Arizona

Fox and the hounds

A long, long time ago, on a college campus far, far away, I made my first leap into the mediasphere as a sportswriter for the University of Tennessee’s student newspaper, The Daily Beacon.

I wasn’t a very intrepid cub reporter, but I did date the paper’s sports editor, a pugnacious and flirty young woman who, much to my consternation, seemed to have previous romantic attachments and dorm-room phone numbers for the football team’s entire defensive backfield. These connections helped me attach my byline to a scoop or two about Tennessee football, which in turn led an invitation to be a guest on a local sports-talk radio show.

The show’s host, Tony, was a fast-talking Italian guy with a bulbous nose and tightly curled black hair — a transplanted New Yorker who was trying to make inroads in the Knoxville market — and I felt pretty important when I put on headphones and pulled up a chair across from him.

“You done any radio before?” Tony asked, his glottal voice resonating clearly inside my headphones.

I shook my head. “Never.”

“Then we might be launching a career here,” Tony said, flashing a smile that revealed a mouthful of jumbled, yellowed teeth. The sentence he uttered next stings my vanity to this day: “You remind me of myself at your age — a smart kid with a face for radio.”

Turns out I not only had a “face for radio” but a voice for newspapers. After stammering through a half hour with Tony and his callers, I kept myself away from airwaves of all kinds for the next two decades. Television cameras make me self-conscious; microphones make me bitter.

Jill shares my disdain for broadcast-media outlets, especially when it comes to local TV reporters. As a newspaper photographer, she had her sightline blocked by many a cameraman and witnessed on-air talent devote more care to applying their makeup than working a story.

So when a TV producer at Phoenix’s Fox affiliate sent me an e-mail expressing her interest in doing a story about the whole “12 Legs” thing, Jill and I were wary. We feared a TV reporter might package our story as cutesy. We worried a TV appearance might reek of self-promotion. And, well, the thought of being interviewed on camera scared the hell out of us.

But the producer’s e-mail came at a moment when Jill and I were trying to figure out what we wanted this blog to be. We created it as a way to keep friends and family abreast of our travels. But, almost immediately, our professional pride took over, and we began writing and shooting as if our audience were much bigger than it was. Then, as we awoke morning after morning in beautiful places with no office to report to, we started daydreaming about how we might make a living out of this type of “work”.

We didn’t have an answer for that question — and still don’t — but we figured a good first step would be to increase the blog’s exposure. And what better way to do that than to go on TV? Besides, even if the story turned out silly, our respective mothers would get a big kick out of it.

So I returned the producer’s e-mail and told her Jill and I were game. We arranged to meet the reporter during a quick swing through Phoenix. On the day of the interview I washed the dogs and trimmed my beard; Jill put on makeup and a pair of big earrings.

It must be said that the reporter, Jayme King, laid to waste both our notion of TV reporters and our expectations about the interview. He arrived early with a courteous cameraman named Juan and interviewed us for more than an hour. He asked thoughtful questions, took copious notes and didn’t mind getting dog hair on his slacks. The fruits of Mr. King’s labor can be viewed below.

Tragically, I still have a face for radio. But I happen to think the camera loves Jill nearly as much as I do. Perhaps some producer from the Travel Channel or National Geographic will stumble across this video and make her the host of a web series, and our dreams of office-less globetrotting will come true.

More likely, though, we’ll just get a comment from my mom telling me to shave.

—Scott

Tombstone, AZ

The last time I walked the dusty streets of Tombstone, Ariz., I was with my Grandpa Ernie. I was maybe 12 years old. I remember going to a “saloon,” where my sister and I saddled up to the bar and drank sarsaparillas while grandpa sipped a beer.

Grandpa Ernie and Grandma Ruth with my uncle Gary and my father Karl.

For me, there was nothing really exotic about Tombstone. I’d grown up around cowboys, horses and stories of the Southwest. It’s rumored that Pancho Villa stole my family’s fortune. On display at grandpa’s house were old Indian tomahawks, and pistols and spurs that grandpa said belonged to outlaws of the past. Tombstone felt like a diorama built to impress someone else.

