John Wise - Photo of the Day from Phoenix Arizona

When your lowly job is to feed on the dead, upon your own demise the rot you embody leaves your corpse alone to turn to dust as the other scavengers avoid your stench. Along the roads of Arizona it is not uncommon to see the buzzard snarfing morsels off a rabbit pelt left parched and flat after a good tenderizing from the passing trucks. That shriveled dead coyote that was there yesterday will be but a tuft of fur in a day or two. Snakes and other birds disappear in hours, but this ugly malcontent who while alive used to belly up and chow on the fetid remains of mystery roadkill meal du jour cannot find takers on a hot summer day, its shriveling head baking all day into the night. I passed this bird in the desert for the first time more than five days ago, today it looks much the way it did then. I must surmise that even buzzards have standards and won't stoop to cannibalism. I wonder if its meat tastes like chicken.

Meet Sidney Clay, born in the month of March, 1942, he's 68 years old and lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the better part of his life. Five years ago, early in the morning, Sidney was asleep in his apartment on St. Charles Avenue west of the French Quarter, surrounded by the floods brought on by hurricane Katrina when he awoke to the sound of helicopters. Stepping outside he thought fresh drinking water was being delivered, but he was wrong. That helicopter crew “rescued” Sidney. Carrying not much more than the clothes on his back he found himself airborne for the first time in his life. Next stop, New Orleans airport where he found out they were evacuating him to Corpus Christi, Texas. Once in Corpus Christi it was discovered that Sidney had family in Phoenix, Arizona and off he was whisked to the middle of the desert.

He left with nothing, arrived with nothing. But this would turn out to less than nothing. This man left school in Lafayette, Louisiana during the 7th grade, left home at age 17 and went right to work for Pendleton Security as a security guard in New Orleans. For nearly 40 years Sidney held this one job. He kept to himself for the most part and lived alone. While he fathered a number of children, marriage was never in the cards.

Sidney is not a drinking man, never was. He's been to the hospital twice, once for high blood pressure and the last time for food poisoning caused by pork, he hasn't eaten pork since. Jail has never been offered the opportunity to host Sidney, matter of fact he has only had one traffic ticket and will likely never have another seeing he hasn't driven a car in more than 25 years. Sidney is not a well traveled man, early in his life he made two bus trips to Atlanta and one to California. He reminisced that seeing Underground Atlanta was one of the most amazing events in his life.

Besides missing his home, he longs for a return to Pat O'Briens for one more dinner, his favorite. What he misses the most though is the music of New Orleans. Here in Phoenix we have no buskers, also known as street musicians, and where music is performed it is done so for money, of which Sidney has very little.

You see, on that day Sidney was uprooted and left with nothing, through a glitch of the bureaucratic system Sidney social security payments were interrupted. It has taken him five years to resolve the issues that stopped the checks. It is supposed to be next month when the money begins to flow again. In between almost exactly five years ago and today, Sidney tried staying with his daughter but a life alone and a house full of grandchildren left Sidney uncomfortable and one day he walked out.

Turns out that while Sidney was staying with his daughter and walking up and down Bell Road here in Phoenix he ran into a homeless man with the name Floyd. I have seen Floyd many a time over the years, even have a photo of him here on my blog taken in May 2004. Floyd helped Sidney understand living on the street which eased his transition from self sufficiency in New Orleans, to dependency with his daughter, to ultimately being homeless himself. For the next three years Sidney lived outdoors.

But Sidney is not your average homeless guy. At roughly 4:00 am he signs up at a Temporary Labor office to get a high spot on the list of people looking for any type of manual labor on offer. He normally knows by 6:00 if he'll have work but he might have to hang out until 11:00 am, too. From the efforts of his labor he earns about $35 for the day. On good weeks he might get three to five days of work.

On the days he can scrounge the money he has found someone with a small apartment who lets him have a room for $10 a night, no money, no bed. Last time Sidney slept street side was about three months ago. His typical day when not waiting on work or working, he walks Bell Road from about Cave Creek Road to 40th Street and rarely wanders from this path. Along the way he picks up aluminum cans and from the generosity of some folks picks up a few dollars that if not required for a room, he'll spend either at Denny's or Whataburger.

