F’ing Tall Cacti

There are a couple sheets of paper with a rough idea of a daily plan floating around my car somewhere. They are not as detailed as they perhaps should be. The entry for April 4 and 5 reads, “Saguaro National Park. Big cacti.” Hooray for details that mean basically nothing, because there are big cacti everywhere. I just left a place with some big ones. Yawn.

Except the Saguaro Cactus is actually enormous. These are like, 40 feet tall, larger than telephone poles. The sheer size just doesn’t make sense.

The plants usually take 10 years to grow a single inch and 200 to reach their full, adult size. Think about the level of luck and evolutionary trust there has to be for that to actually happen. Ten years of growth at a pace of around a centimeter a year! These beats should not exist, yet, the park is full of green skyscrapers. Some of them have funky arms going up and down and to the side and some are baseball bats, complete with a knob at the base. They are everywhere, a venerable cactus forest that has been there longer than the city of Tucson. From the top of a 4,000 foot mountain today it looked as if I was descending into a huge pincushion.

LIGHTNING ROUND

• Because I’m a lunatic, the first thing I usually think about when watching a show like The Walking Dead or a movie like Mad Max is the ideal place to be if an apocalypse type of scenario ever went down. I don’t have an answer yet, but I now know it’s not Phoenix. After Vegas, it might be the second worst major city for apocalypse-readiness. There’s just nothing about the environment that would naturally support human life — no nearby water supply, no ability to grow crops, and 97 degrees in early April. If the world ends, stay away from Phoenix.
• I’ve never seen more police cars on the road than in Tucson, and I’ve lived in both Baltimore and LA.
• The Arizona rest stops are abhorrent in almost every way, including stalls with those minimal doors that make everyone uncomfortable. These are particularly bad. The stall door, top to bottom, couldn’t have been more than three feet top to bottom. A person could conceivably sit down and still be able to make eye contact with a person outside the stall. NIGHTMARE. Would it really cost that much more for a full size door?
• Thoughts and prayers the bathroom situation is more hospitable in New Mexico and western Texas.
• I’m one of those weirdos who listens to a song over and over again until the quality of the music is completely ruined. So far: “Famous” off of Kanye’s Life of Pablo, “Ophelia” by the Lumineers, and “Gone” by JR JR.