In 1983, or thereabouts, I read an article in Sports Illustrated on the best zoos in the United States. I believe they were, in no particular order, the Bronx Zoo, The National Zoo in Washington, and the San Diego Zoo. What I remembered for sure was that they said the best zoo was the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I had just discovered the San Diego Zoo and thought it was the best zoo in the world, without, almost, any evidence and I wanted to see any zoo that was supposed to be even better. I did see it soon after and I was unimpressed (and a little dumbfounded). I’ve been wanting to see it again but, during the interim, I began to wonder if I had misremembered the whole thing. I tried looking it up on the internet a couple of times but couldn’t find anything.

The strange thing about the internet, however, is that, as time goes by, more old stuff rather than less old stuff ends up there. I couldn’t find the Sports Illustrated article but Google did lead me to an article in the January-February 1977 issue of American Education that discussed the Sports Illustrated article. Whenever I get a chance, I complain about local museums wanting to have a second or third class Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg rather than first-class local artists. Ironically, I didn’t appreciate that this nature museum is doing exactly that. It’s sort of embarrassing and it makes me wonder how many other times I’ve missed the point. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has no elephants or howler monkeys, it only has animals and plants that live near Tucson.

The site of the Museum is spectacular, even the drive to it is spectacular – once you leave the extended suburbs of Tucson – with the road winding over a low pass through a saguaro forest. Once we are at the Museum, the landscape seems to be in a natural environment and one of my first thoughts was that this area has a much richer – richer as in more plants and animals- environment than at home. But that is an illusion, this is really a distilled version of the local environment that is made breathtaking by the backdrop of the Avra Valley basin.

One of the downsides to civilization and its accouterments is that it covers up the natural environment. Travel to a city as small as Memphis or an even smaller city, like Chatanooga, and you don’t see the landscape. Even if you go to a local park, it is hard to get an idea of what the land was like before it was covered with our “improvements”. Tucson is different and every place should have a similar Natural Museum. In addition to the great site and lots of local plants and animals, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum has a terrific Birds of Prey show. The day we were there, they had three different kinds of raptors demonstrating three different hunting styles; Peregrine Falcons which cruise the area at ultra-high speeds, Barn Owls which quietly hunt alone, and Harris’s Hawks which hunt as a group. All of them were untethered – except for the golden handcuff of free meals – and they were captivating.

If the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum were all that Tucson had to offer, that would be enough but it also has the stunning Mission San Xavier del Bac and a vibrant art scene. The Mission was founded in 1692 but, the current building – in a sort of primitive, baroque style – wasn’t built until 1740. The only art gallery we had time to see, before hotting the road, was the Etherton Gallery, a suburb photography gallery but we plan on coming back (soon, I hope).

As an aside, one of the nice things I like about traveling is that it takes my mind off of the news. Especially political news. Most people we meet on the road aren’t as polarized as the media would have us believe and I think that the media is doing the country a disservice in constantly harping on our differences. When Trump hired John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, the media – at least the media I usually read, like the New York Times – went into a frenzy of dismay. “Bolton was going to push Trump into going to war with Iran.” seemed to be the main theme. Forget that all the evidence says that nobody pushes Trump into doing anything or that Trump campaigned on getting out of our constant wars. Then when Bolton quit – or Trump fired him, another thing they disagree on – the same people who were worried about Trump hiring Bolton were upset that he was being fired.

The example that set me off this time is Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos by Peter Bergen, a commentator at CNN. Time magazine has printed parts of the book as a long article in its December 16th issue and, in the article, Bergen complains: And then there was the manner in which Trump conducted himself personally. In an astonishing display of insensitivity, during a 2017 meeting about how to best prosecute the Afghan War, Trump said in Kelly’s presence that the young American soldiers who had died in Afghanistan had died for a worthless cause. Trump said “We got our boys who are being blown up every day for what? For nothing”.

By coincidence, the same day I saw the Time article, the New York Times, in an article dated December 9th, said: Thousands of pages of documents detailing the war in Afghanistan released by The Washington Post on Monday paint a stark picture of missteps and failures — and were delivered in the words of prominent American officials, many of whom publicly had said the mission was succeeding.

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for over eighteen years; during those 18 years, 2,372 United States Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines have been killed plus an additional 1,720 U.S. civilian contractors (what we used to call mercenaries). More importantly, over 111,000 Afghans have been killed. Trump is right, all these deaths have been for nothing. Nothing! Afghanistan is no closer to a Jeffersonian Democracy – or any democracy, really – than they were on December 10, 2001 (we are probably further away because the importance and power of the semi-democratic Loya jirga – a gathering of elders – have been reduced. A general’s job is to tell the Commander in Chief how to win the war they are put in command to win. If they don’t have the men and material to win, it is their job to tell their superiors. None of these generals did that. Either they thought we could win with what they had or could get which shows an astounding lack of judgment or they didn’t care in their rush to get promoted. Either way, they have failed the country and shouldn’t be heralded as successes.

Poor President Trump didn’t get on the cover of TIME for Person of the Year and he was upset. Like third-grader upset, so he took it out on the person who did make it, Greta Thunberg. On Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump Tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”…Greta Thunberg@GretaThunberg scooped up Trump’s Tweet and owned it – and Trump – by making it her Twitter handle: A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.

I, personally, like AOC’s reaction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOCUS Representative,NY-14 (BX & Queens): “Because nothing says “mature temperament” like getting rankled by a 16 year old activist.”

