My Father’s Magic

In 1922, my Russian immigrant grandparents bought 20 acres of land on a hill about three miles outside of Nogales, a tiny town on the Arizona-Mexico border. At the time, my grandmother was pregnant with my father. He was born on a November night so stormy that when dawn broke the following day the family had expanded by one squalling member but was minus a front porch, blown off by a gale-force wind. The damage was quickly repaired, the new porch stayed put and my father, along with his two brothers and two sisters and my grandparents, lived in their three-bedroom, territorial-style brick house until he was 18 years old and went off to college.

It was a desolate, sun-beaten patch of property. Aside from a huge stand of leafy bamboo, several pointy gray junipers and a double row of pomegranate trees that my grandfather planted, nothing flourished in the loose desert earth except sparse clumps of beige native grass and the occasional cholla cactus or mesquite tree. But what the land lacked in classic postcard beauty it made up for in vast, uninterrupted views, a sort of romantically rugged frontier cowboy quality and as the site of many unforgettable incidents.

When I was about 10, for example, my father led me up to the pinnacle of the estate to a pile of volcanic Tufa stone and told me that when he was a Zane Grey-obsessed boy he’d named this “Lookout Rock.” Then he caught me off-guard by asking me to promise that when he died I would make sure that this became his final resting place.

It’s worth mentioning that at the time of this conversation, my father was a noted professional architect and serial hobbyist: he was a watercolorist, a photographer, a sculptor, the maker of children’s toys and a writer. One of his creative jags, for example, involved making doorstops by painting ocean-smooth stones he’d lugged home from the beach.

So it was difficult to think of my on-the-go Dad as “resting” anywhere. I also remember telling him that maybe someone older, perhaps someone who still didn’t enjoy the pale glow of a night light at bedtime, be entrusted with such an important responsibility. But he shook his head and said no, that he was holding me to my word.

In 2002, when he passed away, not all of his ashes were interred at the Westwood cemetery and at the Jewish cemetery in Nogales. The remaining portion was placed in a hollow drilled into a boulder at Lookout Rock. My cousin David affixed a metal marker over the stone and then my mother quietly said a prayer. “Fred,” she began, “you are finally where you have always wanted to be--in three places at the same time.”

So now, along with my childhood memories of regular family visits to my cuddly, sweet-natured grandmother, I had something as tangible as my father to keep me emotionally attached to the place. In the early ‘70s, my grandmother, too old to live by herself, moved to Los Angeles, while a string of upkeep-averse tenants let the house sag. Then, in 2004, my Uncle Abe sold the entire parcel to a local businessman. It was no longer ours to love and ignore. At least the new owner allowed us visitation rights.

A couple of months ago, I received from my Nogales-based cousin David an e-mail that was like a beckoning. “I have been riding my bike past [the house] for a couple of weeks, and in the 59 years I’ve known this property, I’ve never seen anything like this. The entire property is carpeted in flowers.” Within 24 hours, four of my cousins and I were in a two-car caravan bouncing up the rutted dirt driveway off Patagonia Road to my grandmother’s house.

True, the surrounding area--typically dust belt stark--was almost lush. But nothing could have prepared me for the sight that awaited us: The entire estate was covered in a thick, knee-high field of brilliant orange poppies along with--as the desert flora handbook we’d brought informed us--a smattering of wild purple heliotrope and fragile clusters of pink fluff called fairy dusters. To me, it was as if the location of a John Ford western had suddenly been transformed to shoot “The Sound of Music.” My cousin Lily had a different movie reference point with regard to the sea of gold: “What happens if it’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz’?” she asked. “What happens if we all get drowsy?”

High-stepping through the tangle of blossoms, we slowly made our way to the summit. There, at the base of my father’s headstone, settled in a nest of fuzzy green leaves, was a delicate, orchid-like flower in two-tone pink with a stripe of vibrant yellow in its interior. It was a “Devil’s Claw,” or Proboscidea louisianica, a desert plant that loves rooting in the cool, moisture-retaining base of rocks. I found this out recently while talking on the phone to George Montgomery, curator of the botany department at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, who also told me that the combination of an extended summer monsoon season and high temperatures had awakened seeds that perhaps had lain dormant for decades. In fact, much of southeast Arizona, he said, had been taken over by Kallstroemia grandiflora, a summer annual that looks like a five-petaled poppy but is actually a close relative of the creosote bush. “I saw miles of these situations,” he said. “Just roadsides filled with those summer poppies, more than we’d ever seen.”

I had many questions still: “Why was the display on our hill so much more spectacular than anything in the surrounding area?” “Was the soil extra nutrient rich because it had never been grazed or farmed?” “Did my grandfather’s penchant for setting the place on fire annihilate so many young plants that it created more space for the wildflowers to spread?” (As legend has it, he’d routinely forget he’d just tossed a lit match on the weekly accumulation of trash, go inside for a cup of tea and return to a roaring inferno.) But the parched, clinical tone of our conversation had begun to deflate me.

In years to come, scientists might think of the summer of 2006 as the year when a few aging hurricanes drifted up from Baja California, some storms broke off of the westerly branch of the jet stream and they both dumped rain over the higher Sonoran desert until it looked like a putting green. But I will remember it for other reasons. That day, after tramping through the wildflowers back down to our car, a couple of my cousins and I drove an hour to Tucson to visit Aunt Fannie, my father’s now-87-year-old sister. When we arrived, the lower parts of our blue jeans were still stippled with bright orange dots of flower pollen, and my head was spinning with theories. When I was done talking, my Aunt Fannie said, “Do you know what I think? I think your father was in the mood for some poppies.”