Tom Zoellner walked Arizona
The author tells us about his new book examining the state’s political culture, history and characters, and his brief romance with Gabby Giffords.
Tom Zoellner has a love/hate thing with Arizona.
That constant tension with the state, its people and its politics is the driving force of his latest book, “Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona.”
Zoellner, an author, former Republic journalist and fifth-generation Arizonan, trekked on foot from the Grand Canyon to Mexico to get a view into the heart of Arizona’s people, politics, culture and history.
The book slides between Zoellner’s reflections on his home state while walking the roughly 800-mile Arizona Trail and his off-trail reporting1 to examine not only Arizona’s terrain, but our state psyche.
“It's a kind of human architecture, human community that leads to all of these social science surveys putting Arizona near the bottom when it comes to questions about neighborhood fiber and a sense that people care about each other,” he told us. “I mean, in this sense, we're Mississippi, we’re on the bottom end of social indexes.”
In this volume of reported essays, he attempts to explain what makes Arizona tick by hanging out with Arizona’s people in their natural habitat, be that the foot of Gray Whiskers Butte on the Navajo Nation or the golf courses of Green Valley. His journey takes him through fire and water as he drudges through burnt-out forests and past rapidly drying lakes and reservoirs. He gorges himself on Arizona food until he vomits, ponders the Great Arizona Novel and listens to Arizona musicians as he endeavors to define our state’s prevailing culture and subcultures.
Zoellner draws from his own childhood in the Catalina Foothills of Tucson, his reporting adventures at the Republic and his brief, young romance with former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, with whom he remained close until her husband, Mark Kelly, excommunicated him from her circle after Zoellner began writing a book about the factors leading up to her 2011 shooting.
“Rim to River” takes us back to pre-statehood days to find the futurists and scammers who invented, marketed and sold the dream of Arizona back when it was largely just a hot plot of thorns and dirt. And he traces that huckster lineage down to their direct spiritual descendants, who can be found on hot, dusty campaign trails today.
It’s a book that blends Arizona legend and lore, like the Mogollon Monster, with a sobering dose of reality, like the state’s World War II Japanese internment camps. He details both a physical journey along the Arizona Trail and a metaphorical one through the state’s history and political landscape.
He retraces his steps, and missteps, as a young reporter for the Arizona Republic covering a murderer who blew up his house to destroy evidence that he had killed his wife and two kids. The man, Robert Fischer, may have been allowed to escape justice thanks to Zoellner printing a hot tip that police considered the husband a suspect.
More than 20 years after the case dead-ended, Zoellner revisited the cave where Fischer was last believed to be hiding out and spoke to the cop who had cursed him out for reasons he didn’t understand at the time:
“I tried not to let any expression show on my face, but I felt like covering it with my hands. My career as a reporter had always been suffused with certain principles. Readers deserve to know. Government agencies need to be accountable. Print the truth as you know it. These ideas weren’t wrong. But here was a case where they had collided with a more compelling interest,” Zoellner writes.
He finds some solace in an unexpected place: southern Arizona’s sprawling retirement community of Green Valley, where the people were thoughtful, kind and inspiring, despite the dark undertones of a community that residents semi-jokingly call “God’s waiting room”:
“The sociology of retirement towns like Green Valley tends to be a lot like high school,” Zoellner writes. “Charisma and sunny personalities can bring popularity and a set of friends. But introversion, thoughtfulness, or a different personality can result in unwanted loneliness. Once the high of new freedom and endless golf starts to get wearisome, a certain depression sets in.”
At the state Capitol, Zoellner follows former Republican lawmaker turned lobbyist Jonathan Paton as he attempts to keep Tucson's Rio Nuevo project alive in the face of Republican opposition, learning a few things about how a master lobbyist works a bill. He also met Republican Sen. David Farnsworth, who was trying to kill Rio Nuevo for very David Farnsworth reasons:
“(Farnsworth) acknowledged he had sponsored the bills in the belief Rio Nuevo had always had the flavor of something sinister along the lines of what might be happening with missing children in the (Department of Child Safety) system. ‘See, all these are connected,’ he said. ‘It seems like there’s invisible hands promoting it – what’s the right word? – propelling it, and you don’t know who’s behind it. Washington, D.C., has a swamp and Arizona has a swamp and they both need draining.’”
“Rim to River” is Zoellner’s attempt to explain what he calls “the most immature state” culturally, a state defined by its never-ending stream of newcomers looking to remake themselves and the state, and the rapid erasure of even our modern history.