Art is a big deal in New Mexico, not just in Santa Fe which, BTW, is the third-largest art market in the US, behind New York and Los Angeles, but everywhere. Art, good art, great art, craft as art, permeates the New Mexican landscape and people’s lives. The last two times we’ve been to Albuquerque, there was an Art/Craft Show, an annual one in Santa Fe for international artisans two years ago, and a show for locals in Albuquerque this year; both were excellent. In this art-infused atmosphere, Silver City has been named the best Art City in New Mexico for two years running and it is between Albuquerque and Tucson so it was a natural stop. Our plan – Michele’s plan, really – was to get to Silver City about two hours earlier than we did, have dinner at Revel, a local farm to table restaurant, and catch a jazz group from New Orleans at the Little Toad Creek Brewery.

But the pass on the most direct route was closed forcing us to arrive at our destination, the restored Murry Hotel in Downtown Silver City, after dark. Like Tonopah, Silver City is an old silver mining town – it was founded in 1870 and Tonopah in 1900 – which still has active mines in the area but, otherwise, they are totally different. Tonopah has a highway running through the Business District while the highway runs next to Silver City – out of sight – and that makes a difference in the appeal of the shopping/hanging out district (just ask Jane Jacobs). About 36 hours later, we left. Even so, we did get to Revel and caught the end of the set at the Toad. From a very short stay – two nights and a morning – Silver City seems like a place that deserves a longer visit, although we did have time to have two excellent breakfasts, one a homemade quiche in a coffee shop and the other, a Vietnamese street food place in an old car dealership. For all that, Silver City seems like a town that is working hard to stop its slow demise and not quite making it. The town is about 9,500 people, having lost about 750 residents since the census and our hotel was close to empty. What it does have is the Gila Cliff Dwellings.

As an aside, we also had time to stop by the Silver City Book Store. I want to say that it is a typical small-town bookshop except that the econiche is more specialized than that, it is a typical, small, out of the way town’s, used, bookstore. The owner, Michael, who was very talkative and opinionated, just like he should be, moved here from New York and loves living in Silver City.

As an aside to the aside, everybody we interacted with on this trip had moved to where they were living and loved living exactly where they were; from the woman who checked us into the Mizpah Hotel in Tonapah who was from Oaklahoma, to my former Californian sister in Albuquerque, to the women who sold Michele her new coat, to Michele’s cousin in Tucson who is from New York. End aside to the aside.

After a few minutes of conversation, Michael pointed me to a row of shelves in the back of the store and said “you’ll find some old friends there” and he was right, John McPhees was there and Wendell Berry, Stephen Jay Gould, and Gary Snyder, and somebody I haven’t thought about for sixty years, Richard Halliburton. Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels changed my life. I have no idea who gave it to me or if I just took my parents’ book, but it exposed me to new worlds that were here to fore unimaginable. I think it was my first grownup book, certainly, one of the first and it was like turning a light on in a dark room filled with wonders that I didn’t even know existed. The book was written during the 1930s and, now, rereading parts of it at home, some of the marvels, like the Transbay Bridge – what we now call The Bay Bridge – seem prosaic but some, like Bagdad, Fabled Arabian City, during the 1930s seem even more exotic. The book is so dated, much more than a technical book of the same era. Hoover Dam is a wonder but The Grand Canyon is ignored, Washington is a wonder but not New York or Paris. It is like running into a very old friend who still smokes and thinks smartPhones are a fad, still, it’s nice to see him again. End aside.

We only had had two nights and a morning in Silver City because the first day was spent visiting the remnants of another city, 45 miles to the north. Well, city may be a little grandiose, ruin of a small apartment complex is closer to reality. We drove through the Gila Wilderness – counterintuitively, the Gila Wilderness is the first wilderness area in the United States that was protected as designated wilderness – which is mountainous but still dry enough to be considered drylands. The road started wide but got narrower the further we went, then it opened again as we got to the Federal Monument. We traveled through the remains of the Mogollon-Datil volcanic field that was active from about 35 to 20 million years ago to an old caldera about thirty miles across (a caldera is a very large volcanic crater). 35 to 20 million years ago, the volcanic activity made this area unlivable. For me, it is pretty much still unlivable; I doubt that I could survive being here a month even with the right clothes and a sleeping bag. Still, people whom our European ancestors considered primitive have lived here, off and on, for more than 10,000 years (Clovis Points, which are found across the American continent, including this area, and were replaced by Folsom Points about 10,000 years ago, are used as a dating device).

During that 10,000 years, members of one culture, the Mogollon, lived in this area and, during a drought, a subgroup built these structures, lived here, and thirty years later, abandoned them, moving…somewhere. There is way more to it than that but most of their story is lost, we know what they ate, what their pots look like and how they fired them, we know what spearpoints they used but we don’t know what they thought. What they valued, we can only guess. My guess is that their sense of natural beauty was closer to ours than their contemporary Europeans who thought the Grand Canyon was a scar on the landscape. I say this because of an experience Michele and I had maybe twenty years ago. We were hiking down the Escalante River from Silver Falls to Choprock, and, at one point, we decided to take a break ( we took lots of breaks but this was more memorable than most). We climbed out of the water and climbed onto a bench with a great view of the river. There was even a nice rock to sit on. Sitting there, eating a handful of gorp, we realized that there were chips of flints or obsidian – I have no remembrance of which – all around us. Five hundred years ago, give or take a couple of hundred years, other people had used this same sitting rock to take a break, to look at this same view. While taking a break, they used the time to chop at rocks to make spear points, leaving the tailings. It was both sort of eerie and exhilarating.