Beethoven in the desert

Mary and I are dry camping on BLM land about twenty miles north of Organ Pipe and some twelve miles south of the town of Ajo. We’ve been into town a few times, mostly to buy groceries and have a coffee and use the internet at a nice little café called the Oasis.

Other than the IGA market and the Oasis, Ajo doesn’t have much to recommend it except that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists yet, there not being much to discover. For a hundred years, it lived off a giant open-pit copper and gold mine, but that closed in 1983, and I’m sure the town’s economy collapsed just like the economies of small Northwest towns collapsed when the mills shut down. Today, law enforcement is probably the biggest employer, with 450 Border Patrol agents alone, though many of them must live in Gila Bend, about forty miles to the north.

So Ajo, despite some impressive historical buildings and a quaint Spanish-style square, isn’t a place you’d expect to find much in the way of culture, which is why I didn’t quite register the 8 ½ x 11 announcement at the Oasis the first time I looked at it: “Tucson Symphony Orchestra in an evening of all Beethoven, Tuesday, March 9, Dicus Auditorium.” It was only the next time we were in town that I looked a little closer and saw that the concert was sponsored by the Ajo Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Dicuss Auditorium?” I asked at the Oasis.

“The high school.”

“Where’s the high school?” I asked.

“Right there,” she said, pointing through one of the Spanish-style arches that surround the square.

I bought two tickets, twelve bucks each, thinking, Who knew Tucson had a symphony orchestra and why are they driving a couple of hundred miles to this little town, and could they possibly be very good, really? Maybe it was in fact the honors orchestra for the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, not Phoenix, but still, that would probably be worth going out to hear. We’ve been camping for three months and haven’t done anything that might be called cultural the whole time, not even visit a museum. I guess we’ve been looking for other kinds of rewards on this trip.

What a wonderful surprise and a musically exciting evening! The Tucson Symphony, it turns out, is the oldest in the Southwest. It auditions nationally and sometimes internationally, and its conductor, George Hanson, has an impressive musical biography, as printed in the program. Most importantly, to my not entirely untrained ear, they sounded marvelous, at least in two of the three pieces they performed.

The Octet for Winds was performed by eight musicians, and although it was from Beethoven’s mid-career, I didn’t find it to be very interesting. To me, there’s a rather dramatic point at which Beethoven stops sounding a lot like Mozart and begins to sound like something entirely new and unsurpassed in classical music. The octet was still from the Mozart period, I thought.

The second piece featured the much larger string section performing the Grosse Fugue in B-Flat Major, which is an expanded version of one of the late string quartets. I’ve actually listened to the late quartets rather a lot, though many years ago, and remembered this piece and was once again struck by how modern it sounds, a good hundred years ahead of its time in its harmonies and fractured fugue structure. As the conductor said in introducing it, it drove audiences insane the few times it was first performed. I loved it.

Best of all after the intermission was the performance of Symphony No. 2. I expected this second symphony to be again rather Mozarty but was surprised at how many twists and surprises it held. The performance was stirring, only in part because it was so unexpected on a Tuesday night in Ajo.

In the whole evening, I can only fault the acoustics of the room, which swallowed up vast quantities of sound and left the performances sounding anemic, especially the two pieces before the full orchestra came on stage. Nobody’s fault. A high-school auditorium was never designed for a concert like this.

Mary and I drove back to camp navigating the twisted little dirt roads by my GPS and still having a bit of trouble finding our trailer in the dark, but enjoying that fullness of spirit that can come only during and after an evening of fine music, regardless of genre.

My knowledge of classical music is limited at best (please don’t take any of my music-critic comments very seriously here, though I do know enough to know that “classical” is a period, not a genre), but I actually did listen to quite a lot of Beethoven for a couple of years in college, about 1972 and 73, say. I had bought a number of collections on LP: the complete symphonies, string quartets and piano concertos of Beethoven, along with a few other things by different composers I liked. I remember often spending an evening just listening to music. Some music should never be used for background, I thought for a long time, though I suppose that’s a foolish limitation.

But still.

Beethoven was the composer who most fulfilled me emotionally and intellectually. The wonderful evening made me regret a little that I haven’t paid more attention to classical music over the years. Jazz has so dominated my passion for music, and so much of what I think of as classical music is frumpy rubbish. But then so much of everything is frumpy rubbish or rubbish of some other kind. In listening widely and well, I’ve discovered a world of music in jazz that I’ve now refined down to a broad but essential collection that continues to grow and delight. Is there room enough and time for a vast expansion in my tastes?

In any case, since I still have a working turntable, I think I’ll get out some of those old LPs when we get back home.

