Borderline madness or myth?

An Arizona Trilogy

Foreword

Bill Moyers: Can you say, for example, that John Wayne has become a myth?
William Campbell: When a person becomes a model for other people’s lives, he has moved into the sphere of being mythologized.

The west, Arizona for certain, is one of the states richest in romantic mythology. There is the land: Arizona sunsets. Arizona highways. The iconic Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, which straddles Utah. High desert country. Sedona’s red rocks.

There are heroes and villains. Wyatt Earp. Doc Holiday, Kit Carson. Cochise, Geronimo, Pancho Villa. And the actors of Arizona westerns (we’ll put aside the palefaces who played Indians): The Duke, Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine. The Old Tucson movie lot provided the films, the context for myth-making, from about 1939 with the film “Arizona” (appropriately enough) until about 1997. By then filmmakers had fanned out across western states in search of better tax breaks.

I came to Arizona in late February for a way-too-short guerilla road trip tacked on to a business meeting. I came with a baby boomer’s memories of TV series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Big Valley, The High Chaparral. And films: Gunfight at the OK Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, Last Train from Gun Hill. Part of the attraction for me was, and still is, the John Wayne/Shane character model: havingr room to roam, freedom, independence, a natural savvy, no need to explain yourself. I also find a clarity out west, like seeing things in high contrast, that is lost in the polluted east. Perceptions improve. And there is an energy in the West, maybe it comes from having that room to roam free, or the fierce sun, that seems to be manufactured by ambition, the rat race, in say, Manhattan or DC.

I came to Arizona for a quick look-see at what has happened out here since the TV westerns died out after the 1950s and 60s, after Wayne and larger than life western actors died off. After the vast open pit mines closed. And since the invasion of illegal “wets” (a myth itself since the desert is dry ten months out of the year) and the empires of Mexican mafia clans began making billions of dollars. I would put about 750 miles on the odometer to see where and how the Old West meets the New West. How the legends hold up, and if they still have meaning.

Borderline madness or myth?

Why walk or drive across the Mexican border these days? My 88-year-old mother warned me, “God, I’ll be glad when you get back.” My wife warned me, my daughter warned me, friends and coworkers. Jeez, be careful down there. I was curious to see — as much as is possible in a three-day blitzkrieg tour tacked on to a business trip — whether the reality is borderline madness or modern media myth-making.

In Arizona the talk is about rugged individualism. Saddle up. Wagons ho! The Old West. The Far West. The Wild West. Stage coaches and bat-wing saloon doors. Tumble weeds and Deadwood Dick. Wyatt Earp and Pancho Villa. Cochise and Geronimo. Tombstone and Boot Hill. Mining empires and ranching empires.

Old romance versus current reality: More than 35,000 people have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown against drug syndicates — the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, La Familia, et al — in December, 2006. About 17,500 Border Patrol agents scour the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. In the few days I was on the border local newspapers carried stories about a seizure of 8,700 rounds of ammunition; Arizona investigators seized $420,000 and confiscated about 100 pounds of marijuana and six pounds of methamphetamine. Minor losses for the bosses that make everyday news.

Border Patrol white and green SUVs and pickups are everywhere, like taxis in Manhattan. They’re kept busy. One afternoon the BP was called to a ranch after skeletal remains were found. A few miles east of Tombstone a body clothed in a hoodie and jeans was found off Middlemarch Road. Up in Tucson a Mexican drug trafficker was found beheaded in an apartment building. West of Douglas, Arizona a border helicopter’s searchlights spot 128 illegals lost in the desert one night. A Cochise County rancher was found last year murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant.

Is the border a no-man’s land, or a no-go-for-tourists’ land of kidnappings, beheadings and public shootouts? I did my Google research before flying west. Yes, it is easy to find various State Department warnings. The central thesis from all I could gather is to blend in as much as possible. So I went out and bought an “original Senor Lopez” black and green-striped hoodie. (“We call those ‘drug rugs,’ dad,” said my son. Perfect.)

Internet instructions included: “Avoid overt displays of wealth.” Don’t flash jewelry. Carry only the cash you need. Watch yourself at ATMs. Stay with the crowds on streets. Watch your back everywhere, day or night. “Visitors should be aware of their surroundings at all times.” “Always keep car doors locked and windows up while driving.” Avoid driving or walking alone at night.

“After reading all of this you may not want to go across the border,” states one blog post. Well, hello.

