We all grow up loving the place we grew up in, I suppose. It’s the love that comes from the magic of being young, and seeing beauty in everything.
In Nogales, there was a certain security that came with that beauty: the security of community. In knowing which kids you would run into, depending on what part of town you would go to. Walking through this town as kids, we always had that one truth, that it was a beautiful little town.
In winter, the school would sometimes walk all the kids through town, lined up in pairs behind their teacher, like ducklings following the mother. It was a stream of children walking from Lincoln Elementary School to the high school gym to see some magical, wonderful presentation of some kind. There was no talk of permission slips, there were no “incidents” and no lawsuits. There was only enjoyment in the walk through the beautiful little town to the assembly at the high school gym.
Summers were golden and we would hit the hills with fervor for adventure, hiking from Nogie to Kino Springs through the hills of the Love Ranch. As Dylan Thomas wrote:
“In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.”
It was a beautiful time in a beautiful place. But one must grow and see the tragedies of economic downturns brought on by outside forces that make the lives of people harder and harder, bit by bit.
Then there are those, again from the outside, that bring “solutions” to politically created “problems.” And all these forces seem to work to try to make that beautiful little place a little less beautiful, a little more run down, a bit more tired.
Still, we could always look to every horizon and see real beauty. To the east, the Patagonia Mountains; to the south, the Pinitos and Pajaritos; to the west the Atascosas and the Santa Ritas; and Cayetano to the north. All of them with breathtaking beauty. But the outside forces would not have it, they placed a surveillance blimp right into the view. We could not even have our natural beauty anymore. It was truly devastating.
So I am writing this as a thank you to whoever was the person that made the final decision to remove that ugly monstrosity from our horizons and return to us the one thing that distinguishes Nogales above everything. In my opinion: its absolute beauty.
