I found Barbara Harris in The Valley of the Sun—Scottsdale
2425 words
Barbara Harris: As an original member of The Second City, Barbara Harris pioneered improv, a true American artform. One of most original comedians and actresses of her day, she dazzled audiences with her downright supernatural ability to become different people, her stunning vulnerability, and mystery. She inspired the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, starred in The Apple Tree in 1967. She was nominated in 1971 for an Academy Award for Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying All Those Awful Things About Me opposite Dustin Hoffman. Most people might remember her as the mother in the original Freaky Friday.
The Valley of the Sun is in southern central Arizona. It is a large basin between many mountain ranges, and the Salt and Verde Rivers open wide like arms rushing to embrace it, only to disappear, become lakes in the north.
I remember the flat open road, how random everyone thought her choice was, Barbara’s, to live here. I remember the cacti like a woman in thick tights turned upside down, the sleek surface of Canyon Lake reflecting the red rock canyon walls full of legends and lore; the musky smell of creosote, burning wood and tar. The Tucsonians love it, it reminds them of the monsoons of the summers when the rain evaporates like magic before it hits the ground. Winds kicking up, dust clouds soar like primordial Gods ten thousand feet high. They roll in fast to swallow Phoenix and Scottsdale whole.
From the ashes rose the mountains that bear the flat city’s name: Phoenix. The bird that soared when everyone thought it has perished. I remember the rough tough White Tank Mountains of white granite in the west, full of enchantment, strife, and resilience. They were impressionable, could not hide what formed them. They inspired my imagination to project magical stories upon their rugged walls. In the south, the Sierra Estella Mountains made the postcard shot, their chalky ranges looked so cakey, like they could crumble to the human touch. The cliffs of Superstition Ridge stood tall above it all in the east, a supervolcano laid to rest in the cacti’s reverent arms. Between the Goldfield and McDowell Mountains, the Userys sang a simple, sweet lullaby, north of Mesa and east of Scottsdale, which is where Barbara Harris lived. I could see Camelback Mountain from her porch, perched above a parking lot as big as an ocean bone dry, like a premonition of a world to come. It looked like a hump. I watched the sun break in fractal rays as it fell and tucked away at the end of the day, colors blooming like orange and periwinkle, the air dry and special, the effect it had, the nights inky and dark, full of stars. The feeling I had, in my heart, that I was in a universe, Barbara Harris might have inspired it, drew it out of me. I really felt that way. Camelback is one in a scattering of mounts, buttes, peaks, and hills cutting through the valley.
The floor of the Valley of the Sun is flat because it was once at the bottom of shallow seas with corals, crinoids, and shellfish. Then, the earth’s core raged and roared. Like Hawaii, a series of volcanic islands collided with the North American craton—but whole pockets of its history remain a total mystery, just like Barbara’s.
The hard shell cracked open. Mountains rose. The moist air from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico was forced to rise with it—a trap—they sucked it dry. The Sonoran Desert sparked into twin flames in the plains of Sonora, Mexico, raged north, and went wild in Arizona. The Arizona Upland decided to remain and brew, a thornscrub. The Lower Colorado Valley blazed onwards, crossed the Colorado River, and spilled into southern California. It leaked down the narrow slip of Baja California to San Jose Del Cabo, the last stop before the sea. Nature is rarely neat.
The desert took shape. The evergreens and deciduous trees and ancestors of the bamboo, those that could, fled for the mountain slopes. Brash washed down from the Tonto Mountains in the North over time, wearing down the mountains, so they float, like bedrock islands upon a vast sea, a dusty dream born from erosion.
The valley sits on thousands of feet of alluvial fill, the mountains the tips of the millennia. If the sediment fell, we’d all fall a mile and a half deep. Steve Skotnicki used drill cuttings from water wells across Phoenix to dig deep into the ground in search of this prehistory. It seemed to me, gazing upon Camelback, packed with volcanic granite 1.6 billion years old, that nothing was solid, that the word “permanence” was full of poetry. The mountains were monuments to what shifts and changes. Connection takes time, communication a kind of translation. I tried to understand her, it, the forces of nature. Why are you tropical and dry, at the same time? Beneath my feet, I felt a settling. Nature is disorder, more so than ordered. The terrain made sense to lose it all over again.
Rain was infrequent and “capricious,” a character. In the dry heat, the desert baked under the golden sun, parched, until it cracked like skin into rivers that ran like veins through the valley, which made the Sonoran Desert rare, there’s water here, and she was, Barbara, rare, if not unique. Earth’s atmosphere circulated, made for cloudless, windless days. Droughts were the norm. Creosote bush had shallow and deep roots, as if toil bred intelligence, resilience, if not talent born from perseverance.
