Arizona Journal
by Charles Platt
When I moved to a small town in Arizona from New York City (where I had lived for 27 years), I kept a journal which I circulated with some friends. Below are some excerpts.
*
July 9, 1997
I wake at 7 am. The house is so bright, I feel as if I'm inside a giant light bulb. Three big windows in the living room, overlooking the wide wilderness of the valley, admit beams of glaring golden sun. More sun streams through glass-panelled doors leading out onto the various stairs and decks.
The sky is cloudless and impossibly blue. I look down over half-a-dozen little houses, straggling out along a limb of land rimmed by the two-lane mountain road. Beyond that there's nothing but sand, scrub, and red strata on the mountains 20 miles away. It's so much larger than life, I feel like a pygmy standing in front of an Imax screen.
My girlfriend Erico and I eat our first breakfast from the plastic bowls of our travel kit. We need to buy ceramic bowls. We need to buy knives and forks. Most of all, we need to buy furniture. The old wooden floors do yield somewhat underfoot, but this does not make them especially comfortable to sit on.
Also we need lamps. The living room and kitchen have no lights in them at all. So, it's back to Wal-Mart. Quickly I discover that Wal-Mart is only amusing so long as you don't actually need to buy anything.
The problem is, Wal-Mart assumes that my house should look like the interior of a white-trash trailer home. I am not allowed, for instance, to buy plain-colored dinner plates; I must have flower patterns, or weird ripple textures, or at the very least a few stripes.
Likewise, all knives and forks must be embellished with pseudo-antique flourishes and moldings; all door mats must have "Welcome!" printed on them in flowing script, with optional flowers in the corner; all oven mitts must be made from garish fabric including many designs featuring (you guessed it) flower patterns; and there is no such thing as a plain, colorless, normally shaped tumbler.
Plainness, generally speaking, is out of the question. The glasses are ribbed or rippled, or they have (yes) flowers printed on them, or they are embellished with brand names or cartoon characters. Many of the tumblers are oddly short and wide, as if to emulate the somatype of Wal-Mart's clientele.
Oh well -- there are other stores in Cottonwood, right? Sure there are! But as we visit these stores, we realize why Wal-Mart has been such a huge success in small towns all across America. For all its shortcomings, Wal-Mart is at least well-organized and professionally run.
In an office supply store, I ask innocently, "Excuse me, how much is this file cabinet? I want to buy it." The manager looks concerned. This kind of thing evidently doesn't happen often -- people coming in and asking to buy things--and it causes trouble. "I don't know," he says, looking worried. "I'll have to check."
He digs out a big catalogue and starts paging through it, looking for a picture of the file cabinet. He finds one that looks almost the same. "We can have this for you in a week," he says, quoting a price that's twice my expectation.
"But I want to buy this one, now!"
Well, that is simply not possible. Gradually I realize that Cottonwood is a throwback to the 1950s, when retailers functioned on a leisurely timebase, ordering merchandise on behalf of the consumer, taking a hefty markup to compensate for their inefficiency and lack of volume, and knowing absolutely nothing about anything.
No wonder Wal-Mart drives the local stores out of business. They deserve to be driven out of business! The only snag is, this forces consumers to buy the home-furnishing equivalent of junk food.
We return to our new home feeling disillusioned and defeated. We have bought no knives, forks, spoons, bowls, glasses, place mats, or oven mitts, because we couldn't bear to sullyour new home with such hideous designs.
Erico places a call to a friend of hers in New York and asks her to send some Japanese noodle bowls by FedEx, right away. I begin to wonder if we're being just a bit ... fussy. Then I think again of those weird-shaped badly-ornamented tumblers and horrible flower-patterned plates made out of some strange pseudoporcelain that is, undoubtedly, Microwaveable and Dishwasher Safe.
No, I simply cannot subscribe to this domestic horror. Better we should continue using the plastic utensils and paper plates from our travel kit, at least for the time being.
*
July 20, 1997
Pulling back the covers before getting into bed, I find some funny little black specks on the sheet, like long, thin grains of rice. And the specks are moving.
