Tucson, Arizona does not feel like this planet, let alone this country. If you had told me that our airplane had made a detour and landed on the moon, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Tucson’s a place where if you take one wrong turn or make one wrong move you will find that it is your last. This feeling may be due to my New Jersey upbringing, where the most dangerous thing I encounter on a daily basis is a bad driver on the Parkway, but after spending a week in Tucson I have to admit that I am far removed from a life where forgetting a water bottle on a long drive could be that one wrong decision that will end my existence.
I mentioned this to my wife and when I began my thesis she stopped me dead in my tracks. My wife is a very down to earth person so when I started my dissertation with the sentence “I feel like we were dropped on the planet Arrakis,” she almost went cross eyed. I figured I wouldn’t go on to tell her the myriad of ways I felt that me, her, and our two daughters’ lives were in mortal danger. I am the man of the house and I am supposed to be strong and protective so I don’t know if noticing every single thing that can kill your family while you’re in the middle of the desert is being a good patriarch or being a pussy. This is why I feel the need to get this down on paper (or the internet).
We can forget the nickname the Grand Canyon State. The state should be renamed to what it actually is – The State Where There Are 1000+ Ways to Die.
Way 1 – Death By Bugs
If Arizona is any inclination of what happens when the apocalypse strikes then it is not the meek that shall inherit the earth, but the bugs. I saw bees as big as my fist, moths the size of bats, and ants that looked like they were walking on stilts. These are just a few of the bugs I can name because most of the bugs I had never seen before in my life. It didn’t help that we were not staying in the actual city of Tucson but at a boutique hotel outside the city which according to the hotel’s website is “located at the heart of the Sonoran Desert.”
At night when we would return to our room there were armies of bugs hovering around a spotlight at the entrance. At least three times a day I would hear a scream from my wife that sounded like someone was torturing her at Guantanamo. I became the heroic Bug Killer Man over and over and over (Daddy, Get The Bug). It wouldn’t surprise me if I was told that half the bugs I ended up killing in our room were poisonous and that my life was in danger every time.
Way 2 – Death By Heat
They call it a dry heat. The sentiment is laughable. I don’t care if it’s wet or dry, 106 is 106. And that is actually the temperature it got up to on our little stay in Tucson. One hundred and fucking six! If I hit a sauna session it would feel no different than what I felt laying out by the pool around 3 PM. In normal climates heat peaks between 1 and 2 PM until the sun begins it’s descent. Not in Arizona. The heat starts at 11 AM and doesn’t quit until hours after the sun has finally gone down.
Besides staying hydrated myself it was a 24/7 task making sure my three-year-old daughter had some water every ten minutes. If you’ve never been around a three-year-old then you should know they tend to remember that you promised them a cupcake a week ago but can’t quite remember to do the tasks that will keep them alive. They also tend to refuse the things that are necessary. So, every time my daughter said she wasn’t thirsty I had to force feed her water like she was Bobby Sands (okay, that joke went a little too far, but I couldn’t resist).
Because daddy has a death wish, I made the family take a trip to see the San Xavier del Bac Mission which is a church about thirty minutes outside Tucson. The church is extraordinary. It’s like a weird, white mirage in the middle of nothing. It’s hard to imagine the people who had the balls or the gall to start such a church in the midst of hostile territory and you wonder if those people themselves had a death wish too.
The church was unbelievably beautiful and it felt like you were walking into a cave made for worship. But when you get up to the pulpit, and look to your left, you will find what looks like a dead man caged in a see-through box. I looked at my wife and made a hand motion to take the kids away because I didn’t want them to see a DEAD FUCKING BODY at such an impressionable age. When I walked up to the tomb I concluded the guy inside clearly died of dehydration. He was sucked out, mummified, and I figured this could easily be us if we didn’t get to the car quick and rehydrate. We found out that the body inside the clear box was not a dead body after all, but a sculpture of one. It didn’t change the sentiment. The desert is a dangerous place.
Way 3 – Death By Cliff
When your three-year-old daughter loves museums you try and find one wherever you go. Even if that museum’s name is “Desert Museum” you don’t except the museum to actually be in the desert. Boy was I wrong. This museum was a couple of buildings dropped out in no-mans-land that you have to walk to and from with signs that say “you are in the wilderness, watch out for snakes.” But it wasn’t even the “museum” that was the most dangerous part, or the paths to get from building to building, it was getting there.
