From Valley Girl to Cactus Hugger
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, making me a Valley Girl even before Frank Zappa’s song popularized the term. My friends and I spent many a weekend evening cruising Van Nuys Boulevard, ending up at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.
So how did I wind up in the Sonoran Desert, calling myself a cactus hugger?
Even though I grew up in suburbia and my father worked in downtown L.A., my parents instilled a love of nature in every way they could. Our family spent many weekends camping. We’d drive the few hours east to Joshua Tree National Monument in the Mojave Desert or north on I-395 to McGee Creek near Bishop in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Wherever the destination, my sister and I squabbled in the overstuffed back seat of our Ford Falcon throughout the drive.
Annual vacations took our family to Arizona and New Mexico. We spent several trips at White Horse Lake near Williams, Arizona. One year, we visited the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, the highlight a horseback tour of Canyon de Chelly.
My dad wouldn’t take us to the Grand Canyon because he felt it was overrun by visitors. My parents were concerned, even back then, about civilization’s encroachment on nature. After she died, I learned that my mother had been a long-time member of the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club.
"Even though I grew up in suburbia and my father worked in downtown L.A., my parents instilled a love of nature in every way they could. Our family spent many weekends camping. We’d drive the few hours east to Joshua Tree National Monument in the Mojave Desert or north on I-395 to McGee Creek near Bishop in the Sierra Nevada Mountains."
Their love of nature became instilled in me, and I grew to share their concern about the impacts of humans on nature. That concern is proving more valid every day, alas. It was perhaps inevitable that when I chose to write fiction, I would find a way to gently remind readers of the adverse human effects on the natural world. When our daughter invited me to breakfast with a man who went by the name of Roadkill and who really did tan and dress in the skins of animals he found roadside, I leapt to make him a key character in my first novel. Roadkill remains a reader favorite and has now shown up in my second series, as well.
In the early 2000s in Idaho, controversy raged over “canned hunts,” where trophy elk were raised and hunted within fenced property, and hunters paid thousands for a trophy. That sparked the idea for Mustard’s Last Stand, where two brothers fight the developer of a faux safari camp in northern Idaho who imported zebras, water buffaloes, and retired zoo lions to serve as prey for paying customers.
When I lived in Idaho, my then-husband and I backpacked in the Sawtooth Mountains before our daughter was born. After that, our trips were shorter but still involved some form of nature immersion.
Somehow, our daughter absorbed our family’s love of nature. She became an environmental activist in her teens, working to save old-growth forests. Now she’s an amazing birder and naturalist, much more knowledgeable than I’ll ever hope to be of the flora and fauna around us.
Although I loved the many years I spent in Idaho, something inside of me always saw myself living in the desert. We visited my daughter when she lived in Tucson, and I fell in love—with the saguaros and the ocotillos and the chollas—and the food!
"It was perhaps inevitable that when I chose to write fiction, I would find a way to gently remind readers of the adverse human effects on the natural world."
In early 2014, we spent time in Benson, Arizona, a tiny rural community with a population of about 6,000, about 45 minutes from Tucson. I learned of a proposed housing development called The Villages at Vigneto, planned for some 28,000 homes. Environmentalists opposed it because of its drain our state’s diminishing groundwater, specifically, on the San Pedro aquifer beneath the San Pedro River Basin, a habitat for migratory bird species and other endangered wildlife, including the yellow-billed cuckoo.
The dispute inspired me to write my first Adventure Calls novel, Murder, Sonoran Style, published in 2019. The legal battle still rages today in August 2025.
That 2014 visit also served to convince my husband and me to move to Tucson, and we settled here that summer. I find peace and joy in desert country.
I’ve become a cactus hugger, so far only metaphorically. All I can say to that is, “Like, oh, my God!”