Tres Gringos
We 3 gringos took a little detour off the Arizona main roads as we headed down to the Mexican border. You got a rental car, you pretty much don’t worry about dry gulches and backwash arroyos. Those horrible scraping sounds of rock on metal eventually seem less alarming. We wanted to see the Saguaro National Monument up close, a vast tract of broken rock, cacti and the occasional black helicopter searching low along the hilltops, checking us out, maybe the only vehicle back in the scrub for the next two hours as we tested the endurance of our Kia’s shock and strut system.
The saguaros grow 200 years old, stand 20 feet tall and look comically human with their Taco Time arms waving at each other. This is where they have come for their convention, a million strong, until the road reaches the security gates of Asarco Copper Mine where ten miles of their tailings create a barren mesa devoid of saguaro or any other living thing. You want copper line to move electricity to power your TV, this is the price you pay.
By high noon we’ve reached blacktop and one of many towns drying up and turning to memory in the desert sun. Some broken down adobe block cantina offered $4 pitchers of cervezas so we beat the dust off our Stetsons and pushed open the doors, strangers in town. Five minutes later we’re provisioned and parked in the ramada off the back, just us, two black dudes, a Mexican and his wife, engaged in a homemade wheel of fortune, a vertical roulette wheel you spin and bet high or low, pretty much a primitive casino.
You may ask, is this what we came to the southwestern end of the USA for? And I will tell you, it beats a swimming pool in Vegas or a fenced resort with HBO and Wi-fi. If you go in search of the real America — okay, the America rapidly disappearing into the future — it’s not to be found along the damn freeway. But it’s out there if you want to take a few chances, risk a little inconvenience, dare the Fates and roll the dice. Or the wheel…. We didn’t lose anything serious to the hombres at the bar, all good folks, but we won back some of what 7-11 and Dish TV and Disneyland stole from all of us gringos without so much as a squawk or a whimper. We bought the bar a round on our way out and hightailed it toward Mexico. Vaya con Dios, amigos.
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