Ajo's Burning by Vince Nuzzo

              ​ Raquel Baranow CC



Ajo's Burning

​These heroin addicts in the southwest border town of Ajo, Arizona, like so many across this country and on this great globe, are like heroin ghosts. They may or may not see you and you can barely see them, they're there alright but it takes a trained eye to catch a glimpse, like the guy with his blankie over his shoulder in the gravel alley by the house that burned down the night before making a quick bend down to see if it was a coin or bottle cap.

As I walked back up the arroyo on my daily stroll after seeing the old, jet black O'Odham Indian looking for his drunk wife's phone she lost the night before, assuring him I'd leave it by the big rock on the trail if I found it on my way back, I thought man, what is the purpose of us humans when all we do is overrun everyone and everything?

I'm sitting watching Ajo burn, burndown for all I know. Some few blocks away what must be a house is on fire, my nostrils fill with electrical and plastic smoke, just heinous while I'm trying to grill out with the weather finally fair, kindly warm, the full worm moon on the rise here on a sultry southern Arizona march night. Poor me. Makes me wonder what is place, where is home, who are my people as I ride this adventure on the edge of this "country." I know my home will always be wandering, I will always be looking for it and finding it over and over again since I left my beautiful little suburban upbringing with my gone World War II Dad and depression-era Mother in the heartland of Madison, WI; was that really my home?

Now I'm dancing with my shadow against the Sonoran sunburnt pine fence like an acid head I saw a picture of in a Time Life encyclopedia book when I was a pre-LSD kid, a stranded desert isle Tom Hanks, face painting and propping up a flotsam-jetsam volleyball on the empty beach as his best friend.


My writing process is--at least for today--constantly trying to stop myself from writing, sometimes even using the liquor and music to quash it, but that backfires too, until I just can't stem the tide, then I deal with it and try again to stop it but then it's way too late.

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Running for my life through the tinseled, twinkling, brightly colored synapses of my mind, lost in forests of pain, ecstasy, fear and confusion, I continue to write.


There's the wicked, haunting pangs of the phrases you let slip away, having turned your back on them, thinking they'd be there when you turned around again, when you felt like it...if even only seconds or minutes later, that once sweet, succulent lyrical mistress can be gone and blows a cruel, empty, cold wind through your head, maybe til death.


Ajo keeps burning and the worm Moon keeps rising and the Coyote runs under the streetlight and chases the sirens towards the fire, it's only six blocks away? A young Mexican girl's voice shouts, it's a fire, it's a fire! Fuego!


Where is home? As modern day soul man JJ Grey sings, it may be on the blackwater swamps of Lochloosa, an imaginary line between here and there, and for now it may be here in the other south, the deep Rocky Mountain rattlesnake infested Sonoran desert.

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Next day, I drive by the scene of the fire, the Lopez family has lost their house, shed and all their possessions, but they're alive under a blue tarp sitting on salvaged lawn chairs.

I'll be leaving Ajo soon, heart of the beloved Sonoran desert, headed back up north to work. I don't want to leave, I want to stay and continue to write and get a dirt bike and rip around the desert in the heat of summer, experience it with the locals and be here too for the monsoonal rains, watch the arroyos, washes and gravel streets rage with torrents of red, silty water. I want to feel what mother Sonoran can throw at me during 100 degree days for months.

An old friend of mine from the north called and said What, is Montana not good enough for you? What's so great about Ajo? I don't know, I said, Go find out for yourself, or, you could wait around 'til my book is finished, but that might be a while.

I fill the water bottle, drive five minutes in the pickup to my favorite trail, strip off my shirt and slather on some sunscreen. The April heat here now is just right, low 90s with breezes and dryness, the sky a riveting blue, layers upon layers of mimicking mountain ridge backdrops of all different red rock shades and the electric, cardinal red trombone flowers of every single Ocotillo plant in the desert serenade me at eye level as I walk up the trail. I hear a 4x4 buggy a mile away and slither off trail down into a wash, one of the many undulations in this desert that you don't realize are there until you get down in them.

I make a game of it with the buggy, they are the hunter and I the prey. They're the only other people out here I'm aware of, the few dozen RVs all left at the end of March and it is an empty, silent but for the birds and wind, desert right now. Weaving behind low-lying, thick, thorned Palo Verde trees, I evade my stalkers as they double back on the trail.

Water bottle is half full, my head full of material I want to get down, and the buggy is now ahead of me on the way out, I'm pretty sure they never saw me. I nick my blood clot leg on a mesquite needle and think this is good because I'll have a little scar of where I'm going back to when those chilly north winds start to blow.

Before I climb back into the truck I stop and look out over the sweet Sonoran desert and say I'll be back, I'll be back my love.

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Raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Vince Nuzzo bolted west to Missoula, Montana for the promise of college and adventure at the age of seventeen. After spending a sporadically enrolled nine years reaching a B.A. in English/Creative Writing at the University of Montana, Vince has since bounced and bashed around the U.S. and Latin America with Missoula as basecamp, considering himself a citizen of the world more than of any one state. His work and adventures have taken him high upon mountaintops and giant skateboard ramps, down into the rivers and deserts, out onto the sea and through many relationships, some successful, many not.  After a feverish run of writing creative non-fiction, the novel Thirst In Montana, and poetry in his younger years, Vince, now fifty, has of late succumbed to a burning, near constant urge to be getting it on the page again. Vince, in a fit of experiential in the NOWNESS and at the time heavily influenced by reading 27 clubber, the late poet and singer Jim Morrison, threw an entire trunk of his writings, starting with his earliest, into a landfill during a move between homes. This is a decision Vince will forever regret but it is also a grand motivator now in his search for the story and his need to tell it, along with the benefit of gaining some healing from life's dreads and wounds. He's weathered two pulmonary blood clots and a DVT clot and now writes for himself first and foremost but considers anyone willing to take a look or two to be a brave, beautiful, encouraging soul. Vince feels thankful to be writing again.

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