My Trip to Bountiful
-or-
A Tour of Southwestern Libraries

 

1 January 2000

            After watching Richard Riordan light up the HOLLYWOOD sign, the showbiz excitement and five glasses of cheap Trader Joe’s champagne bubbled over, and I took to the highway in a frenzy at two in the morning.  My chaperon for the evening, Miss Aimée McNeilly, gave me a sad kiss on the cheek as I drove off into the rainy night.  “You’re nuts,” she said sweetly, and I laid rubber on her quiet Echo Park street to illustrate the point.  I was already tuned into my final destination, that great old building waiting for me on the corner of Tulane and Loyola, Spanish moss clinging to the magnolias and the aroma of hot muffalettas drifting across the Quarter, yes, the New Orleans Public Library.

            The next morning I awoke somewhere in Joshua Tree National Park, the wind blowing across the desert with hurricane velocity.  I decided to call upon some friends partying with Huell Howser at the Twenty-nine Palms Inn, and so naturally I used the pay-phone at the Twentynine Palms Public Library, a branch of the vast County of San Berdoo organization, which stretches from the smoggy flats of Rialto to the torpid stink of Trona, even flinging tiny bookmobiles out to distant Nipton and sandy Kelso.  On this New Years’ Day, the hard-working librarians of Twenty-nine Palms were sleeping it off, but I can report that the building, from the outside, appeared just like you would expect a library in the middle of nowhere to look:  hard enough to survive a direct hit by an atomic weapon, and cold enough to freeze three visiting high school classes to death in under an hour.

            After a pleasant rendezvous in the Mojave sunshine, I continued northeast along the Mother Road 66 through Amboy to Goffs, home of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association.  Housed in a cluster of restored structures and a 1914 one-room schoolhouse, the MDHCA boasts the world’s largest collection of oral histories, books and photographs on the Mojave Desert, curated by a salty former Marine, Dennis Casebier.  However, to my disappointment, Dennis and his wife had fled Goffs for the holiday to visit friends in the nearby metropolis of Needles.

            Without further delay, I vamoosed for Arizona, following old Route 66 into Oatman.  Since the highway inside Oatman narrows down to hardly one lane, a family from Wisconsin took the opportunity to turn around their giant motor-home, a maneuver that only took them ten minutes with some dubious local assistance.  While waiting, I thought up a new joke:  How many Arizonans does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Ten.  One to screw in the light-bulb, and nine to stand around saying, “Boy, that ain’t ever gonna work.”  I asked a woman observing the calamity if she knew the address of the Oatman Public Library, but she just shrugged and handed me a cup of stale popcorn.

            My next stop was at the Kingman Public Library, a tidy fake-Western branch of the Mohave County system, and yes, they do spell Mojave incorrectly in Arizona.  Not surprisingly, this library was also closed for New Year’s, but I did find a fellow sitting on the front steps, and asked him to recommend any good places to eat nearby.  He gave me some very poor advice.

 

2 January 2000

            After climbing out of the Mojave Desert and up the Mogollón Rim onto the Colorado Plateau, I spent the night in lovely Sedona, Arizona, famous for its proximity to the Netherworld.  I telephoned the home of my friend Jessica Nelson, ceramist and high school art teacher, from a pay-phone at the Circle K in Cottonwood and asked if I could sleep on her couch, still feeling a little sick from the awful meal I’d had in Kingman.  Two high school kids were making a pot transaction next to me.

            The next morning we drove into Sedona for supplies, past the Sedona Public Library.  That library is, as you might imagine, an ostentatious A-frame structure with a rather small collection of books, mostly paid for by donations and staffed by Stepford volunteers.  The reference librarian, a Woman of Independent Means judging by the amount of silver and turquoise she wore, noted that the interior of the library could be viewed in QuickTime VR on the library’s website, although their catalogue of books wasn’t readily available.  Pretty nice for a city of twenty-five-thousand, or one-hundred-thousand, depending on whether you include past lives or not.

