A Desert Landscape Painted in a Brighter Shade of Stale

This column is being faxed in from Tucson this week, in case it looks any different. I can’t help wishing a few more things looked different here.

Immediately behind where I’m staying on the far outskirts of town is a stunning sweep of desert, backed by jagged mountains in the distance where cloud shadow and shafts of sunlight are playing. The desert is crazy with cactus--prickly pear, cholla, barrel and brujo saguaro pocked with bird holes--so abundant it’s hard to find a path through it all. The coyote calls at night sound eerily like crying babies stranded in the dark, rain-mad arroyos.

At the first human footstep into this near-mystical place, quail hidden in the bush scatter into the air. My girlfriend wanted me to see a particular vista, one she said had made her imagine how Arizona must have looked a century ago. It was a valley with only a few ramshackle old adobes on a hillside, all just as she remembered it, except for the god-awful new housing tract that looked like it had just dropped in from Mission Viejo.

It figures. There are uniform, profit-maximized, community-association-smothered tracts all over Tucson now, so many that they’re running out of quaint Spanish names for them. The name of this one tract, I believe, translates to something like “Valley of the Hair.”

Except for a few parts of town too historic or poor to mess with, Tucson looks just like Orange County now. There’s Coco’s and Carl’s Jr. and auto malls with familiar names like Tuttle and Click, and Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Huts, strip malls (the certified equivalent of strip mining), K marts and other totems of our advanced culture.

Fifteen years ago if you were in Tucson, you knew it. It felt different, looked different. The food wasn’t called “Southwestern” then; they just cooked it that way because they liked it. Now half the places here look like copies of California “Southwestern”-theme restaurants.

California, of which we’re a choice part, long has influenced the tastes of the nation. Surf guitar king Dick Dale recalls a time in the early ‘60s when you could be traveling in land-locked Midwestern states and see kids cruising in Woodies with surfboards in the back, just trying to claim a piece of the action that is our birthright. Back then it was all sunshine, Chicken Delight and 15-cent bags of McDonald’s fries, and it was pretty darn nice of us to share it with the rest of the world.

Now that there’s a McDonald’s on every block of the nation, along with 46 other prefab franchises, maybe enough is enough. Looking at Tucson and other once-unique towns, now made into ersatz Tang versions of Orange County, I think something has to be done, and maybe it is DESTROY ORANGE COUNTY. It’s not the whole answer, but at least it would be our way of saying “We’re doing our part.”

How, then, could we cease to be? Biblical perils might not do the trick: floods aren’t working; a plague of locusts would seem redundant, considering all the lawyers we have, and if we all were made to speak different languages, would there be a difference these days?

Maybe we should look to the desert for an answer, specifically to the deserts of 1950s sci-fi flicks, where atomic testing was always causing ants, tarantulas, grasshoppers, Marine officers and other scary things to mutate into giant monsters.

Inevitably these mutants would get to thinking “I’m too big for this burgh” and would head for the Coast, where they’d mill around Schwabs waiting to be discovered. But, as huge mutants are wont, eventually they’d tear the town up with their big mandibles, pausing only to exchange insurance information before moving on to new prey.

In the circle I move in, there has been considerable debate as to the most terrifying size that an ant can be. In the movies, your standard giant atomic ant is about the size of a milk truck. To me that’s just too big and impersonal a thing to be scared of, unless you’re lactose intolerant. These ants are going to pull the roof off your house. They will eat you, and your car, without even noticing your cologne.

On the other hand, ants ranging in size from a shoe to a dog seem scarier than April 15 to me. They can chase you from room to room. They can hide on top of the fridge. What’s scariest is that they don’t have the inevitability of the really big ants. While you know there’s nothing you can do against the larger version, with a dog-size one there’s the scant possibility you might prevail, especially if you have a rolled up newspaper. That’s too much like work for me.

Dog-size ants may be a kicker, but dog-size dogs don’t rate much notice. Too bad, because there’s a dachshund here who I know would love to terrorize a populace, if only she could reach above their ankles.

But if she’s around when the next nuclear test goes awry. . . .

Consider for a moment, dachshunds are berserk --on the Frantic Brain scale they take up where Lucille Ball going “Waaaaagh!” left off. The dogs originally were bred--by Germans!--to crawl into places and pester badgers to death. And anyone who has been around the little fellows knows that they’re none too good at differentiating between badgers and certain delicate parts of the human body. Picture that on a big scale.

If just one atomic dachshund were to be set lose in Orange County, imagine the havoc. Newscasters would be flying overhead in helicopters: “I can’t watch! Mistaking them for legs, she’s jumped on every building in the downtown area, toppling them. Persons trying to flee have been nuzzled beyond recognition!”

It would be a terrible sacrifice, but worth it perhaps. It might save these other towns from mimicking us slavishly until all local color is gone. That, or they’ll just go get towering dachshunds of their own.