2. Proposition

The hotel--or Bed and Breakfast called Il Poggio (The Hill) is, or was-- since I don't know about it's present condition-- a fine ancient cut-stone building originally constructed by the Medici family on a sunny hilltop  surrounded by a small forest of pine and cypress. trees.


The main building had been a  country estate. When I discovered it the owner had converted into an eight bedroom hotel. 

The building, more solid than elegant, had heavy wooden shutters and massive front doors--a two story structure with mossy pink tile roof.

The owner, Elizabeth Studer, welcomed me warmly--as she did all her guests--and asked how long I planned to stay. When I said a night or two she said, "Perhaps you wold like to stay a bit longer, if you are not in a hurry to be somewhere. I would like to invite you to stay here to help out--you can work for me a half day and have the rest of your time for yourself. Your rent and meals would be free and I will pay you something to keep you in spending money. The work would never be very hard. Why not try it for a while to see if it would be enjoyable for you?"

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1. Il Poggio

I don't remember quite how I heard of Il Poggio, but I think it was from a couple of ladies who were starting a Bed and Breakfast in southwestern France where I stayed for a couple of nights on my way, slowly as usual since I was backpacking, toward Italy.


They told me that they were modeling their inn on one they had visited near Florence in Italy. They must have given me directions to find the place and suggested that if I was ever in the area I should stop and stay there.


Some weeks later I walked up to the very low-key  hilltop compound of the B&B "Il Poggio ". There was no sign announcing it. You had to know where it was and what it was to find it.

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26. Pool Party

Temecula Base Camp:

There is a big public swimming pool in a park near our apartment and we walk by there almost every day we are in our Base Camp.


There was a lot of unusual activity there a few weeks ago--three fifth grades from a single  public school across town were having an end-of-the-year-and-going-to-a-new-school-next-year party. Not exactly a graduation party, but a moving-on celebration for sure.


A disk jockey was there and the kids were strutting their stuff in bikinis and with wild abandon. Looked like good fun to me.


But I was also kind of wondering: THREE fifth grade classes in just  ONE of this rapidly growing town's SEVENTEEN elementary schools. I think they have a few over 30 kids in a classroom now, but lets just say 30 times three is ninety for short.


Ninety kids  about 13 years old in just ONE of the seventeen elementary schools in Temecula. 

They will all be getting their driver's licenses in about three or four years--that means about a hundred more cars on the freeway from this ONE elementary school and there are how many elementary schools in California?


And more JOBS needed  and HOUSING and, in about six or seven years, MORE KIDS from these kids.

Man, this is trouble BIG TIME.

It is time for us to "grab the bull by the tail and face the situation". 

So many more people so fast...

Something has GOT to change!

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25. Pechanga Casino

Temecula Base Camp:

New in town, we are always looking for interesting work in entertaining places so we stopped in to take a look at the biggest employer in Temecula, California-- a casino on nearby Indian land--Pechanga Casino--about noon on a week-day

Well, Pechanga Casino is HUGE--billed as the second biggest casino in the United States--it is really awfully big--with several restaurants and showrooms and miles of slot machines and other gaming tables and such--and they must hire an army of people to keep it going--but it is not a place for us.

All big casinos always have a peculiar odor--have you noticed? Not exactly a stink, but not pleasant either---sort of a mixture of perfume, restroom deodorant, people, stale booze, fast food, carpet cleaner and I don't know what-all. Anyway, not something you would like to inhale all day every working day--not a scent that appeals to us.

Something else that I personally find unappealing are the casino's  customers---at this time of day mainly old people sitting or sprawling in the ultra-comfortable seats at the gaming machines--the marks-- losing, ever so slowly, ever so certainly, their money in the oh-so-ever-so-loose slots.

It bothers me that OLD people can  be so ignorant. Haven't they learned ANYTHING in all the years they have been alive?

So we satisfied our curiosity about the town's biggest employer and, tailed by a young plainclothes security man, walked back out to the parking lot to drive on to nearby Wal-Mart for some of the Chinese-made stuff we needed.

