Walnuts for my Birthday

Had a great birthday road trip last weekend. Accomodations were organized by J, but I chose the rambling route we took. It was an opportunity to explore bad roads and towns of Arizona I haven't seen yet.

We hied our way through Phoenix metro area on Saturday morning, but just on the south side of the urban area, where it stops abruptly and gives way to the reservation, we got off on the side road, which took us past the casino complex and south across the flats of the Sonoran Desert to the town of Maricopa, where I expected to have the quality of the res, but instead is simply the newly built Phoenix southern suburbs picking up again where they legally can do so. It looks just like Scottsdale or Gilbert.

South from there, however, it gets more rustic quickly. One finds oneself among endless cotton fields, and then cattle lots where the animals are crammed together, and the workers live in little shacks that receive the pelting of dust raised in the crop fields nearby as they the irrigation devices swing in their big arcs.

The town of Casa Grande looks interesting on the map, halfway betweeen Phoenix and Tucson, but inevitably to become part of Phoenix over the coming decades. For now it is still very rustic. Old cars and pick up trucks. An interesting downtown with a closely hemmed-in traditional mainstream with shade giving trees. Mostly shuttered storefronts, including the used book store, where I might have made us stop. Is the virus or just the way of the world? Interesting museum was closed.

South from there we took the back-back county road that crossed I-8 with no interchange, trailing behind a pick up truck looking to deliver glass to a housing site, and then were out on the last bit of populated area that is not part of the gigantic Oodham reservation that goes all the way south to the border.

Arizona City---what is the town like that bears the state name? In this case it is tract home for penny-pinching white retirees and Mexican workers. No downtown in the traditional sense. Interesting tiny library built decades ago. South of there, the road goes up in the mountains and becomes gravel as it crosses into Ironwood National Monument, so at the south edge of town, we turned around and headed back to the main highway, and went east, zigzagging across I-10 to rustic one-saloon, two car-repair garage towns of trailers and sagging little houses in the cotton area east of the freeway, Eloy being the biggest of the towns.

We got delightfully lost on a backroad that went past cotton plantations where the patron lives in a nice bungalow while the workers live a rows of shacks with Rube Goldberg-looking electrical connections, and with the obvious foreman living in the nice shack (with a fence and small yard) at the end of the row.

I was hoping to solve the mystery of what those trees are, in the gigantic orchard-plantation on either side of I-10 and one passes through this area. The trees are tall. What is grown out here in such trees, so bizarrely in the middle of the desert.  J suggested pecans. I wanted them to be pistachios, because of the nearby distinct Picacho Peak. I tried looking up the names of the agricultural compaines on the water towers of the processing facilities as we drove by them, with the trees in the background, but my efforts pointed me to cotton processors. I finally found one travel web site that suggested they are walnut trees.

We will go with that---walnuts.

edit: other sources claim pecans, but the trees seem too large for that, from my limited experience with pecan trees.