The ole pueblo

Tucson is a beautiful, strange town. The oddity of here must be somewhat attributable to my distant roots in this valley, and also maybe too to the strange orange nights that come from the mandated low spectrum lights used everywhere in the city. But I suspect that the strangeness also comes from way back, from long before I or the orange lights were here. My last night here, and everyone is off to sleep, so I am left to myself, and I take to the porch for one last look and breathe of the cool, winter desert air. My moms place is way out, past the end of the street lamps to the east of town, propped up on the side of the Rincon foothills, dotted with only the odd manufactured home here and there, plopped on the empty acres of scrub and cactus. As the night deepens, the stars and moon do too, as does the silence. No voices, motors or movement of any kind is left. And so I sit. Behind the silence, the symphony of the desert starts. The wind coming north out of the peaks whispers through the ocotillo and mesquite. With it, the longest off, far away coyotes yelp and skip...And then, even further out, the liquid coursing of interstate ten, just water beneath the surface of sound really. The most eerie sound out here, haunting, deliberate, ghostlike tones, the sound of a thousand foot cello bowing dissonant chords and intermittent haunting notes. It is the sound of the wind setting moving the cables attached to the steel radio transmitter towers, 6 or so of them, due south, somewhere near the highway. These dinosaurs, now defunct, not worth removing, stand in monument and play me the last song of the desert, my last vision of this town for a good while. It is the saddest lonely song, but somehow it brings me so much peace. The last great movement of this symphony Comes in with the train. Low, distant, uninterrupted thunder that seems to come from around my feet as much as it does from around my ears. The layers of haunting notes, coyotes and wind weave in and out of this last few moments, and then the air grows still and the night is pierced only by the light of the moon and stars above. Time to sleep.