Race & Racism & WAAGNFNP Posted by christian h., 03 Jul 2007 08:16 pm

The Greater Sonoran Desert

By spyder

This post thread is in homage to our showiest of defendants and convicted as the showiest, Teh Chris Clarke. Since he is on the downtime swing of his 2007 rollercoaster blogging, and I have been on tour and missed several of his last postings, I missed the chance to connect and say adieu. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about his contributions to the way I experience the world, and particularly to my experience of the Greater Sonoran Desert.

chir_rock-line2x.jpg

And not to overstate or overtax the fireball’s interests in the greater deserts of the Southwest, I just concluded my summer solstice tour of some of the region in which and from which I find myself collecting precious alkaloid resources. And this time I took to heart and spirit my own adage - —what would Chris Clarke write? - —formulating a constant dialogue with the natural environs around me. So I shall share a few of these:

First, few people realize that there are parts of the region that despite the typical Southwest scorching solar radiation (that GNF is one nasty mother out there, when they keep repeating the heat warnings that more than 12 minutes of exposure can cause severe burning and heat related traumas), that are still quite lush and even green. The deepest part of the southeast corner of Arizona is one such region, at least until the locals and those invested in exploiting it use up the aquifer’s precious elixirs (and the dying ancient cottonwood trees are showing the imminence of the decline). I have always loved the Chiricahuas and their surroundings, and this trip was no different. CC could have easily named hundreds of species (perhaps thousands) whereas I am stuck with just common names or whatever I think I want to call them. Either way, I was very happy to see so many of them with such diversity across the landscape. The drought here is omnipresent and intense, yet the capacity and adaptability of nature to maintain its diversity is another source of WOW. Layers upon layers of life surrounded me and for that I was appreciative and thankful.

Second, I make the effort to visit the sacred sites where the first peoples, who lived on this continent, sent their young people for their rites of passage into adulthood. Thus, in this region there are several with which I am most familiar and from which I draw my own inspiration and motivation (and some of the local flora). I am not concerned with the religious aspects of the sites so much anymore as I was as a graduate student studying them, as I am now with the relationship my own humanity has with these intense and powerful environments. Landscapes carved from geologies by processes are as mysterious now as they could ever have been for the first peoples six or ten thousand years ago. I don’t need to know the physics, chemistry, meteorology, climatology, and so forth, nor do I need to know the names of the forces, demi-gods, demons, gods, goddess’s etc., to experience these specific locations as something unique and present. My own familiarity with them does not diminish their intensity nor takes from the ongoing mysteries that are yet to be revealed.

Third, and herein lies one of those CC thoughts, I am constantly baffled by the idiocy of Euro-American place-names and semioticities. Okay, not so much baffled as disgusted, annoyed, disappointed, and so forth with them being so damned stupid. Even the Spanish names, dating back 400 to 500 years are dumb: Pueblo de la Cienega (house of the swamp) in the middle of a vast expanse of rocky desert??? The worst of course are those that god-fearing white folk felt compelled to damn the place with for posterity enshrined by the National Park and National Forest Services. When you name a rock-outcropping, in the middle of a range of Sonora Desert mountains more than six hundred miles from any appreciably body of water, “sea captain” you are full of shit, and probably suffering some degree of mental instability from hyperthermia or some such cause. But, to then inflict that name upon subsequent generations, to engrave this stultifyingly stupid semiotic on a permanent plaque in a place that was so sacred to generations of Apache people, and various nomads before them, reeks of a foul and vile stench that can only be quashed by some serious monkey-wrenching (left-handed and convincing). Unfortunately, throughout the Southwest it only gets worse. In what universe would any reasonable person connect “Punch and Judy” to a physical feature in southern Arizona???? I might forgive some of the names of towns, but not physical features that have endured for millennia and shared relations in some form with countless generations of first peoples. These names are a form of obesity of culture, pouring layers of fat over the landscape, to envelop it all, under one gianormous blob of Euro white-man crap. Teh Clarke has discussed this to some extent previously, but I found myself revisiting it over and over on this trip, becoming more and more disgusted with the infliction, the meme virus killing the souls of decent people.