But I had a plan. From my base in the border town of Douglas, I’ll cross over into Mexico early, very early on a Sunday morning. Hopefully the drug lords and their minions will be sleeping off Saturday night. From Agua Prieta on the Mexican side I will hop on Sonora State Highway 2, which looks like a well-traveled route on the map and is hopefully empty on a Sunday morning. I’ll take it slow. Many highways in Mexico have steep shoulders to avoid flash floods and many more Americans die in highway rollovers than are caught by stray bullets. I’ll follow the advice from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene where Chef and Captain Willard are jumped in the jungle by a tiger. Chef comes screaming back, “I’m never getting off the fucking boat. Never get off the fucking boat.” Rolling down Highway 2 for Cananea — “horse meat” in Apache — about 80 miles south and home to the largest open pit mine in Mexico, I’ll never get out of the car.

The car proves to be a problem, a mistake. My plan was to “blend in” by renting a humdrum compact and dusting it up a bit going off road before crossing the border. But Cliff, my friendly Budget Rent A Car clerk at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, announced I was his last customer of the day and gave me a free upgrade — a silver convertible Ford Mustang. I was too zoned out from the five-hour flight from Philadelphia to think straight. A convertible Mustang is not what you want to cruise Mexico in. I’d either be mistaken for a gangster or be car-jacked by a gang.

I cross the border around 7 a.m., past parallel 12-foot-high steel fences that run the length of Douglas and Aqua Prieta. Aqua Prieta is a “popular shopping area for southern Arizona residents,” according to one web site. “Where South of the Border Intrigue abounds,” states a brochure. The “intrigue” I get, the popular shopping is difficult to swallow. It’s hard to believe this is a city of 68,000. I see only wild dogs roam dirt streets. What I see of the city is dead, and looks reservation poor. Easier to believe is the Spanish name for Aqua Prieta: “Dark Water.”

Border Patrol agents look me over: “Where are you going? What will you do there? How long are you staying? What’s your occupation, sir? Will you be bringing anything back? Where are you staying? Is this your car?” I blame all the questions on the silver convertible. On the Mexican side I’m directed into a parking slot and asked a few questions in Spanish, which I do not speak. I nod “yes” and they wave me along.

The Sunday morning drive is in fog-shrouded, 30-degree weather called “equipatas,” a mix of hail, rain and snow. The road is cracked, worn, and as barren as the surrounding Sonora desert. All brown and gray. The vibe does not feel dangerous. At Cananea I’m abruptly stuck behind 20 or 30 semi tractor trailers, all stopped. I snake out of the line only to be quickly stopped by a Mexican police officer. I want to get to Imuris, I tell him, another 40 miles south. He grins. “No speak English.” The next half hour I spend driving up and down Cananea streets, looking for an alternate route. But I can’t get around a vast open pit copper mine, the largest in the country. I break my rule and get out of the car at a local supermarket. Another rule of the road for me is this: there are two ways to really check out any local populace — walk the aisles of a supermarket and take public transportation somewhere. Actually, in Cananea I’m hunting for Cuban cigars and the only store open is the supermarket. A long shot for cigars, and I find none.

Why drive further south to Imuris? A bit further on is Magdalena de Kino, where I want to photograph the Temple of Santa Maria Magdelena. It’s also where I plan to turn around and drive north on State Highway 15 for 50 miles to the border city of Nogales. I circle around Cananea to make a last attempt to pass the line of trucks and slip through a loose barricade of barrels and cones. I still don’t understand the delay. It is an embarrassing disadvantage to travel a country and have no idea of the native tongue. I’m shouted down by several officers as I try to squeeze through the barriers. Fuck it. Nothing is worse on the road than retreating back the way you came.

So I head back on Highway 2, now with the sun breaking through solid low cloud cover. I find a turn off, hang a left, and head to cross back into the states at the small, very small village of Naco. At Naco two Border Patrol officers direct me to park the car for what they call a “routine inspection.” A line of vehicles backs up behind me because I can’t figure out how to flip open the damn trunk. I fumble around like a clueless touristo. This is not blending in. Finally one of the officers figures it out. They open the trunk. Open the hood. Open the doors. “Sit over there, sir, this won’t take long.” They bang the tires. Roll adjustable mirrors on extension rods under the front and rear. Pound door panels. Meanwhile I watch a steady flow of cars with Arizona plates cruise through. I blame the “routine inspection” on the silver Mustang convertible. And possibly my Senor Lopez “drug rug.”