            After enjoying some homemade Italian cuisine with Miss Nelson, then spying on her flying-saucer cult neighbors with a pair of infrared binoculars, we fought our way through a sudden blizzard to the old mining town of Jerome, where I naturally made a pit stop at the Jerome Public Library.  A tiny branch of the Yavapai County Library Network, this library was tucked into the bottom of a large Victorian, like all of Jerome, on the side of steep hill.  An old-timer with a tobacco-stained beard approached through the snow.

            “How long you reckon this library been here?” I drawled.

            “Dunno,” he replied.  “‘Bout two or three-hundred years.”

            I later discovered that the Jerome Library was only about ten years old, a convenience for the new crop of “huppies” in Jerome, who prefer to avoid traveling down the hill to Cottonwood, a much larger city on the Verde River, for books.  True to form, Jessica refused to take me to the Cottonwood Public Library, which she described as a haven for “slackers and drug dealing malcontents.”  She did, however, drive me past the Clark Memorial Library in Clarkdale, a tiny town in the shadow of the mysterious Tuzigoot, a Sinagua ruin and home to the Tuzigoot National Monument Library, which has a large collection of books on ancient floodwater irrigation techniques.

            On the narrow, traffic-choked road between Cottonwood and Sedona, we were listening to the NPR news, which said that two Americans had died during a Millennium climb up Mount Kilimanjaro.  “That’s funny,” I said, “my boss went to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with that group.”  Then they said her name, and it wasn’t so funny.  But it was kismet, and if there’s any bond between me and Jennifer Lambelet, one of the few librarians I really liked, it was that I learned of her death in Africa during a snowy traffic-jam in Sedona.

 

3 January 2000

            If you ever find yourself driving across the Hopi Nation, enjoying the spectacular views which stretch fifty miles in every direction, you will find plenty of jewelry, baskets, katcina dolls and piki bread, but very few books.  The Sekakuku family sells a few self-published tomes on the history of Hopi pottery at their trading post, when they’re not fawning over tourists with their handmade jewelry...  “Oh, that’s so flattering on you...”  Just like stepping into Nordstrom’s.  I expected to find the real bibliographic action at the Hopi Cultural Center, on Second Mesa, which includes a museum, motel, and a restaurant where mutton is the special 364 days a year.  “Do you have a library here?” I inquired.

            The proprietor glanced knowingly at a man reading that week’s copy of Tutuveni, the Hopi Nation’s finest (and only) newspaper.  “We got a bookstore.”

            “Don’t you have a library?”

            She rubbed her chin.  “I’ve got a bunch of books in boxes, and someday I plan to unpack them.”

            “Is there a library in the reservation office?”

            “Yeah, they’ve got some books stored at the Tribal Council.”

            So much for the center of the universe.  I was a little peeved, mainly because I’d sent a book I’d written, an annotated bibliography of the Hisatsinom, to the Tribal Council and now I wondered where the hell it was.  The Hisatsinom, better known by their Navajo name Anasazi, which means “ancient enemy”, are the ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo tribes, once the most sophisticated nation in North America.

4 January 2000

            I spent the night next to the Canyon de Chelly at Diné College, formerly known as Navajo Community College, in Dinétah, formerly known as the Navajo Nation.  You can rent a heated double in the dorms for $15 a night, pretty good compared to the Thunderbird Lodge down the hill.  In the morning I stomped across knee-deep snow to the Diné College Library, reportedly the largest Native American academic library in the United States.  This library, like all the buildings on the campus, is built in the shape of the classic Navajo hogan, an octagon with a door facing the east.  Although small and outdated, the collection here is the best cared for I’ve ever seen, with each book dusted on return.  They lack Internet access or a collection like Flagstaff Public Library and the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University, but they do maintain branches in the distant villages of Shiprock and Crownpoint, New Mexico, almost a hundred miles away.

            Fifty miles northwest, on the way to Monument Valley, I stopped at the Rough Rock High School Library.  Those of you fortunate enough to remember Dr. Cheryl Metoyer-Duran from GSLIS at UCLA may know the hand she played in developing this library.  Located in a remote, rural village, Rough Rock is one of the first experimental K-12 schools actually run by Native Americans.  The library boasted all the amenities of the late Seventies, orange carpet, weird concrete angles, and huge panoramic windows.  While several teenagers stared in amazement, their librarian coolly discussed the relative advantages of GEAC and DRA with a white guy in a duster and a five-day beard.  And yes, they did have Internet access, off a satellite.