Grandpa Ernie

Still, for the sake of nostalgia, I wanted to stop in Tombstone as Scott and I drove through southern Arizona. It hasn’t changed much, and it holds even less appeal for me now than it did back then. I don’t play dress-up, and I don’t care to drink sarsaparilla with city slickers in new cowboy hats and boots. We spent a total of 2 hours there. We strolled along the main drag, toured the historic courthouse. Feeling as though I needed to photograph something, I shot boots — beautiful boots worn by cowboy actors performing simulated shootouts on the hour, every hour.

There’s something so expressive about a man’s cowboy boots. When your wardrobe consists of blue jeans, leather and dirt, boots are the one of the few things that lend themselves to some flash. I remember my father’s cowboy boots, which were typically covered in cow shit — “the smell of money,” my mom use to say. When he arrived home from work, my sister and I would rush to the door to greet him. We’d fight over which one got the to help him pull off his boots. They were worn and dirty, and getting them off required a lot of yanking and twisting. They seemed molded to his short, square feet — feet I inherited and futilely try to squeeze into stilettos.

A few months ago, I received a pair of boots that once belonged to my grandfather. He’s the real deal, a big ol’ cowboy. In the last few years, he’s become ill. He’s traded boots for Velcro sneakers. I keep his old boots on top of my dresser, unsure of where to put them. They are worthy of a stage or a shrine. Beautiful, cracked leather. Soles worn uneven by grandpa’s crooked gait. They represent his personality and decades of back-breaking work.

While Grandpa Ernie’s cowboy days are over, being a cowboy never ends. He still talks about cows, horses and women. He’s still a wheeler and a dealer and a teller of tales, only now he wheels and deals and tells tales in a home for seniors with dementia. I can’t wait to see him and listen to all his cowboy talk. I don’t care what’s real and what’s not — for me, exaggerated cowboy stories are nothing new.

—Jill

Who We’ve Met: Tom “Tiger” Ziegler

Tom Ziegler has been tending bar at the Tap Room inside Hotel Congress for 51 years. But hardly anybody knows his name — at least not his Christian one.

Nobody calls Ziegler “Tom.” Not the regulars who visit during his daytime shift. Not the guys who deliver the beer and liquor. Not the hotel’s managers, desk clerks or maintenance men. Not even the owner.

To them, and everyone else, Tom Ziegler is, and has always been, simply “Tiger.”

You don’t have to spend much time around Tiger to deduce that cheerful irony drips from his nickname like beer down the sides of an overfilled pint glass. He’s not at all ferocious or cunning; on the contrary, he is gentle and exquisitely mannerly, much more apt to peer over his spectacles than bear his teeth.

Tiger is of slight, wispy build, with excellent posture and a full head of silvery hair that he parts on the left. He smokes frequently and elegantly, and he is fond of wearing crew-neck sweaters over Oxford shirts — a little bit Truman Capote, a little bit Mister Rogers.

Tiger is 76 years old, and he first stepped behind the business end of the Tap Room bar in 1959. My only concept of 1959 comes from history books and Happy Days. But to give you some context, here are some of the events Tiger might remember from his first year on the job:

Two stars were added to the American flag to commemorate Alaska and Hawaii gaining statehood.
A band of guerilla revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew the Cuban government.
A chartered plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed in Iowa.
Berry Gordy started Motown Records in Detroit.
The very first Daytona 500 was won by Lee Petty. (That’s Richard Petty’s dad.)
And a new toy called the Barbie doll hit department-store shelves.

I’ve never lasted at any one job more than four years. I cannot imagine doing the same job — and relishing it — for more than half a century.

Remember Jesse Helms? It seemed like he catatonically sat in the Senate since the dawn of time. Well, Tiger’s tenure at the Tap Room is longer by 21 years. Does it feel like Dick Clark’s been ushering in New Year’s nearly as long as Father Time? Child’s play — Tiger’s got 13 years on him. Tiger’s even been making margaritas and pouring beer longer than Mick Jagger’s been caterwauling as The Rolling Stones’ frontman.

I know very few septuagenarians who hold down regular jobs; I know even fewer who work as bartenders; I know fewer still who report to work sucking on a cigarette and looking like their mother has dressed them for the first day of elementary school.

But I do know one: His name is Tiger, and, like the hotel where he prowls, he is an Arizona treasure.

The powers of Congress, raw and unchecked

Hotel Congress has occupied the same corner in downtown Tucson for 91 years. But it sure feels like it’s been around the block a few times.

