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I sat today between was and is, between then and now, somehow suspended in the bittersweet nostalgia for memories I cannot claim and experiences inseparable from my being. Tempe Town Lake, also inappropriately named Tempe Beach Park: here every breath I take is infused with past versions of myself, all culminating into one singular heart beat. The late afternoon sun casts beauty and romance over the scene; perhaps my reflections would be different in the garish light of noon. Today, though, I muse about how a life is made of a series of moments, moments that cannot overlap, cannot exist side by side. Places are not like that though. They absorb time, hold onto the moments that we cannot.
One bridge of steel trestles and wooden planks and the other of concrete and cables. The past and the present run parallel yet converge into a single origin. The light rail glides past on its way to Downtown Phoenix, just a slight increase in the volume of the background noise. The sun shines through the number 1912, cut into the cross piece of the trestles on the old Tempe Union Pacific Railroad; sitting on my perch in 1912 a passing train would have produced a much more profound ruckus.
The 1912 train sends vibrations through the air and the ground, causing my bench to vibrate and filling my ears with the clacking roar of the steam engine lugging its cargo to some far off destination. This is the nostalgia that does not belong to me; pointless reminiscence of a time I do not remember and experiences I will never have. And yet who can look at the relics of the past and resist the temptation to daydream about their memories, the lives they witnessed? The actors are long gone, long forgotten and yet nearly a century later the stage – these tracks – survives. They tell no tales, and so I create my own; shadows of the past against a bright blue sky, they take form but lack detail and are as fleeting as the time on which they are based.
As late afternoon turns to evening, the colors in the park are amazing. Turning towards the Mill Avenue bridge I am brought back to the present. I turn my lens toward the subtle nuances of the pastel shades and the duality between the fluidity of the lake and the geometry of the bridge.
Everywhere I look here, memories become superimposed. Along that bridge I walked with my first love in the dying days of our relationship, blissful in our ignorance of the future. Skip ahead just a few months to see two freshman girls from Hayden West jogging along the waterfront, under those arches. “We just have to make it past the bridge and we can take a break.” “Okay. Deal.” And then the two friends become sisters and they laugh and talk in the same voice from so many hours spent together. Across the lake on the north side I run alone as evening falls, listening only to the sound of my Nike footfalls and the chatter of sorority girls as I approach and pass them. I run those paths countless times, up one side of the lake and down the other, passing the Tempe Center for the Arts where one night two lovers took their secrets from the stone wall and shared them with each other, the heightening of a romance in which every moment encompassed seemingly infinite intensity and passion, a fire to blind and a fire to burn. A fire to watch sink into the lake with tears in my eyes as I said goodbye to Arizona alone. A goodbye that lasted two years until I found myself looking out at the dried out lake from the window of a train that passed me by today with barely a roar. My camera pointed out the window to capture the defeat of engineering, the dried up lake that glistened today as a rower’s boat glided between the pillars of the past and the present.
Cuervo truly is a ghost town, barely hanging on to existence. Even when someone stops to notice it, Cuervo’s moment is fleeting and soon fades, reduced to some album in an iPhoto library. I am that someone, guilty of allowing this specter to slip into my own personal oblivion. To be fair, soon after visiting I was inundated with some drastic life changes that garnered most my attention and stripped me of my immediate desire to reminisce about the deafening roar of cicadas accompanied by the hum of the nearby I-40. But the mind is a wonderful dusty little storage shed and nothing ever gets thrown away. So I bring you Cuervo in June – an (almost) dead town bisected by one of the most dull stretches of asphalt I have ever met…
Driving down the I-40 from Oklahoma to Arizona is an exhausting stretch of road. My mother and I made the trek in the Mazda Miata, a poor choice of autos for a stretch of highway lacking any dimension. Without the distraction of curves or the appeal of riding topless, the Miata merely imparted the lingering sensation of claustrophobia. Cramped and feeling rather cantankerous, the only redeeming quality I had to offer was my excitement at the approaching Exit 292. I had anticipated our Westward intermission at Exit 292 since we passed it going east. Finally, my mom flipped the signal and drove down the ramp and then through the underpass and we arrived at Cuervo.
From the I-40 Cuervo appears as a row of dusty houses, the discarded casings of once upon a time. I have an off color fascination with abandoned buildings and the past that whispers through their details. While in Oklahoma I did some preliminary research on Cuervo, and discovered the bare bones of a history. Born between 1901 and 1903, Cuervo served as a railroad loading platform and ranching town. In its heyday, Cuervo boasted two churches (one Catholic, the other Baptist), two schools and two doctors. In the 1930s, Cuervo bustled with a population of three hundred. By the 1940s, that number had fallen to around 150 and continues in decline as the years pass.
