This week on Arizona Illustrated Tucson Celebrates Agave.

Put together this program to demonstrate hands on the roasting of agave.

Poetry in our parks.

I guess the question then is how do we build sound in a poem Photographing the black hole at the center of our galaxy, you can go quite close to a black hole.

But if you cross that virtual surface that we call the event horizon then you'll never be able to come out from it.

Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

The Tucson Basin is home to several native agave species, and you'll find many more varieties planted around southern Arizona.

This staple of the Sonoran Desert supports pollinators and also has a strong culinary tradition.

So what does agave tastes like?

And why is it so culturally important to the region?

Well, that's what participants in Tucson's annual Agave Heritage Festival came here to find.

[soft music] (Jesus) This thing has been burning for 5 hours, but we don't want to let it cool down.

we want to keep that heat as much as possible.

So we're just going to get ready to cut a couple of these in half.

Nice!.

There's a lot of things to keep in mind.

(Liz)Tucson's annual Agave Heritage Festival celebrates the ecology, culture and culinary tradition of the agave plant.

(Maegan)A lot of our O'odham people, our O'odham youth don't know our traditional ways.

But this moment, we're reviving it.

We're living it, we're breathing it.

We're living in this process.

We put together this program to demonstrate hands on the roasting of agave.

That involves finding the agaves.

Some of them, we grew them here at the Mission Garden.

Some of them are in people's backyards.

Some of them were in the neighborhood near the the Mission Garden, where we had to ask permission, of course.

[soft music] Here we're going to try to break this thing in half..

It's going to be a challenge.

(Jesus)And today was the day to prepare the agaves, clean the leaves and prepare what we call the piñas or the cabezas, the heads, the hearts of the agave.

We put a firepit since early this morning to essentially heat these rocks.

And then we throw in the agave heads and we covered it up and it's going to be there for three days.

And then when you when you covered it, we just use an old washing machine covered it.

In Mexico.

They used like a hood of a truck.

Anything that you could find.

Cover it.

put some dirt on top of it and you're done.

One person can do it in 15 minutes.

(Maegan)After three days of just being covered up.

Undisturbed, we just leave it alone.

Let it do its thing.

This is a lot of work.

You have to go and collect the the agave, the heads or piñas.

Will come back on Sunday evening.

[bright guitar music] (Maegan)Clear the dirt off, take that back end of the washing machine off.

In a little bit.

You should be able to smell it.

(Maegan)Take the leaves out.

Take the rocks out.

And our hearts should be a beautiful, brown roasted piece of food.

(laughs) And then we're going to get them out and we're going to see what happens.

We want to taste them.

And eat them.

You're going to chew on it and suck on it and spit out the fibers, you do not swallow the fibers.

It's like sugar cane just like that.

[bright guitar music] My father as a young man was Mescalero.

He was making mezcal, mezcal bacanora, to sell in the town in a place called Baviácora, Sonora.

He talked all the time about how mezcal was made, and every once in a while he would bring chunks of roasted agave.

And it's basically like candy.

It's a it's a it's a morsel.

It's something that any kid would just devour because it's just good stuff.

I feel fortunate that to me, this is a flavor of my childhood.

[trolley klaxon] Agavi experts and enthusiasts travel to Tucson to participate in events happening across the city.

Tequila is just one type of mezcal is a mezcal industrialized with one type of plant, one type of yeast, and one industrialized process.

(speaker)The first one was a pineapple based tepache, with cinnamon and clove, and I used agave syrup instead of cane sugar as the sweetener.

(speaker) Theyre catching water and collecting microbes that ferment in the leaf bases as that water trickles down the leaves.

So you actually have a plant that's a fermentation microbe collector.

Don't think of agave just as a plant.

We have a very intimate relationship with our landscape through food and with the external landscape, but also with our internal landscape.

Sometimes they cannot be explained.

The flavors, the aroma as they are rather felt, deeply felt.

You cannot know a product only after you have tried it many, many different times.

