MESA FLATS RESORT CIRCLES THE WAGONS

The beginning was in September when they returned from the cooler reaches of the North and Midwest or the shores and mountains of California, and in this beginning of autumn 2010, they were greeted by Larry Armstrong, HOA president of Mesa Flats Resort, and his eclectic, merry-making HOA board members. They watched over the flock of eighteen hundred people, parked near each other in twelve hundred trailers, or units, as they were insistently called by Larry. Some units were on blocks, others were mobile homes, RVs, and some were homes, not really mobile. Many were upscale with fancy add-on Arizona rooms—the eighteen hundred citizens were growing older, in an active, adult community, living a second childhood or fantasizing, spending their previously earned savings on human satisfying trinkets of trailer court, resort-like existence, and were immersed in the comradeship often expressed by most of the residents, except, of course, Jack Stoker.
Larry might have been supreme commander, but he had an odd assortment for board members, which, like him, kept getting re-elected. There was Marge Dunlap, from Ohio, a Republican liberal, likely to have an impact on any organized or unorganized plans; Sissy Sprattle, an eighty- three year old retired Treasury Department executive secretary from Washington, D.C.; Carl Ziggler, a retired police officer from Omaha, Nebraska, now head of Mesa Flats Resort security, a nice guy with too many suspicions; and Dennis Packard, a free lance maintenance man, who knew everyone’s dark secrets, learned on the gossamer wings of resort gossip.
Any one of them could stop a Homeowners Association board meeting agenda presided over by Larry, and they often did, which did not mean they resented or hated their leader. They loved him, but knew his weaknesses, along with his foibles, and tried to prevent him from committing serious blunders. They almost tolerated his long, as Dennis called them, soliloquies, his obsession with cowboy icons and lore, and his ever present smile.
For five years Larry had pulled Mesa Flats Resort together and few wanted change except Jack Stoker, a trouble-maker and self-sworn enemy to Larry and the board. Jack had a small following. He had owned an electronic business in Tucson and wanted, with the most desperate attitude, to be president and in charge of Mesa Flats Resort. What he would do with it frightened every unit owner except his small following and Teak Dordin, a clerk now working at Jack’s former electronic store.
There were others, a hodgepodge of castaways: recluses like Digger Duncan, an ex-prospector, mostly from Colorado, and keeper of the Lapidary Shop; John Bennoween, another D.C. renegade moved to these far desert mountains of the West; Seymor Hathaway, a fussy ex-high school teacher of math from Los Angeles who had never married; Sally and Johnathan Johnson, Afro-Americans from Maryland. Johnathan maintained ties with the National Security Agency. There were others who shouldn’t be in a trailer court high in the Sonora Desert, but were, like Burt and Gloria Myers who had arrived at Mesa Flats Resort several years ago from Indiana and Purdue University.
In the winter, their Mesa Flats Resort was full, eighteen hundred of them camped in outdated to contemporary, even posh, units. All the residents were sitting in a gravel and cacti-filled community with paved roads, looking up at the Santa Catalina mountains, wanting to enjoy their remaining years with their remaining dreams and common sociability.
It was late September and they rolled in, having avoided the blistering months of June to August in the Sonora Desert sun. Some, like Larry and the board members, had remained in Mesa Flats Resort, enduring the hardship of dry heat and long days. They were the real desert dwellers. This new season they greeted each returning resident with the genuine friendliness felt by those who had selected Mesa Flats Resort as their place to retire.