Before I continued my way west across Arizona on Sunday, I got wondering what I’d find if I knocked on the door of Congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords’ district office in east Tucson. I expected no one there.
Certainly not the Congresswoman.
Ever since a lone gunman standing three feet away shot her in the brain last January, the third-generation Arizonan has resided elsewhere — mostly in Houston, where emergency-room doctors saved her life and a brain-injury rehabilitation team has since guided her remarkable recovery.
Recently Giffords returned to Tucson for the first time since the shooting to serve Thanksgiving dinner to airmen at the local Air Force Base. She was joined there by her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. About the same time, the couple appeared on the “20/20” ABC-TV show, where they were interviewed by Diane Sawyer.
At the end of this post, after the slide show, I’ve placed a link to a recent New York Times story (photo on left) detailing Giffords’ recovery — including an excerpt from the TV interview and a recent audio message from Gabby to her constituents. Both are brief and really powerful.
Reading the story and listening to the video clip made me want to visit her office all the more. Maybe I could catch a staff member or two working on a weekend. But when I arrived there Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the glass door to the office was locked.
I peered in through the glass and didn’t see anyone. But I could see a lot of the office furnishings — including an old western saddle on a wooden sawhorse, a nice assortment of western paintings and sculptures, a large poster of Gabby and a map of her district.
The 8th congressional district of Arizona includes the eastern half of Tucson and about 9,000 square miles to the south and east. It’s an extraordinary expanse, encompassing the high-tech sector of one of the nation’s fastest growing cities, huge farms and ranches, two military installations, more than a hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexican border and one national park.
In fact Saguaro National Park is only 15 miles from Gabby’s office door. Since my timing didn’t allow me to see the congresswoman herself, I decided I could at least glimpse the crown jewel of her district. And now I’m really glad I did.
For one thing, the whole park is easily visible from one eight-mile-long road loop, and within it is one of the most spectacular desert forests in the world — with its abundant barrel and prickly-pear-pad cacti and exotic chain-fruit and teddy-bear chollas.
Lording over it all, however, is the giant saguaro cactus, which can grow over 70 feet high and live a couple hundred years. I now know many things I could tell you about the saguaro, including its correct pronunciation (it’s suh-WAH-ro — the “g” is silent). But I’ll limit myself to just one thought:
The odds against its survival are huge.
Living in one of the most hostile natural environments on earth — the Great Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, where several months can pass in the spring or fall without a single drop of rain — it perseveres by sending out a very shallow root system (about three inches deep) in a circle as broad as the cactus is tall. When the rain finally does fall, these hairy tendrils suck it up as if their collective life depended on it.
Then the ingenious above-ground portion of the saguaro kicks into action, with its accordion-like pleats expanding when water is plentiful, its waxy outer skin locking the moisture inside, its prickly spines shading the plant from the evaporative effect of sun and wind and protecting it from thirsty animals. Sometimes one rainfall is all the saguaro gets for a year.
But all that assumes that a baby saguaro succeeded in ever reaching its teenage years in the first place, and only about one in a thousand seedlings do. The saquaro grows at an excruciatingly slow rate at first. At eight years old, it only measures about an inch and a half high. After another eight years, it barely reaches a foot. The fauna of the desert is constantly tramping it down.
All in all, I decided, the saguaro — “monarch of the Sonoran Desert” — stands as the perfect symbol of the life-force, of things that struggle against great odds to survive. Not unlike Gabby Giffords herself.
Here’s the New York Times story link:
Travels with Harley 
Happy Birthday, Uncle George! Hope it’s a good one.
And Happy “Same Day” Birthday back to you, Kathleen! (December 6 rocks!) Hope you had some fun today in jolly old London!
Gee, if I’d known you were going to stop in Tucson, you could have spent the night at my FIL’s place. He lives a couple of blocks away from the Safeway store where Gabby was shot. Dad homesteaded here east of Homer in ’49. He turned this place into a beef cattle ranch and he handed it off to one of his kids as fast as he could (1982). Turns out that Charlie hates cold weather, but he still makes much of being an Alaskan Homesteader, bless his heart. He’s 88 now, deaf as a stump, but still an interesting old coot who is a staunch liberal democrat. It’s not easy being Blue in a Red state. (Charlie & George Navarre formed the Kenai Peninsula Borough in 1964 in an old quonset hut in Kenai.)
Wow! Would have been great to drop in on him, Jan. Love them old homesteader stories. Of course we’ve heard a lot about the Yule Katcher clan. Was your father-in-law there in Homer (or east of Homer) before them?
Yule Kilcher beat Charlie to the Kachemak by a couple of years. I think Yule got here in 1946. They were good friends & political allies for 50 years.
Charlie would know who you are. The picture of the cowboys pushing Pete Roberts’ cows across the Sheep River hung in Charlie’s cabin for many years. You were the editor of “We Alaskans” when you ran that big “Kachemak Cowboys” article in 1987. There are Rainwater & Kilcher kids in that photo. Everyone was very proud of that article and most of the guys in the article have photos from it hanging in their houses.
Safe travels, George. If you ever get down here to Homer, we can gather homesteader kids and they’ll tell stories for as long as you can stand to listen. They all grew up in great storytelling homes and they carry that tradition on.
Jan, I look forward to looking you up on my next trip down to Homer. Anyone who sings sea-shanties can sit right next to me! Sorry about incorrectly spelling Yule and Jewel’s last name. I’m afraid that (a) I was tired, and (b) I conflated it with the last name of Anchorage attorney Jon Katcher, a longtime friend. And I can’t take credit for editing the “Kachemak Cowboys” piece either (though I remember it well). I was just the magazine’s staff writer at that point. Kathleen McCoy was the editor. And the guy who wrote it, if my memory serves, was Mike Lewis, who still labors on at the Daily News as the copy desk chief. And of course your neighbor Tom Kizzia wrote several We Ak pieces on Homer old-timers as well, including an early one on Yule Kilcher. My only claim to fame down in Homer goes back to 1972, the year of my first trip to Alaska, when as a wandering college student I pitched a tent only halfway up the beach on the Spit and got woken up in the middle of the night by waves lapping against my sleeping bag.
I thought you were going to meet Gabby at her office despite it being Sunday. Safe journey, Mary
Mary, my apologies. I was probably guilty of a little false foreshadowing there. Leave it to an accomplished Alaskan-Irish poet like yourself to catch me in it. (If it’s any consolation, I was kind of hoping she’d be there too.) Hope you and Lily have a lovely holiday! Thanks for thinking of me. Cheers!
Nice post about Giffords and her district. Thanks for the links to the story and the audio. Reading the above comments, I have to add my best wishes for a happy birthday, George. I want to say, “Hope we see you at the book club on Monday evening,” but then I also want to say–“Better to stay out there on the road for as long as you can if the going is this good.” Take care!
Thanks, Pete. I’ll try to get by, but my plane doesn’t land until 8:45 p.m. Monday night. If Ann and I hurry I might be able to catch the last half-hour. Kind of hoping there will still be some wine left….
Got my start in archaeology in Saguaro Nat’l Park – it’s a beautiful place.
Pam, that it is. And I bet the pre-history was beautiful too. Bet you really enjoyed that.