If and when the social security mess is finally cleared up he'll take an apartment and try to return to a simple and quiet life. What is remarkable about this man who was first homeless at age 64 is his gracious and friendly manner and his positive and grateful outlook. When I asked him if he has anything to be happy about he told me the best thing in life was God waking him up every morning. I then asked him what was the most important event, date, person, or historical occurrence he had seen since he was born, his answer, “The greatest thing I have come to see and know is that America is the greatest place on earth”. Sure is wonderful running into someone who is just happy being alive.

My camera is with me often. I look far and wide for that scene that will demand my attention and stand out against all others. Maybe age has brought cynicism and I am no longer able to appreciate simple beauty. Or maybe a city of cinder block walls punctuated with strip malls leaves the imagination in deficit. Phoenix has become a wasteland to my eyes. I want to see the city I live in with a new perspective but over and over again I look on with mindless disinterest. For beauty I must look up and out. With too narrow a view and in close up, Phoenix is a blight on a desert paved over for the masses to find their beauty in a three-bedroom two-car-garage track home on the corner of Nameless Street and Faceless Road. At least we still have the sky.

I normally don't like posting photos of prepared meals as they don't look very appealing to me. But I love photos of fresh food with all of its vibrant colors. As I sat down to a meal without Caroline (she was attending a user group meeting) this bowl of Pho from Viet Kitchen around the corner from us just looked beautiful in the the late afternoon sun. I suppose this is in keeping with my apprecation of fresh food photos as most of what we see are the bean sprouts and cilantro sitting atop the steaming bowl of broth and noodles below.

Some years ago Caroline and I were on a quest to see as much of Arizona as possible. In our attempt, we kept a map and after each trip we took a Sharpie and drew over the roads we had traveled. That map was ultimately nearly full from corner to corner and top to bottom of markings designating the path. And so it was that this year we retired that map and started a new one where we are attempting to retravel all of those roads that stretch across our state. We have been to Bagdad twice before but our current map wouldn't be complete if didn't visit small towns like this one all over again.

On the narrow winding road out of Bagdad towards Kirkland the rolling desert landscape changes little from corner to corner. But as the elevation increases we are noticing a gradual change from brown to green. Then off in the distance we spot a rare native to the Arizona desert: the elusive desert white rock duck. When they sit very still they blend in with such great stealth that one could easily pass the rock duck and never notice it – well, we did.

Leaving the town of Kirkland which is actually little more than an intersection with one remaining business still functioning, called the Kirkland Bar & Steakhouse Hotel – on the National Historic Register! If Caroline hadn't planned on meeting another fiber fanatic while in Prescott before 2:30 we would have stopped for a bite to eat in this historic building, next time. Up the road we went higher and higher.

Not far from Prescott is Skull Valley. You go to Skull Valley just because the name is cool. Who cares what's to do while in Skull Valley, that doesn't matter as you are now in SKULL Valley! Maybe it would be cooler to be in Nothing but as Nothing is no longer anything we must now satisfy ourselves with visits to Bloody Basin and SKULL Valley! 

There was actually a bigger purpose to this trip besides a map line, we needed to visit Prescott for a stop in Puttin' On The Hats. For our trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon which is quickly approaching we needed river hats. Something to shade us from the sun that wouldn't be ruined after getting drenched. The hats would also require chin straps to prevent them from being dragged off our heads. With the best selection of hats in Arizona and us needing just about any excuse to take a road trip, it was easy justifying a circuitous 250 mile trip just to buy hats. Caroline took some time to meet with Rowena who makes glass bead jewelry. Rowena recommended lunch at Pangea Bakery and for Caroline to dip her toe into A Good Yarn where she could easily lose and arm and a leg spending a small fortune on fiber. Wow, the discipline my wife had in only buying about 3 miles of weaving yarn. We drove back home, end of trip, not end of day, though. Later that evening we attended an incredible performance of Rahim AlHaj, a world-renowned oud virtuoso, at the MIM.