...

23. Ponderosas

Ponderosa Pine Pond

Between the world-famous Arizona town of Sedona where spiritual seekers go to spend their hopeful money on enlightenment and the Northern Arizona University town, Flagstaff, where students go to spend their hopeful parent's money on higher education, lies one of the prettiest drives in this state of beautiful highways: the Oak Creek Canyon.

This scenic highway, following Oak Creek through it's canyon, is very narrow and twisting--emerging at the head of the canyon on the Mogollon volcanic plateau. The canyon itself is filled with a mixed forest of green--so different from the deserty tans south of Sedona, it is wonderfully refreshing.

The highland--the Mogollon Plateau --is forested almost entirely with one of my most favorite trees--the Ponderosa Pine. 

I love the scent of the Ponderosa Pine forest and I love the waves-on-the-beach sound of the wind passing through the top pine-needle-leaved branches. (I REALLY love this piney sound. It is, to me, more satisfyingly musical than Bach--and THAT is my very highest compliment!)

Tanya Snapping Me

My Favorite Person in My Favorite Ponderosa Pine Forest.

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22. Outlaw Village

Outlaw Desert Village. (Tomasito photo)

People do live in the strangest places.

Lucky for us tourists and travelers--because if some  people didn't live a sort of camp-out life beside the highway in the remote deserts--there would be no-one to pump the gas or sell the beer!

The above photo shows a clutch of the mobile-type temporary dwellings of today's free desert people--nothing wasted--nothing around but the most basic shelter and transport--it looks pretty jumbled and jivey but see? There's no trash on the ground or visible garbage (or people)--just the essentials for living. 

The residents are in the market/station peacefully looting the few stray travelers--like us.

I call them outlaws because they live outside the usual normal prosaic common lifeways of the crass majority. They make their own rules and are free to live as they choose  as long as they don't break society's big rules too blatantly. They are kind of like the hopeful weeds that come through the cracks in the pavement.

...

21. Flagstaff Face-off

Flagstaff Face-off. (Tomasito photo)

The little green sub-compact Chevy Aveo is ours--the jacked-up yellow pick-up belongs to the owner of the hardware store next door to the motel where we spent the night in Flagstaff.

When I parked the night before, the pick-up truck was not there--but when I got up it was and placed nose to nose and as close as possible above our little car. 

Boy did HE show US tourists who rules in Flagstaff!

...

20. Flagstaff Revisited

 San Francisco Peak from Flagstaff  Grocery Parking Lot. (Tomasito photo)

Yes, we had to visit Flagstaff, Arizona on our recent "Journey to the East".

For some unknown reason Flagstaff figures fairly prominently in my life journey and I don't know why, but  I can't seem to get far enough away. 

I somehow always manage to return for a look-see every few years.

Many, many years ago I even studented myself in this northern Arizona town for a two dose period--long enough to get a "master's" degree in English. At the time I didn't see the joke of getting an advanced degree in English in this out-of-the-way place so very far from England.


Flagstaff  was a lot smaller then and Northern Arizona University--which is now a pretty big deal--was then very small potatoes.


To make ends meet, I had a job as a night clerk at a motel out of town to the east. The motel was called The Crown and it was fairly new. Oddly enough it still exists but is very much changed as is the entire scene. The motel has a different name and they have added a restaurant (called the Crown Restaurant) and they have paved the parking lot--but the old cowboy-style Museum Club is still in business next door--still serving the town's drunks as it did in those long-ago days--though I suppose they are a new crop of drunks.


We found "Old Main"--the old main building of the university -- still  standing.

I used to pick up my mail there and the NAU  administrative offices were there as I suppose some still are--but the important new buildings of the university are now being built further and further away from what used to be the Flagstaff  town center on old Route 66. In fact to reach the newest buildings is quite a hike for the few pedestrians who might still walk from town as we did.


