Small rooms of Yuma

It was mild enough when we went there last month, but Yuma gets as hot in the summer as you'd expect for a town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It's an interesting little place in its own quiet way, just south of the confluence of two mighty southwestern rivers: the Gila and the Colorado.


Yuma was an important crossing point on the way to California. The old crossing has many bridges - for rail, road, and foot. On the river and not far from the ferry site and the bridges is the Yuma Territorial Prison State Park. Famed, I guess, in song and story ... well, film, anyway. It's more striking than beautiful, but an interesting piece of history.

The cell blocks were originally enclosed, but now they're open to the sky. Somehow they're less ugly than the brutalist jails we seem to build these days - there's kind of a dignity in the stonework, even if the museum is full of the relics of barbarism. And six bunks to a cell is ... yup, pretty intimate.

surprise! dark cell bats

The dark cell is really dark, as advertised, and smells much less of excrement than it would have in actual use. Also, it has bats ...

View from the guard tower

Across the river is an early 20th century mission. It's right beside the administrative centre of the local Indian tribe, who have been as harassed and distressed by Spanish and Anglo incursions as any other people of the region. I wonder whether the tanks were built on purpose to spoil the view to it, thoughtlessly without even considering it, or perhaps the spot was so ideal for the purpose that the prospect was deemed worth losing.
The roads thereabouts are lined with neat rows of winter greens, and you can smell water in the air. The lower Colorado (together with Mexico) basically supplies the winter salad bowls of the US & Canada. (Hoping some of the fields are further off the highway than we saw ...) There are even tours to be had. But I was happy enough with the roadside farm stands and stopping for a quick photo op.


And we had the pleasure of stopping at another small room of an entirely different kind ... A place called Pause, Rest, Worship. Unknown to google maps, but findable by rumor, snippets of old internet pages, and careful watching from the road. This treasure of a chapel amidst tidy fields is a memorial to the builder's wife, and after a storm destroyed it, the community rebuilt it. It is tiny, lovely, and peaceful.