The result is to lay bare the dysfunction that springs from the disjointedness of master-planned communities and resulting human isolation in a place where reality has always been second to legend, hype and promise.
The interview with Zoellner has been edited for length and clarity.
There's a line in here about Joe Arpaio epitomizing the Arizona loneliness, and I thought that was really on point. I’ve had similar conversations with him about how he has no friends. And loneliness comes up a lot in this book. Do you think that’s a defining feature of the Arizona psyche?
Yeah, it's not defining, but it is a big part of Arizona life that doesn't get nearly enough attention. We see this in the retirement communities where there is an unacknowledged epidemic of loneliness that comes along with what it means to uproot yourself and move here to the sort of pleasant tabula rasa of Arizona. And you, hopefully, will make friends — but many don't.
With Joe Arpaio, that was a case of Trump before Trump. This was someone with childhood trauma who had substituted publicity for ordinary love and who self-confessed he didn’t really have friends the way that we would think about them. What they had was just a bottomless need to get approval. And they both figured out a way to tap into darker instincts in the political id to get them there.
I didn't really get into this in this essay, just because I didn’t want to be too much about Trump, Trump, Trump, but he really did find a second political home in Arizona. And so many of the characteristics of America that would create Trump or create Trump's rise to the apex of American politics, you can really see that going on here first.
Parts of the book talk about how the Arizona Republican Party got to where it is today. What do you see for the future? Where will the party be in 10 years?
I've never been any good at the crystal ball stuff. It just seems that the independents have very clearly shown that they are not down with Kari Lake, are not down with the magical thinking and the fabulism and the disorder that the current shape of the party points towards.
It's bad for business. And the shadowy sort of Phoenix kingmakers or queenmakers that are the latter-day descendants of the so-called Phoenix 40, they recognize how this is going to drive away investment. They recognize how major sporting events are going to want to avoid Arizona. Corporations aren't going to want to locate here if our educational system is gutted.
And there's the more modern history that centers around Jonathan Paton and his lobbying efforts to keep Rio Nuevo alive down in Tucson. What did you learn about the inner workings of Arizona politics or the Capitol in reporting that?
I hadn't appreciated how much the general public stays away from business at the Capitol and how hearing from constituents actually really does make a long-term difference. A group who shows up to a committee meeting might not change a vote. However, I do think that folks showing up and making a show of popular passion does plant a seed and ignites the fear that everyone has of losing their seat.
So much of what happens is just a simple desire to hang on to power and passionate fear of looking foolish.
I also really enjoyed the chapter centered on Raquel Terán and the SB1070 generation. Can you explain why you chose to focus on her and what her story tells you about both young Latinos and the history of civic involvement from older Mexican Americans?
Raquel is a living embodiment of someone who grew up a bit disconnected from public affairs, but then she had a moment of awakening and it serves as a metaphor for that generation.
It was explained to me that this is a generational thing that was inculcated because of the violence of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century — that if you know what's good for you, you're just gonna stay away from politics because it’s deadly. And we're now seeing the trend line in the opposite direction.
Raquel’s border upbringing was also really intriguing. Douglas-Agua Prieta, where she grew up, is one of those Arizona cities that is kind of from another time. It's a smelter town where the smelter is no longer there.
I have ask about Gabby Giffords as well. You two dated for a while when you were young, and you wrote a short chapter about that relationship, including a line about her allegedly being disappointed after you wrote “A Safeway in Arizona.” I wonder, do you two ever speak now?
I haven't heard from her. But how much of this is her and how much of this is Mark Kelly, I'll never know. I didn't hear anything from Gabrielle, it was just Mark Kelly, within two weeks of the shooting, telling me, Gabby feels this and Gabby feels that. This was before she was able to communicate.
The objection from Mark, as I understand it, was nothing that was actually in the book, but rather that it was being written in the first place, and that it was not a centralized message.
That chapter ends with the line: “She is a face on a coin.” What does that mean?
There's a reference earlier in the essay to when I was growing up, these figures of Arizona public life like Morris Udall, like Bruce Babbitt, who went to Washington. They just seemed unapproachable. They were less living and breathing politicians than they were totems, distant, unavailable for interaction with mere mortals. And here's someone who I was close with, who I knew. And what happened at the Safeway turned her into not so much of someone I know anymore, but rather, an icon — an engraven image. She has entered a realm of oracle-like unapproachability. She’s a face on a coin.
Hank was among the many sources Zoellner chatted up during his reporting process, and he has one quote that appears, anonymously, in the book. The first reader to correctly identify the quote and email us at info@arizonaagenda.com will win a free Arizona Agenda coffee mug.