New Mexico has the slogan “New Mexico True” which they use widely. Arizona has a similar one, perhaps newer and not quite as established, “Absolutely Arizona.” KGUN 9 TV has a feature every week about some local place, edifice or tradition which they describe as Absolutely Arizona. I like the idea. I'll be using it in what I hope will be weekly posts for awhile on "Memoir Monday."
I cannot recall doing this in Jerome but it was high on the hills and above much of the show. In addition I was very rarely out at night after dark before age ten. Thus my lightning watching days began about my twelfth summer after we had settled in Clarkdale. The town was near the western edge of the Verde Valley, snug against the Black Hills Range which included Woodchute, Mingus and more named mountains to the south. Across the valley, the Mogollon Rim dominated the horizon with several named and known landmarks, the Sedona Red Rocks just not quite in sight. The view to the east was limited a bit by the rugged limestone hills that edged the river on the east side but the clouds rose far above that visual limit.
Summer nights usually found me outside, often sitting on one of the trucks in the alley. Sometimes the whole family was there, Mom and Dad and Alex, after he came along, but often it was just Charlie and me or even me by myself. On clear nights I watched the stars and airplanes overhead but many summer nights were cloudy and that usually meant lightning. I’d watch fascinated until I had to go inside to bed. Sadly I did not have even a cheap small camera in those days to record the sights but they are as vivid in my memory as any photograph could render them.
The four summers I spent in Flagstaff ere not memorable for lightning. I loved the summers there and the nights too but it seemed many of the storms were in the afternoon and we were far above the valley views at some 7,000 feet. Then in 1970 I ended the summer down in Cochise County. I really had no place to sit out and certainly no one to enjoy it with but there were storms. Not for nothing are the mountains to the west side of that valley, the San Pedro, called Huachuca!
Huachuca is a slight corruption of a Sopaburi Indian word. Those native people dwelled in the area long ago, even before the Apache and other more recent groups arrived. They were leaving or dying out by the time the Spanish explorers arrived but it was the latter who picked up the word. It is often translated as place of the thunder, or more poetically, where the thunder walks. And walk it does, rolling and rumbling across the sky among the clouds behind the brilliant flashes of electric fire.
By the next summer I had relocated to Bisbee and then had friends to watch with, my future husband and two future step kids. We saw our share that summer and the next two, often driving out on High Lonesome Road, south and east down the canyon from Bisbee into the west edge of the Sulpher Springs Valley. Then by 1974, we were living in Colorado, a small then rural community called Falcon, about fifteen miles east of Colorado Springs. There were summer storms in that area too and lightning but not to the degree and spectacular profusion of Cochise County, AZ. However I did get a few photos and we did watch some.
The next six years were in the central valley of California—a horrible place to me since there simply were not any summer storms! How I missed that, almost as much as I loathed the pervasive fog that blanketed us all winter. Finally we got back to Arizona in the fall of 1983, settling briefly in Tucson. The monsoon was late that year and barely started when we arrived at the end of August but the fall was very wet--though not much in the way of thunderstorms.
After Jim passed away in November 2003, I did not spend too many nights out any more. It was no fun to do so alone. In 2008 I moved over to the SW corner of New Mexico and the next spring, back to Colorado. Finally in 2011, brother Charlie and I moved down to Alamogordo, NM. That area had its share of summer storms and there was often some pretty good lightning displays but I was spoiled by then with digital cameras and too lackadaisical to dig out the old SLR with a timed exposure system and put it on a tripod, so no photos. And it was just not quite Arizona…maybe no one else would notice the difference but we did!
Then last summer saw us finally head back to Arizona and once again settle in Cochise County although this time landing at the north end of the Whetstones. The first few nights we spent here after unloading the first big U-Haul truck near the end of August, we sat out back and watched lightning. That was when we knew we had come home. It was just as spectacular as we remembered as nature put on her light show just for us, or at least it felt that way.
This past Sunday evening, the 26th, we watched the first real night storm of the season as it wandered among the hills and mountains to the north and east with blue flares seen through clouds and brighter bolts that came to the earth. I may try for some photos in time but for now it is enough just to watch and go back in memories to so many other summer evenings, each of them absolutely Arizona!
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| Lightning at Falcon |
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| Whetstone Lightning |
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| Cloud to cloud--bluer when distant |
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| The Spirit of Huachuca |
Sadly most of my other lightnng pix are on slides and I have not scanned them in yet! So for another time...