            Five hours later, I pulled to the side of a dirt road along the Utah/Colorado border, searching for the library at Hovenweep National Monument.  Downstream from the famous cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde, Hovenweep is a collection of astronomical observatories and defensive structures built on the northwestern fringe of the Hisatsinom Nation about a thousand years ago, when marauding nomads from the north began invading.  These nomads were the Navajo, and the Hisatsinom are usually called Anasazi, the Navajo word for “ancient enemy”.  Hovenweep, because of its observatories, has a unique library of archaeological documents, crammed into a visitor center half the size of the Atwater Village Branch Library.  Two men replacing the telephone line, some twenty miles through the forest to Cortez, let me inside to peek at the library.

            “Where’s the ranger?” I asked.  They indicated a handwritten note taped to the window, specifying that the ranger was off camping himself, in another area some miles away.

            The sun dipped low over the great mesa between Manti-La Sal and Sleeping Ute Mountain, a hundred miles across and open to the sky like no other place in the world.  I was thirty miles from the Four Corners and sixty miles from my next destination, the Farmington Public Library.  “Think I can make Farmington by sundown?” I drawled to the linemen.

            “Not a chance,” one drawled back.

            “Sounds like a dare to me,” I replied, and laid rubber while they laughed at me.  Sure enough, the sun was long gone by the time I reached Farmington, just past the great volcanic spire of Shiprock, and the seat of San Juan County, New Mexico.  Along Broadway, between the Dairy Queen and the Sonic Drive-In, I spotted the ultra-Eighties Farmington Public Library, a two-story cube, partly underground in a “moat”, and boasting dozens of strange angles, twisted staircases and oddly-shaped skylights.

            The reference librarian seemed unable to answer any questions about the local weather or accommodations.  Slightly embarrassed, she added that she was a recent émigré from Michigan, and didn’t understand why everyone was complaining about the cold weather.  “Now in Traverse City,” she continued, brushing off one anxious patron, “a foot of snow wouldn’t even get you a snow-day.”  When asked about good local restaurants, she recommended a place called Three Rivers, which later turned out to be the only restaurant in Farmington where the menu wasn’t written on a chalkboard over the counter.  I then signed myself up for an Internet terminal, to see if I had any e-mail, and found myself sandwiched between two loud teenage girls fawning over pictures of Ricky Martin and another much younger girl beating on the keyboard in lieu of any actual surfing.  After a few moments of this nostalgic exercise, I departed.  On the way out, I said hello to another reference librarian, an overjoyed woman bearing a full set of the Encyclopedia of Associations without even breaking a sweat.  At last I had found the first true Lipstick Librarian of my Southwestern journey, with perfectly frosted hair and a skirt too short even for some of our own leggy colleagues.

            By the exit I also observed the security guard eject a group of teenagers, all of whom he knew by name, apparently for creating some kind of minor disturbance in the typing room.  Meanwhile, at the circulation desk, an angry girl with Gothic makeup and a ring in her eyebrow sorted books with a violence that indicated to me a kindred spirit, so I asked if there was anything to do in Farmington at night.  “Yeah, man,” she replied, not bothering to look up.  “Get drunk and go to Durango.”

5 January 2000

            The following morning, after nearly freezing to death while mistakenly car-camping in sub-zero temperatures, I explored the library at Aztec Ruins National Monument, near Farmington in Aztec, New Mexico.  The rangers, a husband and wife team, prided themselves on what they claimed was the best collection of archaeology books in San Juan County.  Funny, they said the same thing at Salmon Ruins State Historic Park, just down the road in Bloomfield, New Mexico.  But there was no such boasting at the Bloomfield Cultural Complex and Events Center, possibly the smallest library I’ve ever squeezed into, about the same size as the old BLS office, even smaller than the library in Jerome, Arizona.

