On Rocks and Dirt

We recently returned from a two-week trip to Thailand, of which one week was at a resort on Phuket Island.

Travel is a very wonderful pain in the buttocks.  If the destination is well chosen, which Thailand and Phuket certainly are, the wonderful outweighs the pain in large measure. The wonderful of Thailand should be obvious. Regarding the pain, most of it is the grueling travel there and back.

Thailand, at least what we saw in the Bangkok and Phuket areas, means water, vegetation and flowers everywhere. It's a big change from the Sonoran Desert. We have stunning flowers in the desert, but in the tropics of Thailand, the shapes, colors, varieties, and density of flowers are amazing. Plants seem to bloom year-around. Flowers freely burst out even from untended plantings by freeways.

Looking towards Kamala Beach, Phuket Island

It took me a few days of return home to recognize something that had nagged me in Thailand. You can't see the rocks and dirt.

We've had decent rain in Tucson this winter, as evidenced by the weeds that are now sprouting everywhere. I've learned to dislike most of them, and not just because most of the grasses are non-native. Many are the sticky variety; obnoxiously sticky. Then there is the exploding seed pod variety. 

Since our return, I've been spending loose time weeding.  It's hopeless to get them all, but I can't resist pulling them. It's a little like the seven labors of Hercules, except that he got them done. It's more like poor Sisyphus — there's no end to it. There is only the hope that by getting the weeds while small, maybe they won't spread seeds so much.

I was in my fifth day of engaging in my outdoor hobby of pulling weeds. I was thinking of improving and extending a footpath in the desert island area between the driveway and the house. I wondered which agaves needed to be moved, and which flat rocks could serve as stepping stones. That's when it hit me. I love rocks and dirt.

I love the local Catalina rock, a pale, almost whitish pink granite. There are lots of translucent or white quartz rocks that have broken up from veins in the granite. We have a quartz vein on top of the east side of the gully that has helped preserve that hill from being washed down. Some local rocks have tinges of copper, so they have green in them. The caliche has reds. When I walk in the Finger Rock wash, I often take a canvas bag or just stuff my pockets with attractive rocks.

Previous owners had imported water-worn, smoothly round cobbles and strategically placed them in swathes throughout the lot and inside the backyard. I can't stand these foreign rocks. They are not indiginous. They don't belong here.  I have been gathering them by the bucket full and relocating them to obvious artificial and confined areas by the driveway oleander.

Phuket Island, a huge tree completely covered in vines.

Fine gravel imported for the driveway has encroached outside of its intended confines and —to me —the little bastards look hideously out of place. I can spend hours happily picking them out and dumping them in the driveway. When I'm done, the area looks like the desert again.

The Bangkok area is flat, the delta of the Chao Phraya River and covered with city, water, rice paddies, and other vegetation. There is not much in the way of rocks there.

Phuket Island is surprisingly rugged, but its dark granite boulders are mostly completely obscured by dense vegetation. The only clues that they existed are the rugged geography itself, the island's history of tin mining, and the occasional boulder, probably disturbed by construction and artfully arranged and kept clear at resorts.