The rains prevailed. Patiently, they awaited the high pressure to weaken. Moisture slipped down the mountain. In the winter, las equipatas rains were stable, predictable “little packages.” In the summers, las aguas fell, “the waters,” a torrid affair.
Once Pacific moisture reached the desert in July, the humidity kicked up the temperature, a divine formula. The desert so hot, the moist air expanded and shot up in columns over fifty feet per second into the air: thermals. The rain that made it, touched ground, did so with great vigor. Where soil could absorb it, it did, but much of it rolled right off— in sheets. The flow roared through arroyos and flooded riverbeds in minutes, carrying sand, rocks, and plants, destroying banks and carving new stream channels. Merciless, nature was a wiseman. It didn’t feel bad. It was always so. Destruction and creation, a couplet.
I say that because my childhood was a natural disaster, seen and unseen. My parents were very ill. Barbara Harris was an indisputable genius with a mental illness, seen and unseen. She had family problems, whispered…over here. I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t so. And what was worse than the sediment was the sentiment.
This force, this rough runoff, gave back, in a way, gave the spadefoot a temporary pool, recharged the groundwater— a very important detail round here—Scottsdale has a good supply, for now. It irrigated Tohono O’odham squash fields bulbous and green. Bounty. The tropical cyclones could shred it all in the fall, smash stability and security. Chubascos — extremely violent storms — struck from the eastern part of the North Pacific. A great flood came. What giveth life, taketh away. Water, mud, debris, crushed homes, washed away roads. Nine people drowned trying to cross flooded washes. An aircraft got caught in downbursts and crashed, doomed. Those four people. No escape. And the drainage sags like an elder, soft and wrinkled, and drags towards the Gila River like it has nothing but time, time time time.
On both sides of the valley, rivers cut through the mountains, jagged and determined. The Gila gave birth to the Salt River that delivered 15,000 feet of “brash,” or fluvial deposits to the valley, filling it with rocks, silt, and sand. The Verde River rushed towards Sycamore Creek. Creeks cracked North. Green crawled out of the banks and clung on. The free-flowing Salt River fed by springs and seeps, home to many flapping fish, swelled and overflowed. Streets drowned. Steel buckled. A railroad bridge severed in two bobbed, people stranded. Men rushed faster than the flows to build many dams, hit the river with too many blows to understand. In the dry seasons, they endured, but now, at times, they do not flow at all. When the rain falls in flashes, the dams must open the gates — release the surge. There was danger in the wet seasons, but a more pernicious threat in the banks' thirst during the expanding dry seasons.
Around the valley, the topsoil varied, but the hottest desert of them all became the lushest of them all. The valley cracked open in a new way. The world turned inside out to show how soft and lovely it could be, among the brash. Flowers splashed. People traveled great distances at a moment’s notice—desperate.
It was the very end of March, the brink of spring, when I came to the valley to meet Barbara Harris. The Palo Verde trees, the official tree of Arizona, sighed softly, yellow clouds, along the highway.
The desert became a show not to be missed. They spread like the sweetest fire, orange and gold, and kissed me softly goodnight: Mexican poppies. Brittlebushs like daisies. Globemarrows with fuzzy leaves and buds like bowls. Desert marigolds, too. Mesquites opened in subtle colors in April. The ironwoods pucker their lilac lips under a billow of white hanging o’er them like a canopy, their fresh fragrance lingering in the hellish heat. And of course, cream. The saguaro cacti spouted a halo of cream trumpets, milky crumpled sheets. Nothing but layers, a person, and a good scene, too, since I learned a thing or two about it thanks to Barbara Harris just…being herself.
The saguaro flower awakened at dusk and wilted by the next afternoon, making its brief, touching song all the more precious and real. They smell like overripe melons.
A carpet of colors bled across the terrain, but I couldn’t believe the glossy mags, I read. The spectacular displays were rare, very rare, which she was, and very beautiful. The festival of flowers happened maybe every ten years, a realist said. A sensationalist chimed instead—spring is explosive! Flowers everywhere! And then the photographs: 1979, 1983. It depended. There were “flourishes and flops.” A cactus didn’t care, his stubby arms outstretched, letting it all go in a field of hot pink. On his own channel.
When their season was over, it was not yet over. Four weeks after the first rains of the summer, the heat produced the least pedaled, pretty things, and did not stop until the fall. There were the chirchweeds that spread like sunshine all the way to the Mohave, but we had the woodsy and ethereal Cinderella: the fairyduster, a pink starburst of the slimmest stamens, and the devil’s claw, the wood spider, that breathed air. Barbara was enchanted and enchanting but unusually.