If you are the grasping type--hoping to re-experience something good from the past--all it takes is a short trip to some well-remembered site which you have not visited for years-- to realize  very clearly that nothing--but nothing--stays the same and that "this exists only because of that" as the Buddhists say.

...

19. Human Child

Brother Joe's granddaughter, Dulcinea. (2011)

Happy Journey.

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18. Beautiful Mud

 Mud Detail, San Xavier. (Tomasito photo)

We went to see the very famous Dove of the Desert, San Xavier del Bac Mission on the Papago Indian Reservation south of Tucson, Arizona.

This unusual and beautiful edifice was planned by the "Padre on Horseback", Jesuit Father Kino, and built in 1783.

We love to prowl around these old missions. We appreciate the struggle of these long-ago Catholic missionaries to "save the souls" (what ever that may mean) of the "heathen" (whatever that may mean) inhabitants of this remote desert and especially we appreciate the lasting but not quite permanent monuments to their faith symbolized by these mud marvels.


Looking at this dove you tend to forget that it--all of it--including the delicate swirls and ornaments--is made of mud painted white.


Adobe is mud--dried mud--and that's what these missions are made of.


Mud wants to return to it's natural state and place--flat--part of the earth, growing weeds and cactus out here on the desert--but keep a well-baked mud  roof (teclas or tiles) over your walls  and the mud will stand erect for a good long time--if not eternity.


So:  here's to Mud and Beauty!

San Xavier. (Tomasito photo)

...

17. International Wildlife Museum

In a hillside neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona--up where the streets become windy and the houses become architect's dreams and the dry cactusy desert is starting to be a more significant part of the landscape--we found a very unusual institution: The International Wildlife Museum--open to the public for a small fee.

You leave a nice parking lot--cross a pedestrian bridge over a trickling desert stream (with duck pond) and arrive at the museum--A crenelated Pasha's palace from a Hollywood movie. 

Inside, the ground-plan consists of three large regular hexagons filled with stuffed animals and birds--mainly one trophy hunter's brag from a life-long and gaudily successful serial safari.


Patronizing it is.

We discover that: "We  humans have disrupted the balance of natural systems. Now we have to step in and carefully manage our wildlife and other natural resources such as forests, soil and water."

We?


This shooter, a man who got rich selling floor coverings in post-war Los Angeles and so had the leisure to slaughter wild life all over the world, tells us WE must: "step in and Carefully Manage OUR wildlife. Oh, bother!


Megalomania it is.

We live on this living planet with a lot of other living things and we are ALL 
wildlife.

But now that the shooting is over and the damage done--these life-like stuffed birds and animals DO hold perfectly still for us human wildlife to study--meanwhile the rich white hunter has gone on to his final "happy hunting ground".

...

16. birdsong songbird

It's not the bird that comes along and leans how to sing.

It's the song that comes along and learns how to bird.

...

15. Motel 6 Kingman AZ

If you are not an older person, you may not know that there is a reason for the popular motel chain "Motel Six's" name.


The dollar, young person, is NOT what it used to be and the reason Motel Six is called Motel Six is because many years ago every room in the motel chain rented for six dollars a night. It is considerably more now (2011), but still cheaper than most other standard motels.


There were only a few Motel Sixes back then but now, if you want a basic "clean room and a comfortable bed" for a night when you are traveling, you can stay at a Motel Six all over the United States and Canada. Their Directory Listings booklet gives directions to more than 900 locations and we use them fairly often. Like McDonald's, they are all pretty much alike--but the hot water is hot, the TV works, the floors are more or less clean, there are two plastic cups wrapped in cellophane and the usual number of nice, white rather thin towels per guest. No surprises and not the place for an adventure.


Which is why my adventure at the Kingman, Arizona, Motel 6 was rather a surprise.


We checked in, carried our luggage to our room as the sun set and prepared for an ordinary motel night.


Then a noisy thumpity- thump-thump-thump vibration started in the bathroom. What the heck? Bad plumbing?? 

