Rice, Waikiki, and dead people - notes from last fall

The following are some photos of my trip to California to research family past and to Hawaii for the SEM meeting last year.

Here are some other notes about last fall, originally published on the other blog last November.


I’m posting a couple of pictures I took on my California journey, when my mom and I decided to go searching for the long-gone town of Rice, California. Located in the middle of the eastern Mohave Desert, this is where my grandfather worked for a few life-changing months in the middle of the Great Depression. He assisted at a gas station out there, selling tires to those who were out there working on building the aqueduct or providing other kinds of services to the construction workers. Among the services provided were an illegal gambling den and a brothel, which made for quite an education, according to my grandpa’s stories. All that’s there now is a bunch of junk and the ruins of a couple of buildings, including the gas station in its second incarnation (the current ruins date to the seventies, we think.) The only inhabitant, when we arrived, was a bum asleep on a mattress under the old carport. We woke him up so he took off, taking off down the long, hot highway with his little wagon. He pulled it along by means of a giant wooden cross which he hitched over one shoulder.

I had another picturesque and totally Tucson moment on Sunday at the All Soul’s Parade. I don’t know why I’d never been to this event before, which is held to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Thousands of people took to the streets, many in wonderfully creative costumes and masks. There were five-foot-high skeleton heads, strange creatures on stilts, a vulture with the face of Bush, a skeleton dog on wheels, a coffin-wagon with children riding inside, an enormous brain-hat, dead bagpipers and capoeira dancers. Many political statements on the number of civilians dead in the Iraq war and the number of illegal immigrants dead in the Arizona desert were also to be found. At the end of the route, the parade-goers gathered in a parking lot next to the train tracks, where three stages and a crane were set up for a performance by Flam Chen, a group of acrobats and fire dancers. Their show, consisting of people flying up on giant white helium balloons or being lifted, writhing in a cage, on the crane; devils on stilts around an iron mountain; and angels with wings on pillars was eerie. To the accompaniment of a carnivalesque brass band, an enormous urn filled with all the mementoes of the dead observers had cared to throw in was raised up on the crane and set ablaze, providing the perfect conclusion and memorial.