BOOKPATHS

Arizona, and beyond

Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009; first published in 2002)

An early advocate for eating locally, Gary Paul Nabhan chronicles his year of eating food gathered, gardened, roasted, fermented, and feasted upon within a 250-mile radius of his Arizona home.

I continue on, adding to my dooryard garden, harvesting what I can from the wildlands around my home, raising minor breeds of turkeys and planting native seeds.  The percentage of food that I get from local sources will no doubt vary over time, but I’m sure it will never return to the abysmally low proportion it was before I began my modest experiment.  I cannot go back to ignoring where I am situated in the food chain, that cascade of energy that can be shunted in the direction of regeneration or in the other direction, toward desolation now.
     Whenever I have doubts about whether all this effort has been worth it, I go out to the wilds beyond my backyard and taste a fruit or flower freshly plucked from a tree or vine.  My mouth, my tongue, my heart remind me what my mind too often forgets:  I love the flavor of where I live, and all the plants and creatures I live with. – from Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

Related Websites

Gary Paul Nabhan

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Tucson, Arizona, U.S.

The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Collins, 2003; first published in 1988)

While still in high school in a small, narrow-minded, Kentucky town, Marietta Greer goes to work at the local hospital. Continuing to work there after graduation, she eventually saves enough money to escape. She purchases a run-down "'55 Volkswagen bug with no windows to speak of, and no back seat and no starter," and heads west, planning to stop wherever the car breaks down. Lasting longer than she’d thought, the VW takes her all the way to Arizona before two flat tires deposit her at Jesus is Lord Used Tires on the outskirts of Tucson, but not before she’s changed her name to Taylor and “inherited” a three-year-old Native American girl along the way. With Tucson and the surrounding Sonoran Desert as setting, the rest of Taylor’s story memorably unfolds.

“The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.” – from The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver

Related Websites

Publisher’s website

Barbara Kingsolver Website

The Borderlands -- Arizona, California, Mexico

The Devil’s Highway : a True Story, by Luis Alberto Urrea (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 2004)

In May 2001 twenty-six men “attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadly region known as the Devil’s Highway.” Only twelve men survived. When Luis Alberto Urrea was asked to tell their story, he accepted the assignment knowing his sympathy rested with the immigrants. While that sympathy clearly enriches his writing, research led him to a more balanced viewpoint, finding that blame could be shared broadly across borders and that heroes sometimes surfaced in surprising places. Urrea thrusts readers into the desert. His descriptions of heat, thirst, of dying, are unforgettable, insisting that the continuing debate on immigration be given a human face and that the dead be honored. Jeff Salamon of the Austin American-Statesman wrote that The Devil’s Highway isn’t just a great book, it’s a necessary one.” I couldn’t agree more.

Perhaps, ultimately, what is so remarkable about the Mexican border is not how many of Them have come across, but how many of Them have not. It is not hard to imagine any one of the Wellton 26 deciding it was time to put a roof on the house, to build a small concrete room for the new baby, to buy furniture for his wife, to feed his family. Their reasons for coming were as simple as that – as were the reasons Mendez says he came. It is important to remember that Mendez himself never intended to be a Coyote – he was settling in on the Mexican side of the border. To hear politicians and talk show hosts tell it, the entire population of Mexico is on its way. We try to put numbers on a story that is, at base, a story of the heart. – from The Devil’s Highway: a True Story, by Luis Alberto Urrea

Related Websites

Luis Alberto Urrea Website

Publisher’s Website

Bookpath: Tohono O’odham Country, Sonoran Desert, Arizona & Mexico

The Desert Smells Like Rain: a Naturalist in O’Odham Country, by Gary Paul Nabhan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, reprint 2002)

In describing “his visits with contemporary Papago Indians, the Tohono O’odham, or ‘Desert People’,” Ethnobiologist Gary Nabhan enlightens readers about a way of life that, though threatened, has survived for centuries. His essays encompass culture and landscape -- growing food in the desert; making a pilgrimage to a sacred cave in the Baboquivari Mountains; harvesting cactus fruit for the rain ceremony; children’s impressions of their homeland; protesting the border that splits Tohono O’odham land; the story of two oases, one dying, the other bountiful; nutrition-related diseases; and celebrating the Feast of St. Francis. There is much to be learned and savored in this volume. The Desert Smells Like Rain: a Naturalist in O’odham Country should be required Sonoran Desert reading.

Once I asked a Papago youngster what the desert smelled like to him. He answered with little hesitation:

‘The desert smells like rain.’

His reply is a contradiction in the minds of most people. How could the desert smell like rain, when deserts are, by definition, places which lack substantial rainfall?

The boy’s response was a sort of Papago shorthand. Hearing Papago can be like tasting a delicious fruit, while sensing that the taste comes from a tree with roots too deep to fathom.

The question had triggered a scent – creosote bushes after a storm – their aromatic oils released by the rains. His nose remembered being out in the desert, overtaken: the desert smells like rain. – from The Desert Smells Like Rain: a Naturalist in O’Odham Country, by Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary Paul Nabhan Website

Publisher’s Website

Bookpath: Sonoran Desert, Usery Mountains, Arizona

Sonoran Desert Spring, by John Alcock (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, reprint 1994)

Readers follow John Alcock through a Sonoran Desert spring, beginning in February on Usery Ridge, where “the first grasses…appear as green tufts amid the unforgiving gravel.” Though March, April, May, and June’s summer heat, when “wave after wave of heat breaks over the ridge,” Alcock observes the plant and animal life around him, including robins, white-throated swifts, tarantulas, diamondbacks, desert tortoises, peccaries, ravens, palo verdes, and saguaros. Sonoran Desert Spring enriches a spring journey to the Sonoran Desert, whether exploring Usery Ridge or other places in the desert’s expanse of “over one hundred thousand square miles.”