Look closely and you’ll find flecked paint and cracked tile and water-stained plaster. If you arrive in the morning, you might get a whiff of stale beer from one of the five bars (yes, five) that adjoin the lobby. Arrive at midday, and your olfactory glands might be overwhelmed by the cleaning staff’s liberal swabbings of ammonia.

The iron-framed beds are small, the mattresses a little lumpy. But checking into Hotel Congress with sleep on your mind is folly anyway. Long past midnight bottles clank, kick drums thump, locomotives rattle ancient windows.

The bathrooms? Tiny. A man of average stature can rest his forehead on the wall while he sits on the toilet (which I suppose is helpful if you’ve spent too much time at one or more of the bars downstairs). The showers are about the size of refrigerator boxes, and the temperature of the water trickling out of them is as fickle as Joe Lieberman.

Hotel Congress has its flaws, yes. But love is being able to overlook flaws. And true love is when flaws cease to be flaws at all, but rather contextual definers of unique beauty and your relationship to it — like tiny flecks of rust on your ’69 Mustang or laugh lines around your father’s eyes.

Having said that, let me declare this: I truly love Hotel Congress.

I’m not the only one, of course. Since 1919, Hotel Congress has seduced travelers of every ilk. First it was rail passengers, Easterners mostly, disembarking from Southern Pacific trains that squealed to a stop at a station across the street. Later, in 1934, John Dillinger and his gang decided the hotel’s third floor would be a lovely place to lay low from federal agents. And beginning in 1985, when a club opened downstairs, aficionados of live music, unpretentious booze and cigarette-fogged conversation made “the Congress” their favorite hangout.

Hotel Congress comes by its agedness honestly. This place isn’t Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button makeup; it’s John Hurt after a bender. It doesn’t so much live and breathe as it creaks and convulses and bellows.

Hotel Congress’ saving grace lies in the details. It gets them right at every turn. The blood-red Mexican tile in the lobby is burnished to a shine that catches every glint of natural light. The bare, mustard-hued bulbs that droop in arcs above the outside patio cast a perfectly dull glow on the tables below. The ornate yet worn carpet in the hallways whispers the stories of a thousand soles, including those that wobbled past the night before.

Hotel Congress’ décor isn’t merely aesthetically pleasing — it’s transportive. Depending which direction you swivel your head, you might feel like you’re in a Spanish hacienda, a Parisian café or a Victorian bordello. It’s the kind of hotel you want to take up residence in for a week rather than a weekend. It’s a place for whiling away writer’s block or having a fling with a European girl on holiday.

With its stylish surfaces and antiquated guts, Hotel Congress reminds me of the old muscle cars my friends and I drove in high school. The exteriors of those cars were studies in the visceral allure of paint and chrome and vinyl, but under the hood were globs of grease and burnt oil. The hidden grime didn’t matter: The engines rumbled like a Zeppelin song, and your date had oblivious fun riding to the dance.

Like John Dillinger — who, with his gang, was flushed from the hotel by a basement blaze and later arrested on a tip from a fireman — my personal history has been shaped in no small way by Hotel Congress. It is where Jill and I hatched the idea for this trip, and it’s also where I audaciously asked Jill’s favorite musician if he would perform at our wedding … at a campground … in rural Tennessee.

That’s a pretty good story, and many of you know it. For those who don’t, here’s the short version:

On Dec. 27, 2008, in Chattanooga, Tenn., during a concert by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, after Isbell sang the lyric “Don’t worry about losing your accent/A Southern man tells better jokes,” Jill took a long drag on her cigarette, then turned to me and asked, “When are you going to make an honest woman of me?” Later that night, after stealing a ring and dropping to a knee next to the Tennessee River, I did just that.

This is the story I recounted to Jason Isbell himself three months later as we stood outside Hotel Congress, next to his band’s van, bathed in neon. It was 3 a.m. He exhaled smoke from a Marlboro red into the night air; I nervously shifted from foot to foot, my hands stuffed into the pockets of my jeans.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to offend you, but is there any chance — any at all — that you would consider playing at our wedding?”

To make a shortened story shorter, six months later Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit — a band lauded by SPIN and Esquire and Rolling Stone — graced a rec-center stage at Fall Creek Falls State Park. My 86-year-old grandfather was in the audience. Jill cried. Jason and the band hung out with us after the show, passing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around the campfire.

And it all started at Hotel Congress.