I despise the mindlessness of insects. Long ago, when I asked a friend how he could be so callous about killing cockroaches while expressing a general reverence for life, he eyed me severely and said, "A cockroach is not a living thing, it is a mechanism." That sounds about right to me.
In my personal utopia all insects (with the possible exception of bees and other species that are needed for pollination of plants) would be eradicated. I realize this would have some repercussions; birds that feed on insects would also die.
This, however, seems a small price to pay.
Anyway... it seems that some kind of insect (unknown) laid eggs in our bedroom while the house was uninhabited, and now the eggs have hatched. Time for the vacuum cleaner! For the next hour we methodically shake out the sheets, turn all the pillow cases inside out, and suck up the crawling grublike things, which are too young, fortunately, to move very fast.
Then I raise the blind on the window above the bed and find many more of the little bastards. And down at the bottom--a thing slightly more than an inch long darts out from a crevice. It moves very fast on many legs, although not fast enough to escape the vacuum-cleaner nozzle. Almost certainly it's a centipede, and is the creature that laid the eggs. (Is it poisonous? I have no idea.)
After an hour, when I am virtually certain that no further insects remain, we take the dust bag out of the vacuum cleaner, put it inside a plastic bag, seal it up, and dump it in the garbage can. I finally get to sleep around 2 AM, but Erico stays awake for most of the night, constantly plagued by imaginary itchy sensations.
This, however, is just a mild taste of the unpleasantness that lies in store. The next morning I put on one of my sneakers, reach for the second sneaker--and something scuttles from under it. It's no bigger than the last joint of my thumb, but has the unmistakable form of a scorpion.
Instantly, I stamp on it (feeling fortunate that I'm already wearing one shoe). Stamp, stamp, stamp--the damned thing keeps wriggling and scuttling, and is hard to see, because its body seems transparent. Still, eventually I nail it.
Later, at the post office, I run into a muscular, tattooed, shaven-headed guy from the volunteer fire department. I ask him about scorpions. Sure, he says, they exist. Personally he keeps a tarantula in his house, which takes care of the problem.
We return home, and I call a woman who lives locally and has been helpful with advice in the past. Yes, she says, scorpions are a problem, and the small ones are the worst.
But other pests are even more troublesome. The so-called Wallapai Tiger, for instance: This flat-bodied flying beetle with orange markings on its back normally sucks blood from rodents but sometimes gets ambitions and tackles human beings. It injects an anesthetic, so that you don't know what's happening.
But some people are extremely allergic to the bite and go into anaphylactic shock. My friend found her whole body swelling up after she was bitten. She quickly took some Benadryl, but during the lag-time while the drug was being metabolized she felt her throat constricting and could hardly breathe. She was incapacitated for three days.
Then, of course, there are black widows and other highly poisonous spiders....
Foolishly I had imagined that at 5,000 feet, the altitude and lack of water would discourage most pests. I guess I was somewhat naive, in just the same way as when I first started living in New York and couldn't believe that those black teenagers in the East Village, hanging out outside a high school and smacking sawn-off pool cues against a fence while eyeing me speculatively as I walked past, could really harbor any ill-will toward me. If I left them alone, wouldn't they leave me alone? Live-and-let-live, and all that.
Alas, my ideas about fairness were inherited from a sweet-natured, naive British gentleman (my father) who never intended any harm to anyone.
Here in the real world, from the point of view of insects, Arizona is the equivalent of a bad urban neighborhood where local residents don't have enough to eat and must prey upon each other ruthlessly in order to survive.
Into this neighborhood comes Bozo from New York, full of giddy ideas about beautiful sunsets and pretty red rocks. Bozo brings with him a ton of food (easily enough to sustain an entire ant colony for several years) and is in the habit of drenching himself periodically with gallons of water, a commodity that is more precious around here than food itself.
Most tempting of all, Bozo contains vast quantities of thick, warm, tasty, nutritious blood, readily available beneath a fragile shell of easily penetrated soft white skin.
So, how does the local insect population react to Bozo? Do our six-legged friends say to themselves, "We shouldn't steal Bozo's food, water, and blood because they are not ours, they belong to him"? Alas, no. Our insect friends take one look and cry, "Let's eat!"
