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Tuscon, Scale Models
October 14, 2006    File under: Intake

A little weary of the conference, the categorical conference and the actual one, as busloads of conferees began to pack busses for some supervised excursion, I go downtown where today, as last night, traffic knots and creeps, due, at least in part, to the "Meet Tucson" festival packing Sunset Park, a food-and-music extravaganza that brings out the claustrophobe, the agoraphobe in me.

Once downtown, I duck instead into the Tucson Museum of Art where I enjoyed intersections of classical and contemporary art, each work responding somehow to the Grand Canyon, perfect for the spiraling interior that somewhat resembles the ramped Gugenheim except this spiral cuts downward, into the earth. Though at first I am more taken with Jack Balas's Rumor, Tom Strich's Homage To Glen Canyon—in which a sink filled with red desert sand is carved out by the slow drip from a bathroom faucet while overhead a lavatory light pulses irregularly—screwworms into my mind.

***

Outside, two men argue. One's upset and accusatory and demanding. The other: calmer, but concerned by potential witnesses, worried about who's catching the show. The bleat of the first's voice cuts his attempts to placate. At first, I think they are father and son. The first so much younger than the second. But when the second tells the first they're going to cross the street back into the park that's starting to thump more vigorously with Meet-Tucson-festival Mariachi and the first says to the second, child-at-fast-food-restaurant-or-amusement-park demandingly, Let's get an APARTMENT, I see this is a lovers' quarrel.

I walk away, away from them and Sunset Park. Earlier, I promised myself some Carne Seca at El Charro, and now, after eyesful in the museum and earsful outside, I need to cut myself off, cloy another sense. I'm walking away through the Old-Town adobes, but I keep thinking of the demand, Let's get an APARTMENT, wondering what's involved and wondering if—however large or small the demands or provisions of the fearful—the fight is always the same. Where does the hope of acceptance become the drive to control?

***

***

At El Charro, a woman's kvetching at a nearby table about real-estate and trust.

Old Town is, apparently, more crowded than usual. At another table, a loud complaint at traffic begins to interview the waiter.

Traffic creeps. So much in such inflexible veins.

***

The Carne Seca, which I've had here before, satisfies.

On my last trip, my friend Eric Hayot took me to El Charro because it was close to his place, because it was recommended, and because he wanted to show me, he said, what might be another kind of barbecue.

Now I understand it better. I know more of the back-story.

I don't know what the folks at El Charro would say about their history with Carne Seca, how they came to make it, but once I listened to a Bolivian restaurateur in Denver wax at the mention of the dish, a faraway La Pazian sky coalescing in the sclera of his eyes, a face of pleasure that made me wonder if Carne Seca isn't some version or descendant of the Incan charqui from which descends jerky.

Americans might think that jerky was a hidden weed that grew near roadside stands, picked and sold to those rising through altitude, or cultivated by Boy Scouts, but the practice of dry-curing spiced strips of meat is as old as the Incan empire and perhaps older, as early contact-era accounts of Caribbean barbacoa describe a similar preparation, though the Caribs used smoke to cure, while the Incas used the high, dry, mountain air and the sun.

I am told here the Carne Seca is prepared on the roof of the building. The spices are, they say, secret. But here I can taste the salt used to draw the moisture out of the meat, partner to the sun, the signatures of the separations that create this tangle of beef fiber fried with onions and tomatoes, laved with lime, a sharp and fulsome taste.

***

Outside, the festival's breaking.

Above, Carne Seca dries to pieces.

The sky is broken and spectacular.

Something happens in between.

Posted by Jake Adam York at October 14, 2006 5:33 PM