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Tucson
...a day in a darkened motel room
Arizona:
April, 1997
I didn't see much of Tucson. What little I did see I liked very much, and I'm determined to get back there in the autumn, but I spent most of the time we were there locked inside a stuffy room at the Economy 8 Motel, working to get our web site up and running.
Anyone who has created a site from scratch (no lifting of other people's stuff for us — we couldn't even if we wanted to, because we don't hve the time to surf while we are on the road) knows that it is a slow and frustrating process. And we are working in raw HTML.
So I sat surrounded by the semi-darkness of a weak light bulb, enveloped in the halitosis of an inefficient and noisy air-conditioner, with paper spread all over the bed, making regular trips to the motel laudromat to wash our smelly socks, tapping away in Simple Text, and cursing mightily whenever something didn't work out as I expected.
Anyway, after many hours, and a very late night, I was ready to upload our collection of half-finished files, just so that we could show our friends that we were serious about the web site we'd been promoting so freely in the weeks preceeding our departure.
And guess what, the FTP part of CompuServe wasn't operating! Energetic expletives and the bringing down of all kinds of demons and showers of frogs on the heads of CompuServe. A couple of hours of this and checking out time had arrived, without any repair of FTP. I was not in a good mood as we drove north again, but that's not Tucson's fault.
I did have time to wander around the town centre a little, and to visit an exhibition at the University's Centre for Creative Photography. I loved the "Depth of Field" exhibition, a collection of the works of a number of photographers, demonstrating inspired use of the camera lens's ability to select different planes of focus. But I was disappointed by the featured photographer — a long series of over-exposed black and white large format shots of desert fauna that frankly looked as if they'd been taken in about half an hour and conveyed nothing to me at all. All I noticed was the photographer's shadow in some of them. If this was accidental then it showed deplorable lack of care. If it was deliberate it was too precious for words.
Outside in the sun, I sat on the gallery steps, watching beautiful students glide by on long tanned legs. I instantly decided I wanted to become a student again, and that Tucson would be a good place to sit and watch beautiful students glide by...
Tucson, I promise to spend more time with you sometime.
(In the end the web site uploading process had to wait until we arrived, a week or so later, in Tuba City, where the town's public library kindly let us use a spare telephone line for an hour or so.)
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