So my admonition is for all of you to work towards removing these stains from your local tapestry of realms and environments; free the republic of idiot badges pinned upon our local natural and physical resources. Look about your parks and settings, and insist that local rocks have proper local indigenous names. Or better yet, after the GNF party we can travel about in our fused fission states and change all the names in Europe to American Indian ones. Let’s call Greenwich Inyan Kara!! It would make as much sense. The Rhine could become the Niobrara or the Rhone, the Cheyenne.

And if I see another damned cross on a hill somewhere, or along a highway, it is going to experience an all new kind of stigmata I tell you. I don’t give a crap who was stupid enough to get killed on a blind curve in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert. All that imported Chinese plastic flower crap is litter of the mind and landscape. Get rid of it all.

–
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
–Jackson Browne

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Responses to “The Greater Sonoran Desert”

  1. on 04 Jul 2007 at 9:40 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    Though I have had the privilege of a lot of travel in the Southwest, I have sadly missed that part of Arizona (closest I have come is back and forth along I-10). Your post is reaffirming my desire to get there some day myself, but am glad to live it vicariously through you in the meantime.

    On the plastic flowers. It is with ongoing amazement that I contemplate that one component of our global economy involves drilling deep into the earth to remove scarce deposits of hydrocarbons, moving same to a facility where they can be made into plastics**, transporting the plastic to so some place in China where people work for next to nothing, transforming that plastic into cheap gimcracks that literally no one really wants or needs, and then using more hydrocarbons to ship the crap across one big freaking ocean and then distribute it across the continent. So we can toss them almost immediately into the trash - or in your example, leave them to blight the landscape. If this is not the fetishization of consumption, I don’t know what is

    **Everything else considered, I am not against plastics and regard making plastics in general as a far superior use of hydrocarbons compared to burning them up and voiding the residue into the atmosphere. It’s the gimcrack stuff that gets to me

    I blame Jack-in-the-Box Cracker Jack

  2. on 04 Jul 2007 at 4:41 pm 2. black dog barking said …

    Perhaps a talented psycho-evaluator can reverse engineer 17th & 18th century pathology from the names that were used to fill in the New World’s map. When not free associating oceans and swamps in the desert a common ploy was to put one’s own name on the tallest rock around, e.g. Pike’s Peak. For Mr Pike the internal consonant repetitions make the name work — Zebulon’s Peak would be on Name 2.0 by now. Still, it’s kinda like the first!/frist! mania one finds in web places not dedicated to atomic doom.

    The name Mount McKinley also has some alliterative appeal but is a poor replacement for the local Denali. Whatever “Denali” means in its native language it sounds exotic and impressive to this 21st century American-English ear. (”The great one” in Athabaskan, says wiki.)

    As to plastic kitsch and the planetary dance of hydrocarbons, I believe the technical name for the whole business is the Wisdom of the Marketplace.

  3. on 04 Jul 2007 at 6:55 pm 3. James Killus said …

    Re: plastic kitsch and ill-named geography, I take such comfort as may be found from the fact that the landscape does not care.

  4. on 04 Jul 2007 at 7:33 pm 4. JP Stormcrow said …

    the fact that the landscape does not care.

    Well, we should make it care then goddammit. What’s the use of being. like, the most cool species if we can’t make stuff care about what we do. I suggest that we stab it with our steely knives …

    It’s like a 24 scenario, let’s say you have totally unsustainable pyramid-scheme based economic growth to maintain and therefor a limited amount of time to accumulate more stuff than other people and win. Wouldn’t torturing the earth under those circumstances be appropriate? You know Mr. Peabody’s coal trains weren’t just a line in a song after all.

    another world across the sea
    home for little busy bees
    sweatin in some factory
    hurry, please, more of these

    action dolls with laser sights
    robot planes that shoot at night
    faster, kid, and get it right
    they’re rollin down the line

    I believe the technical name for the whole business is the Wisdom of the Marketplace.

    Yep, ‘cuz The Invisible Hand is All Good.

