Journal of the Southwest

Fifteen years ago, I fought it tooth and nail. Ten or five years ago, I fought it tooth and nail. And now I fight it tooth and nail. Every mile marker or year I grow older, a distinct kind of resistance. Hated Chicago, hated the way they all treated me (rather, ignored me)—sure, Mom and Dad, anything, anywhere should be a welcome change. Back to the Sonoran Desert, where Mom went to school and Dad has dreamt of golfing 300 days a year. No new landscape changes the insecurities lodged deep within.

A distinct new sort of out-of-placeness, this time not only amongst high school kids, but amongst vistas from another planet. Everything is brown, barren, ugly. Inhospitable—the people and the plants. In a matter of months I'll graduate and get the hell out. "Out" was a plane ticket north—having driven with my parents from Illinois to southern Arizona before my senior year of high school, an opportune moment when we were all desperate for a change of scenery. This landed me in another town where I felt I didn't fit in—Oro Valley, Arizona—the part of Tucson where no one worth knowing lives, where retirees shuffle between Safeway for groceries and Walgreens for a bag of prescriptions. Yes, "out" was Jackson Hole, Wyoming—where I could be loud, aggressive, and alone amongst the mountains and finally expel my teenage angst under the most expansive skies. I left Oro Valley, my home and my parents, like an unattended dumpster fire. Grievances aired and scuffles surfaced but were never fully attended to, so they burned and burned for years while I frolicked in the Teton mountains. Goodbye, Arizona. Hopefully see you never. [End Page 566]

Never, until about four years into my foray, I skied into a tree, cracking my clavicle and rendering my ski bum self all but use- and purposeless. To Bozeman I go. With everything I own (mainly in the form of coats, socks, and various types of skis) in the back of my Tacoma. Big Sky country will be just that—bigger, more off-grid, and, there's even Montana State University should I get bored. I could take my parents up on that offer for help with tuition, and major in downhill deviance.

Late July, the skies opened. A rain I'd never seen during this stint in the Rockies. I stood there in the bicycle shop where I somehow managed to make more than minimum wage. The front door was propped open, no customers in sight. It was an inhospitable rain, and after a winter of great snowpack, the ground certainly didn't need anything more. The drops fell angrily, telling me I was no longer welcome here. What are you doing, besides being your best brat? A high school diploma and bad shoulder, where do you think you can go? It was the kind of cinematic internal reckoning that shifts a whole life trajectory. I used the shop computer and started filling out the application form for the University of Arizona.

In-state tuition might have been the topical draw, but there was a distinct new sensation of going home that I never really felt before. Home can't be Tucson, can it? After speeding through undergraduate studies as a photography-then-Art-and-Visual-Culture-Education student, and even finishing a semester early, I recall yearning in my final weeks of college life: I CAN'T WAIT TO GO. I despised those three and a half years for no reason besides feeling like I was missing something. Everything. I'll be in Los Angeles in no time. Then up to the Bay. Then, off to expat. Nearly every moment in Jackson Hole and Bozeman was spent outside. In Tucson, barely a minute at all. The dry air. The brown plants. The heat. The heat.

Everything was fine, in hindsight, but during those days, I was Baudelaire's l'héautontimorouménos, the great self-tormenter. I pilgrimaged to San Francisco for some months following graduation, then...