Sat, Jul 05, 2008
 Jim Malusa rides his bike along Smoot Drive on his way to the lowest point in the Old Pueblo. Malusa has bicycled to the bellybutton of six continents and written a book to tell about it. James S. Wood/Arizona Daily Star
More Photos (9):
        
Pioneer Landscaping Diesel Fleet Mechanic Trades/Construction Pioneer Landscaping Yard Person/Loader Operator Trades/Construction Lectra-Serv, Inc Electricians & Helpers Trades/Construction Paragon Electric Electricians Trades/Construction Wentz and Patrick Construction Carpenters & Helpers General Prestige maintenance USA Custodian General ADVANCED AUTOMOTIVE DISPATCHER/SECRETARY Accentcover story
Low points, high jinksMaking friends in low places
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.04.2008
When you have ridden your bicycle to the six lowest spots on Earth, nothing is any longer beneath you.
So Jim Malusa titled his book about the adventures he had along the way: "Into Thick Air."
And he readily agreed to the cheesy suggestion to join a team from the Arizona Daily Star on a bike ride to deepest Tucson.
What we found along the way might surprise you — Moorish castles, Druidic ruins, smoots, four gyros, no villains and Swan Lake.
So come join us on our excellent little adventure, learn more about Malusa's big adventures and read an excerpt from the book. — Tom Beal
It is overcast with darker clouds to the west — unusually threatening for an April morning in Tucson.
I am prepared.
My waterproof jacket with stowaway hood is tucked into my pack. My helmet both protects and cools my head. I have water and snacks. My bicycle tires are pumped to 110 psi and so am I.
I am meeting Jim Malusa for a ride to the lowest point in Tucson.
Malusa, in his book "Into Thick Air," writes that bicycling to the lowest points on six continents means braving monsoons, typhoons, sandstorms, snapping crocs and howling hyenas.
I have presented him with a new challenge — biking to Tucson's low spot while trying to appear interested.
We have assembled an expeditionary team.
Jim Wood, young and fit, has a mountain bike and a vest filled with 80 pounds of cameras and lenses.
Sarah Mauet, also young and fit but still recovering from her last bike crash, will drive ahead in her car and set up video ambushes.
Malusa, 51, comes to the door of his red-brick house in Central Tucson in sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. He cinches the stampede strings of his wide-brimmed cloth hat and mounts his beat-up hybrid bike with 5,000 international miles on it. We are off.
Moorish castle
Malusa and I consulted many maps in preparing for this expedition, but finding Tucson's low spot is easy.
"Just follow the sewer lines," Malusa says. We aren't the only thing rolling downhill.
We head north on Treat Avenue to Blacklidge Drive, then west, speeding across the five lanes of traffic on Campbell Avenue with the Moses-like power of the conveniently placed HAWK light.
West of Campbell we encounter our first mystery. A cinder-block Moorish castle with a heraldic crest and four gargoyles, one at each corner of the square tower.
Peering through spy holes in a gate that seems designed to hold back a company of Crusaders, we spy two things — a stripped automobile and an ordinary stucco bungalow from which this amazing tower has sprouted.
"Someone from the International Wildlife Museum married someone from the Humane Society, and this is the place they built," Malusa declares. Good enough for me.
Boondocks wine bottle
We make a right on busy First Avenue, detouring west just shy of Fort Lowell Road to see if Malusa's auto mechanic is at work. He's not, but his armada of camouflage-painted military vehicles lines the alley. That was his tank you might have noticed parked for years out front of Mario's Pizza.
We head down First to the big stuccoed wine bottle outside the Boondocks Lounge.
Malusa has a story. After high school, he joined a wrecking crew. They called themselves "Cro-Magnon Demolition: Three Brutes With Crowbars."
They demolished barracks at Davis-Monthan during the day, and one of his partners, who was the other guy's uncle and whom they called Tio (go figure), would spend his evenings here.
Instead of getting in his car to drive home, Tio would crawl through the tiny door (now padlocked) in the bottom of the Boondocks wine bottle and go to sleep.
