A Shootout, a Canyon, and Common Ground

By Melina Walling '20
Hometown: Wayne, Pennsylvania
Major: English
Museum Intern, Natural History Institute

Bang. An actress in a hoop skirt falls to the ground, caught in a blank’s imaginary crossfire.

I’m at Prescott’s annual Shootout on Whiskey Row, where a local band of dedicated historian-actors puts on an all-day reenactment of the most famous gunfights in Old West history.  I linger to watch for a while, but as I leave the scene, I continue to wince at the pistol cracks. I never seem to get used to them, even though most of the crowd is unfazed.

A few days later, thirty-two people will have been killed, and dozens more injured, in the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

When I moved to Arizona, I thought I would be most surprised by the big things: the sprawling forests of Prescott National Forest; the red rocks of Sedona; the incomprehensible depth of the Grand Canyon. But the truth is that, while all those landscapes and locations have been spectacular, my expectations have been subverted countless more times by the minutiae of daily life. And while the landscapes have taught me about Arizona, living in this area has taught me a little more about America.

Prescott is a retirement hotspot, and many of its residents have moved here recently. Over two hours from Phoenix, the nearest big city, it seems to preserve a slice of a bygone era. The line of antique shops and historic main street all add to the illusion; the center of town probably looked the same seventy years ago as it does today. Around it, things have changed—a Trader Joe’s, a few yoga studios, art galleries—but the core of Prescott clings to what came before.

I asked one of the reenactors, who has been donning his cowboy hat and three-piece suit for over fifty years, why he does what he does. His response? “They don’t teach history the way they used to. They leave things out. I want people to remember the past.”

Once I get to work, I am absorbed in my job: copyediting and laying out a field guide to plants in the area. I spend most of my time with two former Prescott College professors, a field botanist, and a high school biology teacher, in a thought-bubble as sheltered as the office’s air conditioning.

That said, the Natural History Institute operates under the belief that paying close attention to the natural world around us is a deeply human trait, one that transcends the limits of misunderstanding and political division. And I believe that anyone curious enough to know the type of plant in front of them is already part of the conversation.

Now, the goal is to find common ground. And maybe that ground is this earth: the rocky soil where the plants grow, the red rocks of Sedona, and the chasms of a canyon as the sun sets gold.

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