The worst part about travelling to new places is getting used to a rental car. If I’m in my own car I know the appropriate pressure on the gas and break pedal (which is a lot of pressure in my very old Jeep Wrangler), the proper turn radius on the wheel (which is 360 degrees on my very old Jeep Wrangler), and the exact mileage you have when the gas light turns on (which is very little in my very old Jeep Wrangler.) For the first five days of the seven day trip I was causing my entire family whiplash by breaking too hard or speeding off the line too fast simply because I wasn’t used to the car. It was especially scary when we drove to the museum through a very hilly area with thousands of cacti lined in rows that looked like ominous crosses on the road to Rome. Eventually the drive went from hilly to mountainous and as we climbed higher and higher, steeper and steeper, we eventually came to a point where we had to go straight down through a a curvy mountain pass with no guard rails. The view was beautiful according to my wife. I wouldn’t know because my eyes were dead set on the road. Any wrong move and me, my family, and the brand new Budget rental car would have taken a thousand foot long tumble.
Way 4 - Death By Drug Addicts
There are a lot of homeless drug addicts in Tucson, Arizona. I’m not sure if it’s the “nice dry heat” or the black tar heroin just over the boarder that brings them there, but it’s definitely not a pretty sight. I know not all drug addicts are homeless and not all homeless are drug addicts, but when you combine the two it feels like you’re in a zombie movie. The men that are homeless drug addicts are scary enough but the women look like the Cynthia doll from Rugrats, which is much more terrifying.
At one point in the trip I stopped at a Circle K (luckily by myself) to fill up my gas tank and grab water. I pulled up to the lovely scene of a homeless man shitting into the garbage can just off the side of the store. When I left the store the man was done his business and holding the door open for a women entering the store. Can I glean anything from this? Probably not, except that the world is grosser, scarier, and more chivalrous than I previously imagined.
Way 5 – Death By Dry Skin
I’ve found that the more you make fun of people the higher the chance of the thing you are making fun of them for happening to you. This is the case with me and my mom. I’ve made fun of my mother’s dry feet for many years. The bottoms of her feet look like pre-historic riverbeds. So it was only right that after four days in Tucson a big gash opened up at the bottom of my foot. This big gash had come about on its own. I didn’t step on any glass or a kid’s toy. I didn’t kick anything sharp. All I did was go in and out of a chlorinated pool a few too many times in 106 degree “dry heat” without properly moisturizing and bam – a three inch cut split open on my heel. Which makes the next way to die in Arizona even easier to understand. Because it’s hard enough trying to chase around your three year old on vacation with two working feet, now just imagine your walking with a painful limp.
Way 6 – Death By Children
By far the easiest way to die on this trip was sharing one room with two kids under the age of three. We took this trip as a family because I had a business meeting that coincided with my daughter’s third birthday. I’ve made a vow to never miss one of my children’s birthdays and if that means dragging them across the country on a five hour flight from hell (The Mile High Club) to a place where there are thousands of ways to die then so be it.
There are millions of ways your kids will kill you on a daily basis but on this trip reason number one was that my daughter was awarded her own bed. She was very excited and that excitement turned into elation and that elation turned into a four hour attempt every night to get her to actually sleep. By the end of the trip my wife and I had taken turns sleeping in her bed with her for five out of the seven nights. Together we might have scraped together three or four hours of sleep a night. It doesn’t help that my daughter is a wild sleeper. She moves, she hits, she kicks and somehow all of these movements find the places you least want them. Sleep with one eye open is either a warning about your kids enemies or what actually happens on vacation when one kid has their own free sleeping arrangement.
Now, having taken two thousand words to express the fear I constantly had in Tucson, I feel the need to recommend the place. The beauty of it made the fear worth it. For every way to die there was something so amazing that it almost defies description.
- The sunrise over the Saguaro National Park every morning
- Wearing sun dried clothes you hung outside (because it was 106 fucking degrees)
- Watching your daughter’s face when she sees a mountain lion
- Watching your daughter’s face when she sees a wild javelina
- Watching your daughter’s face when she gets to have room service
- Listening to your daughter pick up the hotel phone and pretend she’s ordering room service
- Celebrating your daughter’s third birthday
- Watching your daughter sit on a whoopee cushion she received for her third birthday (my dad’s idea) and crack up every time
- Watching the sun set behind the Tucson Mountain park every night
There was an endless amount of joy on this trip but as everyone knows…the best part about going anywhere is returning home…alive.
P.S. - I haven’t made a post in a while because it’s impossible to get up early and write when you’re up every night until the crack of dawn losing your mind over playoff baseball games.
P.P.S. - I may not make it through October alive.
P.P.P.S. - Let’s fucking go Yankees.
The only AZ I’ve experienced is “The Valley Of The Sun,” which reminded me alternately of Pensacola FL, or the grubbier parts of Virginia Beach. Going to miss Sen. Sinema for weird Gen X thoughts. Do recommend again Meghan McCain’s Reason interview.
Alex, this is your mother. You forgot to mention another thing you gleaned from our Tucson trip is that your mother no longer had dry gross heels. Reason is I was mortified when you said it to me sooo many years ago and I vowed to keep my heels soft and supple!!! 🤣😂🤣😂