By Jim Cook,
Official State Liar of Arizona.

Big Jake, my older brother, was the first lumberjack at the Petrified Forest.

Jake never got much smarter. While he has not prospered, he has always added flavor to our family.

However, Jakes does tend to carry on about his one remaining goal in life: The establishment of Arizona Dust Storm National Park.

Jake thought he had it made when Bill Clinton was president. You may remember that near the end of his term, Clinton set aside several places he thought should be preserved as national parks and monuments.

When George W. Bush was elected president, he rescinded a bunch of Clinton’s executive orders. Jake tried to get the ear of President Barack Obama, but the Secret Service made him give it back.

Big Jake’s obsession dates back to the Great Dust Spill of 1935, which covered an area the size of Utah. In fact, much of the spill became Utah.

You’ve seen these desert dust storms. They’re awesome, especially with the sun behind them. They are best viewed from a distance of about twenty miles, which gives you time to cover your pool and bring your lawn furniture inside.

Then put yourself indoors, because being inside an Arizona dust storm is like trying to breathe inside a cinder block.

I’ve seen walls of dust that appeared as tall as the Estrella Mountains, and they reached from the Estrellas to the White Tanks. While the pig is not the most aerodynamic of animals, he can fly under the power of an Arizona dust storm.

Most dust storms come out of the southwest and go curving northeast, the direction of the prevailing wind hereabouts. Rotation is clockwise.

However, there’s a phenomenon known as the “desert monsoon.” We used to call them summer rains. Then some cerebral types noticed that around June 15, the rotation switches to counterclockwise, similar to the rotation of the monsoons over the Indian Ocean. TV weather forecasters added “monsoon” to their vocabulary; Big Jake never did.

Jake vividly remembers that fateful June 15, 1935, and he’ll be happy to tell you about it in great detail. He was a young man, and he had a job painting stripes on pavement. He felt lucky to have a government job in the last days of The Great Depression.

The idea of painting centerlines was new back then. Engineers had just figured out that a center stripe worked best if the road was paved first. The stripes were painted by hand, with brushes.

Big Jake was painting a stripe down the middle of the Old Yuma Road when he saw a wall of dust coming at him, rising majestically above Buckeye. Jake and the rest of the crew took cover under their work truck, so they wouldn’t be blown away.

At that moment, the air currents changed their rotations. The monsoon had started, and counterclockwise air off the Gulf of Mexico ran head-on into the clockwise dust storm.

Jake said there was a brief, deathly stillness in the air. He talks dramatically about how the spill changed the face of Arizona. Digging out Glendale was a shovel-ready federal job.

The part of the story I like best is how the stripe that Jake had been painting landed in a field at Las Cruces, New Mexico, where it became the municipal airport.

In the 1950s, the Trailways bus station in Flagstaff was housed in the railroad depot. Many nights, I sat in a cafe across the street, drinking coffee with my buddies and talking about our dreams of the future.

If black people got off the Trailways bus and started toward the cafe, the proprietress met them at the door. She told them she couldn’t serve them.

The African-Americans did not act surprised, or outraged. They were refused service all across America. Many of us sensed that it was wrong, but accepted it as the way of the world–bigotry by default.

A black person needed to carry his food with him when he traveled. He also could not rent a hotel room, except in cities large enough to support black-only hotels. That discrimination was ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, also known as the Voting Rights Act.

Now there’s a Senate candidate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, who thinks the Civil Rights Act should have excluded private businesses which wanted to discriminate against people of color.

Whatever your politics, you’ll probably agree with me that lately, the world has been getting crazier faster. Your definition of “crazier” may be different than mine, and that’s fine. This is America–so far.

During my years as a journalist, I reported on the movements of the time as they came along: the civil rights movement, the protest against the Vietnam war, the women’s movement. Things moved more slowly then, but they tended to move forward.

I was optimistic, but I also was naive. It didn’t take long to realize that whatever gains are made, new bigots are spawned every day. We are all born ignorant. Some of us try to get over it, and others pass it on to their children.

Furthermore, the idea of freedom scared the living hell out of some conservative Americans and their institutions. At this moment, educators in Texas are trying to rewrite school history books to represent a conservative bias.

I believe that I wrote the first serious article about women’s liberation in Arizona. I didn’t intend for it to be serious, but an organizer for the women’s movement made so much sense that she didn’t leave me room to be snide. Those were the days when women mentioned in news articles were not allowed first names; a woman was identified as “Mrs. John Somuch.”

The organized warned me that I would receive more complaints from women than from men. She was right. The housewives of Mesa were furious. I had challenged their traditional roles. But over the years, I watched several traditional women demand equality, fight for it, accept it as their due.

I came to understand that there are always people and institutions that would drag us back into the Nineteenth Century.The coal industry has come close.

There are people in Congress who bang on their high chairs in front of CNN cameras every time someone suggests governance that does not favor their favorite contributing industry. Some of these guys can’t even have a civil discourse with themselves.