At 11:00 pm we arrived near Lake Pleasant to watch the Perseids meteor shower while being attacked by a million large winged flying insects and swarms of mosquitoes. Our endurance paid off and we saw approximately fifty or sixty meteors burning up in the atmosphere. Try as I might to capture the larger ones, it seemed my camera was always pointing in the wrong direction - even with my lens set wide at 10mm. By 1:30 I had enough smeared bug parts in my hair, on my neck and arms that it was time to call it quits until November 17th when the Leonids are to make an appearance. In this photo if you click on it to open the larger image you might see a tiny streak on the right of the Milky Way low on the horizon - a meteor!

A long time ago in a place far away or about thirty-five years ago in Frankfurt, Germany, Caroline Engelhardt made a Christmas ornament from yogurt containers - this is it. Or rather, was, as she felt it was time to part with this relic and forget whatever future nostalgia might be offered in maintaining possession of her handy craft, it went unceremoniously into the trash. This will stand as the only reminder that the tiny hands of a seven year old girl who became my wife made this little Nikolaus which we know as Santa Claus.

A quick return to Tucson for another day of shopping. On Thursday I learned there was a one-day 4th Avenue summer sale today, Saturday. And so here we are, picking up bargains and enjoying the larger Saturday crowds covering the sidewalks and jamming stores. Our first stop was at Razors Edge where Caroline picked up a couple of dresses and some jewelry. With the imporant stuff in hand we wandered from store to store checking out the sales. Most shops were featuring between 20% and 25% off select merchandise. Lunch was a vegetarian treat over at Lovin' Spoonfuls a few miles away on Campbell Avenue, highly recommended - even for meatatarians like me. Back over on 4th Avenue, upon entering the Goodwill store a guy stopped us to have his wife admire Caroline's pirate yarn shirt from Jinx, hmmm, he looked familiar. So I ask this stranger, "Aren't you the King?", sure enough he is indeed the King of the Renaissance Festival held up here near Mesa every year. Great shopping, fantastic bargains, good food, and royal celebrity - another perfect day.

With some free time available today and a tinge of boredom the road south delivered us to Tucson. Also included in our world of possibilities this Thursday was a side trip to San Xavier Mission, maybe the Titan Missile Museum, and some other sights around Tucson, instead we got stuck on 4th Avenue for a day of shopping. The lament for the day is the old tired song about why is there nothing like this in the Phoenix area? Mill Avenue in Tempe lost its funk long ago, the giant malls are generic corporate shells with a dozen empty stores and more people walking for exercise than shopping. But Tucson still has its funk on with small independent shops selling tattoos, platform shoes, drug paraphernalia, used clothes, new clothes, lots of  Frida Khalo inspired art and images, and beer. Fact of the matter was that we had to shop until 5:00 because it wasn't until this hour that the Surly Wench Pub opened and we weren't leaving Tucson without a visit to the Wench. Good thing we made the pilgramage because as we walked through those black doors down the wood floor to the bar, Starfish from Bikini Kill was playing and behind us on the lone TV high overhead they were showing Human Centipede. There could be no doubt this was going to be the perfect end point to the day.

Some months ago a very kind woman near Prescott, Arizona delivered and gave Caroline this quite old counter balance loom for free . When it arrived no one was sure if it was complete or still worked as the woman delivering it was getting rid of it for someone else who had inherited it. The complexity or I should say, the unknowns regarding this type of loom was initially daunting for my wife. But she persisted and through some trial and error and the help via websites, YouTube videos, and the email correspondence from Bernie Goodrich, Caroline was getting closer and closer to seeing this loom make fabric once again. Seen here, Caroline has warped the loom, also known as dressing the loom, and is nearer to throwing the shuttle through the shed to make her first weave.

What do you get when you pee in a bucket, add the juice from the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, submerge a bunch of  yarn, and let ferment for two weeks? You get an incredibly repulsive stinking bowl of magenta colored yarn that upon being exposed to air and oxidizing turns a kind of bluish grey. Interestingly the bucket without pee-pee the yarn turned out a shade of green. Lessons learned; (1) stir bucket more often so that chunky skin mold layer or whatever it was doesn't form, (2) do not rinse this stench in John's kitchen, (3) forget trying to use urine as a mordant. I hope whatever Caroline plans on knitting with this yarn ends up as a gift for someone, anyone else.