And people, when I ask them, what does mezcal taste like?

And people, when I ask them, what does mezcal taste like?

They say all the time.

Maguey, maguey It's a common name that we use in Mexico for the agave plant.

You cannot put into grammar what a specific kind of acidic flavor or lactic flavor.

taste like to really understand and make the beverage.

You really have to feel it in your body.

(slow, soft music) (Maegan)In our language, in O'odham language, Cuk-Son means black base.

There's black rocks at the bottom of A Mountain.

And so that's how it got it's name.

I'm learning my language in this process, how we call things by our language.

I'm learning the Spanish version as well, but it just makes me want to walk through this door that I have no idea is on the other side.

I have a sense of it.

It's an ancient, ancient room that I'm I'm asking to be led into.

Her, this tremendous eagerness to learn.

But even though she comes from the reservation and from a rural area, her upbringing is in the city and it's been for me a pleasure to try to get her to rope her in and to do more.

(Maegan)By doing this, I'm bringing it back.

I'm breathing a little bit of life into it, and I have a son so I can pass that on to him.

And he may have children in his in his life and he can pass that on utilizing my time here on Earth for people that aren't even born yet.

That's what I hope is that it keeps going.

And I think that's been very satisfying for me and for her to try to combine this knowledge, the things that she knows from her grandparents, from her mother, and she only knew them too, from stories talking in the kitchen table.

Agave should be recognized for its survival, it's durability.

It's giving-ness to humans and animals.

And if we keep growing, if we keep talking about it, if we keep being compassionate to our environment and encouraging these plants to grow here and everywhere, we'll have, we'll have food.

We can feed people.

The beauty of the natural world has long been an inspiration to writers and poets.

In April of 2022 poet Jodie Hollander teamed up with the National Park Service in Arizona to celebrate National Poetry Month by holding a series of workshops across the state, inviting anyone interested to explore the art form, check out their own environment, even write their own poems.

[ Sound of a stream] Poetry is what I love and it's what I feel like I'm here on earth to do.

That does get sort of intimate.

I'm Jodi Hollander.

I live in Fort Collins.

I make my living, teaching and writing poetry.

This is the first workshop in a series of six.

We have the S in softly, and then we have the S in grass.

We are in the Desert Research Center, just outside the east entrance of Saguaro national park.

It's gorgeous.

We're so lucky.

[Jazz music] People tend to read poems differently than they would read.

Maybe a piece of fiction.

The way a poem sounds is really important, and it's one of the things that distinguishes it from a piece of prose.

The idea was to try and build a whole series of these poetry workshops for National Poetry Month.

I guess the question then is how do we build sound in a poem?

And there are lots of ways to do this.

You can go and learn iambic pentameter, you can learn form, but you could also create a very musical sounding poem using free verse.

For example, deep green sea.

What sound do you hear?

E It's lovely, isn't it?

If you hear deep green, see our ears like that?

[Sound of a stream] I was hiking and Saguaro National Park East and I was describing to my friend like what I was seeing and how amazed and intrigued I was by the beauty of it.

And so she said, "Hey, there's going to be a poetry writing workshop."

[Bird Sounds] That if I stepped out of my body, I would break into Blossom.

And there's a micro pause there after the word break.

Right.

And so for a moment, we think, wait, is he going to break apart if we are having several interpretations of this poem?

Would you say that the poet is doing his job here?

We first reviewed some poems, and then I learned how to write my own poem based on what I see in nature here.

In the same way that our public lands are for everyone.

I think that poetry is also for everyone.

Being in nature tends to bring out sides of us that maybe wouldn't come out otherwise.

And for me, poetry is about honesty and it's about truth.

And oftentimes we're able to get to those areas of truth when we're out in nature, when we're in an environment that's peaceful or inspiring in some way.

In the thunder sky, the Octillo springs from its death slumber to blossom to leaf seemingly overnight, then on to other uses a barrier to sun and dark ocotillo shade held aloft on mesquite pillars as if awaiting its warrior shield and lance.

