(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, U.S.

Poet Laureate Ada Limón makes a special visit to Tucson.

(Tanisha) Being out here in this setting, it's just the words that she said out here was so beautiful and so meaningful and so connective to just us as people.

(Tom) Fort Lowell Encampment offers a glimpse into the not so distant past of southern Arizona.

(Homer) Visitors can come in and learn about this historic fort that stood at this location from 1873 to 1891.

(Tom) From Tucson to the icy moons of Jupiter, the Europa Clipper.

(Lynn) What we really want to learn for Europa is how the Europa system works.

(Tom) And our desert plant series continues with this beautiful spring staple.

(Jack) The indigenous people shared that it could be used as an incense and so this sap emitted the fragrance that must have greeted people as they entered these missions and churches.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

In July of 2022, Ada Limón was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress.

She's the first Latina to receive this honor.

And last year she visited southern Arizona to make a special dedication right here at Saguaro National Park East.

♪ CALM FREQUENCIES (Tyler) We couldn't be more thrilled to have the 24th U.S.

Poet Laureate here with us in Tucson tonight.

Limón's poems remind that the world is so much more than the rectangle of a Zoom call, or the phantom touch of a phone screen.

If poetry really is a preserve for the imagination like a national park, a place where wildness is still possible.

♪ HIGH FREQUENCY (Michael) Peace is very rare.

There's always something happening.

Vehicles, sounds, phones, technology.

But to be out here with nothing but the wind and the sound of the trees, um, it is sometimes overwhelming for some.

♪ GOURD RATTLE PLAYS ♪ GOURD RATTLE CONTINUES PLAYING AS MICHAEL SINGS ♪ (Ada) Sometimes when I show up to these places, I think, how is this possible?

This was a dream we had in a little office on a rainy day, um, overlooking the capital.

And I thought, we just need to get out into the land.

And here we are.

So it feels really moving to be here.

(Beth) So this is a part of Poetry and Parks, which is the signature project of U.S.

Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.

She selected seven national parks across the country to gift with a picnic table that has a poem picked out specifically for each park.

And we're here to celebrate that unveiling of that table, and now she's gonna speak here to the crowd today.

(Ada) I think connecting the natural world, with language is so important.

But also recognizing that language often fails, that we walk in a place like this and think, I have no words.

And I was thinking about how all the saguaros look like exclamation points.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you travel as a poet.

And your poor, your poor friends have to go, "Oh, there she goes again."

To choose a poem for this park was very difficult.

I wanted each poem to be site-specific and like anything, when you have this idea "I want to do this right," um, then you go, "Oh, it takes so much work."

[ LAUGHING ] It turns out when you want to do things right, it takes a lot of work and a lot of time.

And I was really really grateful that we were able to get this poem by Ofelia Zepeda.

It's the only poem in a park that is by a living poet, is the only poem that's represented in two different languages.

And it is in the O'odham language.

It is so often that we can feel like we don't belong, and I really believe that if we can turn to the natural world, it is telling us that we belong.

And over and over again, that is what I am reminded, that I cannot be un-belonged by this land.

"Cloud Song."

Greenly they emerge.

In colors of blue they emerge.

Whitely they emerge.

In colors of black they are coming.

Reddening, they are right here.

[ AUDIENCE CLAPS ] And now we get the beautiful, um, part, which is to unveil this gorgeous picnic table.

[ AUDIENCE CLAPS ] (Tanisha) Being out here in this setting, it's just the words that she, you know, said out here was so beautiful and so meaningful and so connective to, um, just us as people.

You know, especially in this area, being O'odham, you know, our ancestral lands here and this connection we feel and our ancestors who have been here.

And just the path that we're here on is so much history here.

And you know, um, it's beautiful.

(Traci) Really interested in seeing our O'odham community members being represented in, you know, the different ways around the parks.

(Fred) Saguaro National Park, um, has had a long history and parks in general of displacing, you know, Indigenous communities that were within park lands in the first place.

So, being able to find ways to reconnect tribal youth to their ancestral homelands is really, really important.

And the U.S.