The Tempe Lake broke this last evening and dried out. I took a few minutes to drive over here to see what things looked like and, well, it looked like a dry river bed, which is of course where the Tempe Lake sits. One of the sections of the rubber dam failed and by this morning the majority of water was drained; only a few shallow pools with fish flopping about remained. I really couldn't find a good angle to take a photo of the destruction, it wasn't nearly as apocalyptic as I'd imagined. What was nice is this relatively new building next to the dry lake that the Tempe Center for the Arts calls home.

Somebody had a baby and it wasn't us. The lucky recipient of the stork's efforts works with Caroline and to celebrate James' new son and his entry into this life Caroline felt a brand new pair of hand crocheted Converse Chucks was a fitting gift. James loved the shoes commenting he'd now have to hunt down a baby size Ramones T-shirt to round out a perfect ensemble. A couple of years ago Caroline knitted a purple and white baby sweater with an OM on the front for a Hindu friend who had just had a daughter. Too bad we don't know any strippers, my wife could knit up some pasties and a latex mini skirt. She's threatened that as I grow older she'll be knitting me woolen Depends adult diapers - the joy I have to look forward to.

Month after month the Musical Instrument Museum doesn't fail to deliver a rich mix of music from around the globe. Tonight's featured musicians from Niger are known as Etran Finatawa - click link to watch them live. These five men perform what they call Nomad Blues. They are Tuareg and Wodaabe nomads playing traditional gourd instruments, a goat skin drum, flute along with guitar, and hand clapping. The magic of them coming to the United States and the generosity of The MIM bringing them to Phoenix was nothing less than amazing. It's not very often that musicians emerge from one of the five poorest countries on earth to tour the world. This part of their tour primarily focused on the western U.S. with only Chicago and New York having scheduled dates west of the Mississippi.

Etran Finatawa's performance went by fast although they did play for nearly an hour before an intermission. When they came back on stage for the second half, it was during this part of the concert that Etran really got the audience going. Two of the percussionists came forward joining the other Wodaabe member for a spectacular display of dance and eye movements particular to the Wodaabe. Our peek into this culture from a remote corner of the world was our great fortune. Sadly it will likely be another couple of years before they make a return visit to America. Watch a video by clicking here to see a segment of the Werner Herzog film about the Wodaabe. And click here to watch Tuareg dancing from the Ghadames Cultural Festival.

Photos courtesy of The MIM and Jimmy C. Carrauthers of Great Leap Productions.

Start with one-hundred twenty-five pounds of tomatoes and get busy. Over the previous two weeks I boiled, sautéed, milled, chopped, and canned fifty-four quarts of tomatoey stuff. From roasted pepper tomato sauce to basil garlic marinara. I made V8 style tomato juice, too. And now after all of this work, all of the humidity from pressure canning the jars, all of the onions, carrots, bell peppers, garlic, basil, celery, and dirty pots and pans, I am finished with tomatoes for the year. This horde will last Caroline and I about two years. As winter rolls around we'll still be enjoying the fresh tomato flavor of summer courtesy of Tonopah Rob's Vegetable Farm.

Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows. The fire was ablazing and the cage filled with fresh chili peppers was asmoking. I turned that caged barrel of scorched heat until skins were blackened and seeds were popping out. For hours I filled, fired, and emptied load after load until I must have roasted twenty-five pounds of peppers. Lucky for me Tonopah Rob has just the device to make roasting chilis a piece of cake because this would have been impossible in my oven. Back home the now cooled chilis have had the rest of their peels removed, they are destemmed and deseeded and then put into pint size freezer bags for use over the coming year.

