Fishing, Rodeo and Parade, Oh My!

We’re just back from a weekend in a relatively unpopulated mountain town a couple of hours northeast of Phoenix. There is no cable TV, no Internet, no  cell phone service available in that part of the state.I have to admit I was not aware that parts of the country  were still this rural. 

The drive north is a hint that you left the big city. Beautiful desert countryside.  Mountains, cactus, sagebrush, and not much else. There are only three buildings along the highway for the next 90 minutes.The first is an Pima Indian casino just outside of town. The second sign of civilisation is about an hour up the road. Yes, you guessed it- a combo topless bar and towing business, right in the middle of nowhere. Not a house for 40 miles in any direction. I can understand the towing business on a highway truck route but the topless bar thing is a bit of a mystery to me. 

Which leaves us with the last business on the highway before you reach the Payson, the county seat. Picture this. You’ve been driving for more than an hour north of Phoenix  without seeing any buildings.Then you hit Rye, Arizona (which according to their community profile has a population of 0 and a land area of 1/2 a mile). Rye consists of one business-  a very popular motorcycle graveyard with a couple of acres of motorcycles, bicycles and other related parts.  In a ‘town’ with virtually no people. I don’t get this any better than I get the topless bar. Since both business have been there for years presumably there is a large enough clientele for both businesses to thrive. 

By the way, I live in Scottsdale Ranch, a subdivision of 5000 people, and we don’t even rate a blip on the map. But Rye, Arizona, a 1/2 mile square business with virtually no population at all managed to get a dot on the map. 

Well, we managed to resist these two shopping opportunities and continue on our way. We were staying in a borrowed home located in the tiny town of Strawberry along the Mongollon Rim at 7300 feet. The rim extends 200 miles across the state with majestic cliffs of extraordinary beauty. This portion of the rim is steep sandstone cliffs overlooking pine forests with great vistas, both looking up and looking down. 

The house was easy to find. It was located half way between the oldest one room schoolhouse in Arizona and a ranch decorated with a 30 foot tall Alaskan style totem pole.  I’ve been to this part of the state on horse rides through the years but never came as a tourist before. I missed something; it was great. We headed up this way to watch the rodeo and parade in Payson, a few miles down the road.

This parade may be a little different than those you’ve seen elsewhere. Light on bands (only one) and heavy on livestock (hundreds of horses, and a few goats). Even some Shriners were riding horses. Horses, motorcycles and their usual tiny cars. Every rodeo has a rodeo queen and every rodeo queen in the state was there which makes for a LOT of teenager girls with long hair and a banner doing the pageant wave. Most floats has a cowboy theme. Or Indian theme. We were near the Apache reservation and there were several Native American floats as well. 

The town’s claim to fame is hosting the oldest continuing rodeo in the country. We’ve been to this rodeo a number of times and once even brought my sister’s family to watch.     This time the arena had a lot of mud which slowed things down some but it was still fun. 

Other than that we hiked through the Tonto National Forest, the fifth largest in the US. Lots of huge Ponderosa pines and oak trees in this section. Wish I’d had my horse. And Franklin went fishing. Now that can be a little tricky in Arizona. If you’ve been here you may have noticed that a lot of our rivers and lakes are really dry places where once upon a time water had flowed. This was no exception. The pond across the street from our house was about the size of Walmart and inaccessible as well. It took a few tries to find a pond with water and fish but Franklin caught some trout which went from the pond into the frying pan within an hour. Yum. 

Something that you don’t know about us is that Franklin and I have spoken (kidded? pardon the pun) about having an Angora goat farm and making goat cheese. When I am in Flagstaff I often go to the local farmer’s market and buy goat cheese that comes from Strawberry. The farm was about a mile away from our cabin in the woods so we took the opportunity to pet the goats and llamas and revisit our fantasy of retirement on our own goat farm. We’ve set that dream aside so please don’t buy us any goats. 

The thing that struck me the most about this weeend was not the cowboy events. That is not so uncommon in Arizona. It was the quiet little towns built before zoning. We could have been anywhere in America. The Pacific Northwest comes to mind with the huge pine forests and old wooden homes. No tract housing, no internet, no cable tv, no cell phone service. Plenty of tattoos but no nose rings. It was more than a visit to another place. It was a visit to another time. We may not get back there this summer but we liked it enough to look forward to our next visit and may try to make this our new summer go-to spot. 

BTW I have a lot of really interesting parade photos from Arizona, Oregon, Mexico and Thailand. I'm making up an album of some of the best shots and posting them on Picasa. I'm probably calling it Amy's Parade Pics but I am not sure if you can access them by name or not. Let me know if you need the link. 