From Naco I have a choice: backtrack to Douglas, where there is nothing worth doing, or take a looping, long route to Nogales from the Arizona side. In Douglas, a town of about 15,000, I’m staying at the historic Gadsden Hotel, the largest building in the city. Built in 1907, it has five floors, one of the few remaining manually operated elevators in the country, a 1929 manual telephone switchboard behind the front desk, a lobby with a sweeping Italian marble staircase, a tiffany-stained glass mural, and four soaring Italian marble columns. Shadowy, headless ghosts supposedly wander in the basement, in hotel corridors, playing tricks with lights and furniture. The hotel burned down in 1929, with no loss of life, and was rebuilt. One night I was reading in bed when the bed lamp went out. I figured the ghosts were telling me it was time to turn in.

The rooms are Spartan, the radiator I couldn’t figure out how to crank up, and the room carpet is laid like loose sod. Did you ever see the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink? The Gadsden reminds me of the rundown Hollywood hotel Barton stays in, trying in vain to write a movie script. Steve Buscemi, bulging eyes and nervous ticks, plays the creepy desk clerk. Wallpaper keeps peeling off in Barton’s room. In the finale, narrow hotel corridors like the Gadsden’s become tunnels of flames in Barton’s hellish nightmare exit from Hollywood.

I don’t want to go back to Douglas. Saturday night in the Gadsden’s Saddle Spur Saloon was enough. Another legend has it Lee Marvin, in town to film a western and likely bored to death, almost got into a brawl in the tavern. I was compelled to leave — not by the three old timers talking real estate, or the young barkeep who told me Chivas Regal was one of the bourbons he had, or the old guy and his young thing getting lovey-dovey in a circular booth — no, it was the music. A lanky middle-aged rancher-dude with white cowboy hat and a beer swilling older babe kept returning to the jukebox to play dismal Top 40 hits from the 1980s, the worst decade for music in my life. Journey. Heart. Foreigner. Michael Bolton and Christopher Cross. My god what a dark, depressing scene. Also, I wanted to get upstairs before a DJ plugged in in the lobby to kick off sweet 16 party that the desk clerk had warned me about.

Instead of a drawn out aimless Sunday afternoon in Douglas, I decide on taking the long arc to the west to get to Nogales. Nogales on the Mexican side is one of the more notorious border towns. In Nogales, Arizona, the assistant police chief swears by low crime stats that indicate his city is one of the safest in the whole country, according to the Nogales International newspaper. But residents often hear gunfire, smell gun powder, and they don’t feel safe visiting their sister side on the other side of the line, according to the article.

Across the entire 2,000-mile stretch of the U.S-Mexican border, Nogales is one of the busiest crossings, rivaling Laredo, El Paso and Hildago Texas, and San Ysidro, California. The freezing late February rain and snow flurries don’t help, but I find zero romance in the sprawling city of 189,759 people. This time I walk across the border. It’s part of my plan: Sunday afternoon should be the safest time of the week to stroll on your lonesome in a border town. Mexican families are out and about shopping, despite the wet, dreary weather. Nogales is too poor for a car culture. Long lines wait for buses, white and blue rickety old school buses, and jitneys. I see no lovers holding hands. No smiles. No laughs. It’s grim. You get hustled immediately. “Taxi, taxi, you want taxi?” To go exactly where? My Internet research says never hop in a cab unless it’s called from a restaurant or hotel. Too much kidnapping. Vendors in booths, stalls, and cramped shops shout like carnie barkers: “What do you want? What do you want? Pills. You want pills? Come on, boss, see my stuff. Come in. See my store. What you want?”

A Cuban cigar is all I want. Cuban imports are banned in the U.S. But Mexico has little problem with Castro and I figure I should be able to score a legendary Cuban smoke. Soon enough, not five minutes into Nogales, I find a Cuban cigar cart. Again, Internet research says to always barter with Mexican vendors. Don’t wimp out; they expect it. One guide states you should pay only half of any stated price. I settle for two cigars, one light, one moderate. Very likely I overpay. And I wonder, are they truly Cuban? Are they five years old? I don’t believe anything I’m told by loudmouthed, in-your-face hawkers. A salesman is a salesman, in Nogales, Mexico, Las Vegas or the French Quarter. The harder they sell, the less I believe.

The best way to experience a border town like Nogales is to find an insider or a guide. They take you beyond the blending in scheme to go behind the scenes. They know of charming alleyways, the few that they are, the best, hidden restaurants, the authentic craft shops. Travel writers often use these guides, maybe from the local tourism bureau or chamber of commerce, and wind up writing appropriately glowing accounts. I read a few on the ‘Net about Nogales, and they were notable for what they didn’t say. The hard stares from old, leathery men. The small cluster of guys I wouldn’t walk near in the dark. Pathetic poverty. Nogales sits in a north-south valley with steep hills. Hills crammed with box shanties painted bright orange, blue, yellow, green, red, purple. I want to walk up worn steps along side streets to get a closer look at some of the pillboxes but, no, this is not my neighborhood. A gringo walking these hills is like a tourist staring at the Amish, or Indians on the rez. Except the natives are more restless here.