Noon found me skidding down a snow-covered dirt road towards the library at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, the most plentiful group of ruins in the United States.  Once the capital of the Hisatsinom Nation, Chaco Canyon boasts five buildings over three stories high, walls still standing after a thousand years, with the largest, Pueblo Bonito, about the same size as the Beverly Center.  I can’t really gush over the Visitor Center, a quaint little slab identical to the one at Aztec National Monument, selling the same books and tilting pens.  They also didn’t feel like showing me their library, and in fact got downright Federally Bureaucratic about it, so I skidded back up the road, on the way to Santa Fe.

I’ve heard strange rumors about the Santa Fe Public Library, particularly that they ripped-off the LAPL library card design, and the building needs to pay royalties to Taos Pueblo for stealing their design.  I suppose I have this thing about Santa Fe, although I did walk by the Museum of International Folk Art Library and looked in a window.  I was staying with the mother of an old friend, a trader in Indian goods, and she had the best library I’d seen since leaving the Navajo Nation.  Rather than look at books, though, she wanted to drink coffee and chain-smoke until three in the morning, arguing about New Mexican politics, so like a good houseguest I acquiesced.

6 January 2000

            The next morning I drove to Albuquerque, and since I had to go to the bathroom really bad, I stopped at the Main Library of the Rio Grande Valley Library System.  They had a great bathroom, and it looked like they had a lot more books than Santa Fe.  However, Albuquerque, like so many other cities, is at the wrong end of a bigger-versus-better competition, except in New Mexico, it’s more like dirty-versus-arty-crafty.  But rather than having a strange resemblance to the Georgia O’Keeffe Mall, like Santa Fe, the area around the Albuquerque Main Library has all the charms of Downtown Sacramento, homeless vets, drunks passed out in the doorways of crumbling Art Deco gems, and the occasional artist paving the way for Urban Renewal.  God bless you and get some rent control.

Feeling nostalgic for no reason, I also stopped at the University of New Mexico, looking for the Center for Southwest Research.  Just outside, I was rather captivated by the current display, an exhibit of sheep photography.  The Center for Southwest Research, a preeminent archaeological collection in North America, occupies the west wing of the most famous building in Albuquerque, the Zimmerman Library.  A proud, giant, fake pueblo full of hungover teenagers, the Zimmerman has shaded UNM students from the sun since 1938, and they thank old President Zimmerman and old President Roosevelt for it every day.

Just down the street, near the corner of Zuni and San Pedro, I made a pilgrimage to El Norteño, the best New Mexican cooking that side of Arizona.  There’s no library there, but by God, they don’t need one.

7 January 2000

            No visit to New Mexico would be complete without taking a three-hour detour to Roswell, and surely no trip to Roswell would be complete without a stop at the Roswell Public Library, in the heart of the city across from the Post Office and next to the Capitol Cafe, which makes the best chorizo and eggs in Garces County.  Like so many others in the Southwest, this library was lavished with kitchy Seventies touches, such as fake stone walls and pale rainbow carpeting, but seemed devoid of patrons save one ancient man reading the Roswell Daily Record, Voice of the Pecos Valley, and an angry young woman arguing very loudly on the pay-phone.

            As always, I paid a courtesy call on the reference librarian, a nervous woman in a plaid blazer who became even more nervous when confronted by a Californian in the flesh.  “Los Angeles, eh?”  But after a brief discussion of Cataloguing-in-Publication data and the relative merits of barcodes over date-stamps, she relaxed.  She even recommended that I should go visit her husband, the librarian at the nearby Toles Learning Center of the New Mexico Military Institute.  Some people’s idea of fun, eh?  I asked her about the library at the UFO Museum but she promptly clammed up.

            Then I drove across Texas, and don’t let them tell you it can’t be done in one day.  It took fifteen hours, but I swear on Sam Houston’s grave, I only stopped once outside of Fort Worth, for “all-you-can-eat-catfish” at the Rattlesnake Café.  I don’t know how many libraries I passed, but while listening to a Christian punk-rock radio station out of Abilene Christian University, a girl called up from the Brown Library to request “Chick Magnet” by MxPx.

