(upbeat music) (TOM) - This week on Arizona Illustrated, exploring trails with the Southern Arizona Hiking Club.

- We usually have probably two or three hikes on the schedule every day.

- We are the oldest hiking club in Arizona and one of the oldest in the country.

This year we are turning 65, so I'm telling people the club is old enough to be eligible for Medicare.

- How photography is used over decades to chart the landscape and measure geographic information.

- I started using repeat photos in the Grand Canyon in order to document debris flows.

But then you start looking at these photos and all kinds of stuff starts showing up and it just becomes an adventure of discovery.

- And remembering the life and legacy of Al Foul.

- He was truly one of a kind.

He was called the one, the only Al Foul for a reason.

- Always had had an affection for country music.

He loved going to the library and he would check out every single book he could get on the history of country music.

- To care for somebody who had so much energy and so much life, the amount of medication that he required just to get a moments peace, it was shocking to me.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Tom - Hello and welcome to an all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We're joining you from the iconic Che's Lounge on 4th Avenue in Tucson.

You know, this place has hosted countless musical acts over the years, but perhaps no one captured the spirit of the place better than the late great Al Foul.

We'll have more on Al's life and legacy a little bit later on in the program.

But for now, let's introduce you to the Southern Arizona Hiking Club.

500 members strong, and they've been exploring the trails around here for almost 65 years.

[music] Nancy - I've been a member since 2010 August of 2010 and I've been a guide for the last seven years or eight years.

So it's 1.8 miles and you do go up a little bit on some rocky terrain and some hills.

But we'll go slow and easy and we'll wait at certain places so everybody can catch up with us.

I got all the good stuff on the shoes.

I just don't wear the shoes in the house.

And I don't wash my clothes with her clothes because the last time she got a sticky in her bra.

She really layed into me.

I've been in the club over 20 years.

Me about 20, 25 years.

15.

And I think I joined in 2013.

The newbie.

Somebody introduce to this hiking club.

And I love it because I go with them everywhere.

Even out of state hike.

Tammy - Our members can join for only $25 a year.

We have about 60 guides.

I would say we usually have probably two or three hikes on the schedule every day that our members can choose from.

So it's anywhere from a stroll on the sidewalk all the way to climbing mountain peaks.

Usually about twice a year we have we have a hiking trips that could be like a weeklong the Grand Canyon Canyonlands, Olympic National Park.

In the summertime we have wonderful trips to Maine, to California, to Washington, Oregon.

So I get a a little pin or a badge or something.

We have a good time out here.

We are the oldest hiking club in Arizona and one of the oldest in the country.

This year we are turning 65.

So I'm telling people the club is old enough to be eligible for Medicare.

There's a deer right below this rock.

[music] We've been with the hiking club now a couple of years, and we just come out here and enjoy a little meal after a couple of hikes.

And had I not joined the hiking club, I would have never seen the most beautiful parts of Tucson.

[music] I've seen more of this state than I ever dreamt I would ever see.

We don't just do hiking.

We have picnics, We have downtown events.

We go to the university, we do some tours, all kinds of things to entice people to get outside and keep young.

[music] Tom - Repeat photography is the process of taking a photo from the exact same spot, sometimes more than a hundred years apart.

This allows the viewers to see similarities and differences in our ever-changing landscape.

Enter the Southwest Repeat Photography Collection and take a journey through time.

[music] [beeping] We have over 35,000 medium format negatives.

Some of the most striking images in this collection are of Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, and one of them in particular is of the spot where Glen Canyon Dam is constructed.

And it's the before image pre dam and post dam.

And then other images that we have of the changes in the Colorado River corridor are striking and show the differences in vegetation, differences in sandbars.

Repeat photography came about through the work of a Bavarian mathematician in the late 1800s.

He was using photo surveys to study glaciers in the Alps, and then it was picked up by glaciologists in the US and it progressed from there.

Repeat photography is the technique of taking multiple photographs at a particular location it is used to assess ecological, geological hydrological change in a landscape.

This particular archive originated at the Desert Laboratory in Tucson on Tumamoc Hill, and it came about through the work of Dr. Ray Turner, who is a USGS botanist.

The collection grew through the work of Robert Webb and he worked with Ray Turner, assessing channel change in rivers, especially with regard to the Colorado River.

Well, I was working in Grand Canyon starting in 1984, and I came across this guy by the name of Robert Brewster Stanton, who had the second successful run of the Colorado River following Major Powell.

He was in 1889, 1890.

He was an engineer.

He was trying to document a railroad passage through the Grand Canyon.

He took photographs roughly every mile upstream and downstream.

So it's a beautiful set of photographs to work with.

I started using repeat photos in the Grand Canyon in order to document debris flows.

But then you start looking at these photos and all kinds of stuff starts showing up and it just becomes an adventure of discovery.

One of the things that I remember being struck by more than anything else was cryptobiotic soil.

Now known as soil crusts or biological soil crusts.

They looked the same 100 years later!

I mean, it was stunning!

People have been concerned about biological soil crust for decades, about people trampling it and making it go away.

