In Arizona

for too, too brief a stay

This is Emily Writes Back, a newsletter for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Just your average early evening on the strip in Sedona. “Those aren’t mountains,” Marshall tells me when I ask him the name of these red things rising in the distance. “They are red sandstone cliffs and towers. They’ve been eroded by wind and water. Mountains are when the earth pushes up and points sediments into domes and peaks. This is just rock that has been dug out by erosion. They have not moved, as you can see by their horizontal tops parallel to the earth. I don’t know. The point is, where we are, the lower you look, the lower it is. They are red partially from iron being deposited on them from streams and rivers.” And so I ask why do streams and rivers have iron in them? “Because of plants. Plants have iron in them and streams and rivers are full of plant matter.” OK, fine. Being married to Marshall is like having your own AI, with the same error and hallucination risks maybe, but with a soul.

Do I Even Remember How to Vacation?

As we drove away from Oro Valley, I wanted to smoke a cigarette. For just a split second, before I remembered that I have moderate asthma and haven’t smoked a cigarette in 15 years. But I wanted to feel really free and really on vacation, and I guess those neural pathways still exist, that equate smoking with freedom and relief, even if they’ve been mostly eroded by time and disuse.

Trips Within Trips

If you imagine jogging the distance you’ve just covered in a car, you can get closer to the truth of things. Because within every car trip lives another, much longer trek on foot, maybe even a multi-day or even weeks or months-long adventure that would put you into contact with many more snakes, much more direct sunlight, and the need for much more water. Especially if this trek is in Arizona, where we are now.

“Hey! We saw him on the way from the airport two days ago!” Marsh exclaimed, pointing to a backpacker walking on the road’s shoulder with his back to us, his framed pack bulging with belongings.

“Did he make much progress?” I asked.

“Yes. He made it pretty far,” Marshall said. Of course, in the time that the backpacker had made it maybe 30 miles, we’d spent two nights with relatives, had several meals, and gone on “safari” in Aunt Barb’s golf cart to look for animals on the golf course at dusk.

In the Sun City community in Oro Valley, where Aunt Barb and her husband Larry live, all the houses have red tile roofs. All the streets look the same. And the entire community is hugged by a spectacular mountain ridge. The total eclipse of the moon happened during our stay, and so we woke up at 4 in the morning and walked outside to the street in front of Barb’s house to see the stars that were extra visible. The moon itself looked like it had been submerged in tea.

Why can you still see the entire moon during its total eclipse? Because the refracted red light from all the Earth’s sunsets and sunrises is ringing our planet and shining onto the moon’s face.

Sedona!

And now this morning, I write to you from an airbnb in Sedona, where I am admiring the Ikea furniture—such clean, nice fakes, so inoffensive, but also possibly offensive, depending on your mood. I am in the mood to love this place. Tonight we’ll get into the hot tub.

Our Airbnb turns out to be a mobile home or maybe a prefab home. But does it matter what things are made of if you are just looking at and sitting on them, not checking the exact density and history of?

Real live birds are chirping and trilling and chattering outside. I used the Merlin app day before yesterday when we were still at my Aunt Barb’s in Oro Valley, 30 minutes from Tuscon, and there it identified House Finch, House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, and Dove, but here in Sedona, the app picked up (in the span of just ten seconds as I am writing to you now) American Crow, White-crowned Sparrow, American Robin, Bewick’s Wren, House Finch, and Spotted Towhee.

An “immature female” Spotted Towhee who looks plenty competent and actually a little pissed

If you imagine every morning coffee as an important zoological survey, you can take some personal pride in biodiversity.

A happy mature male

Last night we went out for dinner with our cousin Marci and her daughter (also our cousin, naturally) Emma, who is over six feet tall and has the world’s deepest dimples and prettiest curls. Today we will hike somewhere not too scary, based on Marci’s quizzing of us last night to determine our footwear situation, experience levels, and risk tolerance.

I am disinclined to die on vacation, or at least not this vacation. I have to get back to my cats.

Me and my girl by a 30-foot cactus that must be at least 70 years old. She was surprised it wasn’t squishy, but I always knew it must be hard to survive so long. The needles were like metal.