I’m looking for a desert woman, someone who is totally in tune with this powerful landscape and who might help me tune into its great vastness a little bit more. I hear in a Tucson cafe that Arivaca is ground zero for such women. I head down there - almost all the way to the border - and start asking around town for a desert woman. Who I end up spending time with is a long way from what I had imagined but who fills me with all kinds of ideas about what it is to belong to a place, to know it - and for it to know you.
In Episode 4 we follow the lowlines to the La Gitana bar in Arivaca, the brittle dirt of a huntress’s land, discover an abandoned halfway house, a coven of new wave desert women in a secret bar at the back of a store - and then gravitate further down to the border to get up close with The Wall.
Credits
Featuring the voices of Samantha Moore, the Tumbleweed Cafe owners, the helpful folk at the Arivaca general store, to everyone in
La Gitana, the coven of women at the Hilltop bar at the back of the
Sasabe Store & Wholesale Mesquite Firewood, as well as the odd passer-by…
What is Lowlines?
Lowlines is a sonic scrapbook and a passport to roam. Following one woman’s pull to tune into the pulse of place - befriending strangers along the way.
Feeling pranged out by the London business hustle, food entrepreneur Petra Barran brought an audio recorder and set off with no itinerary, guided simply by a hunger to get lower and closer to the ground.
The series is a holiday for the ears, taking us to the heartbeat of New Orleans, the low-slung wetlands of South Louisiana, the slow gyrations of the Amtrak to Tucson. Down to the brittle rasp of the Sonoran desert, the rich, volcanic soil of Mexico City’s Aztec allotments and further, to the soaring jungle chorus of the Peruvian Amazon.