According to an unofficial tally by Radio XENY in Nogales, Sonora, a surge of violence in 2009 brought the number of homicides to 136, up by six from 2008. One Saturday, near midtown, neighbors looked on as a 28-year-old was assassinated inside his older-model Buick Century, according to a newspaper account. Witnesses said the car was sprayed with at least 30 bullets. A popular taco stand in mid-town was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Three were killed and five others injured. One Monday three bodies were discovered on the streets of Nogales, all victims of strangulation. Two men were found executed at a department store on the south side of the city. Two other men were killed and another injured the same day in the parking lot at a grocery story. The next day, a “convoy” of gunmen arrived at a drive-through store, doused the inside with gasoline and torched the building, according to news reports.
I pull my Senor Lopez hoodie over my head as far as I can so you can’t see my face easily, pull my hands inside the long sleeves, and put on a serious game face. I’m a 55-year-old suburban family man and my get-up would have my wife and my kids and my boss rolling their eyes. Suburbanites don’t blend well into the Philadelphia street scene, let alone a Mexican border town. I leave my camera in the car and walk with the straight-ahead stare, a hard-ass look I see worn by many of the men in town. It’s cold and wet. I keep walking. I watch out for cars that are not watching for me. Many are old models packed with passengers. I read where a 23-year old Mexican male was stopped in Mesa, Arizona. He tested twice the limit for alcohol — and had seven kids in his car, three in the trunk. My walk aims for a Coca Cola billboard sign, then further to a large Burger King sign. I pass a dead dog on a sidewalk.

The further from the line you go, the deeper into town, the vendor hassling drops off to almost nothing. Only narrow, twisted alleys littered with trash, tires and puddles. Bars, some blasting beats, clubs, movie houses, porn shops, diners, nail salons, hair salons, plenty of pharmacies, grocery stores, department stores, banks. It reminds me of walking in Times Square in the 1970s, long before the cleanup.

I’m also thinking of another movie. The famous three-minute uninterrupted crane tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ noir classic Touch of Evil. A doomed couple in a flashy convertible cruise at night down four blocks of a border town amid flashing neon signs, blaring Tex-Mex music, shouts and crowds. The car stops at a border checkpoint, proceeds out of frame, and then blows up.

It is the atmosphere conveyed in that scene that I see around me in Nogales on a gray Sunday afternoon in February. Crumbling steps, potholed streets, side alleys, rusting cars. Nogales certainly cannot be captured in four blocks. It is the largest port of entry in Arizona. Four million people a year crossed the border on foot at Nogales in 2010. Millions more by car and truck. Most of the traffic seems to be Mexicans heading El Norte, certainly not Americans going south. I think of thin, middle-aged wives wearing designer scarves and jangling jewelry while their husbands fiddle with golf bags at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. No, they’d never go slumming down here, trying to hide their tans.

Walking into Mexico is a breeze, just flash your passport and driver’s ID to the U.S. guard. Coming back across is more time-consuming. I wait in long line of pedestrians, mostly Mexicans, for 20 minutes before pushing through the turnstiles and again waving passport and ID at the stone-faced U.S. guard. Coming back into Mexico are huge, boxed flat screen TVs from Wal-Mart pushed on dollies, and cases of bottled water in shopping carts from Safeway. Six or seven lanes of vehicles, mostly worn, faded sedans, SUVs, pick-ups and semis, stretch back a half-mile into Mexico. Like the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, but even more gridlocked.

There is obvious madness on the border. The beheadings, slaughter, blood feuds and people mad to escape into the states. There is media and political myth-making, too, much to the chagrin of southern Arizona tourist promoters, law enforcement officers, and elected officials. More than 80 percent of the 15,600 drug-related killings that took place in Mexico in 2010 occurred in only four of the country’s 32 states, and Sonora, home to Aqua Prieta, Cananea and Nogales, is not one of them. Highway crashes kill many more Americans than bombs or bullets. Tucson’s police chief said in a newspaper article his town is victimized by home invasions and kidnappings related to the drug trade, but “most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.”

The border is not a line in the dirt, a steel fence or cement wall. It is, as a Customs and Border Protection commissioner said, “a third country that joins Mexico and the United States.” The 2,000-mile corridor is poverty-stricken, desperate and full of fear on the Mexico side, and on the U.S. side it is heavily guarded, largely barren, with the faded glory of the Old Tucson movie set (which hasn’t seen any filming since 1997). Most American tourists will fly over this third country on their way to a South of the Border resort compound, if they go at all. That makes sense. The tranquil clarity I love about the west becomes something edgy and murky on the border.


