Seeing the wonder of Arizona through an outsider's eyes


If you live somewhere for a long time, or if you've always lived there, it's natural to become blind to it. Of course the whole world is a wonderful, magical place, but many people stay in exactly the same bored "seen-it-all" attitude that they had when they were 18. I know that I knew everything, and had seen everything, when I was 18, and it was vitally important for me to yawn at everything, because I was all grown up, and so cool.

Then I turned 19 and it all went away in a flash. I moved from Minnesota to Arizona and allowed myself to just absolutely stand there in amazement when I got to Phoenix. My jaw dropped when I saw my first cactus actually growing out of the ground. When I saw my first palm tree in real life, I walked up to it and touched it. I was a stranger in a strange land, and I loved it.

As I recall there were minor nuisances to deal with, like going to school, and working. But between that I would watch sunsets. I probably missed very few sunsets when I lived in Tempe, and after a while I started to believe that the sun wouldn't go down if I wasn't there to watch it. I was also reading John Steinbeck at the time, and he was teaching me to see the wonder and beauty among squalor.

When I moved to California, I got even crazier. I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway more times than I could count, and I especially liked driving south when I could be seaward, and I could drive with pelicans next to me. People would ask me how quickly I got from point A to point B, and I really had no idea. After a while I learned to give people the answers they wanted. But if someone really wanted to know why it took me so long to get from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, I would tell them. I'm an outsider, a tourist.

Being a tourist, or an outsider, isn't something most people like to admit. These people are always slowing down traffic, stopping to ask directions, taking photographs of nothing. Locals know their way, have been on a road so many times they don't even pay attention to it anymore, and are so way cool that they can't even begin to stand the tourists.

For me, it's fun to see my Arizona through an outsider's eyes. A friend of mine on Facebook is visiting from Scotland as I write this, and it's great to see what catches his eye, what he talks about, the pictures he takes. How startling and exotic an ordinary truck is, and the fact that there's so many of them, and that there are tropical plants. When I start to feel as if I've been somewhere too long, I find this wonderfully refreshing.

If you're still 18, and already know everything, and everything bores you, I'll try to stay out of your way. I understand. But I'm so sorry for you, because you're missing so much wonder. If you want to get stupid again, I suggest that you see things through an outsider's eyes, be a tourist in your own home town.

Image at the top of this post: Camelback Mountain in Phoenix in 1955. This is what I see.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

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