Writings of Jeffrey Lazos Ferns

  The Road Back to Douglas, Arizona On my mother, her father Jesús Tarra Lazos, and my great-grandmother Natalia Lopez Trujillo This morning I woke up at 2:00 a.m. I had gone to bed early, and at that strange, quiet hour I found myself sitting up in the dark, looking through genealogy records for my great-grandmother, Natalia Lopez Trujillo. I wanted to know where she lived. The exact day she died. Where she is buried. And then, the way these things go, I fell down the rabbit hole and started looking for my grandfather, Jesús Tarra Lazos. Someone had posted a photograph of his headstone on one of those sites. His name was spelled wrong. Most of the names in these records are spelled wrong. On my father’s side I can trace the family back to Europe. On my mother’s side the paper trail is thin, scattered, misspelled, almost as if it was never meant to hold us. But we have never relied on paper. We rely on our stories. And I remember every single one my mother told me. A ...

  Notes from Bisbee on the eve of the Camp Naco Unbelievable Borderlands Festival It's three in the morning in Bisbee and the wind has come to stay. It started as a polite knock and now it gusts close to fifty miles an hour, rattling the windows of our Airbnb like it lost its keys. Someone in the neighborhood hung wind chimes, and tonight they've turned into a choir. I'm the room closest to the street, so I get every note. I keep looking out the window half expecting to see who's conducting. I think it's the mountains. In this little mining town, the mountains have opinions, and tonight they're singing them. A few blocks away, two briskets have been smoking since last night. In a few minutes I'll pull on a jacket, step out into the wind, and wrap them for their final four hours. By this evening that brisket will be folded into Salud chorizo tortillas and handed to guests at the Camp Naco Borderlands fundraiser. Between now and then the wind has a lot o...

  What We Carry Home from a Walk in the Desert   My work puts me in front of a lot of people, usually for a reason and for a short time. But I take those meetings personally. A stranger can become a friend in the middle of a conversation. Even if all we get is a couple of hours, I take that time seriously. My walk yesterday organized by Experience Scottsdale walking through the Desert Botanical Garden with three visiting gents, journalists and a PR Agency from France was one of those moments. It mattered to me. It mattered to them. And it mattered to the plants. Before they arrived I got there early and walked the perimeter outside the Garden, looking at a moment in time that is rare and celebrated, The desert rich in remnants of a heavy rainstorm. We'd just had heavy rain, which is a gift in the desert. The creosote and the brittlebush were plump. The Texas sage, whose flowers are rain indicators were screaming purple, the way it only gets when the humidity wakes up...

  Returning to a Place, Finding Myself There in “Words” I was probably in the third grade when I first visited the place I now know as S’edav Va’aki Museum. Back then, it was Pueblo Grande Museum, and I was a little boy on a school field trip from Chandler. I remember walking around, trying to imagine the people who had lived there long before us. What had their lives been like? What would it have been like to stand in that same place when it was their home? I didn’t have much understanding of what I was seeing, but I remember the wonder of it. That visit stayed with me. After seventeen years in San Francisco, I came back to Arizona and eventually returned to the museum. I hadn’t expected to feel so much. Walking through the place again, I remembered being that boy, looking around and trying to picture another time. Now I was a grown man, revisiting a childhood memory and beginning to understand how much lay beyond it. As a child, I had thought about the people who lived ...

  The Desert, The Americas, Sedona At 3:00 a.m., I was awake. By 3:15, I was out of the house. My usual walk: through the neighborhood, toward Piestewa Peak and back. Seven miles before most people have even turned over in bed. It was beautiful. Dark, and not a single person crossed my path. There were ducks in the canals, though, floating in that black water as if they owned the hour. I suppose they did. I was just passing through. The water was flowing. I could hear it moving beside me, going somewhere without needing to explain where. Up on Piestewa Peak, a couple of little lights were climbing. Probably hikers. From where I stood, the mountain appeared to have loosened two stars and was letting them crawl up its shoulder. This is what I love best about the desert. Especially before morning. The company you can keep without having to say a word. The plants were there, standing in their familiar places. The wind moved between them and brushed past me. Somewhere be...