Snippets from Tucson Town

Arizona is a wonder in and of itself. With a hardline governess that some have argued is a despotic, anti-Mexican, xenophobic wacko (while others have vehemently defended the smiley blonde against such nonsensical allegations), it is a state where the fun and entertaining group activity of disemboweling a cactus, stuffing it with explosives and blowing it up in a shower of fireworks and razor-sharp needles has been practiced commonly enough to warrant its own name (cactus plugging). Needless to say, this is illegal. Fortunately, there are plenty of legal things to do in Arizona. For instance, it is technically legal to blatantly flout and ignore flood warnings and bypass barricades and roadblocks set up to prevent motorists from entering a potentially (or easily) flooded stretch of road. Now, a few days here are enough to understand that Arizona is no stranger to freak weather occurrences, and a flash thunderstorm here descends as suddenly and crushingly as an obese kid falling from a treehouse. Fortunately, the State of Arizona is prepared for such acts of in(s)anity: the "Stupid Motorist Law" stipulates that any motorist whose car is found half-submerged in a newly-created raging current that used to be called X Road or Y Avenue is to suffer the financial consequences of his or her rescue - literally pay the tow truck for his or her stupidity. Again this suggests this actually happens. I suspect many of these slight violations of the law are perpetrated by overambitious pickup trucks with hydraulic suspension.

Whether landing in Tucson, in Denver or Phoenix, I noticed with astonishment that I didn't notice when the aircraft landed - one moment it was in the air, the next it had touched down - no, transitioned, to the ground. This marks a significant difference from the bouncy-castle tradition of some of the landings in the cheap European airlines I'm used to flying with. And even at the level of the nine airports I traveled through within the first week of arriving in the U.S., I noticed some things were not at all like back home. Airports, in fact, are usually the first hurdle to jump over and our first meeting with the unfamiliar. Public water fountains, for example, are a fictional presence in Poland, and every one of the 500 or so I've seen until now has seemed to scream DRINK ME. The airport also graced me with my first experience with a public payphone, which consistent mostly of me standing with the receiver in my hand, eyebrow raised and mouth hanging open, trying to figure out how in the hell this thing is supposed to work. The airport also introduced me to the American tradition of slapping a taxless price onto products, only to have the client realize with much confusion that tax is only added at the cash register and his cheap purchase is slightly less cheap in the phase of entering the brown paper bag. My disorientation at this fact was such that, when I asked why the quoted price was lower than the final price, I only thought I heard the store clerk blurt out something about "stacks". In America, you pay in stacks. Apparently this explanation satisfied me.

Turbulence at the airport is far from unknown to me, so I was grateful that this time around the only casualty of my arrival in the States was a sizable sausage a man called Groucho, Garcon or Gounash (my memory fails me) extracted from my backpack, inexplicably speaking French to me while shaking the kielbasa vigorously and menacingly pronouncing the words "Bonne arrivée" and "Welcome to America". It is a known fact that meat products aren't allowed into the United States. My humble confession on this public forum is that I had more dried sausage in my checked luggage, and that carried the additional threat of looking like several perfectly aligned sticks of dynamite. These last meat products arrived happily and are now fraternizing in the freezer. Go figure.

But ah, Tucson. My first memory connected to Tucson comes from 2000, when as a naive and innocent boy of 10 I was mad about all things that clinked like the spurs on cowboy boots and smelled like the smoky barrel of a revolver. One video game of old in particular had been filmed in Old Tucson Studios, a few miles and a world away from what Tucson is right now. Back then I pronounced it "Tuckson", the way an American would pronounce the Mexican version of the town's name. To me, today, Tucson (now correctly pronounced) is where I hang my hat, although I don't yet have a coat rack to hang it on. I'm here to start a Ph.D. in Government & Public Policy (a daunting prospect because I have never truly studied Political Science before), while several other members of the Oklahoma Orientation Crew are following their own programs, whether in Second Language Acquisition, English and Spanish, Arid Land Studies (surprise surprise, an Arizona exclusive), Public Health or any other of a wide selection of programs. We're the survivors that stumbled to the end of the beginning of the Fulbright road. In many ways (and this is true of other cases as well, rumor has it), "we Fulbrighters" enjoy some kind of preferential treatment on the part of our universities from the get-go, and the word "Fulbright" can be used effectively as a reaction tester, usually evoking some kind of admiration. Uselessly: we are only worth as much as we will prove to be throughout these coming months and/or years.

Tucson itself is not, perhaps, the Star of the South, nor does it bewitch and bedazzle with fantastic architecture. (It also seems to lack a city center, an unsurprisingly common feature of many American cities that were never forts.) What it offers is something different. Under siege on all sides by the Sonoran Desert and a whopping five mountain ranges, Tucson's specific microclimate and rogue thunderstorms undoubtedly make the Stupid Motorist Law pretty popular around here. It is also a city where the buildings lie close to the ground, providing an unspoiled skyline and some of the biggest stretches of sky I have seen in a relatively well-populated city. A vast sky also means a vast thunderstorm when it really hits the fan, and one of my first experiences was a cascading, apocalyptic wall of water battering against the windshield of the car of my wonderful host family (further praise upcoming :)), lightning ripping through the evening sky like ephemeral roots through the flesh of the earth. Not quite what you would expect of a land where even the cacti are complaining of the heat. But Tucson is also a reality quite unlike any I've experienced until now, and that is good. Difference is good. Variation is good. (And here my black-and-white vision of the world says howdy.) The giant saguaro cacti strewn all around are again symbolic of how new and different everything is. The strangling heat is not that big an annoyance because it all constitutes part of the transition - although I will probably sing a different song the next time I'm panting and slobbering like a dog pedaling all the way to the university campus in the arid blaze.

And blissfully, I'm speaking Spanish. My first interaction with a human being here involved a Salvadoran taxi driver with whom I negotiated a slight cut in the price of a midnight ride to town, and who proceeded to recount poems he had written for his mother and other people he deemed important. Of course, the greatest source of wealth here has been my host family, with whom I feel like I've been dipped in pure Mexican culture and being taught the wonders of the language of Sonora, the culture of Sonora, the people of Sonora, the fantastically well-defined food of Sonora. It is said that the only place in Tucson where you can hear more English than Spanish is the university, and by a single spree in the mall, I testify that there is much truth in that. As such, Tucson is a linguistic reawakening for me, an experience that gives that old familiar feeling of actually not having lost much at all, and the building blocks of the skills one has acquired in a language are always stashed there in some dark corner of the brain, latent, prowling, dormant like a volcano. No one's language skill ever "deteriorates" - it just takes time to bring it back up to what it was before one got disconnected from the language.

Tucson is a small city, one where you can waltz out of a store that lacks a changing room, holding a number of t-shirts, with the blessing of the store clerk to try them on in a public restroom (another word I finally have to get used to). Even if in commercial situations, trust and friendliness are not alien here, and people are far removed from the cold rush that characterizes some of the metropolises of the world. But of course, Tucson follows most of the patterns of American reality. I have never written out a check before, or used my credit card to pay for a phone call or other basic services that usually take cash overseas - and it seems like the ruffling of the checkbook, in this way or another, will be an essential part of this particular reality.

And while this post is essentially just a random, jumbled collection of musings and snippets from reality, it is also important to add that this is home. While on campus, with a prickly pear cactus looming dangerously behind me and its spines aimed straight at the part of me that sits, and while gazing out onto a boulevard of palm trees toward an unknown, distant mountain, I felt a moment of pure happiness wash over me. And while it was gone in an instant, being satisfied with where you are is a feeling that is sometimes all too rare.