Jiggity-jog.
I moved to North Carolina for college, and although it’s the state where my grandmother lives, that was the first time I’d spent any real length of time there, and so I was struck by the depth of state pride held by residents. People would just spontaneously extemporize on the wonder of North Carolina with little or no prompting. It was true that the piedmont region that Chapel Hill inhabited was wonderful – all green rolling hills and azaleas and sunny skies all year. My fellow students who were natives swore that in North Carolina the sky really was a shade of azure that could not be found anywhere else. Carolina Blue. Step over that state line into Virginia or even South Carolina and, well, it just wasn’t the same.

The main thing, though, that people would speak on when they felt called to rhapsodize about their state was the fact that it contained both mountains and the ocean. In one state! Unheard of! These physical features are actually hundreds of miles apart, of course, and much of that drive incorporates the flat, mostly-brownish, unspectacular region of farmland where my grandma lives. Still, people would say, with a sweep of the hand, “You have the mountains…and you have the ocean. Take your pick.” While visiting my grandma on this latest trip, Marshall and I noticed that the public television station has even incorporated this important message into its 30-second station i.d. filler-spot between shows. A shot of some reeds, lilting in the sunset breeze, some seagulls taking flight, fading into a shot of rolling verdant Appalachians, the star of the scene this time, a mighty hawk. And the voiceover: “North Carolina Public Broadcasting. From the mountains to the sea.”

So yes,
we’re back from our whirlwind trip– a trip throughout which, come to think of it, onscreen birds featured prominently. There was the public broadcasting spot in North Carolina and then when we boarded the plane from Pittsburgh to Arizona, our flight attendants had flipped the movie screens down over every few seats and were playing a soothing little film entitled “Swan’s Birthday.” The plot featured a female swan on an afternoon idyll in a pond or lake, to the sound of contemplative piano. Near the end of the movie, when mostly everyone had boarded and the attendants were walking down the aisle stuffing bags more soundly into their overheard compartments, a male swan appears onscreen. He’s taking his own little paddle around, however he and the female never appear in the same frame, which caused us to speculate as to whether Ms. Swan ever actually receives her birthday present. Or whether she’s taking a break from her husband on this particular birthday. (Swans mate for life, you know.) Anyway, they stop playing this soothing Don’t-worry-about-flying, dear-passengers—We’ve-bolted-the-pilot’s-cabin-door-shut-and-x-rayed-your-shoes-so-no-terrorist-shall-harm-thee film and get on with the flight and so we think, you know: Well. That’s that.
Only it’s not. We were revisited by Swan’s Birthday on the flight back from Arizona. This one was a red-eye and so right before boarding, Marshall and I had each taken half a Xanex to help us sleep. And so this time around, Swan’s Birthday hit me at precisely the wrong/right moment of, err, well, highness. Meaning, it set off a fit of unstoppable giggling, turned to laughing, turned to tears-flowing-down-crimson-cheeked-snorting, made worse by the fact that I was trying
desperately to stop, knowing that I appeared insane. Ah, drugs and birds. Drugs and birds and aeroplanes.

So, right: We go on this two-week trip from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to wildly beautiful Arizona where we have a spectacular time with my family and good friends and former roommates and the highlights I give you, Henshaw, are about North Carolina’s State Pride Party Line and watching bird movies while mentally impaired. All right, all right.

Sigh.
Let’s skip to the prettiest part.
So we fly to Tucson, pick up the rental car – a convertible! – well, actually a silver Chrysler Sebring, so we look like retirees – and we drive it about 10 minutes away, to the Saguaro National Forest, where the two-lane road is swallowed up by sandy hills covered with those tall, humanlike cacti you envision when you think of the word “cactus”. Apparently it’s the only place in the world where they grow naturally. Forty minutes after stepping off the plane, we were hiking around these hills and elated. It was sunny and cool and clear, as it remained during our entire stay in Arizona, and we took about fifty photos of plants and each other and the sky – which was some Narnian version of azure – that first afternoon. Then we drove north, and everything grew increasingly beautiful and rugged and wild.

The only ugly part of Arizona I saw the entire four days was Phoenix; it’s like the state had to compromise and agree to take in this sprawling mess of a thing in order to keep the rest: the national forests and the pines which actually smell sweet when you press your nose up to them and the red rocks and the canyons including that really big one up in the north part of the state, there. This state needs no PR campaign, no slogan; it’s the sort of place where visitors are always telling inhabitants how gorgeous it is, grabbing them by the shoulders and saying, “We went hiking in Oak Valley Canyon today! Oh my dearest fricking god!!,” the implied message being: Are you appreciating all this? Are you? Are you? Do you realize what I have to go home to??

So we had a great time. We saw Sedona, the most pretentious, tacky, monied town in the world, surrounded by the most beautiful red rocks and cliffs in the world; we saw Jerome, the old copper-mine town perched on the side of a mountain; we saw and hiked into the Grand Canyon where we just kept pinching ourselves, we hiked around Prescott National Forest at sunset with dogs bounding ahead of us and whenever we drove down long, two lane roads through those constantly changing, ever-more-incredible surroundings, we listened to Music for the West: Jonathan Kane and Frank Black’s Black Letter Days and Dirty Three and Calexico and Desert Sessions. And we ate red meat constantly and the high elevation made us sleep well at night.

And now I’m back and soon, I’ll post a few photos here. I have more stories but all in all, it’s good to be back. Last night, I went with some friends to the Starlight Drive-In where we set out lawnchairs and drank Negro Modelos with limes and cracked each other up. It’s good to have a home, here. It’s good to have these friends and while we were gone, summertime descended with a thud, so now I get to wear the sleeveless tops I packed but never took out of my suitcase during our trip.
But I tell you, that senioritis is going to be worse than ever when I go back to work on Monday.