Day Two -

Tucson to Sedona

Not a lot of time in Tucson, but it seemed to be a cool little-ish town.

I was surprised how much it seemed to sprawl, considering it did have a small city/town feel. These desert towns have their own challenges, and in a way it is surprising that they are able to grow and flourish such as they do.

Tucson is quite far south - only an hour away from the Mexican border at Nogales - and you can tell that it has been there for a long, long time (by New World standards at least)

(Wow - I just looked into it a little bit and found out the history of this area goes back much further than I expected: almost 2,000 years - or more - as far as the indigenous people are concerned. The town itself was officially founded in 1775 with stuff going on a hundred years before that) If interested:

Tucson Brief History

I really like towns and cities that don't just say, "Gleaming Glass Boxes Brought To You Courtesy of Corporate America", but embrace and celebrate their history - that realize what is interesting about them is as much a product of what they WERE as much as what they are becoming.

I fear that as the pace of change in this society continues to accelerate, people will care less and less about the life that preceded cel phones or the internal combustion engine simply because it resembles very little of what we do day to day.

How people could not be fascinated by the process of how things came to be the way they are is beyond me. It is a very clear line - meandering many times with many side trips yes - but with key pieces of information one can trace the progression of there to here.

I don't know how we can have any sense of who we are without trying to uncover some of these rocks.

I guess this comes - if it comes at all - with more time spent on the planet.

When I was a teenager growing up in the Kansas City suburb of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, I really didn't give a crap about "Old Shawnee Town" not far from where I lived that told about the history of the the Shawnee Indians and the early settlers that came to the area in the 1830's. It was just dusty history, bearing no resemblance to my life or my friend's lives. Who cares?

Now, years later, having traveled a good amount both domestically and abroad, I can't stop thinking about all the people, stories, lives that HAD to happen to pave the road to my teenage obliviousness in that Kansas town.

Hanging in Shawnee last week, I wanted to find out all I could about exactly WHERE these various historical events took place in relation to the modern layout of the town - which continues to change and evolve. I couldn't get enough.

And I will say that the town has done a pretty darn good job both with a little museum and historical markers, to NOT let it just get paved over and forgotten.

But if you ask any of the PEOPLE who live there, to say nothing of the people that don't - if they know or care about any of this they would probably stare at you blankly. This is not and indictment of the people per se'. We are too busy running to and from our jobs to earn our paychecks to send to those Gleaming Glass Boxes of Corporate America to really care what happened here 50 or 100 or 150 years ago. I am probably just stating the obvious at this point.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut: "And so it goes".

More on Sedona tomorrow.

I can say this: it is amazing here.