Dad loves the desert.  Where most people see barren wastelands and blistered creation, Dad finds beauty and solace.  I do believe that he loved living at Furnace Creek/Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley better than any other place that he has ever lived. 

The Sonoran desert of Arizona is vastly different from California's Mojave Desert.  The simple presence of cati and trees alone show the change.  Wandering around our desert here in Ridgecrest, you'll find creasote, sage, cholla, and similar low shrubby plants with an occasional Joshua and in the lower deserts, Yucca tree.  However, in Arizona we had those plants, barrel cactus, occatillo, manzinita trees and a million other plants.  The Sononoran desert doesn't feel as flat with saguaro cacti and the other taller plants breaking up the landscape.

I confess, I prefer the area around Apache Junction more than ours here in California.  I don't miss the tales of tarantula migration but I do miss wandering through the desert plucking the needles of the barrel cactus, a sense of safety in knowing there was water inside if I ever got lost.

On any given Saturday morning, Dad and  I might climb into the van and drive to the base of the Superstition Mountains after a quick detour at Dunkin' Donuts for coffee and glazed donut holes.  I drank milk.  Once there, we'd climb from the van, dad with his books and booklets, me with no goal in mind but to see what was there to see.

Dad spent hours wandering the area looking for the famous, "Lost Dutchman Mine".  I never knew exactly what his facination was with it.  If he enjoyed the romance of the tales, if he found the hunt exhillarating, or if he just wanted an excuse to wander the Arizona desert and "graze" as a friend once called it.  Yes, dad loved to graze on the millions of edible plants in the desert. 

Sometimes, we'd be gone for hours, others we'd just wander around for a while until he got his "Desert fix".  We never found anything with the Lost Dutchman Mine.  For all I know, it is nothing more than a dream of someone's from long ago.  I do know that I'm very glad the legend was there.  Some of my best memories are mixed with milk mustaches, donut holes, and climbing the base of the Superstition Mountains in search of dreams and creating those memories in the process.

I know I learned many lessons on those trips.  Sometimes I know what the lessons were or when they were taught.  I don't on this.  I can't remember.  I just know that anytime I was with Dad somewhere, especially when we had no where to "be" or "go", it was a classroom for me.  Dad was the schoolmaster of my life and spent hours instructing me in everything you can imagine.  From those hours I learned things like why we have never had a "revolutionary war" or a "civil war".  I heard the stories of Geronimo and of when he was a boy and ate a watermelon for an after school snack.

At home, we probably ate liver and fried onions for dinner with bacon strips on top and spinach on the side.  Sometimes we played Yachtzee but others I'd take Earl and we'd go for a walk across the desert from our house while I told him stories of Dad's childhood and the Lost Dutchman mine.