This is all very depressing. I left New York partly to get away from a hostile subculture which, I felt, was in the habit of viewing me as prey--or, at the very least, as a source of spare change. Now I find myself surrounded by other species who share the same attitude. Worse still, out here in the wilderness there is no way I can protect myself with alarm stickers, door locks, and other urban good-luck charm.
The only way I can acquire some measure of security is by sealing every crack and crevice in the building (not easy, in an 80-year-old wooden house) and surrounding my property with a deadly swathe of powerful insecticide.
This is precisely what I intend to do. The exterminator will come here on Monday at 9 AM, and I will ask him to kill everything that crawls. On Wednesday, a local fix-it guy will start trying to plug all the possible entry points.
But I'm still not happy. When I pick up a sponge to wash a dish, or reach for a towel, or pull back the bedcovers, I'm as jumpy now as an Iowa tourist in Harlem, constantly expecting something to get me. No longer can I sit out on the balcony at night, chatting to friends on my cordless phone, without wondering if a demented flying beetle is sinking its proboscis into my neck at that very moment, inducing some catastrophic immune response that will constrict my throat and cause me to flop around on the floor, gasping like a beached fish.
I have bought some Benadryl, in liquid form for fastest possible metabolism, but somehow it does not inspire confidence.
My nearest neighbor says she's lived in Arizona for 15 years and has never even seen a scorpion. On the other hand, another neighbor tells me he is quite familiar with scorpions of various sizes, and his wife was thrown into a delirious hallucinogenic state for three days after being bitten by a Wallapai Tiger. Now she always turns her shoes upside down and shakes them before putting them on, and she shakes each towel before drying herself.
On the other hand, John, the former owner of this house, says he lived here for years without any problems, and raised two children who were unsupervised for much of the time. One of them was stung, once, by a scorpion; it was no worse than a bee sting. "They're just insects," says John. "Don't worry about them."
I don't know what to make of this. I've often visited Arizona, and I've stayed in countless motels without seeing anything more dangerous than a mosquito. Maybe I can fix up this house so that it's as safe as that. But -- I have no interest in spending money, time, and labor plugging cracks to keep out hostile blood-sucking pests. I just want to sit and write books.
Last night I fantasized about a house built entirely from concrete blocks, on a concrete foundation, with a concrete roof, windows sealed permanently shut, and a double-filtered ventilation system. Sounds good to me!
Unfortunately, I can't afford to build it, and right now I am stuck in this quaint renovated cabin that is no more difficult to get into as a kitchen strainer, from the insects' point of view.
One encouraging note: the insect community does follow a seasonal pattern. Wallapai Tigers, in particular, are most active during the few weeks before and during the rainy season.
Unfortunately, as I look out of the window at gathering thunder clouds, I see that the rainy season is just about to begin.
*
July 21, 1997
Adam the Bug Man arrives this morning: a jovial rotund guy around 25, with a little mustache and a smattering of acne.
He has a totally professional manner that is the perfect antidote to my scorpion paranoia, and he has no trouble at all persuading me that I should commit myself to regular extermination services for a mere $390 a year.
He starts inside the house, using a little hand-held gadget to puff white powder into half-inch gaps at the bottom of each wall--where the former owner of the house never bothered to install baseboards.
"What's that white powder?" I ask, following him and watching closely, because I am determined to get as much poison into as many crevices as possible.
He hesitates, looking reluctant to reveal the secrets of his trade. "Boric acid powder," he mutters.
Back in the early 1970s, conspiracy theorists claimed that pesticide companies were trying to suppress information about boric acid, which was supposedly a total, permanent, nontoxic, low-cost cure for cockroach infestation. But when I tried boric acid powder myself I watched cockroaches wandering to and fro through the dunes of white powder with casual unconceern. Some actually seemed to eat it.
Still, I'm so desperate for hope, now, I manage to convince myself that Adam's boric acid somehow will do the trick. I'm further encouraged when he recognizes some dead bugs with calm authority (clearly, he has been to bug school). And he finishes by using some genuinely toxic spray all around the outside of the house, creating a free-fire zone that should be thoroughly lethal.
