From miles away I see it glinting in the harsh sunlight.
Jeff and I are headed SOBO (southbound in the parlance of Arizona Trail hikers) on that stretch near Patagonia. For my money, it’s the most interesting small town in Arizona, boasting an award-winning library, community theater, opera house, radio station, arts cooperative, museum and a cafe where you might find the mayor pouring your coffee.
Today we are tracing ridges that connect the Santa Rita range, all 9,000 feet of it, with the grasslands of the Sonoita Creek watershed. This is a land of stately oaks and blue-green juniper, it’s home to literally dozens of native grasses, the ones that amazed Spanish explorers by growing, to steal a phrase from a certain movie that was filmed nearby, “as high as an elephant’s eye.”
Maybe you are having trouble squaring this image with the harsh deserts you find in so much of our state? Me too.
But for now, I’m obsessing over that big, glowing hunk of metal down there on the lowest ridge, the one we cross before exiting the trail at Casa Blanca Canyon. Even at this distance I can tell it’s cylindrical, like those giant tanks you see on gasoline trucks. Is it some kind of water container? The fuselage of a crashed jet?
We press on through the midday sun, and the thing radiates heat and light like a nuclear hot dog.
My chest is flooded with excitement, and a little fear, as it dawns in me. The narrowing ridgeline will force us to pass directly alongside the metal monster.
To Jeff and the larger universe, I mutter, “What the heck?”
An hour later, the mystery is solved. Sort of. The shining beast is in fact a huge metal cylinder — a hollow tube, some 20 feet long and 4 feet around, solidly planted on its side, as if dropped from the sky. But what’s it doing here, far from any road, serving no discernible purpose?
Gobsmacked by the hulking piece of trail trash, Jeff and I stare, touch the metal, peer inside the empty chamber.
Only later do we learn that other hikers are speculating online, swapping ideas about the source of this trail oddity. The most likely theory suggests the object did fall from the sky. Apparently, the tube dropped from a large aircraft, a container for fuel or maybe even weapons, attached to one of the giant cargo planes that operate out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, located in nearby Tucson.
I imagine the real-time reactions of witnesses to what must have seemed like a meteor crash, hikers or even range cows, meandering this grassy ridge on a quiet afternoon. Whether the big tube dropped by accident or due to some pilot’s malice towards Arizona Trail hikers, we can only speculate. The Air Force would not comment for this story. Well, maybe they would, but I never asked. Why ruin a good surprise?
Surprises drop into my city life too. As a young man, I never imagined moving to Texas and falling in love with a girl from Ohio. At work, I expected to be that teacher who overstayed his welcome and died at the lectern. But here I am, happily retired and hiking the Arizona Trail with my good friend Jeff, section by section. As life passed by, I gave up on the idea of being a grandfather. But then Alice appeared. At three years old, she is my youngest companion in exploring the mysteries of turtles, bugs, and gleaming objects large and small.
Of course, not all surprises are so pleasant. But I like knowing that even the most familiar path might lead to mysterious encounters, moments when only three words seem to suffice.
What the heck?
A former resident of Sonoita and frequent visitor to Patagonia, Vince Waldron writes about his adventures hiking the 800-mile Arizona Trail and living in the Borderlands. You can find Vince’s essays on his Natural Connections blog on Substack.