There’s something to be said for being young and in love.
I could have been in the Arctic and it wouldn’t have
mattered to me. North Pole, South Pole,
or Outer Mongolia - the destination didn’t matter. I was eager to start my life with my soon-to-be
husband who was in the Army stationed at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona.
After driving 35 hours straight with my brother and his
friend who were 18 years old at the time, I arrived at my new home in the
middle of the night. Separated only one
month, I didn’t care that local stores sold t-shirts that said, “Sierra Vista,
14 miles from hell.” Of course, I
wouldn’t realize that the t-shirts weren’t kidding until the next morning when
the sun rose.
As I headed out the door to get something out of the van
that night, he scared me to death when he yelled, “Don’t go outside without
shoes on!”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Snakes? Scorpions? Toe-eating desert denizens? As it turned out, sand burrs were the reason.
Picture a cocklebur with very sturdy,
unforgiving thorns. I was raised in
Indiana. While I hate to fuel the myth
about barefooted hillbillies, I never wear shoes unless I am leaving the house
with the intention of getting into the car.
But, the sand burrs made mosquitoes, poison ivy, and other bothersome
weeds seem like nothing.
Later, I only had to extract one from my foot before I
relented. Shoes were a desert
requirement. This made my feet sad. One of my husband’s favorite claims is that
he bought me my first pair of shoes since I’m a Hoosier and all and still look
for the outhouse sometimes because indoor plumbing is a novelty to me. In actuality, I started wearing the shoes I
already owned because sand burrs weren’t the most pleasant thing to pull out of
the bottom of my feet. The brown blades
of grass were the equivalent to strolling on a bed of razor blades, too. Shoes were a necessity. I felt sorry for a region whose inhabitants
never realized the divine feeling of shade grass beneath the bare feet and
between the toes. I can’t imagine
missing out on the ritual of sitting under a tree in the grass with a couple
friends talking. In AZ, one’s rump would
not be forgiving.
When the bright Arizona sun rose that next morning, not only
did it illuminate the sky, but also my view of where I was going to spend the
next three years. I didn’t cry, but I
think it was because I was experiencing some sort of climate shock and my tear
ducts had yet to adjust.
My view when I woke up the next morning. I suppose it could have been worse, but I
sure never got used to seeing mountains.
Indiana is rather flat.
My husband rented a house trailer before my arrival. Buena Vista was the name of the trailer
park. The name translates into “Good
Vista.” Vista according to
Webster’s: a distant view through or
along an avenue or opening; an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time
or a series of events).
The blazing hot
concrete patio was often covered with the tiniest grasshoppers I've ever
seen. I'm surprised they didn't cook on
it. "I'm sorry, I can't leave
because I'm being holed up in my home because of a grasshopper militia."
What an extensive mental view of the first place we lived
together as husband and wife it’s left me.
I didn’t realize how bad Buena Vista really was back then. It’s a very good thing I thrived on the
newness of being in love because it is not some place I would return to
willingly.
My first question once I walked out the door the next
morning was, “Why is the grass brown?”
“You have to water
it,” he said. “Except during monsoon
season when it rains every day for a month.”
During monsoon season, it was 120 degrees in the shade with
100% humidity. Also, these rains washed
the snakes out of the mountains into the valley where we lived. Also, bears and mountain lions. Well, if the National Guard that came down
for their two-week training didn’t scare the latter out of the mountains. I was hardly surprised when animal control
extracted a brown bear from a tree around the corner. When a nearby neighbor stepped on a
rattlesnake as she went to her next door neighbor’s house to borrow sugar
(honest to goodness, you can’t make things like that up) and was whisked off to
the E.R., I treaded lightly and considered getting some combat boots as a
precautionary measure.
It did not take long for homesickness to set in. The only friend I felt like I had was the
maintenance man. Heaven knows we saw
enough of him between plugged toilets, swamp coolers that blew hot air, and gas
leaks. Swamp coolers, I learned, put
moisture into the air. I didn’t know
what it was supposed to do. I only knew
it blew hot outside air at about 70 mph down that trailer’s hallway. Sure, if I stood in the hallway, it blew the
sweat off my forehead as it beaded. They
aren’t kidding when they say it’s hot in the desert and that it’s a dry
heat. It was often hard to tell that I’d
sweated at all, except when signs of dehydration started to set in. Apparently, our swamp cooler was not putting
moisture into the air, hence the reason for the cyclone of hot air. Once repaired, it helped cool things down a
bit. Except during monsoon season
because the air was already full of moisture.
Buena Vista wasn’t so muy buena. After the plus sign appeared on a pregnancy
test, we put in for on-post housing.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait long to move. I didn’t care where it was. We could have been in the middle of the
firing range, and it had to have been better than Buena Vista and the trailer
from the late 60s. I didn’t miss my
neighbors to our right who seemed to have some sort of communal living thing
going on. I bid a final farewell to the
ones whose bedroom butted up to our bedroom at the end of the trailer after
many sleepless nights of overhearing their fights and making calls to the
police.
Back home, I had friends and family. There, I knew next to no one except a German
girl across the street. Sometimes her
English left a lot to be desired, but we both were pregnant at the same time,
so we bonded over that. She didn’t seem
very homesick. I was so sad, and
jealous, when they were being transferred and she went back home to
Germany. I missed sitting around in a
group with her and her German friends while they all spoke their native
tongue. I missed being told, “Stick
around us long enough, and you’ll be fluent in German.” The only thing I was fluent in – counting
down how many days we had left in the desert.
I felt as lonely as this lone cactus somewhere on the route
to Nogales, Mexico.
August 30, 1992 was our departure date. I do often wonder how different it might have
been if technology was then what it is now.
Back then, there was no such thing as email, text messages, or even free
long distance. Maybe email existed
somewhere at that time, but I hadn’t heard of it. I anxiously answered the phone those days as
quickly as I could with the hopes of speaking to someone back home calling to
chat. I relied heavily on letter
writing, which I loved, so that was one of the few advantages of living in the
dark ages pre-Internet and free long distance.
I suppose many sit around and have a good chuckle over the
first place they lived when starting out.
While I think back and grimace, I do know there was one positive thing
about the experience. If our marriage
survived Buena Vista, it can survive anything.
The decision to leave Arizona brought about our first fight
as husband and wife. “You can stay,” I
told my husband who’d been offered a civilian job there. “The baby and I are going home to IN.” It was a promise, not a threat, and he knew
it.
Several times a year, he reminds how close he’d be to
retirement. When the wind chill is below
zero and the snow flies, he tells me it’s all my fault that we still aren’t in
AZ where it doesn’t snow enough to count and you can celebrate Christmas in
short sleeves. I don’t take it
personally, and seldom do I come close to having any regrets. We’ve been back in IN for over twenty years
now. I must concur with the infamous words
of Dorothy, there is no place like home.
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