Close encounters of the cacti kind

From the parking area of Gates Pass, a hilly area aptly named the Tucson Mountains just east of Tucson, Arizona, dotted with thousands of saguaro cacti, a hike up to a ridgeline about a half-mile away looks like a gradual slope, certainly doable. This so-called minor range has peaks from 2,000 to 4,600 feet. The climb I scope out gets steeper near the top, but that’s to be expected. Only later, after I spent an hour scrambling, often hand over hand to reach to top, and another half-hour sliding mostly on my butt coming down, did I read in Backpacker magazine that “overconfidence” is one of 52 common mistakes hikers make. About 42 percent of rescue calls in Utah national parks are due to fatigue, darkness, and insufficient equipment. The bottom line: foolhardy planning.

Guilty as charged. I came to the pass on the last day of February with no plan, no map, no route, no water bottle, no watch, no compass. It was just a brilliantly blue sky Monday morning, cool, cloudless, with the famous Arizona sun creating a picture postcard. It was early, around nine a.m, and mine was the only car in the lot. I had Gates Pass to myself.

And if I had a plan, it was simply to hike up a slope on the north side of the pass, snapping pictures of the saguaro forest all the way to the rocky top. There was no path, I’d choose my own zig-zagging angle of ascent, which had appeal. Little did I know I was ignorantly committing a “crime of fashion,” according to Backpacker. “Ever notice how many stories about rescued hikers include the line, ‘The missing man was wearing jeans and tennis shoes.’?” Uh, that would be me. The tennis shoes, or sneakers as we call them back east, would be my worst clothing faux pas.

Hiking up the reddish-brown sandstone slope took about an hour. Technically, this was an easy, pedestrian walk in the sun. But my sneakers offered no protection against the saguaro needles. Let me explain: The saguaro is the cacti most often used as an emblem of the southwest in commercials, movies, TV shows and tourist propaganda. These plants are light green columns, large and tree-like, with long vertical rows of needles an inch or more in length. Some saguaro grow arms generally bent upward. Some have as many as 25 arms; others have none. Saguaros can grow, very slowly over decades, to heights of 40-60 feet.

I had no trouble walking my way around these stunning plants, sometimes ducking beneath their arms. To see thousands of them on rolling desert hills on a clear, cloudless morning is to experience the power and glory of nature. But if you are out of fashion in your hiking gear, most importantly footwear, you have obstacles, enemies, that you most often don’t even see. Saguaro are very slow growing cactus. A ten-year-old plant might be only 1.5 inches tall. Time and again I’d feel a sharp pain, look down at my feet, and these damnable pincushions, like prickly green golf balls, would be stuck to my sneakers, with needles piercing through to my skin. “Where the hell did they come from?” I’d curse. They also proved adept at affixing themselves to my jeans and hoodie sweatshirt.

Prying them off was no easy deal. I couldn’t simply grab them and yank them off. I swear what seemed like hundreds of needles in each small, round ball of light green had little hooks on the end and extracting them was like pulling teeth. And I couldn’t grab the prickly devils with my bare hands. I needed a strong twig or a rock to scrap them off.

Still, the hike up was enjoyable — a good test of overall fitness, plus agility, flexibility, balance, strength, endurance, and best of all, the mental concentration. The concentration comes into play trying to figure out your best line, your clearest, most stable path, up through the saguaro, giant sage shrubs, ironwood trees, gullies and chunks of rock. Which rock to grab. Where the footing looks most secure. Is that branch strong enough to pull you up? You also look and listen for any signs of rattlesnakes in particular, under rocks, also maybe gila monsters, horned lizards, squirrels and rabbits. It’s like chess: do I make this move to the right, the left, or straight ahead? You are, as psychologists call it, in the “flow.” In the moment. A painful moment when stung by one of those youthful saguaro, those damnable burr balls..

I lounged at the top of the ridge for 20 minutes or so. To the west I could see the Old Tucson movie set. Down below snaked the Gates Pass road. To the east, ten miles away, was the min skyline of downtown Tucson. Homes dotted the hills to the north, with the Saguaro National Park further north, and to the south the Sonora desert stretched into the blue-gray of Mexico, some 110 miles off.