Smugglers

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is our favorite campground so far. It’s located at the extreme southern edge of Arizona. The nearest town of any consequence is Gila Bend, eighty-three miles north. There doesn’t seem to be any air traffic headed for distant cities, so the night sky is unpolluted by light or noise. Temperatures are in the mid-70s. The campground itself is small and lightly used, and with my new Seniors Pass, we’re camping for half price, a budget-comfy six dollars a night. At that rate, we can actually afford to do this trip again next year and probably for as long as we’re physically and mentally able.

There are also numerous BLM areas close by where you can boondock free for up to fourteen days at a time. We’ve scouted some of these along the way, and they range from isolated spots with only one or two trailers to sites just off the highway with rigs packed in pretty tight. We’re moving out in the morning to see how we like it.

We’re moving to one tomorrow

Whoo-hoo!

The stay limit is here is three weeks, and we’ll probably max out; there’s lots of hiking, as well as an excellent visitors’ center and ranger programs in the amphitheater; tonight’s is titled Bark Rangers, about working dogs in the park system. Most of these programs are not rocket surgery.

The desert landscape is as beautiful as any we’ve seen, surrounded by mountains near and distant and lush desert vegetation made possible by somewhat higher rainfall than surrounding deserts get. And it’s been a wet year after years of drought. Everything is an unlikely green right now, and the whole thing looks professionally landscaped.

But in major ways, the rules of the park and the overall atmosphere are dictated by the common border with Mexico. Outside the safety and comfort of the campground and a few close-in trails, this is “no country for old men.”

The campground is only five miles from Mexico and the small border town of Soroyta. Much of the park itself sees high traffic from illegal immigrants and drug runners. Most of the park that used to be open to the public is now closed, including a fifty-mile dirt road with several historical sites, abandoned mines and ranches. The visitor center is named for a ranger who was murdered six years ago while tracking drug runners who had recently committed a string or murders in Mexico. The park’s own brochure warns of wandering off the few approved trails and cautions to keep valuables locked up, report any suspicious activity, and, most of all, not intervene personally if you see anything suspect. No other park we’ve visited has posted such warnings.

Also, the highway is thick with Border Patrol SUVs, some of them pulling trailers with quads loaded for off-road pursuits. There are also signs of the virtual fence being built on contract by Boeing, parked trucks coverer by camouflage tarps with cameras mounted on tall poles. From what I’ve read, the fence is a near-complete failure and way over budget, but work continues.

All of which has got me thinking about the problems of immigration, drugs, gangs, cartels, murders and rapes that have people talking about Mexico as a failed state and dramatically changed the way of life for many along the border, not to mention the explosion of gangs and related violence affecting all of our cities.

I have the solution, two different measures that would be easy to enact and would reduce all the attendant problems by something like ninety percent. Make it ninety-five.

Neither idea is new.

The first is to adopt—I hate to say it—George Bush’s immigration reform package. It provided for a guest worker program which would allow Mexican nationals to enter the country legally and employers to easily hire documented workers. Despite issues of social justice, the program would substantially improve the lot of Mexican laborers by regulating wage, health and safety issues. It would also allow them to return home and reenter the United States without fear of deportation. Everybody’s happy.

Bush’s plan fell flat because it also addressed the problem of long-time residents who entered illegally and have integrated well into their communities. Many of them have been here for decades and have children and even grandchildren who were born here and thus are themselves US citizens. Bush intended a “path to citizenship” for these long-term residents, which was immediately branded “amnesty” by others in his own party, and the future of the plan quickly died.

John McCain, Arizona’s senator, initially embraced the plan but quickly distanced himself when he became a candidate for president. Sadly, of all the problems Obama doesn’t need to take on right now, immigration reform is probably first on his list.

The other simple solution that will never happen is to legalize most drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. The drug cartels would immediately collapse, as would American street gangs. They’d probably dabble a little in murder, prostitution, and double parking, but for the most part they’d be out of work.

Despite fears to the contrary, this doesn’t mean the country would suddenly be awash in drugs. We could still regulate drug use the same way we regulate alcohol and tobacco. No shooting up in restaurants or parks. No reporting for work while high on cocaine. No DUIs or you’re back in rehab and then jail. Certain professions such as airline pilots and Sunday school teachers could still have a zero-tolerance policy.

Pretty much, the same people who use drugs now would still use them if they were legal. Availability would be about the same since, demonstrably, the War on Drugs which started under Nixon has been an abject failure.
These two simple solutions would solve so many problems and work so immediately that it’s all the more heartbreaking that the current situation is tolerated and perpetuated by small-thinking, opportunistic politicians in both parties, backed by the full faith and credit of a bunch of stupid rednecks.

Or we could do what a camper next to me suggested yesterday: shoot them all and send the bodies back to Mexico.

That could also work.