Tag Archives: cave creek

April 23, 2023 · 8:36 pm

Too soon? Too late? Or just on time.

It would seem to be just about the right time to visit Fairy Duster Trail at Spur Cross Ranch in Cave Creek. We see a perfect fairy duster.

Even though it is April, the supposed height of the wildflower season, it seems as though all of the blooms are somehow not enough. But maybe we are just greedy. After all, the slopes here are flooded with yellow.

Some saguaros are in bud – you can see the nubs on their tips. Too soon to see any actual blooms.

The jumping cholla has jumped off its parent but will not take root for a long, long time.

Prickly bear barely obliges.

Well, some do oblige, if you’re paying attention. Note the bug that crept in, barely visible.

Some plants seem to have already gone to seed, like this lady, possibly some kind of clematis.

Way beyond too late for this gentleman skeleton.

Yes, there is plenty of brittlebush. There is always plenty of brittlebush.

And some nice strawberry hedgehog.

But why can’t they all be blooming for us, all at once? Thank you, chamomile. You are right on time.

We sit for a while under a shelter to cool off.

In another month or two we won’t be out on this trail at all. It’s already too hot to go far.

Contemplate the cowboy on the old rusted fence.

Wondering if we’ll see a rattlesnake.

Envying the horseback riders coming through. Hydrate! A couple of the girls shout to us.

Is it a lupin or purple sage? Nubilous (look that one up). Anyway it won’t stay still to pose.

It all seems to make sense suddenly, in the presence of a wispy palo verde, but perhaps that is only a case of pareidolia (look that one up too).

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron relates a story about a woman running away from tigers, coming to a cliff and hanging from it with one tiger above, one below. A mouse is gnawing at the vine to which she is clinging. Suddenly she sees a little bunch of strawberries growing near to her on the rock. She looks at them, looks at the mouse, looks up and down at the tigers. Then she plucks a berry and puts it in her mouth.

In the distance, the creek line shows green.

Each moment is just what it is, Chodron writes. It might be the only moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.

Focus on what is in right in front of you.

Even the dullest cheatgrass is splendid.

Everything is perfectly what it is. The tiniest euphorbia.

The most spectacular ocotillo embracing a young saguaro in a love grip.

Not too soon. Not too late. Just on time.

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February 13, 2022 · 7:31 pm

The zig zag trail leads…where?

First you have to see it. Can you see it?

Maybe you can’t go all the way. Maybe the rocks underfoot prove too much for you, even if the saguaro forest at Spur Cross Ranch tempts you.

Beefy, odd, some more masculine than others.

A well placed bench welcomes us. Behind is a mature mesquite, shaggy and fissured.

A plaque on the back of the seat has a few words from

Walking in Beauty, the closing prayer from the Navajo Way blessing ceremony:
In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again

The lines are supposed to bring peace and calm, and I’m beginning to feel iit, surrounded by an intense aroma that floats on the hot air, herbal and intoxicating, combined with the smell of horse. So many ride these Cave Creek trails.

My father would always find a bench. I don’t like to walk, he always said. I never understood. You’d find him seated, whether on the side of a trail, say, or on a bench at one end of a museum exhibit even when the greatest Jackson Pollack canvas in the world could be found at the other end. He wouldn’t move.

This trail has ancient rocks that have never moved, hot to the touch.

My mother says it’s strange because when my father hit the tennis court he was a demon, with a killer serve.

I think now he was just at home in his skin. He didn’t need art, or a view from a hiking trail.

Sometimes you find a tableau in the desert. Frozen, totally stationary, looking as if were posed by a mighty hand. My mother found one today.

Sometimes you see a saguaro that took protection as it grew under a larger plant, one quite different from itself.

My father never blinked when I said I wanted to go to grad school for an MFA in poetry. What a useless endeavor! He bankrolled the whole thing, and launched me as a writer.

Am I growing up yet? Like the saguaro, I’m taking a long time to be in my skin. I’m trying to be patient. “Patience is also a form of action,” said Auguste Rodin.

There might be birds here, sometime, if you wait patiently.

Two century plants side by side, one quite dead, one obviously alive.

Sometimes the llve and the dead grasses grow together.

In one of his most acute descriptions, Walt Whitman praised “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

Today, down a hill, Cave Creek.

Little more than a trickle now. In another season the rains will come and the creek will rise.

All we can do is observe and be patient.

Wendell Berry writes:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do 
we have come our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go 
we have come to our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Not a long trail today, but one just the right length.

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February 6, 2022 · 10:45 pm

We are nowhere.

Nowhere is sometimes beautiful, especially out a car window, roadside nowhere.

If you’re in the right mood, that is. We drive north from Scottsdale to Cave Creek and pass pretty much nothing. Isn’t nothing interesting?

If you have maybe too much too think about, beefy saguaros in a parking lot can seem pretty cool.

Or massive pines.

Peter drives.

His hat came from the 90th birthday party of Paul Orifice, former chairman of Dow Chemical.

My mother just turned ninety. Still a vision, even when the sun makes her squint.

We pass groves of beaver tail or elephant tongue cactus, no one knows which. Cave Creek’s a tacky western-style town, replete with Jesus, gifts and cheap hotels. Big Earl’s Greasy Eats is the local fast food.

Hooray America.

Bikers throng the bars.

Barrel cactus morphs.

The restaurant a cacophony. Corny Mexican that offers oblivion in its world-famous margarita.

You can get a 32-ounce bucket to go for 32 dollars.

My mother is a naturally spiritual person, though she has no use for organized religion. As long as you’re a good person, she says, it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you believe anything at all. All the fires are lit.

Over chips and three types of salsa, we speak of things that matter. Of “arrangements “ that will eventually have to be made—not yet!

Not every woman has a wall of ornaments gleaned from different cultures, most of which embody spiritual beliefs.

There is a Panamanian toucan and a coming-of-age necklace for Indonesian women. They hang in her lair, in her woman-cave.

One was gifted her recently for her ninetieth year my brother. It’s a Zen chime made by an artist/musician in Memphis, Zen because it is a chime that makes no sound. (I must credit Peter for the best of these pictures.) The Tanzanian headdress for a young woman is especially intricate.

At El Encanto, I dig into my queso guillermo, hot bubbling cheeses blended with yellow chiles, onions and tomatoes, served sizzling at the table, with pico de gallo, limes and corn tortillas. I think about the nothing of the desert, of the flame, of spiritual artifacts, of the ashes that some people want scattered on the desert when they pass. That’s something.

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