Flagstaff, Tattoos and Piercings

Just back from a weekend in Flagstaff, a rather quirky little city. What else would you expect of a town named after a flagpole? At 7000-9000 feet Flagstaff is one of the highest cities in America. It was also a train depot for the transcontinental railroad and a stop along the Mother Road- Route 66- America’s first transcontinental highway. 

"Well it goes from St Louis, down to Missouri 

Oklahoma city looks oh so pretty

You'll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona don't forget Winona

Kingsman, Barstaw, San Bernadino ....."                                                                                               from the song Route 66. 

Route 66 has largely been replaced by I-40 although there is still a stretch in use in Flagstaff.  But the railroad is still in use 24/7.  Once the reason for Flagstaff’s growth, the train- or rather train noise-is largely responsible for Flagstaff’s lack of growth.  It took till last year for the city government to make a connection between the railroad noise and the fact that Flagstaff has not grown at all- it has in fact shrunk - in the past 20 years. When we first started making this our summer home there were three theater companies, a Shakespeare festival and a symphony orchestra. They now have only one small theater group with about 100 seats and few if any new restaurants or shopping centers or home developments in over 20 years. This past year they finally stopped the train horns at every crossing. Horray!

Aside from tourism the other big business in Flagstaff is the local university, Northern Arizona University. Almost everyone I deal with in restaurants, hotels or shops is a college student.  And I find that the summer population of Flagstaff has a unusually high percentage of tattoos and piercings. I don’t mean a discreet little butterfly in an intimate spot or a tiny diamond accenting the side of the nose. I mean a multicolored octopus tattoo entirely covering a lower leg or large nose rings hanging between the nostrils. These nose rings are particularly popular in Flagstaff (city size 65,000. 7 tattoo parlors). Everywhere I went this weekend, these nose rings were in my face. Why are these decorated students here instead of home with their families for the summer? School is out. I bet they need or want peer support. Or aren’t welcome at home. 

My horse, Romeo, is sharing a large field with a few other horses. One young colt is owned by a couple of college kids with matching black nose rings between their nostrils about the size of a quarter. When I first saw them from a distance in a field with the horses I thought they had been fighting and both had bloody noses. When I saw them close up I thought locked up in a field was the right place for them. That’s how local cowboys mark ownership of cows. But apparently this couple is  doing what we used to call ‘going steady’. 

An hour later we went out to dinner at Pita Jungle, a very nice Arizona chain of healthy dining restaurants. Every person working there was marked with piercings and large tattoos. That is where I saw the octopus covering an entire leg. Fortunately my server did not have any piercing but his arms and lets were completely covered with tattoos. There were several attractive girls working there with these same large cow-nose rings. Not my idea of appetizing. One pretty girl had large hideous monsters- women with mouths like hungry ghosts in Chinese mythology- on both arms and large somethings largely hidden from sight on her breasts. 

Now....... I’m all for free expression so my concern is not their disfiguring body art. But viewing their 'art' is turning me into an old foggy. I have always advocated live and let live. Do your own thing. But the fact remains that my reaction to most body art is revulsion. 

I turned to Mr. Google for some support and confirmed that I am, in fact an old foggy.” “Two reactions seem possible in persons who see a tattoo. One is complete fascination, a feeling that here is the ultimate stud, the traveling sailor, the incomparable sadistic master, the criminal released from jail. The other is complete revulsion; the tattoo represents the epitome of sleaze, of low class background, of cheap vulgarity and bad taste, everything that intelligence and sophistication have conditioned you to despise” 

Yup. That sounds about right. But now what? And let’s not forget that I was raised Jewish where tattoos were used by Hitler to turn people into numbers. How do I overcome that childhood conditioning? 

But Mr. Google let me down. I could find a lot of opinions and even a PhD thesis about all phases of tattooing and body piercing. And a suggestion for parents:  “Hard as it may be, a nonjudgmental approach is best. Adults need to respect adolescents' autonomy and convey empathy for the fact that it's a tough age. Also, to give some hopefulness that a lot of things are transient, developmental changes that go away.'' 


Well, I’m not their parent. And I’m a believer in voting with my wallet. So should I walk out of a restaurant or Trader Joe’s where everyone is tattooed and pierced? Should I inconvenience myself to allow tattoo fans to experience their self expression? I want to feel comfortable, not revolted when I walk around town. When I’m at the ranch and these two kids show up again to visit their colt I want to be able to look them in the face. I don’t have an answer. Do you?