My descent was more treacherous and unfortunately involved a series of dork moves on my part. Again, there was no beaten path to follow. I quickly learned my sneakers provided no traction on the loose gravel and shale. I should have read the Backpacker article before my trip. Mistake number 41: Stepping carelessly. “About 77 percent of the 306 injuries recorded in Yellowstone in 2003-04 were leg sprains, strains, abrasions and lacerations,” said the article. “Watch you step. Wear high boots and use poles to prevent stumbling.”

I had no boots, no poles, and a sore butt from falling backward. About halfway down I realized the best tactic was to descend side-step fashion, one foot crossing over the other. Better traction, but still it didn’t prevent the biggest tumble, when I completely lost my footing and fell against a saguaro. Must have taken ten minutes to pry the pincushions off my sneaks, jeans, hoodie, fingers and scalp. Some of the most stubborn needles are still embedded in me, I believe, as I write this

Coming down I also committed mistake number 20 — getting disoriented. I had no compass and did not leave marks on my hike up that I could follow coming back down. I lost sight of the Gates Pass parking lot, and as I got lower, the Gates Pass road itself. Giant saguaros could serve as landmarks, but hiking through thousands of them is like a maze of mirrors. For the most part, they all look the same, that iconic symbol of the west.

Finally I found my way to the road, about a half-mile east of where I had started my hike from the parking lot. It was close to noon. Gates Pass was now being challenged by a steady stream of seriously committed cyclists. You know, the ones with zero body fat. The pass has been considered an extremely dangerous road due to a switchback slope that occurs midway through the route, with 58 wrecks reported between 1996 and 2001.

All in all, I considered myself beaten but lucky. I did the hike by my lonesome. The weather was gorgeous. I had no broken bones, twisted ankles, sprained knees or elbows. No snake bites. No bobcat or mountain lion encounters. No fateful blunder. But honestly, I was a foolhardy tenderfoot, a 55-year-old suburban baby boomer imposing another age-defying test on myself. Would I do it again? Not without a lot more foresight. Once pricked, twice shy.


Cochise gets the last laugh

It’s right there on the map of Arizona, in tiny red type that strains my 55-year-old eyes: Cochise’s Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains, about 140 miles southeast of Tucson. It is the remoteness of the spot that draws me more than Indian lore. You see, I get excited by little dotted lines on a map. That indicates trails, not highways. The only way to Cochise’s Stronghold, either from the west or the east of the Dragoons, are primitive bounce-along trails.

There is a problem, though, I have the wrong vehicle to go off road. At Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport I was upgraded to a silver Mustang convertible, “a great deal,” I was informed. Has a kick-ass sound system, I’ll give it that. But it is so low-slung in design that it has but four inches of clearance beneath its underbelly and the road. Utterly wrong for the rutted, rock-strewn off-road desert rambles I planned.

I flew to Arizona from back east, Philadelphia, to see if I could find what hard facts might lie behind or beyond the myths of The Old West. Cochise County seemed as good place to look. It is the home of Tombstone, the “town too tough to die,” Boot Hill, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Mexican border towns, and ghost towns like Gleeson and Pearce. Cochise’s Stronghold, just a tiny red square on the map, was ground zero for my exploring the Sonora desert country.

At the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce building I asked how to reach Cochise’s place. I pointed to a dirt trail, Middlemarch Road. “Will this get me there?” A rangy old-timer behind the counter looked at me strange, as in “Why in the hell do you want to do that?” “Well, yeah, I guess that’ll work,” he said. I was not reassured.

He’s the native here. But it was an optimistically bright late February Saturday afternoon. I lowered the convertible roof and took off down dusty Middlemarch Road. A yellow warning sign said: “PRIMITIVE ROAD. Caution. Use at your own risk. Surface is not regularly maintained.”

Just the welcome I was waiting for. The joke was the 35 M.P.H. sign beneath the lettering. Not in this Mustang. I crawled along at about 10 M.P.H., not wanting to owe Budget more than the price of my whole vacation. Every driver of a pick-up or SUV I passed heading the other direction would casually wave as we passed. Made me feel part of some dusted-up fraternity, a less of a jackass for being out here in a got-it-all-wrong Mustang convertible. I passed not a single sedan off-road. A Border Patrol pick-up, white with a large green slash running down both front doors, crept up behind me and followed for some time. Probably thinking I was either drunk or lost.

The Mustang bounced east along Middlemarch Road for ten miles, which took almost an hour to drive. The Mustang’s low clearance made the ten miles seem like one long cattle crossing rumble strip. Then Middlemarch Road came to a fork. I could continue on straight, or turn left onto a narrower trail with a sign indicating mountain views. There wasn’t a house, animal or human in sight. Just low trees, desert scrub, winter grass and the Dragoon range ahead. I was getting closer. The sun was still high. I figure on taking the mountain view. I had no GPS, but out here I don’t know if a satellite would find me.