Poet Laureate absolutely helped to kick that off today in a real big way.

(Maria) She has that voice where it's like, it's soothing and you're out here.

And I was just thinking of all, like, the saguaros, cause the saguaros mean a lot to the O'odham people and they're considered like people.

Um, they're considered family.

So I was just thinking how her words were embracing all those saguaros out here and they were able to hear all that she was saying.

A lot of this project came to be because, uh, even if I have moments where I have trouble relating to the idea of being part of a nation or being part of a country, I can see myself as being part of this land.

And I can see myself as being part of this planet.

And this is a poem where, um, I first sort of etched those ideas into being a new national anthem.

The truth is I've never cared for the national anthem.

If you think about it, it's not a good song.

It's too high for most of us with the rockets, red glare.

And then there are the bombs, always, always, there is war and bombs.

Once I sang it at homecoming and through even the tenacious high school band off-key.

But the song didn't mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth.

And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions no refuge could save the hireling and the slave?

Perhaps every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we absentmindedly sing the high notes with the beer sloshing in the stands, hoping our team wins.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental.

Best when it's humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything.

When it's not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you could keep it until it's needed, until you can love it again.

Until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods.

The short grass plains, the Red River gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, the song that's our birthright, that's sung in silence when it's too hard to go on, that sounds like someone's rough fingers weaving into another's, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says, "My bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones."

And isn't that enough?

[ AUDIENCE CLAPS ] Um, After I wrote that poem, I said to my husband, "Well now I'll never be invited to be the Poet Laureate of the United States."

[ AUDIENCE LAUGHS ] ♪ FREQUENCIES AND STRING CHORDS PLAY ♪ The story of the Fort Lowell Encampment is one of resilience, conflict, and transformation.

Established back in 1866 in downtown Tucson, it was later moved out of town, and today its ruins and museum offer a glimpse into the past and preserve the legacy of those who helped to shape Southern Arizona's history.

♪ SOFT OLD WESTERN MUSIC [ HORSES TROTTING ] (Homer) Southern Arizona became part of the United States with the Gadsden Purchase.

The Mexican military left in March of 1856.

Later that year the American military came.

After the Civil War in 1866, they established Camp Lowell in what is now Armory Park in downtown Tucson.

♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC In 1873 they moved to this location and they did that because the soldiers were creating problems.

They would get drunk on payday and shoot civilians and there was a lot of malaria from the Santa Cruz River that was killing off the soldiers.

So they moved out here to be further away and to have a better environment.

♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC ♪ [ HORSES TROTTING ] Prior to the fort being here, the Apache would come down and visit and raid, and people would be killed.

The fort sort of stabilized the area and by having several hundred soldiers here, that sort of mostly halted.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC On this side of Craycroft, on the east side, we have the ruins of the hospital building and you can see a few other wall segments for barracks and stables.

Across the street there are three more officers' quarters and just a little bit of the guardhouse is visible as well as the large empty area that was the parade ground.

One of the main features of the fort was Cottonwood Row, which was a row of cottonwood trees.

And on the east side, although not in the correct alignment, but you can still see these cottonwood trees.

♪ SOFT MUSIC I'm standing in front of the recreated officers' quarters from 1963, and in the last two years it's been restored.

The adobe bricks have been replaced with stabilized adobes and the roof fixed and all that.

♪ SOFT MUSIC Inside the museum there are displays that include artifacts from the time period.

They have uniforms of the soldiers so you can see what they were like.

It talks about the Apache and why they were sometimes mortal enemies of the United States.

♪ SOFT INTENSE MUSIC Visitors can come in and learn about this historic fort that stood at this location from 1873 to 1891.

There's that saying, "If you don't know your history, it's going to be repeated."

So understanding why people lived in Tucson, how they lived, it is important because it tells us something about our present, and it gives you a sense of what history was like.

Europa Clipper is a NASA mission to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, which is an ocean world that may harbor alien life underneath its icy crust.