  5. on 04 Jul 2007 at 9:38 pm 5. James Killus said …

    I suggest that we stab it with our steely knives …

    Pssh. That is what the Giant Nuclear Fireball is for. I’m surprised I have to remind you of this…

  6. on 04 Jul 2007 at 11:16 pm 6. Oaktown Girl said …

    If I ever spent a significant amount of time in Arizona, I am quite sure that those ridiculous Westernized names would drive me batshit crazy. I’d probably damn near bite my tongue off from trying to keep from ranting constantly against it.

    Ah…the GNF as the ultimate (and final) Steely Knife. An excellent poetic metaphor worthy of Gojira Fest™ I hope to see it there!

  7. on 05 Jul 2007 at 9:54 am 7. Seattle said …

    Now what you really need to do is work on the phones and ask people for their contact info including addresses. The longer you do that, the more you realize that the European founders of the current geo-political entity known as the United States were not particularly creative folk. Neither were they particularly sensative. As I recall, a certain number of them were prisoners transported due to lack of space. Then there were the bond servants, and a lot of people who weren’t part of the party in power wherever they came from so they came over here. As a result we have painfully obvious names like, Centralia, Beaver, Clearfield, North Bay, ad naseum. Our saving grace is the number of indigenous names that were kept. In Washington State we have a large number of names most people from around here have no idea how to pronounce. River names come to mind. Snohomish, Skykomish, Skagit, Nisqually, and my favorite, the Stillaguamish. Just rolls off the toungue, doesnt it?

  8. on 05 Jul 2007 at 11:55 am 8. black dog barking said …

    Washington State is pretty good with the fictitious places names as well.

  9. on 05 Jul 2007 at 12:20 pm 9. Kiera PSI said …

    I’ll be busy all weekend telling people how much their future will suck and how they won’t ever hook up with the man/woman of their sick fantasies (I’m an honest psychic, what can I say? That’s why I don’t make any money at it to speak of.), so I’ll miss the Gojira Fest.

    Have fun without me.

  10. on 05 Jul 2007 at 12:59 pm 10. Oaktown Girl said …

    I’ll miss the Gojira Fest.

    Well, if we do have the Gojira Fest™, you don’t have to wait until next weekend to write your poem, song, tribute, parable, etc. You can start writing it now! (It’s what any good Party Patriot would do). I can post it for you, or you can post it in the evening when you get home. Besides, starting now is what I’d recommend for everybody, unless you are really good at on-the-fly creative improve (which some of you are).

    And Kiera, I happen to know you’ve written a clever song or two in the past. We eagerly away your contribution to Gojira Fest™!

    {Hey Kids! Want to know how to put the “trademark” superscript after Gojira Fest? Right after the word “Fest” with no spaces, add the following: & trade ; - that’s the “and” symbol, the word “trade” and the semicolon.}

  11. on 05 Jul 2007 at 1:01 pm 11. Seattle said …

    Don’t get me started on David Lynch. I walked out of “Eraserhead”, really wanted to walk out of “Blue Velvet” and never watched “Twin Peaks” on principal.

  12. on 05 Jul 2007 at 1:04 pm 12. James Killus said …

    We make up for some of the lack of creativity in naming by audacious mispronunciation, especially of the French and Spanish names that were strewn across the land by earlier thugs…, er, explorers.

    My favorite, perhaps, is Vallejo, pronounced Va-LAY-o, which is neither Spanish nor English and a mere step from Valley-o, which is, of course, where our Johnny-o went away, alive, alive-o.

  13. on 05 Jul 2007 at 1:21 pm 13. Oaktown Girl said …

    Don’t get me started on David Lynch.

    Agreed.

  14. on 05 Jul 2007 at 2:55 pm 14. black dog barking said …

    The first settlement in Nebraska (obviously not counting non-Europeans, duh!) was in Beatrice, pronounced by locals to rhyme roughly with “see THAT dress”. There is a Cairo, pronounced care-oh and Norfolk, pronounced nor-fork because that’s what the town intended but paperwork at the post office was either misprinted or misread.

    And there’s Kearney, named for pre-Civil War general Stephen Kearny, misspelled. (spyder, have you ever had interaction with Stanal Sound, formerly of Kearney?)