It took some time for it to dawn on me that I had made the wrong turn. Sure, this trail was much more rocky than Middlemarch Road, which seemed like an interstate in comparison. And it wasn’t much wider than my Mustang. The few jeeps or SUVs coming the other way forced me up on the road’s shoulder.

But I was having fun figuring what imaginary lines to follow to miss chunks of junk rock, skirt gullies, ride the edge of old ruts; in other words how to avoid getting stuck. Up, down and around dry gulch beds the Mustang banged and clanged. I wasn’t driving, I was creeping under 5 M.P.H. Up a jagged incline and down a twisted hill. I was in the middle of the Sonora Desert and often couldn’t see 20 feet in front of me, what with the trail carved low, the bramble brush, boulders and tall grass. Got out and took a photo of the Mustang; all you could see was the windshield in what looked like a trough. Cochise’s Stronghold… I didn’t have a clue.

Cochise is a truly legendary figure, if you go by the formal definition of “legend”: someone forever talked about but never once photographed; someone actually seen by few people. A Chiricahua Apache, a solid warrior standing about six feet tall and 175 pounds with long black hair, his name “Cheis” meant “having the quality or strength of oak.” That would come in handy out here. His father was murdered by Mexican forces, and his brother and nephew were killed in battles. Cochise seemed to me a guerilla fighter or a frontier terrorist, a freedom fighter, supposedly unequaled with a lance. Something of a Native American Renaissance Man, a naturalist, spiritualist, philosopher and warrior.

“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches,” he once said. “After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it Apaches wait to die – that they carry their lives on their fingernails? I am alone in the world. I want to live in these mountains. I have drunk the waters of the Dragoon Mountains and they have cooled me: I do not want to leave here. Why shut me up on a reservation? Let us go around free as Americans do. Let us go wherever we please.”

Sounds fair enough to me. Cochise lived to be about 70, and was secretly buried in the hostile, unforgiving terrain at north end of the Dragoon range, which I was attempting to navigate in a convertible sports car. I imagined Cochise up in the sky getting a good laugh out me. This little ant of a tourist from frilly Philadelphia inching his way between the broad boulders of the big man’s rock fortress.

I don’t know how they ever got Cochise out of there. The so-called stronghold is a jumble of 50- to 100-foot high slabs of dull red and gray granite, bunched together in slanted columns. In February the tall grass is yellow and the iron wood trees, well, leafless and looking like they’re made of iron.

Cochise used the stronghold as his cover and base from which he attacked white settlements in the 1860s and early 1870s. Arms, even artillery, could not dislodge him, but a treaty did, negotiated between a U.S. Army general and Cochise, then in his 60s. Maybe he had just run out of gas. Or room. He retired to where the present-day stronghold is and died in 1874 of natural causes.

I wasn’t close to running out of gas, but daylight was another matter. Clouds were rolling in and the light was beginning to dull. I was at the walls of the stronghold, but I’d have to hike to get in, and I didn’t have the time. Damn. I didn’t have a clue where this winding trail was leading. I kept imaging a nice two-lane asphalt state highway always around the next bend. Didn’t happen.

After bounding along for about an hour, I finally came upon humans. Young eco campers sitting around in the late afternoon, parked beneath a copse of trees. They turned and stared at the Mustang like it was a spaceship. “Excuse me fellows, but where the hell am I?” One camper in a wooly cap with flaps down over his ears said: “Go 500 yards and that’s the end of the trail, turn around there. Take this road back 12 miles and you’ll come to Middlemarch Road, much wider. Take Middlemarch to Route 80 and head south to Tombstone.”

Damn, a full retreat. And I never set foot in Cochise’s stronghold. A gloom set in. I was out of my depth. Had the wrong car. Misjudged the map. I’d be lucky to get out without rolling off a shoulder and being rescued by the Border Patrol. On my way back I passed a campsite of Boy Scouts settling in for supper. One of the men leading the pack slowly watched my drive by with a stare that said, “You tenderfoot fool. What the hell do you think you’re doing out here in a convertible?”

A few times the Mustang lurched down into a rut or flat ran over a rock chunk. There go the shocks, the suspension, the paint job. My only hope was to get the car so mud splattered and covered in grime any small dents and scratches would be camouflaged.

I made it back to State Highway 80 to see one of those famous Arizona sunsets. The hills turn to purple haze and the sky layered with streaks of burnt red, orange, yellow, then sky blue, deep blue and if you look straight above, stars are out with a clarity you will never back east.