Now, the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab has direct involvement with two instruments aboard the spacecraft, and the poet laureate you met earlier in the show, Ada Limón, wrote a poem that is etched onto the side of the spacecraft that's now exploring the depths of our solar system.

(Ada) Curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water.

Each drop of rain, each rivulet, each pulse, each vein, O'second moon, we too are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We too are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.

(Control Center) Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ignition.

And liftoff!

Liftoff of Falcon Heavy with Europa Clipper, unveiling the mysteries of an enormous ocean lurking beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa.

♪ INTENSE MUSIC (Alfred) Europa Clipper is a NASA mission dedicated to studying Europa, especially to understand the habitability of Europa.

We're pretty sure that there's a liquid ocean inside Europa beneath an ice shell that's anywhere from 10 to 50 kilometers thick.

It is, in the view of some, the most likely place to find extant life.

Think about the black smokers, the sub-sea floor, life on Earth.

If there's something like that on the floor of Europa, then that could really be teeming with life.

And then, what does that mean for life elsewhere in our galaxy?

(Mission Control) We can see that Clipper has successfully seperated, please say goodbye to Clipper on its way to Europa.

[ TYPING ] (Alfred) So I am a planetary scientist, mainly a planetary geologist, and I've worked on many spacecraft missions.

I sometimes describe myself as a mission junkie.

One mission I started working on right out of graduate school was the Galileo Mission at Jupiter.

Galileo Mission showed that there's probably a subsurface ocean inside Europa, which is very interesting for habitability.

Now with Europa Clipper, we're going to go back with a very large data return capability.

♪ SUBTLE MUSIC Europa is one of four of the Galilean satellites discovered by Galileo himself back in 1610.

Three of these satellites have a very interesting orbital configuration around Jupiter, and this creates forced eccentricity of the orbits.

And that means as you go around massive Jupiter, their shapes change.

They swell and contract in shape, and this produces a tremendous amount of tidal heating.

♪ SUBTLE MUSIC So Europa Clipper isn't formally looking for life.

It's trying to understand Europa's habitability.

So we want to know, is it currently active?

(Lynn) So on Europa Clipper there's a number of instruments, many instruments, but the one that I work on is the Reason Radar System.

And the waves are so long they can go into the subsurface and bounce off of things there.

So for example, if there's layering in the subsurface, different density layers, or if there's water, like if you had kind of a reservoir of water sitting in the upper crust, those are all things that the Radar wave will reflect off of.

What we really want to learn for Europa is how the Europa system works.

For example, what is the interior structure?

Where is the ocean?

Does the ocean interact with minerals or you know things that could be food for life, essentially?

We don't really know for sure if there are plumes coming off that could bring some of this water up.

(Alfred) I'm involved with EIS, which stands for Europa Imaging System.

This is a very innovative camera design.

We need the wide-angle camera to cover a large area and to map stereo along a swath.

Then we have a narrow-angle camera where you can collect enough signal while whizzing over the surface very fast to take very high-resolution images.

And so we designed a new camera that we can run in either mode.

(Lynn) When we first arrive at Europa, I think all of us are just going to be like immediately basically sitting there waiting to see what the first Radar gram is that we get back.

There's just so many unknowns, so for me it's really like a sense of adventure going and seeing this new place that we really don't know very much about.

♪ SUBTLE MUSIC (Alfred) Hi Sarah.

- Hi Alfred.

- What have you got that's fantastic?

- Well.

(Alfred) Here at the University of Arizona Sarah Sutton is working with me on EIS in her digital trained model production lab.

(Sarah) In my lab, which is a photogrammetry lab, we make stereo models, digital stereo models of topography of planetary surfaces.

(Alfred) Yep, this will be great data.

We wanna find future landing sites too.

(Sarah) So when we take stereo images, which we will be doing with ice, you can look at them in 3D in a special monitor and it's like you're there.

(Alfred) And look at surprising terrains, which I'm sure we'll see.

(Sarah) I am interested as a geologist in looking for if we can observe active processes on the surface during our mission.

What we already know we will see is our icy ridges, icy bands, plates that look a lot like icebergs and ice plates on earth, chaos regions, like where it looks really broken up.

