “Klan in cowboy boots” bill.

Most of my friends agree that the law and the bill are nasty, bigoted and more in keeping with the spirit of 1910 than 2010. But since my friends don’t live in Arizona, they think there's not much they can do about it.

Oh, but I can. I'm a travel writer.

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Dead And Dragged Out On The Throughway: Is this really a better way to go than by air?

by Sallie Bingham

Santa Fe to Tucson in a one-day mad dash

Jack the Pup is riding shotgun on the roommate’s lap as we head west on I-40 at nine AM, planning to reach my sister’s house in Tucson in time for dinner. The first miles across the desert, numbingly familiar by now, yield as this time we’d planned a back roads excursion south, just across the Arizona border. The map shows one of those intriguing dotted lines, a scenic highway, just what we need after hours of rumbling 18-wheelers…

To ready ourselves for adventure, we stop in Gallup at what is now our favorite eatery: Earl’s Family Restaurant. Here in Navajo Country Earl’s is shopping center, family reunion, and good staple New Mexico food: guacamole, burritos and so forth. Outside, Navajo craftspeople jam the sidewalk with their tables; inside, they patrol the aisles, silently holding out pins, bracelets, necklaces, and, in a departure from the usual, a pair of weird lamps, the ceramic bases coated with sand and then painted with iconic motifs. I’m charmed, I must buy at twenty dollars each, then wonder, too late, where in the world I’m going to put them….

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