Jay Caldwell
26 April 2009
The Trip, Outbound
[Thursday, 23 April: I drove, my wife Diana rode shotgun, and in the backseat were my 86-year-old mother and her 88-year-old friend Lillian, a former-judge. Just for fun, I chose the long way, via Ajo, Gila Bend, Buckeye, and Aguila. 7½ hours.]
On the first leg, the Border Patrol was out in impressive numbers. Half-way to Ajo we saw a lanky guy with dusky skin and a bandana around his head run across the road from south to north. Obviously, an illegal I commented. As we approached, he signaled to someone on the other side of the highway, arm extended, wrist extended 90º, palm facing away. The other illegals, I said. Maybe an Indian someone else said. This is a bad stretch of road, she added. I looked to my left as we sped by. There was a pick-up in the scrub pulling a trailer full of horses with a half-dozen other guys all in cowboy hats standing around. There goes the stereotype for you. Just a bunch of hard-working cowboys.
A dozen or so miles later two Border Patrol wagons were parked on the south side of the road. Four officers were herding a bunch of lanky guys with dusky skin into their vans. Just after we passed by a third Border agent pulled up behind the others. Stereotypes confirmed. Illegals.
Fifteen minutes later a we passed a Border Patrol truck pulling onto the highway from a dirt track to the right. It followed us several hundred yards back and I wondered if those guys could give speeding tickets. Just as we approached Why a lanky man with dusky skin but no bandana around his head ran across the road from the left. Another cowboy? I asked. To be honest he looked pretty Indian and spaced out and after all, there was a casino just a couple of hundred yards up the road. In the rearview mirror I saw the Border Patrol pass the spot, slow, then turn around and stop on the other side of the road. Stereotypes in action again.
After a not real good lunch in Ajo we headed north. Before long we came to a string of speed limit signs, slowing us from 65 to 55 to 45 to 35 to 25 to 15, then a bunch of cones, a rank of stop signs, and a raggedy trailer off to the right. A red-headed kid in a green uniform came out and walked across the road and put out his hand, arm supinated, palm toward me. I came to a stop so that he was lined up not with my window, but the back of the trunk. I was feeling cute. I thought he had blond hair, my mother thought it was red. No one else could remember.
Where did you come from? . . . Tucson
Where are you going? . . . Prescott
Taken aback momentarily, why did you come this way? . . . because I wanted to.
He looked nonplussed. All of you American citizens? . . . uh huh
Earlier, for about 45’, my mother had seemed to be asleep. She had on sunglasses so that when I looked at her in the mirror she was just sitting there, upright and still. Later, as Diana and I were trying to get to sleep in our hotel room in the Hassayampa Inn, I asked her if my mother’d been asleep. She admitted that for a moment there she’d wondered if maybe she had just simply died, sitting there in the backseat. Morbid, yeah, but then we started wondering what would have happened if she had been dead and if the Border Patrol guy had asked each of us to show him some ID or, worse, to get out of the car? What would we do? Or, even if that hadn’t happened, what do you do if you suddenly realize you have a corpse in the backseat? We drifted off to sleep, uneasily.
The Conference
This is one of these events where quality of the presenters can be pretty iffy. They usually fall into one of several categories:
a) The Hobbyist: a former school teacher from Back East, now retired to Arizona and doing a little parlor sleuthing on local history (lots of train robberies, outlaw stories, and Indian raids)
b) The Relative: a longtime resident doing a little library work on family genealogy or local history: the ______ Ranch; my great aunt, _______, a pioneer seamstress; or, railroadin’ on the Tucson, Cornelia & Gila Bend. Hard to fault these sweethearts.
c) Doing what comes natural: a retired lawyer doing some fact history on a peripherally notorious legal case: the notorious Whiskey Row showdown, the Sycamore Canyon Indian ambush, etc. This can be any ex-professional: cop, teacher, doctor, architect, you name it.
d) The student: a budding young academic historian doing a class project and encouraged by his/her teacher just to submit a paper and see what happens.
e) The character: a guy dressed up in a huge cowboy hat, concho belt with massive turquoise buckle, and boots to the mid-calf talking about outlaws and sheriffs as if he might be the latter, but really wants to be the former.
f) The super-specialized expert: Sewing needles used by late 19th century Mormon settlers in northeastern Arizona. Inevitably these talks end up being catalogues of minutiae.
g) The professional: the rarest breed of all, a real historian who can actually use and analyze specific event to illustrate some broad(er) theme.
