Retrieving Arizona

I came to Going Back to Bisbee (R. Shelton) once again by way of librarian Nancy Pearl (Book Lust to Go).  This is a terrific memoir by current Tucson resident (UA faculty, if memory serves).  It's one of those books rich in references and tantalizing links and offshoots that begs for further investigation.  Many books elevate, enlighten, and entertain me, but those that also provide me with a wealth of other enticing leads, to books or otherwise, hold a special place in my heart, serving almost like a short-term special friend with inside knowledge to share.  I believe I have created posts around several other books that met these personal criteria.  Quammen's Dodo was in that category, as were titles on the epochal Mississippi and Johnstown Floods.  Other examples escape me at the moment, hopefully my inner gremlins will not keep me awake on that score.

But back to Bisbee.  If you don't know it, this is (so I hear - I've not been there!) quite an astonishing non-Ghost Town ghost town.  Born in an earlier mining era, I believe it is pretty fully lived in these days, but it has weathered some remarkable economic swings.  The author cut his teaching wings there a good while back, and crafts this memoir around a sentimental return.

But there are a multitude of wonderfully intertwined topics on the road to Bisbee.  I found discourses on cholla and ocotillo, and the author's personal "system" for coining names and/or categories for living species a lot more fascinating than you might imagine.  Had I not read this book, I might never had cottoned to the idea that the improbable Boojum Tree is also a member of the ocotillo family Fouquieria.  (Said tree named after dreadful L. Carroll creature in The Hunting of the Snark - which I must now of course track down!).

Canines are prominent, not least because the author and family are apparently committed owners of big dogs.  I don't want to own or be responsible for them, but I do find them fascinating.  (I recently friended Giant George, the Guiness largest ever, on Facebook.)  That gives some credibility to this:

The Navajo name for coyote translates "God's dog," and they give the coyote a place of prominence above that of the wolf, referring to the wolf as a big coyote, rather than the other way around.  But the coyote's name comes to us from the Aztec coyotl.

The author's original intro to this smallish-on-the-map but huge in terms of terroire southeast corner of the Grand Canyon State was his military service at Fort Huachuca.  I believe I first came upon that name when a co-worker at a former consultancy had a project there 25 years or so ago related to their electrical utilities.  But the Fort has its' own fascinating history, going way back to the era when the Apache more or less controlled the area, holding off Mexico when that country claimed the land and for a good long spell when the US of A had similar pretensions with little means of defending them.  That history also remarkably includes being the base for the original Buffalo Soldiers troops during WWII, something I only learned here.

But there is much more, involving land grants and battles, struggles over water (duhh!), and searches for the traces of important historical sites.  The author captures the euphoric feeling I have experienced more than once in encountering a mind-blowing expanse of scenic wildness.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and strongly recommend it if any of the multiple threads I have briefly touched on resonate with you.