Week 2 has finally dawned on our great Western adventure, and while I don’t have much to report, a few interesting things have transpired. The change of pace between DC and Tucson is stark. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to imagine that it’s the heat. A person just can’t do very much when the sun is beating down and the temperature is in the triple digits. It saps your energy. People here move slower, talk slower, drive slower, and do pretty much everything slower. And by the looks of things, most of the homes on this side of town have nothing but swamp coolers, which offer little relief from the summer scorch. For example, right now, it’s 100F outside, but it’s 89F here in the house. In the shade. That 11 degree difference is appreciated, but I’ll still need someone to peel me off the couch when I’m done writing this. (Yes, in case you were wondering – it’s leather.)

Come to think of it, maybe not everything is slower than back East. Seems as though people here – plenty of them anyway – have a slow, deliberate death wish. The people of South Tucson appear drawn to the hard life. If you can smoke it, shoot it, snort it, or drink it, and it alters your state of mind (and your dental work) then you can find it here. I met a man yesterday who runs a nursing home in a nicer part of town. He told me he’s having to deal with employees – young men in their 20s – who are smoking heroin. He was beside himself with disbelief at how they care so little about their lives.

For my part, in the short time I’ve had to observe, it seems often to be the case that despite being in the minority, white people here are often in the worst shape. Baked by the sun (and a few other things) many of them seem to be stumbling about, shriveled and reddened like sun-dried tomatoes, looking, one can only assume, for their teeth. Not a few of them look like they’re more than a little bit crazy. (Can’t help but wonder, all things considered, if I don’t fall into that category myself…)

Last week, we shook most of the last remnants of whatever virus we had picked up en route to Arizona, and with some energy coming back and fevers and unsightly throat lesions fading away, we were able to start getting some things done.

I spent most of the day Friday at the VA hospital with a family member, getting a front-row seat to what government-run health-care will look like. What was supposed to be a routine post-surgical followup turned into a five hour journey through bureaucracy. I kid you not when I tell you that it was nearly a spitting image of your friendly neighborhood DMV. We got sent down for a “stat” (as in, “immediate”) X-Ray (fortunately the nurse practitioner wanted to get out at noon, so she cut some red tape) only to find that in radiology, you were handed a ticket by an old-timer as you walked in the door. The room was filled to overflowing with poor, bedraggled guys who were either on oxygen or clinging to walkers (or both), waiting as the one person in receiving cycled slowly through them. There was a computer display with the standard automated DMV female voiceover, intoning every few minutes over the loudspeaker, “Now serving number two-three-one, at window number three.”

The nurse escorting us asked if we could get in quickly, because of the “stat” order, and the attendant apologetically huffed, “You’re going to have to go down the hall to imaging. I’ve got 16 people ahead of you!” Based on the questions I was hearing, it also seemed likely that these people had had their X-Rays scheduled ahead of time. Perhaps days ahead of time, not just hours. It was hard to be sure.

As we walked down the hall, I looked into various glass-enclosed waiting rooms where the same DMV-style window system was in place, the in-hospital pharmacy among them. In each case, the rooms were beyond capacity, the overflow as too few attendants dealt with too many patients spilling out into the hall. All the while, the disembodied computer voice droned through the ticket numbers as the crowds were whittled down.

Upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs. We went back and forth for this test and that, each time being shoved out without further instructions. Once, we were told to wait in the upstairs lobby, only to find out an hour-and-a-half later that we were supposed to go back downstairs again for another exam. The nurse tried to blame me, but I had asked her – twice – where we were supposed to wait, and followed her instructions precisely. I also checked twice at the desk over the duration of the waiting period when we were supposed to go downstairs again, only to be told that they would call us when we were ready.

The system was anything but efficiency at its finest. There was an overall lack of professionalism, from the nurses in plain clothes (not scrubs) to the fact that in that entire five hours, we never even saw a doctor, only nurses and technicians. Ironically, I’d classify the hospital in question as having fairly nice facilities and kind staff. It wasn’t Walter Reed, it was just riddled with bad procedures. It does not bode well for our future if this is where things are going.

Friday evening we came back to a too-warm house (91 inside instead of 89, dontcha’ know…) and I got my first look inside a swamp cooler. Up on the roof, I saw the system up close, “squirrel cage” a’ spinning as we snaked out the “spider legs” that distribute water into the cooling pads. Still not sure what was blocking them, but there’s a lot of dirt in the system, I can tell you that. (And if you think the components make it sound like it may have been used as a medieval torture device, I’d hazard a guess that you may, in fact, be right.)

The house we’re in belonged to Jamie’s mom before she died, and now belongs to her dad. Her mom was a bit of a pack rat, and consequently, the house has quite an accumulation of stuff – much of it junk – that needs to be dealt with to make it livable. Saturday, we spent the morning cleaning out rooms. I then went out and moved a bunch of furniture from one house to another in the sweltering heat. At about 110 degrees outside, it was not my cup of scalding tea, but you’ve got to get used to it. If you always wait for it to get cooler (which is limited to early mornings and later evenings) you’ll never get anything accomplished.  After the furniture was done, I went through our pods, looking for the items we need in the house while trying to craftily re-pack what we don’t need back into storage.

In a place with no naturally occurring grass, dust and grit are a huge problem. They coat everything if you don’t stay on top of it. We had to get the carpet replaced in one of the bedrooms after we discovered that the old one was so dirty we couldn’t get it clean after multiple shampooings). With that out of the way, we set up the kids’ beds in there – one set of bunks, one twin. All said and done, I didn’t finish up until after dark on Saturday. The next morning,  as I weighed myself, I realized that I’d lost seven pounds since being here. Most of it no doubt due to the heat. I can’t seem to drink enough water to replace what I’ve lost. Bourbon either, for that matter…but that’s another story.

I can’t say I’ve gotten used to being here yet. When I was up on the roof last Friday, just before the setting sun, I had a chance to survey my surroundings. Ever see City of God?  We may not be camped out in the slums of Rio, but there’s enough here to remind me of it. From up high, I could see almost nothing but trailers, many of them owned by my family, stretching off in every direction. Boarded up, torn apart, covered in graffiti – these are the landmarks of  my immediate future.  This was a once-functional facility, but was allowed over time to fall into ruin by Jamie’s mom, who unfortunately just didn’t know how to run it. Now, to rehab or not to rehab, to sell or hope that the Great Tornado in the Sky cometh and taketh away, these are, among others, the questions that face us.

And until we sort them out, every day will be punctuated by the reminders of where we are: the F18s roaring past to land at Douglas AFB, the rooster across the street that crows at all hours, the sub-woofers of the gangbangers, the padlock and chain on the rusted pink gate that guards the entrance to the property, the empty, soulless, smashed-out windows and wind-banged screen doors of the dilapidated dwellings around us.

Thank heaven for the good things: good (and cheap) bourbon at the end of a long day, Chinese dim sum, Mexican street food, piano lessons for Kiana, austere  mountains, billowing clouds, and sunsets that look as though they were painted by God’s own hand. Finding the things that are worth seeing and doing is what will make this work.

And there’s a rumor we may even get air conditioning…