I grew up as a military brat (Coast Guard brat, specifically), so my family moved to a different part of the country every two or three years. I think that nomadic lifestyle has shaped my love for seeing different parts of America. In fact, I’m more interested in discovering the mysteries of, say, Kansas City than I am interested in exploring Paris, France.

During the weekend of Thanksgiving Leslie and I visited her father, Vern, in Tucson, Arizona. Vern has lived in Tucson for the last three years and this was our first real chance to spend some time with him out west. I’d never been to Tucson so I didn’t know exactly what to expect.

Fortunately, my good buddy Fred Mills, editor at Blurt Online Magazine, lived in Tucson for over a decade. I asked him to make a list of things to see and do while in Tucson and he came up with a great list of about 20 essentials.

A mountain lioness at the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson.

The first thing on Fred’s list that Leslie and I did was have brunch at the Club Café at the historic Hotel Congress in downtown Tucson. Built in 1919 to serve the growing cattle industry and railroad passengers of the Southern Pacific Line, the Hotel Congress is the site of one of the most intriguing criminal captures in America. On January 22, 1934 a fire started in the basement of the hotel forcing the evacuation of all of the guests, including the notorious John Dillinger gang that was “laying low” on the third floor after a series of bank robberies. Members of the gang tipped two firemen to retrieve their luggage, later revealed to contain $23,816 in cash and a small arsenal. One the firemen later recognized the gang from a description in True Detective Magazine and contacted the police. Within hours, the small Tucson Police Department had achieved what hundreds of FBI agents had not, and without a single shot fired. After his capture, Dillinger muttered, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

Later that year, Dillinger escaped from the “ecape-proof” Lake County jail in Crown Point, Indiana using a fake pistol carved from a piece of soap and blackened with shoe polish. Exactly six months after the fire at the Hotel Congress, Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Tucson receives an average of 12 inches a rainfall per year, mainly in the late summer and early fall. During the first two days we were in the city we saw more than two inches fall at Vern’s place. This unusual circumstance provided us with some spectacular visions of desert rainbows and low gray clouds hanging over the bone white mission churches. You could practically see flowers bloom in front of your eyes as plants soaked up the rain.
Speaking of plants, a lot of easterners have this idea that the deserts of the Southwest are just big sandboxes with the occasional tumbleweed rolling by. While it is true that there are not as many trees in Tucson, the place is filled with strange forms of vegetation that have carved out little niches in the arid environments of the desert.

The Sonoran Desert Museum 10 miles west of downtown Tucson is a fantastic place to learn how different plants and animals make their homes in the arid Southwest. The place has indoor and outdoor exhibits and caves where you can see how the desert used to be a giant inland sea. The outdoor exhibits include live desert predators such as mountain lions, bobcats and ocelots.

Unfortunately, not all of the parks of the greater Tucson area were as beautiful as the Sonora Desert. We visited the Coronado National Forest just northeast of Tucson the day after Thanksgiving. It is in the Catalina Mountains and features fantastic views of the city of Tucson and its surrounding vistas. Coronado allows sportsmen to bring rifles and all terrain vehicles (ATVs) into the park and therein lies the problem. The park is littered with spent shotgun shells, broken beer bottles and other forms of trash.

The saguaro cacti in Coronado, some of which are hundreds of years old, have been shot with guns and pelted with rocks. The scarred old cacti of Coronado stand in stark contrast to their majestic brethren in other park areas around Tucson. It just goes to show you that ignorance and selfishness are problems in all parts of our country.

Counties in Arizona are as big as some eastern states and Tucson’s Pima Country is over 9,000 square miles in area. The county stretches over 100 miles from east to west and last year its population surpassed 1 million for the first time. The county has seen a nearly 20% increase in population over the past decade. You could say people are dying to get there…and you would be right, unfortunately. Because Pima County shares a border with Mexico, it is one of the hot spots for illegal immigrants looking for work in the United States. According to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, 272 unidentified bodies of illegal immigrants have been found in the southern part of the county from 2005 to 2008. That’s a heartbreaking number when you contemplate that each of these persons has a family who wonders what happened to them.

I found Tucson to be a magical city from the old downtown area to the University of Arizona campus to the saguaro-filled outskirts. It makes me eager to visit some other American places I have yet to see.