Smoot Drive
We seek out Smoot Drive, for no other reason than that Malusa has never been there.
Smoot hosts well-tended homes, including one with a birdbath and a gargoyle.
"This is becoming a theme," says Malusa.
A car pulls up and we chat with the occupants.
They're visiting the grandparents. We had hoped it was a wedding. Malusa attended a wedding in Egypt and two in Russia while bicycling through. We're guessing that's probably not going to happen in Tucson on a Wednesday morning.
I will later learn that this subdivision was built by Smoot-Harmer Realty.
For the record — no smoots were harmed in the making of this story.
Swan Lake
We zigzag northwest to our next destination.
On the map, Malusa has discovered a lake, just west of the Auto Mall.
We try two side streets but are blocked by chainlink fencing.
On Flowing Wells Road we find the gated entrance to Swan Lake Estates. We wait for a car to activate the gate and ride in on its tail. We cycle straight to the office to turn ourselves in. A security guy in a golf cart is already on our trail.
Swan Lake is lovely, lined with weeping willows and manufactured homes with skirts and trellises that make them look like lakeside cottages. It has an island with picnic tables and grills.
Manager Nancy Walsh, who has lived here since 1973, is Swan Lake's historian. In a pamphlet she compiled, I learn that the lake was created on the site of an old hog farm in 1947 by University of Arizona agriculture professor Wallace Schafer.
Schafer stocked the lake with bass and bluegills. He and his friends fished and hunted ducks.
Schafer called his gentleman's ranch "Vista del Lago."
The homes came in 1973 after several changes of ownership, including, according to Schafer's oral history, "the Peruvian government."
The 530 residents of Swan Lake Estates still fish, but they leave the ducks alone. There is just one swan — a plastic one.
Lunch / Stonehenge
We're hungry, and Walsh recommends a Greek restaurant, "just around the corner on River Road."
These are not bike directions — the restaurant is more than a mile in the wrong direction. We press on, taking the tree-lined park path along the Rillito from Flowing Wells to La Cholla, stopping at "Project Potty," a bathroom with a prestigious architectural heritage, designed by the nationally renowned folks at Line and Space Architects.
We make another brief stop at a place I call "Stonehenge" — a combination of art and Druidic astronomy whose circular walls have openings that align with the sun at solstice.
Its creators, including architect Paul Edwards, who died much too young last year, called it "Sun Circle."
Leaving the bike path, we head down La Cholla to Ruthrauff and find food — big, beefy gyros at Angelo's Pizza and Gyros.
Thus fortified, we make the final push.
The low spot
We go west on Ruthrauff/Camino del Cerro, into a wicked headwind. It is turning cold and spitting rain. We press on, under the interstate and over the flowing Santa Cruz River.
North on Silverbell, we look for the city boundary that is just south of Sunset. On the map, it's shaded red, but here, no clue.
We simply pick a spot and ride our bikes through flattened dirt paths back toward the Santa Cruz.
We portage up and over the first depression.
Lightning rips. Thunder rumbles. This is just too good to be true.
We scramble up a berm, ditch the bikes and descend to the main channel. It is lined with cottonwoods and flowing nicely in this riparian stretch just downstream of the Roger Road sewer plant.
This is Tucson's low point — 2,205 feet above sea level (or as close to it as we need to be for this silly exercise).
Malusa keeps telling me to look in the other direction when I point out the many abandoned appliances, couches and other debris dumped in the washes leading to the channel. He needs his low spots to be idyllic places.
Ordinarily, Malusa would camp, drink a beer, smoke a pipe and wait for the stars to click on. Not today. His kids, Rudy, 10, and Rosita, 8, get out of school at 2:15 p.m., and the family rides home together on their bikes.
It dawns on him that he's been here before. Years ago, he and his wife, Sonya, came down this stretch of river in a kayak during an attempt to popularize another arcane sport they invented — wastewater rafting.
Wonder why that never caught on.
● Contact reporter Tom Beal at tbeal@azstarnet.com or 573-4158.
|
2 Comments on this story