The town has a few remaining residents, the final breaths of its death throws. The only evidence of these survivors is the church; the chain link fence still stands, its gate latched; the doors are locked and in each window, in front of the drawn curtains, are vases of fake flowers. I guess I might too find reason to pray if I lived in Cuervo. Delusion at least makes for some sort of company, if not lively discussion. And we all need someone with whom to talk.
Although the town is not entirely deserted, I do not hesitate to call this place a ghost town. Many of the buildings seem as though their occupants simply vanished. In the corner of a cluttered living room, sits a television and tattered curtains still grace the windows. There have clearly been visitors since the desertion; the disarray of furniture and appliances indicates a history of plunder.
The residue of the town hearkens back to the 40s and 50s. The old school television, now shattered and gutted; the decimated truck with its rusted engine; the rickety outhouse next to the grain silos (or at least what I assume are grain silos). The most modern feature is the basketball hoop, standing erect as homes crumble around it.
The eeriness of the dilapidated buildings and abandoned belongings is enhanced by the high pitched drone of the cicadas. There should be silence but instead noise permeates the air with no relief from the clamor. For all the cacophony, I feel as though I must tiptoe as I make my way around cacti and sagebrush. The din sounds like the past crying out as it is reclaimed by the desert. The most sinister sounds, however, are the whispers made by the imprints of children at play: The basketball hoop, standing tall while the vegetation stabs through fissures in the court; the swing constructed of rope and plank, one end broken free; the handwriting of one Deo Chavez immortalized in 1955.
Something about the phantom footsteps of children gives me the chills. The children of Cuervo did not die in some horrific accident, but simply grew up and moved away. But the deserted schoolhouse still echos with the scratches of pencil on paper and multiplications tables recited aloud. Even if the adults into whom these children grew are alive elsewhere, their childhood is forsaken and trapped in Cuervo. Places where children once roamed and none can now be found seem to me stuck in limbo and slightly malevolent for their loss.
Our journey through Cuervo ended here at the schoolhouse. We gently picked our way through scrub bushes back to the Miata, back to the present day. We left Cuervo to continue its gradual decay back into desert dust and wildflowers.
No photograph can do the desert justice. I wish there was a way to capture the other sensations of a walk down the dusty trails just outside my parents’ abode. The desert has a scent, a soundtrack, a taste. You can feel the desert on your skin. Close your eyes, take a deep breath. That is the smell of dry air and dust with a hint of sage and creosote. You can tell based solely on that scent whether it has rained recently, is about to rain or whether the earth has been parched for days simply by the balance of those elements. Dry dirt smells different than wet dirt and desert humidity is saturated with creosote. There was no whisper nor memory of rain today. No whisper but that of the breeze through the desiccated perennials that had bloomed a carpet of purple and yellow a few weeks ago. The crunch of my boots on the path was accompanied by the frequent call of the bobwhite and the shrill song of the cicada. The cicadas are scarce this summer. In years past their racket was deafening, their buzzing overwhelming all other vibrations. Today I can almost pin point in which trees the cicadas could be found. Occasionally their instrumentals stop, and the calls from above break through as hawks circle on the hunt for their next meal.
A shift happens in the way the desert feels as the morning wears on towards midday and the sun rises higher in the sky. The suggestion of coolness vanishes from the air and the warm caress of sunshine can quickly become a fiery embrace. Sweat hardly has time to leave the pores before being stolen away by the thirsty atmosphere. The allure of the palo verde tree is not only in its twisted branches and the way light cascades through them but in the shelter of its shade. During the hottest part of the day there can be a 20 degree difference between direct sun and the shade. Stepping from the blaze into the shadow of a palo verde is an instantaneous relief from the harshness of the desert’s touch. Even the palo verde, however, is a collection of thorns. Nothing in the desert is soft, there is no inviting lushness to its beauty. Life flourishes, but it does so in an eternal battle for water and it guards its sequestered hydration carefully. The landscape is a collection of thorns and spines. To get close to the desert, you must tread carefully, respectfully.
I covet the fine balance between the serenity and urgency of the desert’s existence. The light, color and form of the Sonoran can speak to the senses, can weave a tale of the arid existence, the silence broken by the harsh cries of desert birds, the heat of the sun baking the earth and its inhabitants. But that tale is a mere murmur of reality.
