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Next in the alphabet comes Arizona, the state of the Grand Canyon, where cactus-ey things abound (the state bird is the cactus wren and the state flower is the saguaro cactus), and if you’ve bothered to give the current political hubbub one bit of your time, you’ll also know it as the state where John McCain is the senior senator.
In State by State, we read about Arizona through the words of Lydia Millet, a self-acknowledged yuppie trying to fit in amidst a very foreign landscape that she has claims as her new home.
“Every weekday, for instance, I have to drive my little girl through
the national park, over a steep mountain pass, and into town for
preschool, because there’s nothing out here. By the time we get back,
at least in the so-called winter months, the sun is low in the sky,
and as I drive along the meandering, hilly park roads I have to swerve
to avoid centipedes, desert tortoises, ringtails, and other animals
that emerge from their burrows in the day’s waning hours and seem to
offer themselves as roadkill.” (State by State, pg 29-30)
Neither of us have been to Arizona (yeah, somehow we both missed the Grand Canyon visit), so Lydia Millet’s vivid descriptions gave us plenty to picture ~ sprawling valleys of giant cactus, jagged mountain ranges, coyotes, big trucks, and miles of land and sky that stretch beyond what we can see.
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