The noise kept going for a few minutes and we were ready to go over  to the office to complain when it stopped.

A few minutes later--there it goes again and carries on for five minutes, then stops again--but THIS time , for me, the vibration goes on! Not the loud sound, just the steady, pulsing vibration!


Tanya doesn't feel a thing.


 I am perplexed to say the least--for me, the floor is vibrating with a regular pulse and when I touch the door it is vibrating rhythmically too--with the same frequency as the noisy bathroom plumbing. 

On the way to the office to inquire what might be going on, I feel the vibration through my shoes in the parking lot and when I lay my hand on the concrete curb it is pulsing too.


The girl in the office says SHE doesn't feel anything but would we like to change rooms?

Well, I am no stranger to oddball pulsing. I hear the Taos hum when no one else can. I hear a distant rumbling at remote, silent Pate Lake in Alaska when no one else hears a thing. I hear and feel  the yoga "nada" current in empty churches  and solitary beaches, but this is something different. For one thing it is so VERY strong it is bizarre even for ME.


SO bizarre in fact I decide to shut up about it--like I have since I first started to feel the vibrations and hear the nada hum after my experiences with a Sufi teacher in Lebanon many years ago.


I notice a freight train with over a hundred heavy cars passing on the mainline across the highway and a block or two away. Maybe constant heavy train traffic has set up this constant pulsing vibration?


I have no problem sleeping and the next morning I keep quiet about the vibration. I'm not nuts or "hearing things that don't exist"--I don't think--and away from Kingman I don't feel anything unusual.

...

14. Mrs. Shimmer's Garden

When we were in the desert garden section of the Tucson Botanical garden I remembered another desert garden I visited a long time ago.


My mother was a very sociable woman--when she was young she had several older women as close friends and when she herself was an old woman she had several young women as close friends.


One of her oldest friends when I was a boy in Albuquerque was Mrs. Shimmer. Mom had made friends with Mrs. Shimmer when she (Mom that is) was a girl so Mrs. Shimmer was quite elderly.


At the time of my memory, I was about eight years old and Mrs. Shimmer must have been about 90 years old--quite the oldest person I had ever met.


Of course Mrs. Shimmer was a native of Germany and spoke with a heavy accent which made her even more exotic to me--though I was too young to recognize a German accent--to me she just sounded strange and very old.


"Shimmer" in German means the same thing as it does in English--a sort of sparkle--and Mrs. Shimmer was a sort of a tiny ancient sparkling person.


When we visited Mrs  Shimmer, I would play outside in the front "garden" of her very little old house in a run-down old neighborhood of Albuquerque, while she and mother visited.


Now THIS garden was a REAL desert garden and that is probably why walking through the Tucson Botanical Garden triggered the memory. There was NO grass or plants of ANY kind except for some  large bushes and a skinny tree or two growing from circular earthen depressions which could hold some irrigation water. I seem to remember lilacs since this is one of the memorable scented plants I recall from childhood and we didn't have any at our house. There were several kinds of cactus too and I remember checking out their different kinds of needles very thoroughly.


Best of all and beside the garden adventure--whenever we visited Mrs. Shimmer, she would always hand me a huge, thick home-baked sugar cookie from her big cookie jar. And I wish I had one now!

...

13. Tucson Botanical Garden

 Zen Garden Exhibit. (Tomasito photo)

There  is a good smallish botanical garden in Tucson where we spent a morning.


A special exhibit called "Wicked Ways of Wicked Plants" was featured with some clever postings describing such plants as "Flesh Eaters" and "Horrific Houseplants" and a whimsical mock laboratory of  "Horticulturalist-in-residence, Dr. Ergot Ratbane".


One of the workers said she enjoyed having so many children  visit the garden to see the collection of "wicked plants" and to meet "Dr. Ratbane"  because, as she said,   "Kids listen and adults don't and kids tell the truth and adults don't." 

 Desert Blue. (Tomasito photo)

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