He also finds a dead cat under the floor of our back porch--a horrifying emaciated thing, half-mummified by the Arizona climate. But I tell him not to worry about that.
After he's gone, Erico asks difficult questions, such as, Why did Adam only puff boric acid at widely spaced intervals? And, How does boric acid kill bugs, anyway?
I become irate, crying "How should I know!" Then with chagrin I realize my irritation results from Erico puncturing my pretense that everything is now okay, when really it isn't.
So ... I call another service and I ask what they use inside people's homes. They reel off a list of dangerous-sounding poisons. I ask what they think of using boric acid. "We only do that if people are really nervous about chemicals," they say.
Naturally this reactivates my scorpion paranoia at full force, so I ask them to come and re-bugproof this house as soon as possible. They promise to get their Bug Man to call me later today. His name is David. Right now, he's out killing bugs.
Feeling extremely depressed, I go to the local library.
Although this community only has a population of 400, it does possess a library in a basement near the center of town. I wander in and find absolutely no one there--not even a librarian. There are many ancient books held together with tape. Some of the shelves look as if they came from yard sales. There are quaint old card catalogues in little mahogany drawers with brass handles.
I browse around and find a couple of books on poisonous insects, spiders, and snakes. My scalp starts prickling as I look at a series of line drawings of venomous or parasitic things that "are not usually life-threatening, but cause serious symptoms requiring immediate medical attention."
At this point a nice little old lady wanders in. She's everyone's stereotypical vision of a gray-haired elderly librarian, back from her lunch break. As she types out a couple of library cards for myself and Erico on an old Selectric, she tells me she's been stung several times by scorpions. And like everyone else, she says that the small ones are the most dangerous.
I'm really interested to know where these nuggets of rural wisdom come from. How small is "small"? How is seriousness-of-sting measured -- by swelling, fever, liver damage, anaphylactic shock, wound infection, skin erosion (caused by digestive enzymes in the venom), or what? I mean -- where are the clinical studies? Verbal and textual bug descriptions fall short of my demanding needs for precise documentation.
This always tends to happen when I start learning about any field. At first I'm impressed by seemingly authoritative statements of fact; then I start to ask questions, and quickly I discover that reliable observers are vastly outnumbered by people promoting pet theories based on evidence that it skimpy at best. This has been the case when I have dug for data in disparate fields such as aging research, archeology, high-definition television, and repetitive strain injury. No surprise, then, that a similar situation exists in the world of bugs.
I take the books back to Erico, and we spend a morbid hour leafing through them. One turns out to be copyright 1946, and advises Epsom salts as an antidote to scorpion stings. I wonder if I will be able to find Epsom salts at Wal-Mart.
Clearly, we need better info. I call the local hospital, then the local college. No one has any standard texts or advice for paranoid tourists. I call a friend in Phoenix, who confirms that scorpions are endemic there, just as they are in northern Arizona, and people just put up with it. I can't understand this. Americans become hysterical on the subject of violent crime, but where violent bugs are concerned, nobody seems to care. Why not?
With Erico, I drive down to the book store in Cottonwood. Since the owner is a gun-carrying libertarian, nonspecifically paranoid and well equipped with guides advocating self defense against the Federal Government, surely he should know how to deal with bugs. Indeed, he turns out to have four books with relevant information, so we buy them all.
This is not a good idea, because one of them identifies the scorpion that I found as a bark scorpion (so named because it lurks under tree bark), which is listed as one of the two species in Arizona that are "potentially life-threatening."
This plunges me into a deeper depression. I imagine whole families of bark scorpions out in my yard, planning their assault on my house from hiding places among the bits of wood and other crap abandoned there by previous residents.
My guidebook advises that the first step to eliminating bark scorpions is to clean up your yard. Well, fine, but I've been trying for days to find someone who will haul away the junk, and no one wants to do it. I'd do it myself, but in the 100-degree heat I start gasping and staggering after just a few minutes of physical labor.