8 January 2000

            After more car-camping near Arcadia, Louisiana, I wandered into the tiny town of Gibsland, and stood exhausted before the tiny Bonnie and Clyde Museum.  Unfortunately, being six in the morning, the museum and the accompanying library were shut.  They did have some very grisly pictures of the famous couple up in the window for the public, and of course I took the detour down the lonely Jamestown-Sailes Road past the rise where the Law finally caught up with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.  The Bienville Parish Police Jury was nice enough to put up a marker commemorating the spot, and some of the locals, armed with sledgehammers and spray-paint, were nice enough to add their own commentary.  Momentarily imagining my own poor Plymouth Neon riddled with bullets, I shook my head and drove south, on the last leg of my outbound adventure.

Heading back to the Interstate, I pulled into the Natchitoches, the most northern French settlement at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.  I couldn’t quite find the Natchitoches Parish Library among the cobblestone streets, but I did ask for directions to Opelousas at the yellow concrete Watson Memorial Library of Northwestern State University.  The two reference librarians, who had just opened on Saturday morning, were so excited they made a fresh pot of coffee and showed me photos of their Christmas party.  I was more interested in the current exhibit, which appeared to be solely old photographs of cars stuck in muddy country lanes.

Between Natchitoches and Morgan City, at the southern extremity of the Cajun bayous, I passed through many small towns, Franklin, New Iberia, Eunice, Opelousas, and never saw a library or even a small pile of books.  In the city of Lafayette I stopped to ask the location of the local library, and started an argument between two men over whether I should go to the Lafayette Parish Library or the Dupre Library at the University of Louisiana.  Another fifty miles down the road, I crossed the Atchafalaya River into Morgan City, where the Morgan City Free Library was tucked into a Victorian house in the middle of a small park.  However, I was more interested by the library at the International Petroleum Museum and Exposition, known to the locals as “Mister Charlie”, a life-size replica of an offshore oil-rig.  The museum, according to a local fisherman on the levee, had been “temporarily” closed for two years, since Morgan City had been bypassed by the new highway.  He also informed me, amidst some mumbling, that “the whole damn levee’s ready to go,” and when the Mississippi finally jumps its banks upstream and moves into the Atchafalaya, Morgan City, Mister Charlie included, will be under twelve feet of water.  And on that happy note, I drove into the first growing city I’d seen since Dallas, the wealthy town of Houma, passed the swampy Terrebonne Parish Library, and headed for the lights of New Orleans.

9 January 2000

Unfortunately, I have little to report during this day of the journey.  I may have seen a library somewhere, but more frequently I could be found in a bar or a restaurant, having difficulty even reading a menu.

10 January 2000

            I must admit that I remember very little about New Orleans, except that I arrived in darkness and left in darkness.  Judging by the crowd across the street from the mansion of Anne Rice, I assumed residents of New Orleans sport a great love of literacy and libraries, but I was rather disappointed by the condition of the New Orleans Public Library, a great steel and glass monument to the Sixties in the Central Business District.  The librarians seemed shocked that a tourist, or anyone in fact, would go out of their way to find the library, a fact demonstrated by their limited hours:  ten to six, five days a week.  Before you decide to move, LAPL colleague, be warned to check the price of a house in the Garden District first.  The librarians also moved slowly across the reading room with a pained demeanor, apparently ripe for a young union radical to come along and organize them...but that’s another story.  Like other residents of New Orleans, the librarians I spoke with were only interested in two subjects, restaurants and government corruption.  If you think LAPL has a high vacancy rate, try working for a city where it’s fairly common to put your relatives on the payroll...even if those relatives happen to be dead.

11 January 2000

            Sorry, I was too busy holding my head in pain to visit any libraries.  I did, however, observe a man in a bar on Decatur Street reading Death is Now My Neighbour.  I also took the ferry across the Mississippi to the old suburb of Algiers, and asked where the Algiers Public Library might be near the landing.  An old woman nodded and pointed to a burnt-out shell across the street.