Sometimes we may not, you know, understand what the author, the poet is trying to say.

So we get discouraged.

With dawns and desks as regular as a clock, as steady as time itself.

Lovely.

Really beautiful.

It's hard to believe that you were able to write something so powerful in such a short amount of time as anyone.

I was so happy with the participants today.

They were all really interested and engaged.

They asked great questions.

They had some really sharp insights about the poems.

And then the original poems that the participants wrote were really incredible.

Was it painful or did you feel nothing?

Did you accept the invasion or did you lament the change?

Where would you be today if not where you are now?

How did you get here?

Who are you?

It makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Still standing.

So writing poetry is an opportunity for us to connect with our own humanity and to maybe find a voice inside that we didn't know was there.

Or maybe we knew it was there, but we hadn't really listened to it.

You plant them just like that.

I heard it on NPR.

We eyed the tall, gray, lifeless sticks with skepticism.

A living fence signals our desert path.

[Jazz Funk Music] A black hole is a region of space time where gravity is so strong, not even light can escape So you'd think they'd be impossible to see.

But think again.

In 2019, a series of radio telescopes positioned around the globe called Event Horizon made headlines by capturing the first image of a black hole.

And that effort was spearheaded here at the University of Arizona.

This year, they made news again with an image of The black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

About 20 years ago when the existence of black holes was just being accepted, a lot of us asked the very simple question, What would it look like if we could take a picture of a black hole?

It's not about what you see, but what you don't see.

[News] On Wednesday, scientists unveiled the first direct visual evidence of a black hole.

[Scientist] In April of 2017, All the dishes in the Event Horizon Telescope swiveled, turned and stared at a galaxy 55 million light years away.

And we are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable.

We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole.

Here it is.

I was stunned by how fascinated people were with the black hole.

The day after the announcement, the picture was in the front page of every single newspaper anywhere in the world.

I mean, we knew it was a good result, but it was amazing to see how the world reacted to it.

Unlikely as it sounds, we now have an image of that invisible space anomaly, a black hole.

This is amazing.

The first picture ever of a black hole.

We now know clearly that black holes drive large scale structure in the universe, and we now have an entirely new way of studying general relativity in black holes that we never had before.

And as with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning.

So of course our experiment isn't done.

Once that initial excitement died down, we went right back to the drawing board and we said, okay, we have more data in our hands from that observing campaign.

We have this other black hole.

We've been working very hard at it and hopefully will be able to share the results soon.

But very much along the lines of what is inferred for M87 and Sag A star... A black hole is a warping in space time that is so strong that not even light can escape from it.

And you can go quite close to black holes.

But if you cross that virtual surface that we call the event horizon, then you'll never be able to come out from it.

It's a place in the universe where our ideas of how the smallest things work with quantum mechanics and how the largest things work with gravity and Einstein's theory of general relativity get married to one another, like they both play a role in the event horizon of a black hole.

So when we asked ourselves which are the best black holes to take a picture of, only two of them crossed the limit.

One of them is the black hole in the center of our galaxy because it's the closest and the other is the biggest black hole.

And that is the black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy.

M87 is so slow that it stays still for us.

This is why we started with the M87 Galaxy and we moved later on to the black hole in the center of our own galaxy.

The Event Horizon Telescope is an international collaboration.

Just by virtue of how we conduct this experiment, we need telescopes all across the globe.

In fact, what we really did was get telescopes from on different continents to work in unison as if they were one telescope.

It is centered here at the University of Arizona.

We are the PI institution and we actually held the first meeting of the event horizon here in Tucson.

We hosted the meeting.

We made possible three of the nine telescopes of the Event Horizon Telescope, two of them here in Arizona, one on top of KITT Peak and on top of Mount Graham and the telescope in the South Pole.

When I got a job when I was 15, it wasn't to buy a car, but it was to buy a telescope.

You know, I have been interested in this for a long time.

Going to a telescope is perhaps a little bit like going to a monastery.