Once again I call the second exterminating service. With relief I find myself talking to David. He sounds very wise, with far more experience than Adam, the youngster who was here this morning. He says he has some granules that are specially formulated to kill scorpions. He also reassures me about bark scorpions.
"Only the ones in southern Arizona are dangerous," he says. "Not around here. I've been stung six or seven times, and it didn't bother me much."
This is a great relief, if I can believe it. David promises to come and redo our house tomorrow at 4:45. He will spray guaranteed lethal poison in the gaps where the baseboards should be, for a mere $30, and he'll scatter special scorpion-killing granules in our yard as an extra service at no cost.
Wonderful -- but I still don't know what to do about tonight.
Our mattress rests on the floor in the center of the bedroom, because the local craftsmen who promised to build us a bed have not yet done so. In my current state of anxiety, I see the mattress as a trophy vulnerable to attack from all sides. Clearly, I need fortifications. How about a rectangle of duct tape all around the bed, like a moat? If I lay the tape sticky-side-up, that should literally stop intruders in their tracks.
Of course it won't protect us against the dreaded airborne Wallapai Tiger (which is more properly known as a Cone-Nosed Bug, according to one of my book). But since I didn't see a Cone-Nosed Bug, and I did see a scorpion, I'm more freaked by the idea of scorpions.
So -- back to Wal-Mart, to buy a king-size roll of duct tape.
And while we're there, we pick up some plastic storage boxes with tight-fitting lids, so that we can keep our shoes and clean clothes safe from infestation. (Is this any way to live? I think not. But here we are, so....)
Meanwhile, Erico has developed a bad cough and sore throat. Probably this is just an upper-respiratory virus infection, but it's strange because we haven't met anyone suffering cold symptoms, and it's the wrong time of year.
I can't help wondering if this may be the dreaded Hanta Virus, which is caught by inhaling dust from dried powdery rat droppings. I recall that Arizona is a danger area for this disease. But I can't remember the precise symptoms. Some friends of mine in California discouraged their son from camping in Arizona because of the Hanta Virus, so maybe I should call them to ask for details -- but maybe not. Reading the insect guidebooks was bad enough.
I should just shrug and live with the situation like everyone else, bolstered by that universal human faith, "It won't happen to me."
I have never been very good at this. I've always assumed that if there's something life-threatening or unpleasant, probably it will happen to me. I suppose this explains why I must be the only person in town, right now, who is going to lay duct tape around his bed.
*
July 22, 1997
The duct-tape barrier is a proven success! When I awaken this morning I find one spider and one large cockroach firmly anchored to the adhesive. Both insects are facing toward the bed and were clearly approaching it when they were apprehended. With grim satisfaction I leave them for examination by David (the new exterminator) when he visits us later today.
Before he arrives I have to lay phone wire in the gap between sheetrock and floor boards around the base of each wall, so I can have a phone on my desk. Soon I'm drilling holes, soldering wires, and sweating freely. The usually dry Arizona climate has turned moist, by local standards, meaning that the humidity is as high as 40 percent.
Unfortunately our cooler--the louvred cube on top of the roof, which cools air by drawing it through moist pads--just adds to the humidity.
The upside, though, is a fantastic display of weather viewable from our front windows. The limb of land that protrudes about 200 feet below us is cloaked in cloud, while mounds of cumulus tower around us, and the sun throws random beams turning gray masses of vapor into glaring explosions of white light. It's quite amazing.
In the afternoon a stereo system is delivered; I ordered it so that I can listen to progressive rock station KZON in Phoenix, which somehow stays in business with the kind of radical playlist that was abandoned in the New York area more than a decade ago.
And then--amazingly--Manuel, the yard man, turns up. Somehow the bartender got a message through to him after all. Yes, Manuel will clear our yard, but he doesn't know how to get rid of the garbage, because he doesn't have a pickup truck. This makes no sense; surely all laborers and gardeners own pickup trucks.
I can't discuss the issue, though, because of the language problem. When I ask Manuel how many hours he will work and how much he expects to be paid, he squats down and writes numbers with his finger in the dirt: 8-12, 6. He'll work from 8am till noon for six dollars an hour? I bid him up to seven. He nods with pleasure. He insists, however, that I have to provide him with tools: a pick, rake, and shovel.