It's the right time of year for the monsoons. There are clouds on the horizon, they even move into the valley, but the rains are not materializing. Well at least we are having some clouds dot the sky which make for great sunrises and sunsets. After months of nothing but blue skies it is a thrill to once again see cumuli in the late day. This morning had low thin clouds aloft but even they are welcome. Funny how some people dream of moving to Florida, California, Nevada, and Arizona to escape the grey days while many of us Phoenicians long for a cold, rainy day with a hot chocolate and the patter of rain drops on our windows. Instead all we get is another perfect day - drats.

Since June 15th, thirty-five pounds of beans have been picked from my twelve-by-fourteen plot out at Tonopah Rob's Vegetable Farm. A few days ago Rob gave me a small rough-neck of carrots, I thought I could put them to good use, it didn't even look like it was that much anyway. Turns out there were fifty-one pounds of carrots in there. Add to that my seven and a half pounds of garlic I have hanging up in my closet that was picked on June 2nd and you know I needed to hurry up and do something with the quickly accumulating food. Up until this past week we were able to eat our way through the smaller harvests but with a few pounds of beans still in the fridge and the almost fourteen pounds I picked yesterday, it was time to get busy. I busted out the really large pot and got to boiling water. With the sink full of ice water I was soon blanching the beans and carrots. Into quart size freezer bags I stuffed beans and carrots and then added some fresh sliced garlic, quartered red onions, and chopped green peppers. For the next six months Caroline and I will have a steady supply of mixed veggies ready for the steamer.

Back when Nothing, Arizona was something, it really wasn't much of anything. And now that Nothing is no more it truly has become nothing, it might even be considered less than nothing. If only there was something to miss besides the thought that we might long again for Nothing.

The original plan was for us to drive out of the national park late in the day yesterday, instead we opted to grab a night at Kings Canyon Lodge which had a free room – on a holiday weekend! We'll have a few more hours in the midst of all this spectacular beauty although we'll get home later, too, of course. We were gone  arrived at Hume Lake just at sunrise, when a breeze blew through and disturbed the water's glassy surface. Ducks were beginning to stir and a light fog was lifting off the lake– a perfect sunrise moment. But we had little time to linger.

We do decide to take time to enjoy the sights at the General Sherman trail after all. Eight years ago was our last visit to this corner of Sequoia National Park and being right here in the middle of the park it would have been a shame to skip a return walk through the woods on our way south. Everything is different, well the trees are all the same but the parking lot has moved and the trail is altogether new. The next thing that strikes us is the evidence that yesterday was a major holiday that brought out the worst of people. Trash is everywhere. Paper, wrappers, bottle caps, pieces of plastic, and toilet paper. That's right, TP. Who is it that thinks about bringing toilet paper out on the trail, squats next to a giant sequoia to take a pee and then leaves her wad of paper right there at the foot of the tree? Good thing there is all this beauty around us competing for our attention.

Something these photos have trouble conveying is the size of the trees. With Caroline standing in the trunk it's easier to get the idea of the enormous footprint these giants have imprinted on the hillside. Besides the General Sherman tree at the beginning of the trail, nothing looks familiar. Had there been a billion less mosquitos maybe we could have walked slower, allowing us to remember a few familiar locations, instead we hoofed it. The Congress and the House parts of the grove were the only other trees that stoked our memories.

As we are leaving the trail, everyone else is joining it. Less than two hours to cover the two-and-a-half-miles, a land speed record for the snail hikers.,Although, I'm telling you, it was the motivation brought on by the angry hordes of mosquitos. Before leaving the park through the south exit we have to endure a partial road closure that is regulated by a light, a long painful red light that takes forever to turn green. Eventually though we are quickly descending the mountain to rejoin urban America. Oh, the misery of forcing ourselves back into reality.

Most of the drive home is through desert. From out in the Mojave east to that infamous hotspot Needles, California we cruise along at ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit. Here comes Ludlow and Dairy Queen, yummers, a chocolate malt sounds good right about now. Off the freeway and OMG there are ninety-five cars and three hundred other ice cream hungry travelers here. We don't even get below fifteen miles per hour as we turn around and are right back on the I-40. At the last possible second I pull off in Yucca, Arizona to photograph a town that has all but disappeared. A defunct neon sign is all that remains of the motel that is no longer to be found.