Examples of this last category were two Friday morning papers read in a double session titled The New Deal/Depression in Arizona: “The New Deal Impact on Native American Art” and “Boys and Men of the CCC: Gender Constructions and the Great Depression.” I mention these two because I sat in on them. Each seemed to touch on matters of everyday life and stereotype. The first lady handed out a flier for her soon to be published book (by the U of A Press) A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943, that contained lots of words like romanticism, indigenous, Other, commodification, colonization, transcultural. The second lady, just completing some sort of a degree in history from NAU actually spoke out-loud words like hegemonic, patriarchy, masculinity, feminization, self-hood, interiority, role stratification, and of course gender construction. When you read or hear this kind of jargon you know you are in the presence of someone serious.
The point of the former paper was that as U.S. Indian policy changed during the twentieth century from conquest to sequestration to assimilation, so too did attitudes about Indian art. In general, the emphases of Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, were to promote the dignity of Indian-ness but they chose to foreground the fantasy ideal of the pre-contact Indian, rather than the Indian-of-the-present. I’ve got to get her book. $48 after the conference discount. The second talk described how the ideals of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century masculinity were impacted by the realities of the Depression (e.g., men no longer had the role of primary bread-winner). The Civilian Conservation Corps was established to rebuild American infrastructure, but had the serendipitous (maybe, or maybe just the side-) effect of restoring the ideals of American masculinity as well.
I sat through far too many of the A-F category talks for the rare G presenter. Judge Lillian footed dinner Friday night. I had Cornish game hen. Others had scallops or prime rib or ravioli. This was at the Sheraton/Yavapai Indian Casino (now there’s a whole other set of stereotypes).
Breakfast
The alluring raven-tressed waitress at a nearby eatery (Sweettart Café) had noli me tangere and a deer tattooed on the volar surface of her left forearm. She wore all black with a simple, knotted black cord necklace and bracelet and black eyeliner. Asking people about their tattoos is almost always a great ice breaker. I learned this by talking to heroin addicts at the methadone clinic where I work. She said it came from her favorite poem, one by Thomas Wyatt. So I looked it up back in the room, on the free WiFi. Wyatt (1503-1542), it turns out, was one of Anne Boleyn’s many suitors (and maybe lover), at least until Henry VIII moved in on him. So, he wrote this for/about her:
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
When I asked her about it two days later, she blushed and said that she thought of herself as her own Caesar. She lives by herself, up a nearby canyon, in a derelict cabin she’s fixing up, owned by her folks. Her father’s a golf pro. She doesn’t play golf. Never did.
The Trip, Return
We took the Interstate home. At the rest stop just north of Casa Grande four sets of Indians had spread blankets out under the veranda and trees, with rows and rows of reasonably priced and attractive trinkets for sale. One guy was offering “white turquoise.” I had never seen this before but according to the December, 2000, Rockhound Gazette it was discovered in a turquoise mine on the Shoshone Indian Reservation near Battle Mountain, Nevada in 1993. An assay proved it to be true turquoise. To quote the Gazette, “It was not until 1996, however, that it was finally made into jewelry. The Shoshone Indians are not known for jewelry work and, as a consequence, the Shoshone sell or trade the white turquoise to the Navaho in Arizona who work it into jewelry. Because white turquoise is as rare as the white buffalo, the Indians call it “White buffalo” turquoise. Turquoise gets its color from the heavy metals in the ground where it forms. Blue turquoise forms where there is copper present (most Arizona turquoise). Green turquoise forms where iron is present (most Nevada turquoise). White turquoise, where there are no heavy metals present, turns out to be rare. To date no other vein of white turquoise has been discovered anywhere else. When this current vein runs out that will be the last of it.” That got me to thinking about a great idea for a paper: “The Economics of Native American Roadside Jewelry Merchandising.”
The trip took only 3½ hours, including that stop. Everyone got back alive. Without added jewelry.
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The Budding Young academic student didnt just submit a paper on a whim, he did months of research at the State Capital and was quite a challenge to find the mans grave site ( the subject of the paper). This budding young student is my son and one day when he completes his PHD for for him on the history channel or his books in your favorite book store of maybe your grandchildren will be lucky to have him as a professor for he thinks todays young people do not know enough or anything about their countries history. He could easily be a doctor or go in a professional that provides a handsome income but is choosing to teach others and pass it on. By the way the story of your trip to Prescott is funny. Reminds me of some we had with my Mother in Law.
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