History Adventuring

If you're like me, and feel a twinge of resentment when someone starts using their GPS to navigate around the town you love, which for me is Phoenix, relax, it doesn't necessarily mean that you hate technology. It just means that you love your town. And to test that theory, all you have to do is do a little time-traveling. Let's go! Although maps and compasses were common in the days of old-time Phoenix, my best guess is that most long-time locals would have resented their use the a same way that old-timers nowadays dislike seeing someone use GPS. And it has to do with effort, and affection. That is, memorization, or in other words, "learning something by heart". When you genuinely care about something, you don't need to refer to anything. You don't need notes to remember the name of your home town, you don't need a map to find the street you grew up on, you don't need a compass to get there. You just know. You know it by heart. It's an ...

If you've ever looked at old photos and wondered what it would be like to go there, you understand my obsession. I don't want to just look at old photos, I want to live them. I want to step into the photo, walk around, be there. This is an imaginary journey. Now hold on here, I have no desire to go live in the past. In fact, as I write this, I'm very glad to have a 21st Century air conditioner keeping me comfortable, a powerful computer in front of me, the internet, etc. I'm not wishing that things would be "just the way they were", I know that things are better now in ways that we just take for granted, like the water I'm sipping now which I'm sure tastes better than the water that people took out of the canals, or wells in old-time Phoenix. Well, that's my best guess. And I like to use the expression "my best guess" on certain things. I surround myself with experts who can give me very precise dates and locations, but as I do the...

I love Phoenix, but you gotta admit that the roads are very often deadly. I haven't checked recently, but Phoenix had always lead the country in red-light running. And it's really true - I see cars whizz through red lights all of the time. But it was definitely along the road (literally) to good intentions that all of this happened. Phoenix has some of the widest, most clearly-marked, most visible streets of any city. I've lived there long enough to know that they're well-kept up, and of course they're flat and mostly without any blind curves. The visibility is so good that you can easily see the traffic lights a mile ahead of you, if not farther (depending on how sharp your eyes are). What all of this safe engineering had led to is some very high-speed travel. Although most of the main streets of Phoenix are nominally 40 miles per hour as the speed limit, they're mostly traveled well beyond that. In fact, if you go 40 miles per hour you'll probably a...

Walk with me. I'd like to show you my Santa Barbara, California. We're about an hour north of Los Angeles, and we're at East Beach. The photo at the top of this post is Cabrillo looking east towards East Beach. I collected a lot of postcards like this when I lived there. East Beach is where I spent a lot of time when I lived there in the '80s. It's right nearby Milpas street, and I lived in the Milpas area, which is a, ahem, less-than-fashionable part of town. I lived in a tiny apartment that that had been subdivided (illegally at that time) in a house. I had my own room, bathroom, and tiny kitchen, but it really wasn't much bigger than a broom closet so I spent as little time as possible in there. It was a place to sleep, and hang my hat, that's all. Strangely enough, my neighborhood, which was the "low rent district", was very close to a very upscale neighborhood, called Montecito. It's hard to describe Montecito, except to say that it...

The city of Phoenix is in the Salt River Valley, which is a desert. It's hot and dry, and it's been that way since the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Water flows through it, in various riparian washes, including the largest one, which is called the Salt River, but it doesn't get much rainfall. So it's a pretty tough place to live, unless you're a desert-adapted animal. But people live there because they've turned it into an oasis. The process was difficult, but not complicated - just stop the water that flows through every year and divert it through canals. And that's what people have done. This creates a place where human beings can live, not just Gila Monsters. And if you're thinking that the first people who did this were the founders of Phoenix, think again. There were people there long before the 1860s. They are simply called "those who have left" - the Hohokam people. I'm not exactly sure why, but when I use the word peo...

My fascination with Phoenix history puzzles a lot of people, and I understand why. They're the reasonable people who expect to only hear about bad, or spectacular things. And it is reasonable! I remember hearing the answer as to why newspapers don't report good news: because there's just way too much of it. I mean, what kind of headline would scream: "Man Goes to the Grocery Store and Buys Eggs!"? And the story might point out that all twelve eggs made it safely home without being cracked. There was an excellent shady parking spot at the store, eyewitnesses said. And so on. Just ridiculous, right? And that's why so much of what we read in old newspapers gives us a distorted view. There's only so many pages, only so much ink, and besides which no one really wants to hear boring stuff like someone went to work and came home safely, possibly greeted by happy dogs. Well, almost no one. I do. So when I look at old-time Phoenix I'm not interested in...

It's true that you can never really go home again. I grew up in Minneapolis, went to college in Tempe, Arizona, lived for about ten years in Southern California, and now live in Glendale, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And I know that I really don't fit into any of those places. When I go back to Minnesota, I really don't fit in with my friends who have stayed there all of their lives (which is most of my friends from high school). They're real locals, they know the best places to fish, what days the snowplows come through, that sort of thing. I ask where a good Mexican Food place is, and they just stare at me. When I go to California, of course I seem very Minnesotan. Although I'm an Arizonan, and have lived there for more years than I care to admit, it's the slight midwestern twang in my voice that people hear, and the fact that I can't imagine eating dinner at 9 pm. At restaurants I order a steak. I can't tolerate seafood, so I'm an embarras...

