My brother, born in the Midwest and living now in Tucson, believes he loves Arizona, but he’s a busy man who rarely gets out to test the theory. So when I came down to visit for one of my manic national park campaigns: Saguaro! Casa Grande Ruins! Tumacacori! – he took a day off of work and came along on my next day’s outing.

We drove an hour east of the city, up into the hills, and I was already grateful. Frankly I hadn’t cottoned to the desert the way so many cool-minded people do. Saguaros were interestingly weird, barrell cacti formidable, jumping cholla luminous, but my feeling for the landscape never got much beyond the needles these plants project toward the world. I think of the desert as a place that cannot be entered without a sense of distance and personal rejection: Watch out. Stay away. You’re not welcome here.

On the other hand, the grasslands leading up to Fort Bowie – an outpost in the Apache Wars of the late 19^th century – had been a welcome change that morning, and after our hike out to the fort ruins and back, we had driven down to Chiricahua to check out the hoodoos.

“Hoodoos?” my brother said.

“Standing up rocks,” I said. “Those things Wiley Coyote was always falling off of in the old Roadrunner cartoons. They have names.”

Driving up to the visitors center, we were already amongst evergreens, and the road from there on rose quickly, past the first named formations of eroded pillars: The Organ Pipes, which were pretty obvious; the Sea Captain that we couldn’t find, the China Boy that we assumed was some kind of politically incorrect image that our own refined natures would refuse to acknowledge.

“This isn’t working,” he said, and I was relieved when the park brochure I was reading gave us permission to name our own formations. We hiked around the Massai Point Nature Trail at 6,800 feet, skirting the canyon edge, then drove down a hundred feet to try the Echo Canyon Trail. It was there that we came face-to-face with the hoodoos.

Face is the word here. Every balanced boulder on a neck of stone became a head: We saw E.T. We saw a parasaurophalus. We saw an Apache warrior gazing out across the canyon. And then my brother went crazy. 

“That looks like a whole hamster crawling over a cliff,” he said, and I could sort of imagine it, but I began to suspect that he'd been in his office for too long.

“And that looks like a little angry Buddha duck. Do you see it?” This one escaped me.

“I’m having trouble with the ‘angry Buddha’ concept,” I said. “I tend to think of the Buddha as contented. You know: Contemplative.”

“This one’s different,” he assured me and carefully indicated the rocks he was rearranging in his mind. The Buddha part, I realized, was that the duck was slightly potbellied. He was also, I pointed out, wearing most un-Buddha-like wrap-around shades.

By this time we were primed for anthropomorphic avatars of anything, and driving back down the road to the visitors center we found the Sea Captain and even admitted the presence of the China Boy. We weren’t contemplating or even comprehending nature at all, of course, but had created a sort of theme park of frozen figures. I don’t apologize for the impulse – it’s an eternally human act – but I wonder if I could now go back into the desert and this time find a saguaro, arms raised in welcome and wearing a prickly smile.