And there have been all these claims about how long lived it this well, we can demonstrate how long lived it is.

And that's the point of repeat photography.

You can actually demonstrate that stuff as opposed to just guessing.

I became interested in repeat photography, actually, as a result of the work that Bob Webb did, you know, learning, for example, that these little shrubs had been living in the same spot for over 100 years.

Visitation of people in the river corridor could unknowingly be destroying plants that had been there for over a century, several centuries, in some cases, just with a misstep that really opened my eyes to how powerful repeat photography can be, not only for talking about change, but also talking about what hasn't changed.

You know, we'll pull out the photograph and we just start scanning the, the horizons and trying to find the general location.

I've been down working in the Grand Canyon for over 40 years now, so I have pretty good idea of where things are just looking at a photograph just getting to some of the places that can be a challenge unto itself.

There was one photograph that we matched.

The image shows this wide open beach.

Well trying to get to the same spot to match that image required one of the most challenging bushwhacks I've ever done.

It's a little bit like an Easter egg hunt.

It's actually a lot of fun, as well as being really challenging.

And so the collection is now over 100 years old.

We have over 100 years of imagery and it spans work in the larger Southwest.

And we're in the process of digitizing it and protecting the negatives.

The one thing that I find so powerful about using repeat photography is that you don't have to be a scientist to be able to to see a photograph and see with your own eyes the changes that we often try to translate into graphs and charts and and numbers.

It's it's a really powerful way of communicating.

It levels the playing field for everybody.

They can all see the same image.

They can all interpret the results from their own background and perspectives as well.

[music] Tom - Che's Lounge celebrated its 23rd year in business this August, and that's a birthday it shares with one of its most beloved patrons, musician Alan Louis Curtis, affectionately known by his stage name, Al Foul.

Now, Al played his last show here back in December of 2021, and five months later he passed away after a long battle with laryngeal cancer.

One of his dying wishes was for his wife Hannah to raise awareness about end-of-life options, which are legal in 11 states but not in Arizona.

[music] [Music] (Hannah) He told me a long story about these two kids he's here with.

They were being mercilessly bullied.

And his teacher saw that Al had a big heart.

but was also fiercely protective.

So she asked him to watch out for them.

Not just really sweet evidence of his character, but the reality is he'd been dressing like this forever.

Always had his shirt tucked in and always shined his boots.

All that old-fashionedness, though, sort of belied the fact that he was extremely interested in looking at everything with a very inclusive lens.

You know, there are a lot of things I could say about Al that they sound like cliches, but they just aren't when it comes to him.

He was truly one of a kind.

He was called the one, the only Al Foul for a reason.

[music] He worked within a pretty classic vernacular of like classic country, classic rock and roll, like Americana, but it really didn't sound like anything else.

[music] He grew up in Hyde Park in Boston in the 80s, around a lot of violence, a lot of racism, and abject poverty, and overcame that.

And, you know, left Boston, went to New York for a while, got involved in the punk scene, but always had had an affection for country music.

He loved going to the library, and he would check out every single book he could get on the history of country music.

He was very self-educated in general that way.

[music] Didn't like a lot of things about classic masculinity.

We lived at Casa Libre, which is basically a queer feminist artist compound, and he fit right in.

You know, like.

Our lesbian landlord loved him instantly, and she was the one that ended up marrying us a few years later.

(Officiant) I present to you Hannah and Al, wife and husband.

[cheering] These two are going to just take a minute to look at each other.

Yeah?

[music] (Hannah) We got engaged in December of 2018, and then had to reschedule a couple of times, and the pandemic happened.

And then he got sick, and we just, you know, didn't know what we were going to do.

And then one night we were talking about it, and we decided we still wanted to get married.

When he was first diagnosed, the estimate we were given by the oncologist was that he had an 80% chance of survival.

We thought this was going to be a rotten thing that he was going to go through, and it was going to be a hard year, but that when we'd be on the other side of it, it would just be another difficult thing that Al lived through in his difficult life and triumphed over.

People really believed that about Al for good reason.

He seemed like someone that you couldn't knock down with something like that.

We had to wait for him to heal from surgery, and then he started radiation, and he was getting daily radiation treatments for a couple of months.

And then he started chemotherapy on top of that.

All of those things combined were as difficult as it sounds.

I mean, I think they certainly prolonged his life a bit, and in between that we tried immunotherapy treatments.

Those actually kept it at bay for a little while.

We bought a little bit of time, and during that time that he was on immunotherapy, that's when he was getting into painting and able to get a little bit of quality of life.

He was very depressed.

Who wouldn't be if you're someone that loves life that much?

You know?

He was...we were really happy.

We bought this little house and fixed it up and filled it with beautiful furniture he made.

Life was really beautiful.

(Al) Still going?

(Hannah) No it's not.

Okay.

So... Oh, jeez.

Cats messing up the bed.

So, the bedroom, we actually, you know, when he got sick, and I knew that we were going to be in here a lot with him recovering, I decided that I just wanted to make it all black and white, because that just seemed soothing.

About a year before Al died, we hired Staci Snyder from FairWell Consulting.