I've lived in big cities, and I've lived in small towns. And I carry with me some of the attitudes of both places. And since I have that perspective, I can explain why big city people always seem to be in such a "gul-darned hurry" if you're a small town person. In fact, big city people are often rudely abrupt. If you've lived in a big city, you know why, and if you haven't, it may have puzzled you. I'll see if I can explain without hurting anyone's feelings. I love LA, and visit it often, but I gotta admit that it's crowded. Everywhere I went there was a line of people, lines at the gas stations, lines in the grocery stores. It's crowded, crowded, crowded. Trying to do something as simple as buying milk at a grocery store can be terribly time-consuming. I tried to figure out ways to avoid the crowds, but in Los Angeles you really can't. There's traffic at 3 am. All of the restaurants are always packed, you always have to wait, ...

As a former Californian who lives in the Phoenix area, I think about earthquakes. It's both a personal thing, and a concern for friends and family who live in California. And if you've been pondering what to do, sorry, I can't tell you - no one can. But there are several ways that you can deal with earthquakes. Here are some that spring to my mind right now. You can do what I did, and move away from California. As much as I loved the Golden State, my fear of earthquakes was very close to the top of the reasons why I couldn't stay. Of course, you may just find something else to worry about, but it all comes down to personal preference. The planet has always been trying to kill us, no matter where you live, so you just have to find something that won't worry you. I tended to worry too much, every time a bus went by I felt an earthquake, I would wake up at night certain that I'd felt something. So I had to go. My favorite technique, which is embraced by a br...

Looking up at the Arizona sky, I've always been someone who believes that we're not alone in the Universe. That doesn't mean that I believe in conspiracy theories, I just like thinking that somewhere out there that there may be life on another planet. And of course it gets me to thinking about what people thought in old-time Phoenix. I believe that a lot of people looked up at the starry sky, which must have been spectacular before all of the modern-day light pollution, and wondered. Even nowadays, out in suburban Glendale, I see a lot of stars. In old-time Phoenix, once you got a little out of town, which would have been north of Van Buren, it must have been amazing, and I'm sure that there were a lot of people who were looking up. Those were the days of Edgar Rice Burrough's "John Carter of Mars" and a lot of people really did believe that there were canals on Mars. And if there were canals, why not canal-builders? I'm not saying that people t...

As someone who is drifting into his senior years now (and has been for some time), I often think how nice it would to be young again. I picture myself playing on the teeter-totter as a kid, or even starting at my first real job after I graduated from college. But I'd rather not be an adolescent again, thank you very much. I don't know about you, but those years for me were more than just gawky, they were embarrassing, painfully so. I remember my voice breaking at the worst possible times, and I don't even want to think about what the girls had to go through! And so today I'm thinking of how it would have felt to have been at that age - we'll say about 14ish, in old-time Phoenix. Come on, let's go! Well, hello, Stinky! I didn't recognize you here at the stables, standing next to that horse. Yes, I realize that he's facing the other way. What? No, I've just been here all day, shoveling. What's that you have on your face? Manure? Oh, I see. Y...

I'm hungry, it's the 1950s, and we're in Phoenix, Arizona. Let's go get some breakfast at the Robbins Nest. Come on, I'll buy, you're with me. Can you lend me a dollar? Yes, I'll give you the change back. Looks like a nice place, I'll get us a table. Is it OK if we sit here? Thanks! Yes, coffee for both of us. Thank you! Inside of the Robbins Nest. Here we are, enjoying some nice coffee. What? You wanted what? Decaf? What's that? Decaffeinated coffee? That's ridiculous, you might as well get de-alcoholed whiskey! I have a flask here in my coat pocket, by the way. Thank you, waitress. How about some sugar? I like my coffee the same way I like my women! And you do look like a sweet thing! Well, thank you! My friend will have some sugar for his coffee, too. I have no idea what he means by "Splenda". We're from out of town. Yes, we're ready to order. I'll have the special, please. Scrambled with bacon. The same f...

Walk with me, and tell me what you see. A parking lot, of course. Maybe some electrical wires, a car parts store, a concrete curb. Looks like some river rocks. Let's keep looking. The sky is that intense blue that I remember from Minnesota, which they call "the land of sky blue waters". There are some wispy clouds, so it doesn't look like rain. And that's good, because this parking lot, which was built (constructed? made? poured?) in the 1980s floods like a lake when it does rain. The 1980s doesn't seem that long ago, and I'm sure that there were engineers who could design a parking lot that didn't flood. Even in light rains this parking lot floods. Let's keep looking. At this point we'll need to use a bit of imagination, and strip away the asphalt. I really don't know what was underneath there when they brought in the construction equipment. This area was mostly farmland up until then, with really nothing much except the college abo...