Slice of Rural Life
Sunday, June 15th, 2025: 2025 Trips, Nature, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands, Wildfire.
Since 2020, when we lost our local restaurants to COVID, I’ve been preparing all my meals at home. Imagine that, you city folks. Imagine being single and actually preparing every damn meal, every day. Yes, I can do it, and do it healthy. But although I now walk with one knee immobilized, and can’t hike, doc says I can still drive. So I try to get away on Sundays to someplace with both wild nature and a decent restaurant. One restaurant meal a week, prepared by somebody other than me, seems like a huge luxury.
This Sunday I learned that a cafe I like over in Arizona would close on Monday for lengthy renovation. It was forecast to be our hottest day yet, the air conditioning in my 30-year-old Japanese vehicle struggles to keep up, and the destination is lower elevation and would be hotter than home. But I was desperate, and driving our lonely highways helps clear my mind.
When I arrived, setting my watch back an hour, I discovered that all the indoor seating was taken – for the first time ever – so I had to sit outside, where it was nearing 100 degrees and a sycamore offered only spotty shade.
But they had a special brunch menu, and I ordered grilled trout with scrambled eggs and a regional IPA, at about half the price you’d pay in the city. The Canadian Grand Prix was just starting – a guilty pleasure – and I followed it on my iPad via the cafe’s sluggish wifi. Still hungry and wanting to hang out till the end of the race, I next ordered pancakes and an espresso.
Expecting the heat, I’d brought my old Yucatan hammock, and after the extended brunch, I drove up the canyon, nearly empty of tourists during summer, to a secret place, tucked away on a dead-end forest road too rocky for cars. I strung up the hammock in the sometime shade of a cloud and spent a couple hours reading, sweating, and drinking ice water I’d prepared at home and carried in my ancient mini-cooler.
Most of the southeast corner of Arizona lacks cell phone coverage, but as I drove away from the mountains, I began to get text messages on my flip phone from our electric utility. An outage had begun at my address at 2 pm and power was initially predicted to be restored after 5, possibly before my return. I wondered if I would lose the precious leftovers I had stored in the freezer. The closer I got to home, the more texts I received, delaying the resumption of service. No problem – I’m always prepared for camping, and I had canned chili and soup I could warm up on the old gas range without opening the fridge.
I was more concerned about the wildfire. It had started Friday in habitat I hike regularly, fifteen miles north of home, and by this morning it had grown over 12,000 acres, with zero containment. Nearing town, I could see the smoke obscuring most of the range just north of town.
Two blocks from my house, I passed the utility crews, blocking a side street with crane trucks and repairmen hard at work atop two power poles. Confirming my power was still out, I walked next door to check on my older neighbor.
In homage to Cormac McCarthy’s epic Western novel Blood Meridian, I call my neighbor The Judge – he retired a few years ago from a popular judicial career in the state of Texas. Similar to McCarthy’s judge, my neighbor is a large, nearly bald man, but the only other shared characteristic is his encyclopedic knowledge and storytelling acumen. In fact, people like my neighbor have shown me where McCarthy got many of the characters in his Western novels. Rural Texas and New Mexico really are full of eccentric, erudite, and interminable storytellers.
The Judge’s house was hotter than mine, and as we sweated and discussed the power outage, he recalled an episode featuring his former El Paso neighbor, a recent immigrant from Mexico. At home one hot summer day, the power had gone out, and with air conditioning disabled, everyone in the neighborhood escaped outdoors with cans of cold beer while crews worked to replace a blown transformer.
As soon as power was restored, the neighbor’s house began to pop and crackle, with lights flashing on and off, and the new transformer was quickly fried. It turned out the neighbor had hired an electrician from across the river in Juarez, and none of his house had been wired in compliance with the North American electrical code.
The El Paso neighbor was partners with his brother in a chain of botanicas north of the border. The brother, profiting from the superstitions of his fellow immigrants, became rich enough to buy a big ranch in Mexico and stock it with exotic wildlife from Africa.
The brother bred horses as food for his African cats, and one day, he drove out on the range, forgetting there was a leg of horsemeat in the back seat of his convertible. A lion smelled it, tore through the car’s soft top, and proceeded to eat the hacendado.
The Judge assured me he initially deemed this a tall tale, but was surprised to confirm it later on Wikipedia. Anyone wondering what inspired the cheetah scene in McCarthy’s movie The Counselor might likewise be surprised to learn that the truth is both stranger and more satisfying than Cormac’s fiction.
I returned next door to shower off the day’s sweat, but before turning on the water, I heard my fridge powering on – electricity had been restored. After my modem completed its lengthy startup procedure, I checked the satellite data on CalTopo, and saw that the fire had reached the eastern highway, with a hot spot on the far side. This would give it access to the vast Black Range, which had already lost most of its forest in two mega-wildfires since I moved here. Old burn scars can provide plenty of fuel for new fires.
