Rock Wren trail

To be an early riser is to see the dawn of the world, the crepuscular beings. It’s good to rise early, first, to accomplish some work you love in that part of day, when the people up before you are quiet, too, and, second, to go out and see the wilderness of the early hours, for even cities are wild with creatures finishing their nocturnal activity and returning to trees or holes or other secret dens in places made by themselves or humans. And of course it is good to see the dawn. Many people see the sunset; fewer see the dawn.

In winter, too, you can rise and make an early fire or just light a candle.

Here in the Sonoran Desert, where I have come in January for a few days, or a couple of weeks, or even a whole month during the past 11 years, I walk to the mountain trails early most days, in my sweater and jacket. But the working people are up much earlier than I, the ones who come to maintain and clean the casitas, built in the 1990s in a kind of neighborhood setting, with a golf course and pool, dropped into an already inhabited place. The place is well-kept, but quiet. In the down-market times, many casitas, like the one where we stay, were sold to private owners.

I walk past the pool to mail postcards at the clubhouse, but other than that I spend little time on the pavement. I have come to know one particular trail in the Tucson Mountains, every curve of it and every view from it, as it appears in January, almost as well as I know my own trail by the river at home.

Along the crumbling blacktop road, I watch for javelina, who relish the leaves of prickly pear cactus and the pods of mesquite, planted thickly there as a landscape screen. The javelina ramble along the road in the morning in small herds with their babies, and I slow down and give them wide berth.

A quarter mile past the parking lot, beyond the high mounds of fill rock connecting the road to the mountain, the native desert edges in, and around the curve where two trails meet I reach a spot that the sun warms early, where white-crowned sparrows and cactus wrens and blue-gray gnatcatchers congregate, where a herd of mule deer often crosses, spreading out and browsing, before they crest the hill toward the golf course. On the trail, they are still wild, different from what they seem to become after they reach the greens, where the bow hunters cannot get to them. The javelina and the roadrunner and the Gambel’s quail will all come right to the patio for the scattered birdseed, and they seem to wear a sunlit guise of tameness there. But back in the hills, where I am walking again at dusk, I often see the deer returning, where they seems to shift back to their true shapes.

This desert is a place where the earth tumbled over and over again in fiery times, a treacherous place for a bike ride or a run, with spiked vegetation of all kinds and sharp rocks and trip hazards everywhere. But I have run miles here and walked even more.

At some point I began to build a tiny sculpture at a place just off the trail and return to it the following year to see if anything was left, or if passing creatures and weather had knocked it down. I know I am not supposed to do this and do not venture more than a few feet off the trail or change very much, but I do it. I stack and arrange bits of the scattered multicolored volcanic rock low to the ground so they might hold up better. Starting from a bit of fence that has been my turnaround point for short runs, I find a certain saguaro, and I build and rebuild my little structure at its base each year.

Farther on, the Rock Wren Trail connects with the Yetman Trail and the Little Cat, and then you have choices to make, and every choice means possibility and commitment. Tucson Mountain Park did not have a signage system until 2021, and more than once when I tried a short through-hike, mapped out at five or six miles, I got lost on the braided rogue bike trails and came out at a trailhead other than the one expected.

I haven’t gotten lost since the signs went in, and the rogue trails have diminished in number and in effect. The backs of the signs have become places where trail visitors leave stickers with messages (“Just rolling through watching society collapse”), as earlier people left petroglyphs on certain rocks.

The rock wren itself, the trail’s namesake, is an uncommon bird that loves this kind of place. One sang out behind me yesterday morning after I ran back outside around nine to find the pack of coyotes that was carrying on in the sunlight and moving toward the southeast on the other side of the clubhouse and the parking garage, which are low and hidden from view here. I started a voice recording on my phone and walked fast toward the sound until I saw them on a dry green beyond the wash. By the time I turned on my camera, they had gone silent. One trotted off out of sight, another—colored in patches, dark and light—followed, and a third appeared at the edge of some shrubs, their purpose a mystery. Maybe they were young and inexperienced. Maybe they were hungry after staying put during the dust storms of the day before.

Then behind me, the rock wren started its bright, repetitive call and hopped across the ground. Here it was, buffy underside and faintly striped breast, busy and musical and gone in a moment.

This desert has gotten into my system, as it did with my parents, who invited me here in the first place. But of all my family who have come here, only I keep an annual tryst with the Rock Wren Trail. I have many third places, but this one I visit, at least in my mind, every day of the year.