12 January 2000

            Driving through a thick fog, I crossed the Rainbow Bridge at dawn, over the mouth of the Neches River and into Port Arthur, Texas.  I was looking for the home of Janis Joplin, and so I stopped at the Tri-Cities Public Library, serving Port Arthur, Groves, and Lakeview.  The original Port Arthur Public Library, where Joplin used to volunteer as a teenager, is now the Museum of the Gulf Coast.  Even thirty years later, mentioning the name Janis Joplin will still earn you a dirty look in Port Arthur, and I made sure the reference librarian knew she was laying some attitude on a distant colleague, but unlike most Texans, this one was downright unfriendly.  So, much like Joplin herself, I headed west.

After a short ferry ride from Port Bolivar, I went looking for the Galveston Public Library, the oldest public library in Texas.  But after admiring the architecture of the building, built on the ruins of the 1900 hurricane that destroyed the city, I headed for my real destination, the small Freeport Public Library.  I was looking for the house my great-grandfather grew up in, and caused quite a stir when the librarian, a young Korean woman, learned of my project.  Apparently, genealogy-thumping Californians are a rarity in Freeport.  She immediately arranged for me to meet with the director of the Freeport Historical Museum, Mr. Wesley.

            “What’s the name of the family?” he asked me, in the cool office he kept in the Freeport City Hall.

            “Day, Thomason, and Hudgins.”

            Mr. Wesley became very excited, because he had never met a real Hudgins before.  He was crushed to learn that the only Hudgins in my family, Samuel Houston Hudgins, was married to my great-grandfather’s sister Oza, not exactly a close relative.  Not easily dissuaded, he offered to take me Hudgins Boulevard to the Hudgins Plantation, in a decrepit state on the shores of Oyster Creek.  When I asked if the house was to be restored, he replied, someday, after wearing out its current function as a favorite drinking location for local high school students.  I had to decline the trip, however, because my cousins had a bed laid out for me seventy miles north of Houston, a few blocks from the Huntsville Public Library.

            I did manage to find my great-grandfather’s house, but not through the good works of any librarian.  Driving slowly down the street where he lived, I asked a man with several unwashed kids if he’d lived in the neighborhood long.  He demurred and pointed to a large woman chain-smoking in a nearby van, busily filling out papers.

            “Have you lived around here long?” I asked her.

            “My whole life.  What’s it to you?”

            “Have you ever heard of the Day family?”

            “Which one?”

            “Cohen.”

            She laughed and extended a meaty hand.  “That’s my Grandpa’s brother.”  We talked for about a minute, but then she had to cut the tender reunion short.  It turned out that the papers she was filling out were eviction papers for the man with the four kids I had first met.  So I bid my new cousin adieu and headed north, stopping for a bite to eat.

            After enjoying a chicken-fried steak so large that it drooped over the sides of the plate, I decided to test the hospitality of the Texans further, and stopped in nearby Angleton at the Brazoria County Historical Society Library.  Like the librarian in Freeport, the librarian here was amazed that anyone from Los Angeles even knew where Angleton was, and proceeded to open up several file cabinets bursting with papers, releasing a huge cloud of dust that briefly obscured the light.  But again I found nothing but tantalizing bits of data about a family that had moved away from Texas a century earlier and died out in Arizona.  Shaking my head and departing the old haunted Victorian, I accelerated towards Houston and points beyond.

13 January 2000

            My cousin, Professor Charles Darby, recommended I spend the morning at the Newton Gresham Library, a place he was familiar with as a teacher at Sam Houston State University.  But like the macabre traveler I am, I insisted on visiting the Texas Prison Museum Library, just down the road from the famous Huntsville Prison, the “Walls” where the executions come fast and furious.  The library wasn’t too much to look at, and the docent, rightly so, noted that the real attraction was the display on “Ol’ Sparky”, the former Texas electric chair.  He offered to let me flip the switch, but I had a date with an old flame at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, a few hundred miles away in Austin.

