Writer Richard Grant moves back to Tucson with his wife Mariah and their four-year-old daughter Isobel. Finding it much changed he embarks on a journey to explore the entire state of Arizona, its history, and its peoples. The main issue Arizona faces is the same one faced by the state and the whole Southwest, specifically what writer Kyle Paoletta calls the oasis cities, of which Tucson is one: water. 

In the 1940s there was enough water in this aquifer to keep Tucson, the nearest city, supplied for more than 900 years. Now it was so depleted that only capital-rich corporations could afford to drill wells deep enough to reach what was left. It was a race to the bottom of the aquifer, and a race to the bottom of crazy. Some local people were now advocating for state management of the diminishing groundwater, but it was proving a hard sell to many of their neighbors. Even as their wells were going dry and they were trucking in water to take showers and flush their toilets, the idea of government oversight and regulation was still anathema to their politics and their self-image as rugged individualists.

That self-image is not shared by the Native American Arizonans, one of whom tells Grant

I don’t mean to be rude, but white people have no idea what they’re doing to the earth.

Groundwater is completely unregulated in Arizona. You can pump all you want, which is what has driven the unbridled growth of Tucson, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, at the same time draining both the underground aquifers beneath them and the rivers running through them.

Segue to a gun show where Grant is invited to Big Sandy, a “shoot.”

Along the rim of the canyon was a quarter-mile firing range with hundreds of perfectly legal, fully automatic machine guns set up and ready to fire, plus mortars, military cannons, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, antiaircraft guns and a great big Sherman tank.

The safety talk which begins Big Sandy concludes

When shooting at the model planes that would be flying through the canyon, resist the urge to keep following them with your gun barrel, so as not to endanger the shooting line. Also beware of target fixation that led you above the horizon because on the other side of the mountain was public grazing land.

And, possibly, people.

Inevitably Grant attends a Trump rally, where people stand in line for hours in 97 degree heat.

An old man collapsed and split his head open, just a few feet away from me, as more VIPs pulled up in expensive vehicles and strolled into the air-conditioned building. It seemed like an apt metaphor for Trump’s brand of politics. He presented it as an anti-elitist movement for working people, but his greatest achievement, apart from stacking the Supreme Court, was record tax cuts for wealthy Americans, like the ones walking straight into the air conditioning while the working stiffs were kept outside waiting for hours in the heat.

Some of these folks are smart and funny and some are insane and terrifying (stay as far away from northwest Arizona as you can get unless you own your own howitzer) but one thing that never stales for Grant is the infinite variety and beauty of the Arizona landscape.

Saguaros start growing their first arms when they are between fifty and a hundred years of age. They can reached a height of seventy feet or more, weight up to two tons, and live for over two hundred years. In May and June they produce creamy white flowers—the state flower of Arizona—which are pollinated by bats, doves and a native bee. For the Tohono O’Odham, who harvest the scarlet fruits to make syrup and wine saguaros have long been revered as another form of humanity. Children are taught never to throw rocks at the giant cacti or harm them in any way, because saguaros are people too, made by the god and creator I’itoi.

This view was not shared by a twenty-seven-year-old white man named David Grundman, a cook and petty drug dealer who had gone to prison for robbing his customers. In 1982, he packed two rifles and a 160gauge shotgun and drove with his roommate into the desert northwest of Phoenix. First they riddled a ten-foot saguaro with bullets until it fell. Then, from close range, Grundman started blasting away with his shotgun at a twenty-seven-foot-tall specimen that was probably a hundred years old. A large limb fell and simultaneously crushed and impaled him to death.

One can only hope that the land will always have the last word. Part memoir, part sociopolitical study, part travel guide and always informative and entertaining. And daughter Isobel is a pistol.

She got out one of her notebooks and her invisible ink pen and started writing spells. The first two were rain spells, which seemed fitting for an Arizona child. “This one makes it rain, and this one keeps the rain away from our campsite so we can have a fire and cook s’mores.”

Highly recommended.

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As is his Dispatches from Pluto, when he moves to Mississippi.

Book Review Monday Chatter A Race to the bottom of Crazy Dispatches from Arizona Dispatches from Pluto Richard Grant