I think getting at those questions is gonna be really fascinating.

♪ SOFT MUSIC (Alfred) Exploration itself, it has great value.

It's fundamental research.

We can't predict what in the future this will lead to, but we can look back and fundamental research has led to all of the advancements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

(Lynn) The sense of adventure really does drive me to do this spacecraft mission work.

There's really this sense that we could go there and see something totally weird.

For me, that's really the motivation to keep doing it.

(Ada) We are creatures of constant awe.

(Alfred) Another aspect of this is appreciating life on Earth.

(Ada) There are mysteries below our sky.

(Alfred) Life is very rare, especially advanced life like ours, so it makes us appreciate and hopefully do a better job of managing spaceship Earth.

(Ada) And it is not darkness that unites us.

Living in the Sonoran Desert offers us many advantages.

Among those, being able to grow some of the thousands of native and drought resistant plants available.

So next, we'll introduce you to one of the most popular plants of spring.

It's called the Brittlebush, and it's known for its bright yellow flowers.

♪ CALM GUITAR (Jack) So we're in the Sundial Garden here at Tohono Chul, and I am surrounded by one of my very favorite spring plants here in the Sonoran Desert, brittlebush, Encelia farinosa.

And it's worth dissecting that botanical name a little bit.

The species name farinosa refers to the whitish hairs that cover the leaves of this plant.

And this is a really neat adaptation to a hot, sun-baked environment.

Whereas dark leaves would tend to attract heat, lighter colored leaves reflect it allowing this plant to survive in environments that would absolutely destroy many other plant species.

One of the best qualities of this plant is that some years we don't get great winter-spring rains like this one.

And we aren't going to see large blooms of plants like poppies or lupines, but no matter what happens with rainfall or temperatures, brittlebush will almost always bloom reliably in the spring, coating hillsides and road edges in these gorgeous mounds of golden yellow.

Finches and Verdins who will eat the seeds, perch on a tree in another part of your yard, and deposit those seeds in a nice little pile of fertilizer that's going to germinate with summer rains to ensure that you have an ever increasing number of spring blooms year after year.

An interesting ethnobotanical quality of this plant is the sap contained within the stems that have lent this plant one of its Spanish names, incienso.

So when Spanish friars showed up to this region in the 16 and 1700s, they didn't have the frankincense or myrrh that they might have burned on sensors in churches and missions.

The Indigenous people shared that it could be used as an incense.

And so this sap emitted the fragrance that must have greeted people as they entered these missions and churches along the Spanish frontier.

Though brittlebush only blooms in the springtime, through the entire warm season.

These plants can also be cut back once the flowers have died and the seeds have been distributed by birds.

This will help keep them dense and ensure really lush growth in future seasons.

So if you're looking for a plant that's easy to cultivate, self-perpetuates in your landscape, and reliably provides excellent spring blooms, brittlebush is one of the ideal species and can be found at almost any local nursery that specializes in native plants.

♪ CALM GUITAR If you have questions for Jack Dash about what to plant in your yard, be sure to mark your calendar.

On April 19th, we'll be hosting Arizona Illustrated Thriving in the Desert, Sustainable Landscaping for Southern Arizona at the Environmental and Natural Resources II Building at the University of Arizona campus from 1 to 2.30.

For more information and to reserve your spot, go to azpm.org/plants Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

I was actually going to class, and I missed class because I wanted to look at all the clothes.

The sign caught my eye.

It was like three shirts for like 20 bucks.

So I was like, "Okay, let's see what they have."

Death Row Productions shirt, a little oversized, and I'm obsessed with Star Wars.

So I really like this one.

This was the best one I found.

I am from Mexico, so I live with my sister, and we actually both really like thrifting together like all the time.

Not only it makes it like more special when you find something you really like because like you worked to get it, but also like a lot of times I'll have people come up to me and be like, "Where do you get this?

This is so cool."

And I'm like, "Oh, I thrifted it.

It's unique."

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Thank you for joining us for Arizona Illustrated from here in Saguaro National Park East, where it's beautiful.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again next week.