Yesterday I left town for a week in Tucson and Sedona, to attend a writer’s conference and then bask with a girlfriend in the woo-woo energy of the northern Arizona energy vortex. I was a little nervous heading to the airport, as my instagram feed is currently 30% capybaras, 50% end of the world, and 20% TSA security checkpoint horror stories (lines out to the parking garage in New Orleans! Three hour waits in Houston!). I knew I was flying out a dinky little airport that’s probably only “international” because it has a flight to Toronto or some such, but I was still a little nervous about missing my flight. I needn’t have worried; there was exactly one person ahead of me in line.

Since I was quite early, I staked out a good spot where I could spread out and make myself comfortable reading the last few manuscripts I needed to review for this conference. I was annoyed when, soon after, some random man came and sat in the middle of my workspace. I defaulted straight to judgment mode and clocked his shaved head, ostentatious scraggly white beard, and conspicuous tattoos (though, to be fair, not the prison variety)…was he MAGA? White nationalist? Something told me no, but I stayed on alert. For the next hour he hunched over his phone, watching something on YouTube, I presume, then suddenly erupted in outrage. “Goddamnit!” he exclaimed, “Are you fucking kidding me?” A cloud of nervous glances gathered around him, and I threw all my energy into maintaining the impermeable shield of invisibility all women learn to manifest around the time they hit puberty. Yes, it’s awkward to pretend you don’t hear someone who’s shouting profanity at their phone two feet away from you, but you’ll never survive in this world if you can’t. As the nearest person to him, I knew I was vulnerable to being dragged into whatever drama was unfolding in his plans/life/imagination; I began to debate vacating the scene.

“The curse of BWI strikes again!” he announced to no one in particular, and part of me felt a little sad; I know that urge to have the world share in your dismay. But then he shouted, “Jesus Christ, is there anything Trump can’t fuck up?!” and I laughed aloud involuntarily. Turns out he had a text saying the extraordinary security backlog at BWI was impacting departure times, and his next flight had been delayed several hours.

“No, and don’t tempt him,” I responded. After that, we were friends.

My travel was mostly uneventful. The first flight contained at least 50 Michigan middle schoolers returning home from a field trip to (I assume) Colonial Williamsburg, as well as the most ferociously outraged baby I have ever heard. Both the smell and the noise level of that flight were unbearable. Every child aboard had at least one soda, one bag of Sour Patch Kids, and one bag of Takis, so I can only imagine the atrocities inflicted upon the lavatories. My second flight, full of adults and departing at 9:30 pm, was dark and silent. I arrived around midnight local time and got a cab to my AirBnB; along the way, I exclaimed over the saguaro cacti I saw everywhere along the road. “They have to be at least 50-75 years old before they even start to get a arm,” my driver told me. Somehow, the fact that he said it this way–“A arm”–made it sound even more remarkable–mysterious, foreboding. But maybe that’s just because it was 3 am for me. “The ones you see that are 30 feet high, with arms going in every direction? Those ones are like 150 years old.”

“Holy shit,” I said, as understanding dawned in my brain. “They’re like trees, but different.” Which, I know, is exactly the sort of penetrating insight that brings you to this blog.

“And they’re protected,” he added. “So you can get in a lot of trouble if you steal one.”

This, I’ll admit, took me by surprise. “Steal them?” I asked. “Steal the cactuses?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess you need special equipment or something ’cause they got all those spines, but you can do it.”

I thought of the prickly pear cuttings a friend had gifted me, how you just set them in the dirt and they start to grow, no potting necessary. “Because they don’t really have a root system!” I said. Mind blown.

“Exactly. The baby ones especially, you can just pick them up and drive away with them.”

My mood darkened abruptly as I considered the trauma of baby cacti, kidnapped in the middle of the night.

He had a lot of recommendations for things to do, though, including my first stop this morning, the Tucson Botanical Garden. This was a lovely way to start my visit, and I took a lot of photos that document not only the astounding variety of surreal and scary-looking flora here in the Sonoran desert, but also the reality that when I am wearing sunglasses, I cannot see my phone screen at all. Basically I’m just pointing my phone in the direction of whatever I’d like to remember and hoping for the best, only to find, when I get home, a collection of blurry, off center tree limbs and bird butts, plus accidental shots of my own face, scowling.

After the garden, I called a Lyft to take me to 5 Points Market for lunch, and was alerted by the app that my driver would be deaf or hard of hearing, so I should use text if I needed to communicate with her. I immediately went on YouTube to refresh my memory of how to say “thank you” in ASL, imagining that single gesture would be the extent of our communication; the driver who’d brought me to the garden in the first place had said my name when I got in the car and then never made another sound. I gave him 5 stars. This new driver, Ellen, pulled up to the curb and started peppering me with questions the moment I opened the door. I uttered six words–“I’ve never been to Tucson before!”–and she was off to the races with recommendations. Aren’t you supposed to be deaf? I almost said, but I hardly had the chance to interject; she told me about all the high end resorts up in the mountains that surround the city (though obviously I already have a place to stay), then moved on to food recs, which I definitely was interested in. Hers were singularly awful. She pointed out one chain restaurant after another as we cruised past a slew of strip malls and shopping centers–Asian, Italian, a place called “Cheddars,” a pizzeria–and when I said, “I’m in Arizona, I want to eat Mexican food!”, she said the Mexican here is too spicy (turns out, she’s from Chicago). But she urged me repeatedly to go to Forbes Meat Market, and she loves the French fries at Applebee’s.

I told her where my Airbnb was located. “You could go to the Holocaust Museum,” she offered.

I don’t mean to suggest she wasn’t a good conversationalist. When I told her my conference is meeting at the Marriott by the University of Arizona, she piped up “That’s right by where all those kids were killed!”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Um, what kids?”

Apparently some billionaire’s asshole son crashed his car into three college students crossing the street and then kept driving. “You can google it, the kid got out on a quarter million dollars cash bail. I think he should lose his license,” she said, “and make restitution. And do community service–you know, give something back.” I started to say I was impressed that she didn’t want to see him thrown in jail, but she cut me off. “And he should definitely spend time in prison. A lot of time.”

Since we were on the subject of crime, I asked her, “What do you think happened to Nancy Guthrie?”

“Epstein files,” she said. I agreed they’ll never find her.

Ellen dropped me off at the 5 Points Market, where I’d been told to get the huevos rancheros. “That’s the Forbes Meat Market, across the street,” she said for the third time. I gave her 5 stars, too.