One woman finally sees beauty in her hometown—Tucson

By Megan Irwin

I was always a wilderness junkie by default because there was ‘nothing else to do in this stupid town.’

I am a child of the desert, born and raised in Tucson—a town burned by the sun and surrounded by mountains. I grew up blistering my feet on the summer sidewalk, frying eggs on my driveway and splashing through washes scented with creosote and filled with rainwater from the summer monsoons. I never understood the concept of cold. For me, winter was always a pleasant 68 degrees.

I am a child of the desert—a fact I often bemoaned as a teenager. “Why did my parents have me here? Why not someplace where things actually happen?” In high school the weekends were filled with trips up the mountain or to the canyon near my house. I was a wilderness junkie by default because there was “nothing else to do in this stupid town.”

In the summer I was 16, when we tired of swimming pools, the mall and aimlessly cruising downtown Tucson in cars borrowed from our parents, my brother, my best friend and I would drive up Mount Lemmon—a natural wonder we took for granted. Driving the 28 miles from base to summit is the same biologically speaking as driving from Mexico to Canada. Nowhere else in the continental United States can you find such topographical and biological diversity in such a small space.

Photo by Josh Irwin
The author and her younger brother, Josh, always stopped at the viewpoint on the way to the top of Mount Lemmon.

But behind the wheel of my mother’s beat-up Plymouth, I really didn’t care about all that. I inched the car up the winding road. I was a terrible driver, terrified to brave the windy mountain passes at speeds above 25 miles per hour. On the radio Cat Stevens wondered where the children play, and the Eagles felt peaceful and easy. Outside the car the scenery changed from saguaros to ponderosa pines. Inside the car sat three teenagers, bored and unappreciative of what they passed.

We always stopped at a lookout point about halfway up the mountain, got out of the car and stared down at the cloud of dust covering our hometown, wishing “anywhere but here.”

“It’s kinda pretty though,” one of us, usually my brother, would say.

“Yeah, I guess. I still want out,” another of us, usually me, would reply.

And we’d pile back in the car and head farther up the mountain. We’d usually get sick of the drive around Rose Canyon Lake, where we’d get out, poke around, sigh deeply and head back home for dinner. We’d pause at the lookout again, this time to watch the sunset. As we watched the day flame out in the violent orange way it does in the Southwest, we all felt something—some pull in our chests we couldn’t articulate

Back inside the car, Cat kept singing, “I know we’ve come a long way. We’re changing day to day… but tell me, where do the children play?”

Longing for mountains
In the winter I was 21, I left the desert behind and moved east. I wanted fast talkers and tall buildings.

I found what I was looking for, but something was missing. I was homesick. I tried to deny it, but I missed the dusty land I’d always claimed to hate. I craved my car and those late afternoon drives up the mountain. Although skyscrapers surrounded me, I wanted nothing more than a car with the windows down on a winding mountain road. I needed the Rincons’ peaks lit by the early morning sun and the Santa Catalinas’ foothills in the evening light—that golden time of day when sleepy desert towns settle down and bored teenagers drive up winding roads to watch the sunset and dream of escape.

I am a child of the desert, but it wasn’t until I moved 2,500 miles from any saguaro that I understood what that means. It took living in a place where the day dies slowly behind 40-story buildings, instead of burning out brilliantly on the western horizon, for me to understand how beautiful and rare this land of my childhood actually is.

Back home
When I returned to Tucson eight months later, I knew exactly what to do. At dusk I grabbed my brother and oldest friend, and we piled into the car—this time my own Honda Civic—to inch our way up the mountain once more. The music was different. I had a CD player, so we were no longer at the mercy of Tucson’s classic rock station. But the destination was the same. We reached that old lookout point halfway up the mountain and climbed out.

Standing in the spot I had ached for, I stared down at the town I used to hate and saw it for the first time. When the last of the day’s light had gone, we climbed back in the car and headed home for dinner.

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The Devil’s Tale showcases the coursework of individual students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.