Coming Home
Did we make a wrong turn somewhere, or did the monsoons change everything while we were gone?
Going on a trip, especially when you live in what's not exactly a major air-service hub, requires leaving a trail of pieces of your life, like Hansel and Gretel with breadcrumbs. You stop the mail here, park your car there, check your bags and hope to someday see them again. Coming home, you pick up the pieces of the everyday life you left behind, one after another, until you arrive at the place where you began.
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So, coming home from our annual stint at the Maui Writers Conference, where this year I helped to direct the writing retreat, we rode the redeye all night to Los Angeles. Flying homeward with the headwinds, the flight is almost an hour shorter than jetting west. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing, but on this strange flight from night into morning it robs you of sleep just as the clatter of the beverage cart, clamor of conversation and flicker of in-flight movie (Jack Black in Nacho Libre, hardly a serious competitor to sleep) have faded and you've wrestled into a semi-comfortable snoozing position. Suddenly, you're there. The lights of the California coastline materialize in the blackness beyond the window seat like a lava flow. The plane left Hawaii about 10:30 the previous night, flew for five hours and here somehow it's 6 in the morning already.
The crepuscular sense of unreality continues in the fluorescent-lit purgatory of LAX. Outside, pinkish digits of dawn begin to finger the shimmering tubes of airplanes coming and going. Inside, it still feels like last night. You struggle to grasp a few more minutes of fitful sleep, draped over the plastic chairs in the waiting area like a rag doll. Finally the flight to Tucson boards, offering perhaps another half-hour snatch of sleep in-between takeoff and landing.
Tucson was where our process of picking up the breadcrumbs was supposed to begin. Baggage began bumping out onto the silvery carousel at the Tucson airport—a surfeit of checked luggage, now that the government has abruptly decided the liquids we've been traveling with for five years since 9/11 without incident might be misused by evildoers. One, two of our bags slid into view. Long minutes passed as we watched in vain for bag number three, the one we'd cleverly packed in another bag on the outbound trip so we'd have room on our return for souvenirs for friends back home. The crowd around the baggage claim slowly dwindled to us and one other unlucky family. The scattering of unclaimed bags made a mournful whooshing-clanking sound as they went around and around. None was ours.
Dazed from lack of sleep, I filled out a form provided by a United agent, who seemed much too perky for this time of the morning, Maui time. She assured me that our missing bag was in Los Angeles, having somehow failed to accompany its traveling companions to Tucson despite a two-and-a-half-hour layover. We could track the bag on a special Web site, and it would be FedExed to Silver City after it arrived on the 4 p.m. flight. (In fact, the United baggage Web site consistently reported our bag as MIA—not merely delayed in Los Angeles but vanished, perhaps en route to Bora Bora or abducted by aliens. This caused me much grief until the bag, unheralded, showed up at our doorstep the very next day.)
Semi-mollified, we called the airport La Quinta motel, where we'd stayed the night before our flight to Maui. They have a nifty system that lets you leave your car in the back of the motel parking lot, saving on airport parking fees. But on this groggy morning, La Quinta's airport shuttle van was on some other errand and, we were told, wouldn't be available to pick us up for half an hour. Our return journey was not starting off well.
I called a cab and overtipped the driver for making what was no doubt his shortest run of the day, from the airport to the La Quinta about three minutes away.
At least our car started. One year, parked in the Tucson airport lot, it was as dead as roadkill. When AAA finally arrived, the mechanic told us that Tucson's extreme heat somehow fries car batteries; he sees it all the time. That same year, we had to crawl home through highway construction between Lordsburg and Silver City. Crazed by sleeplessness, I pondered seizing the wheel from my saner wife and driving straight through roadblocks, torn-up pavement, orange-jacketed flagmen, just to get the heck home.
This year, though, the flat race across Arizona, the careening through goofily impressive Texas Canyon, the endless expanse before Lordsburg and the final rise into the Gila National Forest all proved a revelation. The monsoon-sodden landscape had already begun to green up before we left, but this was like coming home through some exotic botanical garden. The long stretch of prehistoric lakebed that I-10 cuts through before Lordsburg looked like time had been reversed by millennia—yes, that was water shimmering on either side of the interstate. In places it looked several inches deep. Somebody get a boat! Heck, start building an ark, just in case.
Everywhere we drove past, there were wildflowers: asters, what looked like poppies seemingly confused into thinking spring had sprung, and especially bright masses of yellow blossoms on rangy stems that looked like junior sunflowers—golden crownbeard aka cowpen daisies, I think. Wildflowers grew in the ditches along the highway, on the hillsides, along the ridgetops. Beneath and between the pines and scrub oaks, areas ordinarily brown and boring shimmered with emerald life, punctuated here and there with yellow, orange or purple floral bursts. Even the humblest spots—the lee of a ramshackle shed, the base of a batch of mailboxes—were graced with color.
Groggy though we were, we goggled at the sights. What had happened to our high desert home in our absence? The unreality imposed by the redeye flight was multiplied by these beautiful but bizarre botanical pyrotechnics. For the moment, our missing bag was forgotten, the La Quinta shuttle hassle ancient history. We felt like we were arriving in Oz.
Finally, we turned off the highway onto the road toward our house. To our right, verdant hillsides rolled like distorted billiard tables off into the gray of gathering clouds, as though it might rain yet again. We began to wonder if our driveway might be a lake.
We spotted the hill that drops away from our backyard first. It was mostly yellow, ablaze with flowers. Turning in to the driveway—mercifully not lake-like—we saw that the gravel road from the side of the house around back to the propane tank had vanished into a jungle of still more flowers. The propane-delivery guy would need a machete to make his way back there with his truck.
After hauling bags out of the car and greeting the cats, we stepped out back to see what else the monsoon and subsequent sunshine had wrought. The backyard pond, filled to overflowing, barely burbled. The salvia and Russian sage we'd planted this spring, nibbled down to bare stalks by drought-desperate rabbits, now wagged with flowers, lipstick-crimson and purple. The rose bushes that we studiously ignore looked like prizewinners, weighted down with gigantic blooms. Beyond the roses, those cowpen daisies waved their heads from one end of the yard to the other. None of this had been there when we'd left; it was as though we'd been gone for months.
Usually, the pleasure of coming home is the reassurance of the reappearance of the familiar: There's our street, our mailbox, our driveway, our house, our garage, our cats. This trip, though, coming home was a revelation of the familiar transformed. Everything was as we'd left it, except that everything was different.
We get no sympathy for the rigors of our trip to Maui—the long flights, the jetlag, the changing time zones. Hey, it's Maui. And perhaps people don't entirely believe us that we're always glad to get home. Hey, it's home. But this year, in particular, it was good to come home—even though it didn't exactly look like the home we'd left.
We got the beach sand out of our systems especially quickly this time. "Maui? Oh, yeah, it was great," I'll reply vaguely to familiar faces at the grocery store, as I hurry to fill my cart and rattle to the checkout.
You see, I just can't wait to get home again. To look out over that sea of flowers against the backdrop of autumn's brilliant blue sky.
Who needs the ocean, when I've got this?
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.