Arizona Humor

rizona Humor WINTER VISITORS

Last year, during our sixth winter visit to Arizona, my husband and I were working on a float for the annual parade at our Mesa RV park.

I was on my way to borrow a pair of scissors from the park office when I saw a gentleman standing outside the office door studying a map of the park, which has nearly 2,000 spaces.

Trying to be friendly, I said, "When you learn who lives at each space you get a prize." "Learn who lives in each space!" he responded. "Why, I can't even find the street that gets me out of here."

WHAT'S ITS NAME

Two Marine officers were traveling from Phoenix through Gila Bend to the Marine Corps Air Station at Yuma when they got into a discussion of how to pronounce Gila Bend.

One argued correctly that the "G" was pronounced like an "H," but the other said the "G" sound was proper. They decided they would stop at the first likely place in Gila Bend and ask a native to say the name of his town.

Finally, to the counterman in a local restaurant one of the young men said, "We'd like two cups of coffee, and then will you please pronounce the name of this place very clearly?"

When the coffee was served, the counterman said very distinctly: "Dee-air-ee Ka-ween."

RAW LAND

He had sold his farm in the Midwest and then moved to Arizona for his wife's health, and now he was accompanying a real-estate salesman to raw desert land that had been laid out for a subdivision.

BACKCOUNTRY TRAVEL

My granddad, Walter Durham, one of the original Hashknife cowboys of northern Arizona, drove a car as if he were handling a bronco. Fortunately for him, road conditions in early Arizona made backcountry travel very slow.

We usually made the 45-mile trip from Stoneman Lake to Flagstaff in two hours unless the county road grader got out ahead of us, then we could hit speeds up to 40 mph. That was the situation one morning as Granddad and I raced along a newly scraped road south of Mormon Lake.

Ahead, the one-lane road rose steeply to a hilltop from both directions, so we did not see the other car speeding toward us until we neared the top of the rise.

Granddad spun the wheel, and our 1929 Studebaker skidded into a shallow ditch, then farther out into the rough, overrunning a stand of jack pines before swerving back onto the roadway. He had missed a sideswipe by a hair's breadth without slowing down a bit.

Undaunted, he opined in his slow drawl, "If that ol' boy had been wearing chaps, I would've hit him for sure."

A road grader had defined the dirt streets on the windy flat landscaped with snakebush and ragweed. The spring wind filled the air with fine dust, and a tide of last year's tumbleweeds flowed in front of the salesman's automobile as he drove his client over the property.

All of the "streets" boasted euphemistic names: Camelot, Shangri-la, Avalon.

Suddenly, a roadrunner dashed in front of them.

"What kind of bird is that?" asked the farmer.

The salesman, more concerned with image makingthan with ornithology, replied, "That's a bird of paradise."

"He's a heck of a long way from home, ain't he?" the farmer retorted.

ALWAYS PREPARED

As a biology professor at Western Montana College, I have taken many study groups to Arizona during the spring break. Each student was responsible for a report covering a specific interest area: plants, reptiles, animals, birds. On one morning while we camped near Mount Lemmon north of Tucson, I talked to two boys returning from their daylight birding observations.

"We sure are amateurs," one said. "We just met a retired couple from Washington. The woman was wearing a carpenter's apron with three field guides in it and was too busy to talk to us, but her husband said she was the champion birder in their state.

"She is such an avid birder,' the husband said, 'that the first thing she puts on when she gets dressed in the morning is her binoculars."

DIRECTION FINDER

During the backpacking craze of the late '70s, I worked in a large sporting-goods store in Tucson. One afternoon a young woman came in and asked to see a "map-reading compass." She explained she was going on her first overnight hike in the desert.

I demonstrated and explained the features of several compasses, and she decided on one of the more expensive ones.

As I was putting it in a box, she said, "Just one more question. How often do you have to wind it up?"

TO SUBMIT HUMOR

Send us a short note about your humorous experiences in Arizona, and we'll pay $75 for each one we publish.

We're looking for short stories, no more than 200 words, that deal with Arizona topics, and have a humorous punch line.

Send them to Humor, Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. Please enclose your name, address, and telephone number with each submission. We'll notify those whose stories we intend to publish, but we cannot return unused submissions.