“She was pink,” Mike Nichols said, but she was “sort of haunting and haunted,” Austin Pendleton said. An unusual blend of qualities, one I captured, for a brief fleeting moment in her living room at very end of March, the very end of her life, the brink of spring, though she died in August, the end of the summer.
In the winter, the poppies smiled, and all was well. Alice in Wonderland came to real life, yellow and orange. Lupins. Long cones of many buds purple and pink, they shot up like a revelation almost wet like paint. Like the tips of vegetal temples, they took over. Bouquets stemmed from brash. A phenomenon. How could it be, that a land so barren and parched, could be so fertile and floral? We forgot, we always do, that it always happened where we least expected it, the grandest shows of wildflowers opened in the most arid places like Baja and Gran Desierto. We forgot, we always do.
As water flowed through the valley, sycamores and cottonwoods flourished along the banks of rivers and creeks, home to trees and flowers one wouldn’t expect to find in the desert. Spots of colors taking off, birds flying towards the Verde like waterfowls: green, red, and yellow. Desert honeysuckle curled its petals, opened its heart so gently. People described Barbara Harris as fragile, delicate. I stood where all was vulnerable, as she was, that was her art. On the slopes somewhere out there, with northern exposures—mosses, liches, microorganisms. Everything was alive, not dead.
Inside their green flesh, beat a heart that dares to thrive, not survive. Rising tall, very tall, the columnar cacti. Reverent, curious, bewildered, confused, eager, deranged personalities; they made me laugh. Senitas like thickets, organ pipes like wild ideas, and the icons of the Sonora: the saguaro. Cacti have bones, fibers, that can store hundreds of gallons of water during the rainfalls. They sprout fingers—a sign of age. They can live up to 200 years. They get creative with headpieces. Against the rugged rock beige, brown, and even red, what a beautiful meeting of colors under a pale blue sky. Red-tailed hawks and woodpeckers nest here.
The valley land was layered and textured. In the foothills, the soil is expansive and, in others, dense, sticky clay. The clay washed down the mountain with running water into the lower portions of the valley. In the northeast of Mesa and Scottsdale, along the foothills, there was collapsible soil, soil made from silt and sand, which is loose. In Gilbert, Phoenix, and Mesa, the homes were built over a former farm field, it helped. There was a constant wetting for crops. The closer to the mountains you traveled, the older the deposits became, millions of years old. And the deeper you went, beneath the oldest layers, were thick, red soils underlain by accumulations of white caliche. And on the driest soils in the desert, the brash became a mosaic reminiscent of a cathedral with a varnish that shone in the sun, a microbe's defense strategy: just shine.
I have spoken of the two season rainfall that brought a festival of flowers in the spring, the wet years, the dry years, the flash floods, and haboobs; I have spoken of the forgetting, how we never learn from history. The end was coming, this we always knew, for certain, it was coming — doom, no matter what. We were doomed, at every turn. “This time it’s different.” The waters that run around the valley are drying up, stripped, the fish that called this desert home, pupfish, are endangered. Everything changed, nothing changed. The Sonoran was always expanding, contracting, redefining itself.
And that was the long Valley of the Sun in the Sonoran Desert. “Its history was like that of the rest of the state.” First there were the “Indians” or indigenous people—to bypass around Steinbeck’s racist ideology— then the Spaniards, and then, of course, Barbara Harris, a comedian who merited a real debut. She wouldn’t have minded if the entire encyclopedia preceded her…she would already be gone, at A.
This land had a most violent debut. Our ear drums would have exploded, bled, we wouldn’t have been able to stand here, we would have been slapped out of existence, a surge of hot white red magma obliterating the breath of our existence. Just a picturesque shot.
I didn’t know. Neither did she.
McDowell Mountains just collapsed during the Ice Age, 25.8 billion pounds fell and detonated an atomic bomb: an avalanche of unimaginable power. I stood, in Tom’s Thumb, staring at these breathtaking boulders. Isn’t it amazing what can happen? You are so much more than you think you are, that’s who she played. The least likely to succeed.
She wandered off the street, one day, fresh out of high school, into an abandoned Chinese restaurant in Chicago where the future Second City lived and rehearsed. “They had their own booths, you know?” She said, and they would pioneer an American artform. Without them, Saturday Night Live wouldn’t exist.
Sensational the desert, isn’t it? Inherently mysterious, the cacti nature’s clowns, their mutable shapes, like inkblots. The majesty, the stature, Steinbeck — Scottsdale— the punchline. Her intangible quality. She was an American classic.