I see another costly visit to Wal-Mart in my future.
Then David the Exterminator arrives. He's in his late 30s, very experienced and totally confident, claiming a Master's degree in entomology, though he doesn't say where he got it.
He scatters poisoned scorpion bait like bird seed (sure hope the birds don't eat it) as he strides around the yard. Once again he assures me that bark scorpions are relatively harmless, though he reiterates the same persistent piece of folklore: "The small ones are the worst."
As for the Wallapai Tigers, he recommends setting up one of those blacklight high-voltage bug killers a good distance from the house, to lure the flying beetles away. Well, why didn't I think of that? Add it to the Wal-Mart shopping list.
David is very reassuring--yet as I accompany him around the outside of the house I get the impression that he is a bit slow-witted. He doesn't notice the ant nest that yesterday's exterminator, Adam, saw right away. He doesn't use a flashlight to peer into dark crevices. He certainly doesn't find the dead cat under the deck at the rear. He does use a lot of poison inside the building, though.
By the time he's finished, there are damp swathes around the edge of every room. I guess we won't be walking barefoot anymore.
"I don't recommend it in any case, for safety reasons," David says sternly.
So--whom do I trust? Adam was more high-tech, claiming that his zone of death was activated by microencapsulated poison with a time-release feature guaranteeing performance for three months. David is more of a traditionalist, with his little hand-pumped metal can full of nasty-smelling stuff, and he wants to hose the floors once a month, just like old-time exterminators in New York City. Adam has a newer truck, and a smart contemporary business logo. But Adam also charges more than twice as much as David, and suckered me into a one-year contract.
Ultimately, I don't think I trust either of these men. Still, the house has been doused with pesticide, which is what I wanted.
The pesticide stench is so bad, we go down to Cottonwood for dinner--always a daunting prospect, resulting in massive overdoses of salt and saturated fat. Then to Wal-Mart, then back home, beneath a sky strewn with streamers, towers, chunks, shreds, and twisted extrusions of cloud, sidelit by the setting sun, which is now hidden behind the jagged mountains, somehow turning the sky a delicate shade of green.
And in the center of the deep gray mountainous silhouette is a sprinkling of tiny lights, shimmering in waves of heat rising from the desert. Yes, it's our little mountain town, looking amazingly scenic even from six miles away.
This really is a truly special, truly wonderful place, and if I wasn't so paranoid about insects and didn't have to waste so much time and money fixing up a really annoying house, I'd be ecstatic to live here. As it is, I just feel tired.
Still, Manuel will be here tomorrow at 8 am to clear the yard (I bought him some sturdy work gloves at Wal-Mart, so that he'll be safe from any marauding scorpions and/or lethal poison). And then Joe will drop in after lunch, ready to lay plywood over the ancient floorboards and plug every visible crack with silicone sealant. After that we'll get carpet installed, fix the details on the outside of the house, paint the damned thing, take delivery of an arm chair to go with the new couch, and then -- head back to New York, exhausted and bankrupt!
This doesn't seem very sensible, but I agreed previously that Erico should be able to return to the city that she misses so much; so there it is.
*
Footnote:
Six years later I am still in Northern Arizona, although the area where I live now is more arid, which discourages insects. We do have fleas once in a while, which sometimes carry bubonic plague, killing an average of two people a year in Arizona. Plague however is curable if it is correctly diagnosed. Antiobiotics are effective. I have made peace with the Arizona wild life, more or less.
But Erico still lives in New York City for much of each year.
The End
Charles Platt is the author of more than forty books, including The Silicon Man, The Dream Makers, Protektor, and his most recent work, the novel Loose Canon. A journalist and computer programmer, he was at various times editor at three different New York publishing houses, and both designed and edited the ground-breaking British magazine New Worlds. For several years a senior writer at Wired magazine, Mr. Platt taught at The New School for Social Research in New York City before moving to Arizona in 1998. Charles Platt's fiction and nonfiction works are available at amazon.com.
