Agua Caliente Park

 We live just off the Catalina Highway. We can get on the highway in minutes, and be heading up the winding road some 8000 feet to the top of Mt. Lemmon. The scenery is stupendous as we climb up through life-zone after life-zone from the flat desert at the bottom to the coniferous forest at the top. But it is more than visual: It is our dial-a-climate. At this time of year when we we have day-after-day of  100-degrees we can watch the temperature in the car fall to whatever temperature we want as we reach higher altitudes. By the time we are at the top it has dropped down into comfortable 70s. 

There are wonderful mountain trails to walk, and we were originally looking for one for a suitable place for a daily walk, but many are steep and rugged, and at our age sometimes you want something easier going. That's when we discovered Agua Caliente Park. "Agua Caliente" means "Warm Springs." It's an astonishing place, an oasis in the midst of the desert, from water welling up. The vegetation outside the park is cactus and cholla; inside the park it is aquatic grasses and hundred-year-old date palms. At the entrance to the park you come to a big lake followed by a chain of smaller lakes joined by smooth, level paths. We only had to walk around the paths one time before we looked at one another and said "This is it." The clincher was, it only took us eight minutes from our house to get there. 

 Nature is encouraged, and when we arrive we are always watching to see what new birds are passing through. But in general people come there to walk their dogs, and dogs like their walks daily, and following a daily routine, and so the dogs' owners are forced into the same routines. We don't have a dog but this is a friendly place.  Everyone on the path has a friendly "Good morning," and their dogs, wagging their tails, pull on their leads to come over to you to have their ears scratched, and that is followed by a discussion about what kind of dog and so on, and when you come the next day and see the same person with the same dog you have already the makings of a new friend. Pretty soon you know all the regulars and their dogs, and they know you.

Since you are not climbing the mountain, the daily heat needs to be handled another way: We get up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning (this is now every day, unless there is some necessary interruption) and drive straight to the park without breakfast, and try to get all our exercise-walking done (by about 830) before it really begins getting hot. The trick is to get it done, and still get a chance to chat with our growing accumulation of friends.

You see, living out here on the scattered edges of northern Tucson, as most of us do, we have protected ourselves from Covid by avoiding the downtown crowds and either staying in the bubbles of our families, or walking in this wide open airy park. As to the people, the dog-walkers, this is our society, in fact it is our social life. And this seems to be enough.