THE ZEN OF AJO

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pericles of Athens declared, “All good things on this Earth flow into the City”. There’s truth in that statement but countless not-so-good things are also found in cities. It follows that many people are called out of cities to find the natural places of the earth. They seek the solace of pristine forests or glistening seashores, if only for an afternoon or maybe a few days. Some folks are drawn to the deserts. This has been my experience. 

Since I was a boy I’ve loved the deserts of the American Southwest and have spent twenty years of my life living in various parts of the vast outlands of Arizona and New Mexico. During my late teens I attended Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. One evening I went out with a couple other guys on a blind date with three Sorority sisters. It was an innocent time in the early 1960s. We were all scrubbed clean, the boys wore sports coats and ties while the girls wore tasteful summer dresses. I mention this only to say that my blind date, Susan, was an attractive and bright young lady who was born and raised in the town of Ajo, Arizona. I had never heard of Ajo and when I asked her about it she only said she was glad to be out of there and was never going back. We didn’t hit it off that night and I never saw Susan again.

More than a half century had passed when I made my first winter camp with the Gypsywagen at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in 2020. The camp is located in western Arizona along the Mexican border. As it happens, this place is 30 miles south of Ajo, Arizona. It seemed ironic, really. All my life I carried the fragment of that memory of Susan and her antipathy towards Ajo. So I figured I’d drive up there and maybe see what she was talking about. 

Like the saying goes, “There’s the idea of a thing and then there’s the thing itself”. What I had thought would be a bleak, dystopian Siberia turned out to be something quite different. I found Ajo to be a fascinating oasis in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The town contains beautiful architecture from it’s halcyon days as a copper mining boom town. The mining operations closed down in 1985. Today the population of about 3,000 souls is half of what it was thirty five years ago. The town is impeccably clean with modest homes on streets with lights and sidewalks. A house I saw last week recently sold for $45,000.

The people of Ajo, the ones I’ve met so far are thoughtful and pleasant. Something I find interesting is that so far I’ve met no one who speaks of wanting to get out of Ajo, never to come back. More than this, the town has evolved a nascent art colony with handsome murals on the walls of many of the downtown buildings. Local Art galleries and the Curley School Artisan Apartments form an impressive core for things to come. 

My camp south of town is a haven of rest where I’ve gotten to know a small group of émigrés in this area. Some of them gather on Saturday evenings for campfire meetings. I so enjoy these gatherings and will miss them when I return to New Mexico next week for scheduled cataract surgeries.

There’s so much more to learn about this place. I plan to return in the Autumn to hunker down here for awhile. Who knows, it may be longer than awhile. So to that young lady with whom I spent that evening all those years ago, I’m grateful for the seed she planted in my consciousness. I guess none of us can ever know the ripple effects of our lives.