On my recent trip to Phoenix I did quite a bit of wandering around my old neighborhood. At one point, a few blocks over from my old house, I paused at the end of Arcadia St. to see this much-familiar side of Camelback Mountain.

That odd, scraped blank cliff has been there as long as I can remember. Sometimes it was covered with a kind of netting (to catch the falling mountain?) and always felt like a crappy man-made eyesore, which it was and is.

One afternoon in the 1970s my dad took me for a drive. This in itself was not unusual — he wandered quite a bit in one of the various cars he’d buy and lose interest in — MG, Land Rover, fancy Mercedes. At this point of his life, he was 50, he had just recovered from a heart-related health episode, and was embroiled in a very bitter and chaotic phase of his marriage with my mother. A far-too-light description would be a “mid-life crisis,” but that’s kind of what it was.

We stopped by the side of the road at one point, facing the mountain on Arcadia Street. I was staring at the ugly, scraped cliff as he began to tell me that he was leaving, that my parents weren’t staying together. As I remember, the word “divorce” wasn’t said, and it actually took quite some time to pull myself through a thicket of pure denial, but the truth was told that day — my dad left, my parents split up.

That conversation near the mountain was a very low point among many, many low points that pockmarked those years in Phoenix. However, I still get a lot of joy when I visit there. Maybe I’ve directed all my bad feelings and memories to that scarred slash in the mountain, where they are now stored — all the low points, all that chaos and bitterness, all secreted away on Divorce Cliff.