Archaeological Buses, Ep. 9

Episode 9, Celebrating AZ

Both Julie and Lisa recall powerful places from childhood: Julie in the lobby of the Mesa Southwest Museum, Lisa at Fort Lowell Park in Tucson.

"Mug" (an honorary term this week): Hardtack

from Chief Yellowhorse Lives On

Copyright Lisa Schnebly Heidinger, All rights reserved

Shaking our heads, and sorry to lose more natural land, we run over the Corbett Ditch, which wasn’t named by the Hohokam who built it but by the pioneer that used it later.  Just past that is a beachhead of original adobe wall from Fort Lowell, like a baby whale separated from its pod.  I put my hands against it, trying to figure out how to keep the old wild way intact in this hungry modern city.

But it dawns on me as I do so that a tribesman watching from a lofty outpost in the foothills while the fort was being built would have felt the same invaded outrage.  What to me is appealingly antique was to him desecrating his homeland: laying out rigid rows of trees in militaristic order, erecting walls and fences over what had been rabbit and wildcat territory.  Now it’s nostalgia, but in its time, it was progress of the kind I curse.

I guess it all depends on which stop you boarded the anthropological bus.  To me, Fort Lowell ruins are good, apartments are bad.  To those before me, the fort was the intrusion.   I guess that’s nature’s way of making progress a little less painful: each generation sees only so much of the big picture.  I’m glad I got to see inside the adobe walls of Ft. Lowell.

Ode to the Safe

by Julie Morrison

To all robbers, masked and not:

must you snatch at what I’ve got?

Why are my deposits tempting?

Breaks for you bankrupt and bust me:

peace kidnapped, reason held up,

perspective gagged—with you I’m stuck—

needing some new combination

to safeguard against predation—

I swear my stores are safe from plunder,

except you always have my number—

is every heist an inside job?

Prizing is risk of being robbed?

This the craw that chaps and chafes:

what love opens can’t be safe.

Copyright 2025 Julie Morrison, All rights reserved