I had about a 70-minute drive on 80 to the border town of Douglas, where I would stay the next two nights exploring the borderline. In the growing darkness I considered those Wild West myths and legends, how Cochise went from feared terrorist to having a county named after him, as well as a community college. He’d get a laugh out of that, too. First we killed his people, cornered them, defanged them, then turned them into what we call nowadays revenue streams. Wild Bill Cody showed off old warriors in Europe as part of his touring show. Back east in the late 1800s, publishers of so-called dime novels cashed in on pulp fiction heroes and villains of the Far West. Cochise, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, they have been mythologized for more than a century now. Hollywood made millions off them. In the 50s and 60s TV couldn’t broadcast enough westerns. When Disneyland opened in 1955 one of the most popular attractions was an hourly Indian attack on a beleaguered but brave fort. This little fling of mine through southern Arizona provided just a glimpse of the barren, simple living behind the myths. Most tourists would sleep their way through this kind of hard country. Wake me up when we’re at Universal Studios.

Afterword

Arizona is the closest state in the U.S. projecting a third world vibe. You have the sprawling country club that is Phoenix. Gated communities like 500 Club at Adobe Damn, Antelope Hills, Apache Wells. Scottsdale’s walled in wealth — “plenty of late night partying and a buzzing hotel scene,” says The New York Times. Scottsdale is 90 percent white, with a median family income of $92,000. Stunning Sedona where retirees find the sunset is 92 percent white, with the median age of 50. Upscale resorts and fashion malls pepper Phoenix and Tucson: the Biltmore Fashion Center, Desert Sky Mall, Foothills Mall. Out in suburban Glendale sits a hulking silver aluminum space ship, an enclosed stadium with retractable roof and a grass field that can be rolled outside for cultivating. It is where the Arizona Cardinals NFL team plays. You have Arizona State and University of Arizona, hip campuses, “flipflops in February” is how they are marketed in the Midwest and East.

Then there is the legion of immigrants, legal and illegal. Douglas is 80 percent Hispanic. There is what is left of the Apaches, the Navajos, in isolated towns like Kenyatta up north and Nogales Arizona on the border. Residing in the middle class is Cliff the clerk at Budget Rent A Car, a 22-year veteran. “Recovery, yeah, sure, whatever,” he tells me. And Phyllis Little, who owns with her husband Rich the High Desert Antiques store on the small main drag in Benson, 40 miles south of Tucson on I-10. “You wouldn’t believe the rent here,” she says. She and her husband are hanging on. Not making money, not losing it. Tourism hasn’t come back, she says.

There is middle class life in new adobe subdivisions outside of Douglas. A Wal-Mart and Target and Safeway have done their damage, draining the life out of downtown Douglas and G Street. Phoenix is ringed by suburbs: Mesa, Carefree, Paradise Valley, Sunrise, Sun City, Goodyear, Chandler and Tempe. It’s all good.

But you’re never far from the edge between gated comfort and grinding poverty. A gap-toothed Mex with a loopy smile rings up a case of Bug Light at a Circle K convenience store. Asked his age, he says 35; he looks about 50. Two teens come in asking for firewood. Creepy. And I’m suburban Mesa.

The booze flows easy out here. Stacks of beer, hard liquor, jugs or minis, and racks of wine at any Circle K or Safeway supermarket. That’s a lethal combo, easy booze, guns and poverty. Put Tombstone on the map, and still is making news today.

On a cloudless Monday morning, I pull out of Douglas at 6:30 in the morning, frost on the car, 22 degrees outside. Driving west the sun begins to climb from the flat desert behind me, a blinding orange and yellow orb. The sky above turns rich blue. I want to grab a handful. The air is clean and clear and the road empty. The Chiricahua, Dragoon, Huachuca, Whetstone and Santa Rita mountain ranges rim the horizon. Who needs myths when you have mornings like this.

Soundtrack CDs for a southern Arizona road trip:
Outlaws musicians wealthy enough like Willie and Waylon to live outside the lines, and others who don’t make dough and don’t give up: Simon Stokes with his biker white beard. Ronnie Elliott playing lounges in Tampa. Brooding bluesman Charlie Musselwhite. The soundtrack from the film Get Low. South Memphis String Band. Jerry Garcia, live from Berkeley in 1975, an outlaw from the world of fluorescent office lights these guys will never and could never see. Sufjan Stevens. Richard Hawley’s “Truelove’s Gutter.” The Kills (for all you who think rock and roll guitar music is dead and gone), jazz pianist Fred Hersch, the soundtrack to the remake of “True Grit” (but of course).