    David Lynch’s works are hit and miss with me. Spent a very troubling three hours with Inland Empire this spring. Not light in any way, but entertaining in the way that watching the collapse of European civilization in the first half of the 20th century can hold one’s attention. Weirdly compelling.

  15. on 05 Jul 2007 at 3:12 pm 15. Oaktown Girl said …

    The most common mispronunciation (meaning not saying it the way locals say it) in my region is the small city called Albany. It’s pronounced ALL-bany, but for some reason most outsiders (for the record, “outsider” not derogatory in this comment) say it AL-bany (like the male name “Al”). That one drives me crazy because our first house was in Albany, so I know it well.

    The other big one locally is San Rafael. Most outsiders try to say it in the original Spanish way: rah-fah-el. The way it’s really pronounced (again - the local way) is ruh-FELL. Outsiders always give themselves away with that one.

    Down in SoCal there is a town called San Pedro. But to say PAY-dro is incorrect. It’s PEE-dro. That’s even worse than San ruh-FELL!

  16. on 05 Jul 2007 at 3:47 pm 16. James Killus said …

    I worked in San Rafael for a number or years, for a company that had moved from Southern California. One of its founders was Greek, with a classical education, so they were still working off the original stationery that said “San Raphael” when I arrived.

    My mother grew up in a town in southern Georgia named Seville, pronounced SEA-ville, despite its being at least a hundred miles from any coast.

    The Georgia pronunciation of Albany has the “Al” as the first syllable, but the first two syllables have equal emphasis, and the third is nearly the same.

  17. on 05 Jul 2007 at 11:33 pm 17. JP Stormcrow said …

    In William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, he humorously describes his terror at driving the road that crosses the Chiricahuas. Blue Highways is a bit of a mixed book, I liked it, because he it was the kind of amateurish road trip I could see myself taking (and I could follow the whole freaking trip on maps). He was quite the consummate newbie on the real backroads, which did have its charm, but I imagine grates on some. However, his story-telling of encounters with the folks he meets is the real strength of the book.

    His second book Prairy Earth is a nearly impenetrably-detailed look at a piece of one of my favorite landscapes, the Flint Hills of Kansas. I will hold out the Great Plains of the US as one of the most overlooked great places of the world (I suspect the Russian steppes are similar.) I have yet to inflict a whole vacation on the family traveling them, but have gone out of my way a number of times to cross them - North to South (or vice versa) is hard to arrange, but I it find more interesting than East-West. (One place I have sadly missed is the Nebraska Sand Hills.) I have been to Kearney … and the best stars I have just about ever seen were from a campsite near Kimball.

    To me one of the sad truths is that several of the great ecosystems of the country were not preserved in any single large block. To me the lack of a truly large (say Yellowstone-sized) untouched swath of Tallgrass Prairie or Eastern Woodland are a damn shame. All the more reason to hang on to those few rugged places such as the Chiricahuas the have so far held out against complete exploitation by homo despoilus.

  18. on 05 Jul 2007 at 11:47 pm 18. JP Stormcrow said …

    Was trying to think of an appropriate song for Black Dog Barking’s planetary dance of hydrocarbons and it finally came to me:

    Actually, this song has GNF significance for me. As I annoyingly posted several times at MB’s place, my GNF scenario is to have White Rabbit set to play over massive omnipresent low-fidelity loudspeakers, timed so that right at the end as the rabbit bites its fucking head off (to quote HST) the GNF strikes. And then - as on the album - it is immediately followed by Plastic Fantastic Lover, there just doesn’t happen to be anyone around left to hear it. (Need some maximal investment to GNF-proof all the sound system components - I assume spyder and James can rig something up.)

  19. on 07 Jul 2007 at 8:55 am 19. black dog barking said …

    Thanks for the pointer to Prairy Earth. In the mid-90’s I made several trips to Tulsa, OK which meant driving lots of two lane blacktop up and down eastern Kansas. My favorite part was the stretch of US 75 just south of Burlington “Gateway to the Flint Hills” KS.