Death Dulas do extraordinary work in bridging a lot of those gaps in care in the American healthcare system.

They offer support to the person who's dying and the family all along the way.

We eventually asked, you know, about all the questions about end of life, including, What would our options be if the suffering was so great that Al wanted assistance with dying?

And unfortunately, it's not available to people in Arizona.

We looked into possibly going to New Mexico or going to Oregon, which would have been close to my family.

And very quickly, it became clear that we actually didn't have any options, and Al was disintegrating rapidly.

His condition was getting worse and worse all the time.

I had to eventually step away from work to care for him full-time.

And my friend Mel Mason, who also happens to be a nurse, reached out to me, and I don't know what I would have done without her.

(Mel) I had seen Al play music in town for years.

He's just one of those... he almost felt like a mythical creature in many ways.

And if you've seen him play, you understand that.

[music] And it's hard to see when you are acutely aware of the energy that he had exuded at those shows and the way he tells stories at the shows.

He didn't just play music.

It was like a whole persona package deal.

It was like an experience.

It wasn't just a show.

To care for somebody who had so much energy and so much life, the amount of medication that he required just to get a moment's peace, it was shocking to me.

You're given a certain amount of tools to work with, and everyone did their absolute best, and it just felt like it wasn't enough.

(Mary) Many people have a personal story that makes them interested in the right to die movement.

With me, it was a former spouse who became paraplegic due to cancer.

He had 16 months in hospice.

The basic definition, it's a medical practice for terminally ill patients who have less than six months to live, who ask for a prescription filled by a compound pharmacy to end their life if and when they choose.

It's not something that happens easily, even in the states where it's legal.

A full 30% of the people who qualify and go through all the steps don't end up taking the medication.

So in some way, it just makes them feel better that they have it.

In the states where it's not legal, you know, people end up ending their lives in very violent ways.

We're a big gun culture.

The opposition says, "If you have hospice and you have palliative care, you don't need medical aid in dying."

People say, "Well, we have pain management."

(Hannah) Sort of an early painting of his that turned into kind of mixed media This was certainly at a time when he was absorbing the fact that the cancer that he had was going to kill him.

And pain was becoming a really big issue.

And so this is his prescription bottle for morphine.

There are a number of different medications you can take to control terminal agitation.

We were trying to calm him down so that his body could do the work that it needed to shut down and die peacefully.

But we could not get that under control.

Most people, when they're in the process of dying, sleep constantly.

Al was not sleeping.

He was awake and in pain.

One of the hardest, hardest moments for me was when he was in this state of terminal agitation.

And he was really kind of out of it.

And all of a sudden, he became more lucid for a moment.

And he looked at me in the eye and he said, "Am I dying?"

And I had to say, "Yes, yes, my love.

I'm afraid that you are."

So he was very cognizant of this descent into death and this pain.

[footsteps] The night that Al died, this is where I came.

Our death dula, Staci, got to the house.

And once she was here and with his body, then I came up here and started calling people.

So, come up here to catch our breath and, you know, look at beautiful things and just take a break from how horrifying everything was.

(Mary) At the top is loss of autonomy, loss of quality of life, loss of dignity.

Even pain is kind of low on the scale.

It's only like 26% of the people choose pain as the reason why they're making that decision.

So, for a lot of people, it's a line in the sand that they qualify and they're going to take the medication if they get to a certain point.

(Hannah) Our lack of literacy around death makes this conversation that much more difficult.

So I think opening up a dialogue about the realities is only going to get us closer to making humane choices.

(Mel) If this option is something that people would like to have, even if it is a choice you would not make for yourself, try to extend your circle of compassion.

Like, where is that circle around you?

How far out can you extend that?

(Hannah) I made a promise to Al when he was sick that I would be his biggest protector.

That I would do everything I could to make him feel empowered about any decisions around his care.

And I did that to the best of my abilities.

But taking care of someone who's dying is, I think, much more difficult than a lot of people realize.

Unfortunately, not only did he suffer horribly, his worst fear around that was realized in that I was traumatized.

I am traumatized.

I can just be going through about my day and all of a sudden a film loop will be playing in my head of what I witnessed.

So it's going to affect me for the rest of my life.

I'm trying to do everything right.

I'm in therapy.

I'm taking it very seriously and I'm back to work.

I'm your host, Hannah Levin, here with you every weekday from 3 until 6 PM.

Thanks so much for joining me.

Losing Al was horrible enough, but losing him that way was just so much worse.

[music] It's something that's going to affect everyone in one point or another in their lives.

Al told me in no uncertain terms, if I'm able to end my life when I want that in my obituary, I want people to know that medical aid in dying is a human right.

He wanted that to be a public awareness component.

[music] For a brief moment in time, we thought we might at least be able to control the suffering.

and that he could end life on his own terms.

in line with who he was.

[Music] Tom - On Saturday, October 21st at 7.30 p.m., Che's Lounge will be celebrating the second annual Foul Fest, celebrating the life and legacy of the one and only Al Foul.

You can find more information about this on the Che's Lounge Facebook page.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week all new episode.

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