How to enjoy Apache Junction, Arizona


I've spent a lot of time in Apache Junction. I have a friend who lives there, and I visit as often as I can, and I've spent a lot of time house-and-dog-sitting. And I enjoy Apache Junction a lot. If you've never seen what I've seen, I'd like to share it with you, so please walk with me.

And that's where you start. Get out of your car, and more than that, get out of your car mentality. If your first thought is to drive somewhere, and drive somewhere else, and then drive somewhere else, that's fine, but you'll never see what I'm seeing. Lace up your shoes. And no, I don't mean your hiking boots, we aren't going to see if we can find the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. That doesn't matter to me. If you walk with me, you'll see the magical world that the grownups never understood when I was a kid walking around my Grandma's neighborhood in Minneapolis. If you can remember that fascination, you know what I mean.

There's a quality of light there that I've never seen anywhere else. I wish I could describe it to you, but you really have to see it. It's a wonderful warm glow (that can be kinda painful in the summer!) that washes the landscape. There's a sound of the desert, and the comforting human sound of things that people do in the background, like cars, or maybe someone revving up a power tool. The best way that I can describe it is that it's like the sounds people make in the background after a heavy snowstorm. There's a sharpness there, as if the clarity of the air carries it with more precision.

I like looking at the weeds. Of course, there's no such thing as a weed really, they're just a "plant out of place", and in the desert there are a lot of plants that would be out of place in a suburban yard that are just exquisite in the desert, with amazing tiny flowers and foliage. I also look at the rocks, both the ones beneath my feet and the big ones in the background, called the Superstition Mountains. I like rocks. I don't know what they're called. I don't label them, or categorize them, or count them. I just look at them.

I especially like walking with a dog. There's just something nice about walking along slowly, looking at stuff, and standing there looking at more stuff, when you have a dog. I just feel less self-conscious, as if I'm there just to allow the dog to sniff around. Dogs like to look at stuff with their noses, I like looking at stuff with my eyes.

When people ask me about places that I've visited, they're often puzzled that I didn't go visit a particular restaurant, or that I didn't go watch a movie, or go to some other pre-packaged entertainment. I could tell them that I was too busy looking at weeds and rocks, but I try not to say that. But it's true, and I highly recommend it as the best way to enjoy the most magical places in the world, like Apache Junction.
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more