The Kid's as tough and old as Arizona

Enlarge Image

Handout photo �You�re getting pretty old when you have a son who�s 80,� admits LaVona Evans, who turns 100 on Valentine�s Day.

THATCHER, Ariz. -- The state of Arizona turns 100 years old on Tuesday, and so does the woman who is sitting across the table at Denny's in this little Mormon cotton and mining town.

She is the indestructible LaVona Evans, born, by a cosmic quirk of karma, on the very day a parched and barely habitable territory completed the contiguous republic. Now, like her six million younger neighbours, she is about to celebrate her own centennial of survival on the physical and emotional frontier.

"Are you going to lead the Thatcher parade on horseback?" I tease her as she devours a plump breast of chicken, a helping of corn, and a bowl of salad deep enough to water cattle.

"Yes," she replies. "They'll have a jackass for me to ride."

Outside the restaurant, a full moon is rising over the broad valley of the Gila River, gilding the winter snows that dust the looming peaks of the Pi±aleno Mountains. We are three hours east of Phoenix, just outside the Apache Indian reservation, in an outpost largely of Latter-Day Saints that contains three prisons, a huge copper pit and one remarkable, redoubtable woman.

LaVona Evans isn't the only centenarian in the Grand Canyon State-- the retirement havens in Tucson and Lake Havasu and Sun City are teeming with them. But she might be the only one who never saw Grand Canyon itself until she was 96, when I gathered up the lady and a small fraction of her 126 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and hauled them to the South Rim for lunch at the fabled El Tovar. So this is not our first date.

Sustained for a century by a diligent abstinence from alcohol, a single sinful sip of coffee, a sharp shootin' eye and a whole lot of ice cream, LaVona also is the only man or woman standing of the eight babies who were born in this thorny paradise on Feb. 14, 1912.

Another, whom I had hoped to meet when I was living upstate and writing about the impending centennial seven years ago, was proudly named Valentine Arizona Cooper. But she passed on before I could get to Yuma.

LaVona, by contrast, still abides by herself in her own house, drives herself to the supermarket, tends her own garden, paints admirable canvases of landscapes and flowers, and, being so busy, has found time to sew only two quilts for her newest descendants since Thanksgiving.

Her given name, of course, is a sundae scooped from the names of the 48th state and the lovers' holiday on which she was born.

"She is always thinking, always doing, always reading," says her daughter LaVana Parke, 78, who lives a block from Mother. Parke was two days old when her father died of appendicitis, leaving LaVona with a newborn, a two-year-old son, and $10.

"Ten dollars to her name, no mother or father, and nobody to help her," notes Louise Jorgensen, another daughter and resident Thatcherite. (LaVona's mom had died when she was five, leaving five children to the mercies of the desert and their relatives.)

"You could say that she did what Arizona has always done -- she accomodated. Life has never been easy for her, or for anyone out here. But she has always been a little bit of an adventurer. And she shot a lot of jackrabbits."

"My boys always brought their guns to me to sight them in," LaVona reports. "They're bringing me a new one next week."

There were other escapades: a Mormon mission with husband No. 3 to Tonga, where she taught the island's Queen to stitch a quilt as a wedding gift for Charles and Diana. A flight to New York City that was so harrowing that she made the return trip to Arizona by bus. A sojourn in Connecticut to tend a dying in-law who was married to a card-carrying American Communist.

There was a sweet young woman of colour about the New Haven house: Angela Davis!

Evans, on the other hand, is not a Communist. When I ask her about the electoral prospects of her fellow Saint Mitt Romney, she answers that "He looks like a president. Maybe if he wasn't LDS he might have a chance."

"Does the current president look like a president?" I ask her.

"You don't want me to say anything about that," she replies.

LaVona, Louise and LaVana, a mother and two daughters who are 243 years of age combined, never have been to their nation's capital, but there are branches of their family in greener pastures than Graham County, Ariz., which is a sere and forbidding wasteland, save for the bounty brought to flower by the Mormons' ditches and wells.

Almost all of the numerous and scattered clan are to reassemble here for the centennial, and they'll probably come back again when LaVona, like the summer temperature, hits a 110.

"You're getting pretty old when you have a son who's 80," the matriarch admits. It is the only complaint I have ever heard her utter.

Like a very few before her and many millions who followed, the Centennial Kid has achieved what geography tried to render impossible: to find serenity in desolation, purification in hardship, and a full and fruitful life in this incomparable Arizona.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 11, 2012 J1