Any measure that suggests a more beneficial relationship between a taxpayer and his government is called “socialism,” and in some cases it is. Social Security sure isn’t classic capitalism. That would be British Petroleum.

Despite ourselves, we have come a long way since 1964. In general, more people are more equal than they used to be. The knuckle-draggers have slowed progress, but they haven’t stopped it.

So now we have a candidate for the U.S. Senate who thinks the Voting Rights Act of 1964 went too far. It would be easy to ignore him, but I suspect he has a lot of friends out there. Still.

By Jim Cook
Official State Liar of Arizona

Long-time friend Steve Auslander of Tucson wrote, “I wonder whether being an official state liar means the lies one tells are official lies. If it is so, then should not the lie bear some official status, such as a stamp declaring that the lie is official?”

This is what our design staff came up with:

Steve wrote a learned discourse on obfuscation, prevarication, equivocation, and the body waste of male cattle. We only have room to repeat the flattering part:

“I must say I am a big fan and am certain that in time your efforts will be recognized, even extolled, as developing an entire academic discipline, as developing an intellectual paradigm, a cosmic shift of cross-discipline study that will bear enormous fruit. Then doctoral graduates of Factual Diversity will fructify the land with wise counsel.”

That’s what we’re striving for, from multiple platforms.

Spinning the Roundabout: My brother Dean, who lives in Glendale, e-mailed the Arizona Department of Transportation about a mound of earth in the middle of a new roundabout. The roundabout lets drivers escape the U.S. 93 bypass and enter downtown Wickenburg.

Dean’s e-mail: “The roundabout on the east end of the U.S. 93 bypass at Wickenburg has a dangerous design flaw. The mound in the center of the roundabout prevents traffic entering from the west on U.S. 60 from seeing incoming traffic on U.S. 93, making it nearly impossible to merge safely, particularly since the U.S. 93 traffic is moving rapidly.”

ADOT’s response: “The mound in the center of the roundabout is designed to block entering traffic from seeing oncoming traffic, while allowing enough sight distance for drivers to determine an acceptable gap in traffic to enter the intersection.

“This mound helps to reduce speeds at the roundabout and provide greater intersection visibility to drivers as they approach the intersection. Roundabouts without center island mounding or other sight obstructions have experienced issues with motorists driving thru the intersection without slowing down because they focus their attention to the road beyond the intersection and not notice the intersection.”

Jacking up the fish: Friends Dick Thomas of Phoenix and Marti Fischer of Scottsdale, acting independently, sent this story:

“I finally got around to going fishing this morning, but after a while, I ran out of worms.

“Then I saw a cottonmouth with a frog in his mouth, and frogs are good bass bait. Knowing the snake couldn’t bite me with the frog in his mouth, I grabbed him right behind the head, took the frog and put it in my bait bucket.

“Now the dilemma was how to release the snake without getting bitten. I grabbed my bottle of Jack Daniels and poured a little whiskey in its mouth. His eyes rolled back, he went limp, I released him into the lake without incident, and carried on my fishing, using the frog.

“A little later, I felt a nudge on my foot.

“There was that same snake with two frogs in his mouth.”

That gave me the idea of using Jack Daniels as bait to catch sand trout. They swim through the sand of the dry Hassayampa River, just as other trout swim through water.

I’ve been using water for bait, but Jack Daniels, seeping through the sand, might attract more fish. I’ll let you know.

The tsunami set off by the earthquake in Chile didn’t do much damage around the Pacific Rim, but it did cause a river surge in the Hassayampa.

A wave of sand half a meter high surged out of the Gila River near Arlington and rolled up the Hassayampa as far as Morristown, smashing against seven million acres of tumbleweeds.

We don’t have many big events like that around here. And yet we live by the weather, or lack of it. As we see reports of blizzards and flooding elsewhere in the country, and catastrophes worldwide, we feel ever more grateful to live here. Miss Ellie, a northern California girl, says she doesn’t miss the earthquakes and mudslides. Mudslides are rare in Arizona, and very dusty.

We did have heavy storms off the Pacific about a month ago. We measured more than five inches of rain here at the institute, which qualifies as a weather phenomenon. The Hassayampa got all wet.

Now, vast stretches of desert are emerald green, and we figure the rain sets us up for a spectacular season of desert wildflowers, starting any day.

As a matter of fact, I was out looking for early wildflowers the other day, which is why I know about the river surge in the Hassayampa. I was alongside the river, just north of Buckeye, when the sand began rippling back out toward the Sea of Cortez.

Frankly, I was lost. That also was because of the recent storms. The rain stirred up the boogie bushes (Meanderous adios), which move from place to place on a whim, looking for wetter places to extend their shallow roots.

I thought I was driving north on Vulture Mine Road. But a big boogie bush that I use as a landmark had moved across the road from west to east, nudging up alongside a damp wash.

My subconscious, acting out of habit, told me that if that bush was on my left, I must be driving north. (The Arizona Woolgatherers Association meets here Wednesdays.)

