Occupation of Independence

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 -

It seemed prudent to drive to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles in New Mexico to update my mail forwarding  address, lest there be complications with a speeding ticket from the Tucson reconnaissance-camera reich . After several nights of noisy, parking-lot boondocking my nerves were pretty frayed. Anybody who thinks that that style of camping is a quixotic, dreamy, escapist, full of holy Simplicity, Socrates and Thoreau-approved way of life has been sold a false bill of goods. Thankfully I'm back on public lands near the Santa Rita mountains, south of Tucson. It's always a little surprising to see certain topographic features stand out so clearly, clear enough to serve as a navigational tool. In the Tucson area Baboquivari Peak serves that purpose. I like to call it "Babo".

When I got together with a Tucson friend yesterday my first question was about the photo-surveillance cameras used here; then a ticket is mailed to the citizen-criminal. I was concerned about tardy payment penalties being added to the speeding tickets of travelers who only get snail-mail forwarded every month or two. My Tucson friend has indeed gotten a camera-based ticket the past year, and his wife got three. Each was over $200. Hers were at the same intersection, but on different days, which helped her think that they were repeated notices of the same "crime". (She didn't read the dates or times apparently.) She didn't pay all three tickets and got her driver's license suspended. The good news is that the Tucson reich sends somebody to your house before raising the stakes. At another time they called on the telephone. What a relief that was. It keeps the citizen-criminal from being completely at the mercy of snail mail delivery, which alarmed me the

I've only gotten close to an owl once before today, and that was when mountain biking in a ponderosa forest. They are larger and more powerful than I expected. They seem more exotic and menacing than other raptors. So I grinned from ear to ear when a friend walked us over to an owl nest on the southwest side of Tucson. (Gee, maybe I should provide GPS coordinates so readers will have the ultimate in convenience in finding the owl. Isn't that how "RV blogs" are supposed to work?) An impudent Malevolence in the shadows...