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It’s Personal ~ Kathryn I t was low, slow, and mournful. He dragged the scarlet notes across the floor like a velvet gown. I sat on the couch, next to two basset hounds, and listened to Bill play the trumpet. Light shined through the French doors where vines wrapped around panes of glass with orange and yellow flowers hand-painted by Angie. Bill was a musician. He played in the Army Air Corps Band with Zoot Sims, and later in Tucson he arranged charts for Louis Leon’s Big Dance Band. It seemed the perfect life. When I got older, I would go to Gus and Andy’s Steak House on Miracle Mile to hear Bill’s jazz improvisations. Some of my favorite childhood memories took place in the house of my godparents, Bill and Angie Eagle. My sister and I would go to the house to play with the kids, Jim and Chris. But my favorite moments were when Bill picked up that trumpet to practice. I’ll never forget the day Angie removed the curlers, combed through my hair, and we saw that it was pink. She tsk tsked, the clients exclaimed, but secretly I was proud. I wanted my hair color changed, but the pink was unplanned. Angie left the dye a little too long. When I went to my high school, I was the envy of all the girls. My mother and I often went to Angie’s Beauty Shop on Grande in Tucson.The shop was always busy. I remember listening to the beautiful Spanish language all the women spoke. I learned a few words but was too shy to say much. I think I was the shop mascot because I was allowed to just be there as Angie bustled around, chatting with her clients. Hanging out on Grande with my Mexican American godparents was one of the best memories of my life. They taught me the first Spanish words I learned, but mostly I just had fun with them. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I realized they were a major reason I joined Samaritans to help in the desert. It was because of my relationship to them and because of life-changing experiences in the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua,Mexico.For the last fifteen years,I have come and gone from the Sierra while making documentaries as an independent filmmaker. Partly because of its astounding beauty and ruggedness, but mostly because I have friends in Choguita and Norogachi in the Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon), I fell in love with the Sierra. I was born in Arizona but feel that I am going home to the Sierra. My friends are serious country people—small-ranch owners and arrieros (muleteers) of the most elegant kind. You may think to call a muleteer “elegant” is a bad choice of words, but they are nothing less. They are the essence of remaining Mestizo culture. To ride with Hiram Loya Villalobos on horseback to the high country to tend his cornfield, returning along the riverbanks in a snowstorm, cutting through a rainbow and arriving back at his kitchen in time for his wife, Elia, to dish out steaming frijoles de olla is sublime. Hiram, handsome and intelligent, has outwitted a twenty-year drought by working dawn to dusk, caring for crops, family, and animals . He takes people on pack trips through the most traditional Tarahumara backcountry to the upper Rio Conchos for Matachin dances and peyote healing ceremonies. But this is not regular tourist fare. We’re talking about thirty-five-day pack trips with mules where you have to be experienced and smart, or you won’t find your way home. The Sierra is generous but unforgiving. Next to Hiram’s hand-built adobe house is the bodega (storehouse) and potrero (corral). It’s the kind of place Architectural Digest dreams of profiling in a photo-essay that depicts a “rustic” home, and lifestyle. But what’s missing in the magazine is sweat and the smell of saddle oil. You open a shutter to pull out a rebuilt Tejano saddle, the worn hide glistening, as comfortable as your favorite leather chair at home. It is a saddle with hombros (shoulders), which allow the rider to position the legs so he is not fighting to stay in the saddle while riding down a narrow mountain trail knocking against thick brush. It comes with tapaderas (which look like a monkey’s head) into which you...

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