I didn’t realize my error until I was almost to Buckeye. That’s when the wave of sand rippled past, also heading south.

Desert wildflowers should get a big boost from saguaros this spring. As you know, a saguaro is basically a water-storage machine. Its accordion-pleated hide allows it to expand and suck up water, as much as 200 gallons from a single storm.

After the recent storms, some of the saguaros found they had taken on too much water. They’ve been squirting water out of their “ears,” the holes left by woodpeckers and butcher birds.

When I was driving the wrong way on Vulture Mine Road, I saw a couple of saguaros that looked like they were having a water fight.

All that sprinkling can’t help but promote wildflowerism. I’m going back there in a few days to see if the cacti have raised a garden of gold poppies.

By Jim Cook
Official State Liar of Arizona

I came home from our winter tour of Lapland with terrible respiratory problems. The staff in the emergency room here in  Wickenburg couldn’t believe that I got sick while being chased by wolves.

Now, as I sit here hacking and coughing and blowing permafrost out  my ears, I know that the trip was worth it.

I always wanted to see Lapland. It started in the fourth grade, when I saw photographs in geography books of the native people posing stiffly beside their reindeer.

Engineers from the Wickenburg Institute for Factual Diversity had to go to Lapland to road-test the new Hyundai Hypothesis. Miss Ellie and I went along.

The Hypothesis, a mid-sized SUV, is designed to run on a fuel that hasn’t yet been invented. Attempts to turn permafrost into fuel are not promising, but we needed to test the vehicle under arctic conditions. 

Since the Hypothesis engine is still a theory, we borrowed the engine from a Hyundai Tucson. We used the same powerplant to test the Hypothesis on the harsh deserts of southwestern Arizona last July. For the Lapland tests, we had to install four-wheel-drive skis.

You probably remember from grade school that Lapland is a blanket name for a region that spreads from Russia across Finland, Sweden and Norway. (Blankets are recommended). But to confuse me, Finland has an actual political subdivision called Lapland, a province squeezed between Russia and Sweden.

The indigenous people of Lapland do not like to be called “Laps” or “Lapps.”  That’s like calling an Apache a “Redskin.”

The natives of Lapland are Sami people, the oldest indigenous culture  in northern Europe, and a rich culture it is. They do Sami dancing, not Lap dancing.

Some Samis still herd reindeer, but others are right up-town, working in mills, electronics factories, banks and bistros. One morning when it was 76 degrees below zero, we saw a man walking down the street on snowshoes, carrying one of those little red ”designer” laptops. The computer turned blue in the cold.

We were never out of sight of tourists. Apparently, a lot of people share my curiosity.

We hired a Sami support crew, with their reindeer, their sled dogs, their snowmobiles. From our base in Enari, Finland, our little caravan headed into the wilderness, going east toward Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Only the tops of trees were poking out through the snow, which must have been twelve feet deep.

We were not far out of Murmansk when the Hypothesis quit cold. No one could figure out why. It’s the kind of thing your car will do when there’s no mechanic around. But we had a factory-trained Sami mechanic with us. His best guess was that gasoline was retreating to its nice warm tank, refusing to go meet the fuel injectors. Samis employ a good deal of mysticism to explain life. 

We put a sled under each corner of the Hypothesis, and  hitched up twenty reindeer to pull it. Miss Ellie had always had a secret wish to drive sled dogs, so the Samis fixed her up with a team. I followed along on a Finnish kicksled powered by one big reindeer.

We traveled rather slowly and sedately, until the bears came at us. There must have been a dozen of those big critters. They were grizzlies of the 800-pound kind, and they looked hungry.

We whipped up the reindeer and the sled dogs, and sped back toward Finland. The bears were gaining on us. Riding out there alone on my kicksled, I thought I was sure to be devoured. I could feel one big bear’s breath on my neck. He grabbed the scarf off my neck, which is probably why I have bronchitis. 

Then we heard the wolves. There must have been 40 of them, coming up on us fast. We didn’t know if the wolves were hunting us, or the bears, but they were howling and yipping and slavering, and we didn’t want to stop and ask their intentions.  

We were now sandwiched between thundering bears and slavering wolves. Bears were starting to pass me. I whipped up my reindeer and herded the hindmost bear off ro the left, around a little knoll. Sure enough, the wolves followed.

Our Sami crew chief saw what I had in mind. He went around the other side of the knoll, steering the Hypothesis behind its reindeer train. The bears followed him.

Our party hurried to the top of the knoll so that we could watch as bears and wolves met head-on. We expected a gory sight, but it was not like that. Traditionally, bears and wolves are not supposed to meet that way. They stalk each other.

They seemed confused and embarrassed. The bears sneaked back toward Russia, and the woves skulked off in the direction of Sweden.

It was a memorable experience, but I’m finnished with Lapland, and Miss Ellie says there’s Norway she’ll ever drive a dog sled again.