            As usual, I was stood up, but sympathetic college students offered to show me around Austin, maybe even pop into the Faulk Central Library, right on the main drag, Guadalupe, across from some of the best bars in Texas.  But I decided to hit the road.  Perhaps I should have detoured to Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos and seen the Southwestern Writer’s Archive at the Alkek Library, or paid a visit to the showy San Antonio Public Library, or even gawked at the purple home of Sandra Cisneros, but my two-weeks of beard was itching.  Instead I hopped on the Interstate, immediately seeing a very discouraging sign:  EL PASO 400 MILES.  Looking forward to another long night of driving, passing hardly any buildings, forget libraries, I took off my shoes and relaxed, cruising (and being frequently passed) at eighty miles per hour.

14 January 2000

            I woke up in the most maligned city in the United States, El Paso.  Naturally I went looking for the El Paso Public Library, but none of the men hanging out at Union Plaza had ever seen it.  They told me to go up the Rio Grande to the local campus of the University of Texas.

            The University Library at UT El Paso mimics a Bhutanese temple, as do several of the other structures on the campus.  They also had up a display of Bhutanese tapestries.  With Ciudad Juarez only a few miles away, the culture-shock gave me a headache.  I introduced myself to the reference librarian, a perky woman in a blinding orange blouse, and asked where the water-fountain was.  “What’s up with all the Himalayan stuff?” I then asked.

            “The whole campus has a Himalayan theme.  Did you visit the Chenrezig Center?  It’s over in the Philosophy Department.  You know, I took a meditation class there last year, and I really enjoy coming to work now.”

            “That’s nice.”  I wondered if they had any openings…in the meditation class, I mean.

            “So you’re from California?” she asked eventually.

            “In fact, I’m driving to California right now.”

            She brightened up considerably.  “Did you know that El Paso is almost as close to San Diego as it is to Houston?”

            Not only did I not know that, but once I found out, I immediately hit the road.

            Instead of continuing west on Interstate Ten, I followed the two-lane blacktop to Columbus, New Mexico, where my great-grandmother Bertie spent her teen years, flirting with the cavalry soldiers posted at the border to protect the town.  The precaution was necessary, as Pancho Villa attacked Columbus in March of 1916.  Spinning this yarn for the hundredth time, I finally found an appreciative audience at the Columbus Historical Society Library, where two women bundled in down against the unheated building, an old railroad depot.  They wanted to interview Bertie, but I had to disappoint them, since Bertie’s been dead for two decades.

            Then I recrossed the Great American Desert, approaching Arizona and the famous Chiricahua Mountains from the back, rounding them to another border-town, Douglas.  A block from the historic Hotel Gadsden, I stopped to use the bathroom at the Douglas Public Library, a new facility built into the old J.C. Penney’s on Tenth Street.  I asked what they did with the old library, a nasty little Beaux-Art structure.  The reference librarian, a fellow obviously hyped up on too much java, snickered and replied that “some old women from the Historical Society play cards there.”  Then, after a terrible grilled-cheese sandwich at the Gadsden, I entered the quick twenty-mile road rally to Bisbee.

            Bisbee is one of the weirdest places in the United States, an old mining town creeping up the sides of two canyons, centered on the Copper Queen Mine, a glory-hole a few hundred feet deep.  Along the narrow streets, buildings on top of other buildings, hip coffeehouses and boutiques vie for space where gunslingers and union-busters once vented their rage on the working class.  Every walk is either uphill or upstairs, and Laundry Hill is right above Brewery Gulch.  In other words, my kind of place.  I spied two young women, one with bright green hair, the other with bright blue hair.

            “Hey, where’s the library around here?” I asked the girl with the green hair.

            “Right above the Post Office.”

I parked behind the Post Office and walked up two flights of stairs to the Copper Queen Library, probably the first public library in Arizona.  Originally built by the Copper Queen Mine for company employees in 1882, it’s rumored the mine owners were shocked to see a body swinging from a pole and decided that Bisbee needed more Christian entertainment.  So they opened a library, which became hugely popular, although I noticed that the reading room is on the third floor, while the second floor was set aside for a “smoking parlor”, enlarged twice before World War II.  They bought their first computer in 1999, and told me the library once made a healthy amount of money selling guano collected from bats in the attic.