The place doesn’t have air conditioning. It doesn’t have TVs. It’s loud. The plumbing sucks. But it’s where stories begin. Or end. Or just gestate at the bar. Or, in the case of this post, get rapped out on a keyboard as haggard dogs sleep on shiny Mexican tile.

I would happily stay here for months if I didn’t have so many other places to go.

—Scott

‘That book is not approved’

As it happens, the first official chapter of our journey is to be written in a place called Page.

Those of you who are familiar with Northern Arizona and Southern Utah will know Page, Ariz., as the closest neighboring city to Lake Powell. We arrived just short of midnight, so we didn’t initially see the lake. But I knew we were getting close when we crested a hill and saw smoke billowing from the three massive chimneys at Navajo Generating Station.

Those chimneys are nearly 300 feet taller than the tallest building in Phoenix, and, if the Salt River Project’s website is to be believed, the sulfur dioxide scrubbers inside them help make Navajo Generating Station “one of the cleanest coal-fired power plants in the country.” Then again, if the advocacy group Environment Arizona’s website is to be believed, NGS “is the eighth-dirtiest plant in the country.”

Navajo Generating Station is just one of Page’s entries into the great Human Ingenuity vs. Environmental Responsibility debate. Located a few miles across the rust-colored plateau, clogging the cold green waters of the Colorado River like a colossal cinderblock, is Glen Canyon Dam.

Glen Canyon Dam provides hydroelectric power to parts of Arizona and Utah, and, more importantly, stores water for 27 million people in the West. It also provides irrigation for 3.5 acres of farmland.

But, for many Westerners who love this part of the country for its wide-open beauty, Glen Canyon Dam is an icon of ecological degradation. When the dam was completed in 1963, it began flooding an 186-mile stretch of the Colorado River and submerging the geological splendor of Glen Canyon. An entire ecosystem died. Sierra Club founder David Brower called the dam “America’s most regretted environmental mistake.”

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve never read The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, but I know what it’s about: Four “environmental terrorists,” who love the wildness of the land and loathe the federal government’s idea of progress, plot to blow Glen Canyon Dam to smithereens.

I’ve been to Glen Canyon before. I’ve walked across the dam, and I’ve spent many an enjoyable day on Lake Powell, the recreational area created by all that flooding. So when Jill and I pulled into the empty lot of the Carl Hayden Visitor Center at Glen Canyon Dam, I was really only curious about one thing: Would its gift shop display the most famous book ever written about this particular tourist attraction?

I thought I might buy a copy.

As it turns out, the visitor center’s gift shop is more like a bookstore. It is operated by the Glen Canyon Natural History Association, and it indeed houses a small section of books devoted to the work of Edward Abbey. There are selections of his nonfiction, a biography, a collection of essays, a compilation of notes and photos. But the novel I’m looking for is conspicuously absent, so I mosey over to the salesperson and pose my loaded question.

“Do you guys stock The Monkey Wrench Gang?”

The salesperson’s reply seems practiced. He has no doubt fielded this question before. “That book,” he says flatly, “ is not approved for this location.”

Every outsider, be they an engineer or an environmentalist, brings his own history into a place, and I’m no different. I come from East Tennessee, where, in the 1930s, the federal government began building dams to harness the hydroelectric power of the Tennessee River. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created to manage that power and spread electricity across the South. The TVA also created thousands of jobs in a time of deep depression.

Maybe this is why, despite my lament for the canyons and side canyons lost under all that water, I’ve never been able to work up much ire about Glen Canyon Dam. I look at the endless concrete plugging up a wild river, and I can’t help but think of the families it helps.

What’s the price of this progress? In the case of Glen Canyon Dam, it’s 272 million 1963 dollars and 1.2 million acres of drowned America. In the case of Navajo Generating Station, it’s $1 billion and air pollution equivalent to 3.5 million automobiles.

This is the sort of stuff that was going through my head yesterday morning as I photographed Lake Powell with my iPhone.

An iPhone. Now that’s progress I can get my head around. Mine even has an application that can pinpoint my location and tell me where the closest library or bookstore is.

Looks like there’s an independent bookseller up Highway 89 in Kanab. I sure hope it has a used copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

—Scott

12 Legs Travel

Fox and the hounds

Tombstone, AZ

Who We’ve Met: Tom “Tiger” Ziegler

The powers of Congress, raw and unchecked

‘That book is not approved’

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