Word: saguaro
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only 35 miles east of Phoenix, Superstition Mountain rises dull red and sheer from the sunbaked Arizona wasteland with its yucca, saguaro, greasewood and ocotillo. In that land Geronimo, Cochise and their Apaches once roamed, and Superstition Mountain gave them hiding. When the moon is right, its beams shine through two notches flanking a spike of rock called Weaver's Needle. Some say the moonlight points to the location of the Lost Dutchman's gold mine, where men have sought wealth for more than a century-and died in the seeking...
...over the Dragoon Mountains to Elfrida (pop. 300), near the Mexican border, another to lettuce-growing Willcox (pop. 1,500), where Goldwater changed shirts for a dinner with the Willcox Women's Republican Club. Not till 10 p.m., when a golden quarter-moon was sinking into the saguaro, did the campaigner call it a day. Taking off from a scrub-lined strip without lights, he flew into Tucson, checked in at the Pioneer Hotel, took off his shirt, pants and shoes, ordered a brace of Old Crows (splashed with water, but no ice), swallowed a Miltown tablet and went...
...jazzmen, in turn, have taken to scribbling. Lippincott. backed by his own quintet, recently recited a piece about how the guy in the combo feels when he is going way out ("We were all there waving at the hillside Picasso men who turned out to be saguaro cactuses . . . We were all there together, really, still, now, always, rotating, revolving, dancing, now, always"). The jazz accompaniments are both premeditated and improvised, but all of them are far too sketchy to stand by themselves. If the poets are sold on J. & P., most of the jazzmen are cooling on it. An exception...
Here he praises the saguaro, the prickly pear and the wicked cholla cactus with all the exuberance of a convert. His companions are no longer Columbia University students, whom he once taught as Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, but creatures of the Sonoran sands -road runners, elf owls, jack rabbits, Gila monsters, tarantulas and scorpions...
...Gila monster stalking a desert rat, a summer torrent building up into a wall of water, the blossoming of cactus flowers. The splicing and re-splicing gives the film such a rapid gait that within a few minutes a wild pig chases a bobcat up a hundred foot saguaro, a poisonous wasp vanquishes an equally deadly tarantula, and red hawk devours a rattlesnake. The most callous little boy will lie awake until three a.m. after viewing these battles...