After a little tour by the library assistant, I got serious and crossed over to the headquarters of the Cochise County Library District in old Bisbee High School, which involved crossing two streets, squeezing between two buildings, and climbing a huge staircase.  And that’s not even the shortcut.  Still wheezing a little, I met the director of the CCLD, Ms. Gaab, who invited me into her office to describe the strange organization she commanded from the eerie, musty ex-high school.

            On my way out of town, I drove past the Sierra Vista Public Library, but my colleague in Bisbee had already crushed whatever hope I had of working half-time in some tiny adobe library with a pet coyote and a cactus farm.  Cochise County has a very complicated library system, essentially a county system where the city libraries are supported to varying degrees.  In Bisbee and Douglas the city library is nearly independent, with Cochise County merely doing the hiring, while Sierra Vista, a much larger city (though I’ll bet you never heard of it) is primarily run by the County.  The resources are also stretched out, with cataloguing handled in Bisbee and several towns rotating one children’s librarian on a daily basis.  Imagine a life driving from branch to branch, with names like Tombstone, Naco and Sunizona, and a bookmobile so far-flung it stops at each location only once a month.

            Trying to get from Sierra Vista to the Interstate in the most expedient manner, I made the mistake of taking a shortcut through Fort Huachuca.  After driving around the barracks, obviously lost, I asked a man pointing a machine-gun at me where I could find the Morale, Welfare and Recreation Center.  Since I knew the secret Army code name for a library, he told me, and after consulting with the toughest librarian I’ve ever seen, I was racing on a tiny country road across the Huachuca Mountains.

            At sunset I reached the home of my ancestors, the torpid essence of desert philosophy with the mysterious name of Tucson.  I immediately raced to the hub of the city, the only place to go to run into friend or foe alike, the Hotel Congress, and called up my friend Peter Hormel.

            Just around the corner from the Hotel Congress is the Tucson-Pima Public Library, which serves Tucson and the outlying communities.  During the early Nineties, I entertained plans to work at this library system with some of my acquaintances from the library school at the University of Arizona.  The only thing that changed my mind was a wild party held by one of these students, whose grandmother Winnie owned the Singing Wind Ranch in Benson, the best bookstore in southern Arizona.  Starting at an infamous U of A dive called the Banquet and eventually ending up at a filthy liquor store in South Tucson, trying to barter four bottles of tequila after-hours, I realized that a life in Tucson would probably be a life shortened by alcoholism.  Yes, even in the intellectual hub of Arizona, the only hobbies I observed my colleagues engage in were dancing at the Hotel Congress, drinking until four in the morning, and taking a few days off each year to eat peyote and go howling across the Sonoran Desert.  Alas, or ALAs, it was not for me.

            My friend Peter, a public defender, had observed the wild side of librarianship when we once visited a friend of mine at the Arivaca Branch Library, in a tiny town between Tucson and Nogales, where the Interstate exit is marked by a house shaped like a giant cow skull.  It was Friday evening, and she was about to close the branch so we could all enjoy a cocktail at the local Grubstake Inn.  A huge biker and his equally large female companion suddenly came in, swinging a bottle of tequila and demanding to see the Physician’s Desk Reference.  While we waited for them to finish, I struck up a conversation.

            “How’re you doing?”

            The woman shrugged.  “It’s the worst acid I’ve ever taken.”  That ended the conversation almost immediately.

            On this night, however, hunched in a phone booth at the Hotel Congress, there would be no suddenly library excursions for Peter Hormel and me.  I had decided to forgo spending the night in Tucson, and instead lit out for home, five hundred miles away.

15 January 2000

            I was through with libraries.  It was three on Saturday morning, and I had accomplished a run that my truck-driving uncles could be proud of, from El Paso to Los Angeles straight in less than twenty-one hours.  On the way home I had passed the great public libraries of my youth, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and even the yellowing box of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library at Cal State LA.  Yet more than that, I had discovered the true literary heritage of the Southwest, the Great Irreversible March of libraries from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and best of all, I still had two days of vacation left.

TRANSMISSION ENDS.