Despite the aridity of the region and the intense heat of summer, when daily temperatures regularly reach or exceed 105 degrees, the land is far from barren. Although there are impressive sand dunes in northern Mexico, for the most part the desert is covered with vegetation in great and delightful variety. This is particularly true of the upland Sonoran areas, which are the subject of this book. The ancient age of the desert and its subtropical climate have combined to foster an extensive radiation of plant species beautifully adapted to cope with their demanding environment. Amid the desert vegetation live animals of an equally wonderful diversity whose ways of surviving also elicit admiration. This book describes some of the plants and animals found in the Usery Mountains of Arizona during the Sonoran spring, the time of year when the desert is most alive and accepting. My journal is an appreciation of desert life, the spring season in this marvelous arborescent wasteland, and the importance of places without people. – from Sonoran Desert Spring, by John Alcock

Publisher’s Website

Bookpath: Nogales -- Arizona; Mexico

Capirotada: a Nogales Memoir, by Alberto Alvaro Ríos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999; out of print, but available)

The gate between the United States and Mexico was up, but open, during Alberto Alavaro Ríos’s Nogales childhood. In short, quiet, vignettes, readers come to know Rios’s neighborhood spanning both sides of the border, his family, friends, and experiences beginning in the 1950s. Capirotada: a Nogales Memoir is an enriching border story, one that contrasts vastly with those heard today.

“Nogales in the earliest years I can remember had a smell of woodsmoke in the evenings. The town itself, which is where I grew up, was separated into two parts, the American and the Mexican, by a ten-foot-high hard wire fence. We lived on the American side, in Arizona, but my father’s family had lived on the Mexican side as well. I’m not sure what year the fence was put up, but my family could remember the time before it, and still lived as if it didn’t exist. They were not alone.” – from Capirotada: a Nogales Memoir, by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

Tempe, Arizona

Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, has been chosen Bookseller of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly.

“The 33-year-old Changing Hands Bookstore is co-owned by Gayle Shanks; her husband, Bob Sommer; and Susie Brazil. ‘The enthusiasm, energy and creativity of the people of Changing Hands Bookstore is what makes me look forward to each visit,’ Random House's district sales manager Ron Smith told "PW Daily." – Kevin Howell, Publisher’s Weekly

Bookpath: Zane Grey Cabin, Payson, Arizona

The Northern Gila County Historical Society operates the Rim Country Museum, the Museum of Rim Country Archaeology, and the Zane Grey Cabin. Rebuilt after the 1990 Dude Fire destroyed the original cabin, the “new edition” continues to give “local residents and worldwide visitors the opportunity to learn more about Zane Grey and his place in history.” Between 1918 and 1929 Zane Grey “regularly spent time in Arizona, owning numerous pieces of land and helping immortalize Rim country through books such as Under the Tonto Rim, Code of the West, and To the Last Man." In addition to the cabin, exhibits on Zane Grey are on display at The Rim Country Museum. The museums and cabin are open Wednesday-Monday, 10:00 a.m. to 4 p.m. Additional information can be found on The Northern Gila County Historical Society website.

Bookpath: Pennsylvania; New Mexico; Utah; Arizona; and other stops along Abbey’s road

Edward Abbey : a Life, by James M. Cahalan (Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 2001)

James M. Cahalan separates “fact from fiction and reality from myth” in his biography of the incomparable Edward Abbey.  From Abbey’s Appalachian roots to finding his place in the desert southwest, Cahalan presents a “fuller, more human Abbey than most have ever known.”

Demythologizing Edward Abbey starts at birth.  Key to the persuasive myth that he created about himself, as reinforced in several of his essays and books, was the impression that he had been born and reared entirely on a hardscrabble Appalachian farm that had been in the family for generations, near a village with the strikingly appropriate and charming name of Home, Pennsylvania.  In addition to book jackets, even Abbey’s academic vita listed him as ‘born in Home.’  And in his private diary as late as 1983, Abbey whimsically recalled ‘the night of January 29th, 1927, in that lamp-lit room in the old farmhouse near Home, Pennsylvania, when I was born”.  In fact, that night at 10:30, weighing in at nine pounds, three ounces, Abbey was born in the hospital of the good-sized town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, with doctor and nurse in attendance, as recorded on his birth certificate and noted in the baby book that his mother kept. – from Edward Abbey ; a Life, by James M. Cahalan

Patagonia, Arizona

Charles McGrath visits with Jim Harrison at his adobe casita on the Sonoita Creek near Patagonia, Arizona.

"This time of year, Mr. Harrison (who also has a house in Montana) does his writing, in longhand, at the dining room table of a nearby tin-roofed, ocotillo-hedged ranch house he rents from a neighbor he calls Rancher Bob. Machinery is scattered around the place, and dogs and horses wander freely. The house itself looks like a time capsule from the early 1950s, with shriveled rattlesnake skins on the wall and rusting canned goods in the kitchen. Some glass-jarred preserves there are so gunky-looking they could explode at any moment. ‘That’s why I like it here,” he said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with life in our time.’” – from “Pleasures of the Hard-Worn Life,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times