Soon another year will place its hand on my shoulder.
Nothing is wasted. Pain becomes a record that I was here long enough to be marked.
I will not ask for fewer days of pain. I will ask for more moments of noticing— the hummingbird darting the chipmont on the ground, The olive tree’s kindness of shade.
If this is my work now, I accept it gladly: to love the world as it is, from inside this aging, faithful body.
Tell me, what else would I have been practicing for?
This old saguaro bends, arms too heavy for the trunk, two pressed down to the ground like crutches that keep it standing.
I know the feeling — knees gone, back stiff in the mornings, each step a small negotiation with the earth below.
They say the cactus has lived a hundred years, maybe two — having seen men die younger, and still it leans, still it finds a way to stay upright, though gravity has claimed every inch of it.
I used to think I could resist— work harder, drink less, walk farther, but the cactus tells me the truth: sooner or later, you bow down.
What matters is how long you keep your arms in the air, catching light, refusing to be silenced, before the earth pulls you all the way down.
“A full moon really affects me,” Fred told his brother Don.
“I get nervous and irritable. Does that ever happen to you?”
Only on days that end in Y.
For Christmas in 1999, Joy gave me a “coffee table” book, Two Guys Four Corners — Great Photographs, Great Times, and a Million Laughs by Don Imus and Fred Imus. The Imus brothers grew up on a cattle ranch in northern Arizona, a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch between Kingmen and Seligman called the Willows. The main ranch house was on a dirt road fifty miles old, Route 66.
We first learned about Don Imus, a ‘shock joc’ nationally syndicated Imus In The Morningradio and TV program out of New York. His younger brother, Fred, also had a radio show and would frequently appear on the Imus program. Fred was the irascible brother of the far even more irascible Don Imus. He was also an entrepreneur, owning and operating the Auto Body Express in Santa Fe.
I didn’t grow up in the Southwest, but I fell in love with Arizona and the Four Corners when I finished my service in the Army in the late ’60s. If you love photography as much as I do, the Southwest provides a photo opportunity at every turn. The gift of the Imus brothers’ book set me on a path that would take me full circle back to Arizona in 2010. Since then, we have photographed almost all the venues in the Imus book.
Speaking of full circle, the Imas program was primarily a talk show. However, he occasionally played Americana music, and one of his favorite groups was The Mervicks. The lead singer is Raul Malo, whose voice is exceptional. They have a new album, Moon and Starts. This past Sunday, Raul, who is 58, was interviewed on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, during which we learned that he has cancer.
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.”
For most of us, There is only the unattended Moment, The moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.
— from Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” by T. S. Eliot
Rancho Fundoshi Above Bear Canyon Creek — Images by kenne
“Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
In Sabino Canyon Recreation Area, if you hike to Seven Falls, you walk the Bear Canyon road to Bear Canyon trail, which crosses the Bear Canyon creek seven times. South of the trailhead sets a house on a cliff above the creek outside the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area. Since 2010, I have hiked to Seven Falls several times and may have noticed the house but was more focused on the hike.
Yesterday, a group of us older, now slow hikers hiked the newly paved Bear Canyon road to the Bear Canyon trailhead, taking a trail south to get a better view of the house on the cliff, where I took a few images of the house. After discussing the possible owners, I decided to do a Google search once I got home. I first did a drag & drop in Google Images with no match. So, started a Google search using a few descriptors. I learned that about 65 years ago, Jack Segurson, a local high school wrestling, and swimming coach and teacher from the 1950s into the late 1980s, bought the 151-acre property that he lived on, cherished, and mold into a naturalist’s paradise — it became become his legacy.
Segurson died at age 90 in 2011, and soon afterward, an appraiser valued his land at $3.9 million. He left the property to The Nature Conservancy with restrictions that it never be sold or developed. The Nature Conservancy donated the property, which Segurson named “Rancho Fundoshi,” a fundoshi is a Sumo wrestler’s loincloth to Pima County. The Pima County Regional Flood Control District manages the property as open space and owns and manages other lands along Bear Canyon and Sabino Canyon as part of its riparian habitat and upper watershed preservation program.