You're locked in a space with nothing to do except for your work.

The first part of my work in this project is making it possible to do the observations.

And currently, I'm responsible for making the two observatories in Arizona and the one at the South Pole work each year.

Things we have to worry about that are a little bit surprising are things like the temperature of the cables that carry our signals and how they change during our observation, or the little quartz crystals that do the oscillations that we use to reference are our measurements to.

You've always got to be checking something.

It's like if you're driving and you had, you know, 50 mirrors that you had to be checking all the time, it's a lot of little things, but if you get any of them wrong, then it doesn't work.

The SMT is a little unusual because when the telescope turns, the building rotates with it.

It's gradual enough that you generally don't notice it unless you can see out a window.

A neat thing about being at the telescopes is that there's no better place to just sit and look at the stars the way I did when I was a kid.

If you were to ask someone, imagine the strangest thing that must exist in the universe.

There's no way they would imagine that there's a point in space where all the laws break down.

And so determining whether that's a real thing in the universe and proving it, that seems really cool.

So I'm really happy to have the chance to be a part of that.

Einstein told us how to interpret the world in a way that is very counterintuitive.

The equations of Einstein's theory are very complex, and the only way to make any progress is to throw them on big, super massive computers.

And calculate what they predict.

So what we do is we make a virtual black hole.

We calculate the motion of the plasma and the motion of light coming out of it.

And then we simulate the observations, just like the real observations happen.

We actually have a little machine that we control our simulations with our hands while the simulation is running in real time.

And now we're at the point where our tools here at the University of Arizona are so efficient that we can actually render a single simulated image in a fraction of a second.

We have spent the last year and a half finessing our tools, given what we know from the previous models.

And we are very, very eager to see what this second black hole picture will look like.

Is it the same is a different degree with Einstein's theory, does it not?

University of Arizona have just announced new information about the center of our galaxy.

Literally just it just announced what they're calling a very groundbreaking discovery and very cool stuff here, Nicole.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here.

While we share with you our exciting new results about our galaxy, the Milky Way at its heart towards the Constellation Sagittarius is Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole suspected to reside there.

The Event Horizon Telescope is delighted to share with you the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.

Sagittarius A star.

There is a reason why we say seeing is believing.

When you see something that you've heard so much about, it suddenly becomes real.

And the black hole that we took a picture of is not imagination anymore.

It's something as real as our own.

The thing that has drawn me to black holes is this test of theories of physics, theories of the universe.

And I really hope that my career and all the things that I worked on and contributed to actually ends up, you know, furthering that.

The release of Sag A star brings us to the end of that top level goal But the amazing thing is that the data we've taken since the very first experiment has gotten so much better that astrophysically, We're going to learn a lot more from everything we do after than we did from just these first 2 pictures.

As humankind.

I think we do a lot of things because we are intrinsically curious.

We have a sense of wonder about the things around us.

The story of the Black Hole just is a chapter in that book.

Like you just saw, Southern Arizona is a place where researchers are tackling some of the world's biggest problems and challenges.

It's also a place of rich biodiversity that's so small you may walk right past it and not even notice it.

Our producer, David Fenster, came across an unusual site like that while hiking in the Catalina Mountains.

Here's the first installment of our ongoing series, Field Notes.

It's June and I'm walking near Summerhaven in the Santa Catalina mountains.

I keep seeing these strange sacks hanging from trees.

I assume they're spider webs.

In a seemingly unrelated event.

I feel something drop onto my head and pull a caterpillar out of my hair.

I eventually find one of the low hanging sacks and take a closer look.

A passerby informs me these are called Tent Caterpillars.

Apparently it's common for them to fall on people's heads as they walk below.

The Internet tells me these caterpillars are part of the genus Malacosoma.

This is what Malacosoma californicum turns into.

There can be outbreak years where during a walk there can be a constant rain of caterpillars on your head.

While these caterpillars can defoliate the trees, they often don't cause lasting harm.

And they provide food for the birds.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrator.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week with all new stories.