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Back in the Big City

It probably helps your fuel economy some to blow into town riding a 30 mph tailwind. Thus it was the day I showed up in Arizona's megabarriopolis #2, Tucson. After camping in the desert for several weeks, will the big city be different than I remember? More entertaining or just more noisy and annoying?

With the strong west wind, the big city had remarkably clear air -- almost as if a big city weren't even there. It's challenging and fun to imagine the geographical setting of a big city before the big city came to be. Imagine how pleasant the land around the Old Pueblo was: a large mountain range just to the north that provided escape from the summer heat; the lushest examples of Sonoran desert vegetation, on opposite sides of town; grasslands and chaparral in the higher elevations to the southeast. 

There are probably a few people still alive who remember the Old Pueblo when it was small. I wonder what decade it was when Tucson started undergoing cancerous growth -- the Fifties? 



I have personally experienced the same destruction at other places in the Southwest, such as St. George, UT. A decade before that, it was Prescott's (AZ) turn. And so on, and so forth, until everything is ruined.

Actually a person feels remarkably clear-headed when arriving back in the big city. You tell yourself that you're not going to get sucked up into that insane culture; that you aren't going to drive around in an automobile all day, hacking your way through stop and go traffic; that you just don't need all those damn stores and strip malls. After all, in a small town you got by pretty well on a grocery store, a Dollar Store, and a laundromat. (And the internet.)

But the big city operates under a miasma of mindless busyness and phoney pragmatism. The human central nervous system has a remarkable ability to adjust to, and then become addicted to, constant stimulation, even if most of it is just annoying. The reductio ad absurdum of this is the casino, which can be seen as the holy temple of modern metropolitan culture. Without even realizing what has happened, each of the scurrying ants sees his own self-esteem and moral self-worth as being tied up in the endless busyness. Beyond self-importance, busyness implies a purpose in life.

Comments

PetDoc said…
Great post. You are a poet...do you know it?
Deanna
Anonymous said…
or perhaps busyness is the means to avoid one's purpose in life?
XXXXX said…
Agreed.

It is a crazy things that we humans do. I live in an old farm town and all the little stories of how things used to be are known only when told by the very old who learned those stories from the very old when they were little boys. Stories few are interested in...why a road is suddenly a dead end, that the main road used to be several feet lower which is why someone sees only dirt now out their downstairs window, etc.....I know this is simply boring to most but we do these things to make driving easier, increase drainage, etc. We mess with everything. But the bigger point is that all this messing everything up doesn't seem to bring us happiness. We travel faster and instead of being supremely happy with that accomplishment, we impatiently sit at a red light and burst into anger at fellow drivers, etc. Yeah, I know I'm an old fella but somewhere along the line we took a bad turn.
Anonymmous, a sly comment.

George, sounds like you are no more of a worshiper of the False Idol of progress than I am.
Jim Melvin said…
I didn't realize you cared so much about cities. HA!