Lake Powell and the Kaiparowits Plateau

Reading the Palm of Arizona's Landscape

I AM READING THE PALM OF THE LAND.

Creases and wrinkles weave in and out of each other thousands of feet below. Each line, each arroyo and canyon and ridge tells a story... something about the future, something about the past.

Leaning forward from the jumpseat just behind the pilot, I shout over the deafening roar of twin-propeller engines, asking if she'll dip the plane to the west. The dragon spine of the Dragoon Mountains stretches across southeast Arizona, and I want a closer look.

Passing over the north edge of the Dragoons, I point to the Dos Cabezas Peaks not far off.

"Can you get us over there?"

She turns to look at me, shouting above the engines. "Why don't we just circle all the sky islands from here to Phoenix?"

"Perfect," I shout.

For the rest of the day, the land unfolds beneath us-darkly forested mountains springing straight up from the wash-scrawled Chihuahuan Desert. I have her circle twice, then a third time over the secret interior of the Galiuro Mountains, groves of aspen trees hiding in the high basins, Aravaipa Canyon slipping like a dark snake around the northern end. This is what I mean by reading the palm of the land: From here I can see the larger patterns of the earth, how things are put together. The sky islands of southeast Arizona are not independent mountain ranges, but are instead strung together like pearls on a necklace. Each pearl, each range of mountains, is an isolated ecosystem, an island of forests suspended in a desert sea.

I ask for one more turn. She obliges.

What reason is there for flying other than to have a window seat? I am the one who holds up the line in airports, making sure at the ticket counter that I don't get the aisle or middle. Don't we all dream of flying? Isn't that the one superpower we wish we had?

Though the crop patterns of Iowa and the oceanic blue of the Great Lakes are intriguing, my native state of Arizona is by far the aerial champion, a landscape of infinite changes. Yet somehow it is not so huge from the air. Things are not so far apart. Phoenix comes as a surprise early in the evening as we descend into its gridded lights, striking down on the asphalt runways of Sky Harbor International Airport. When the propellers jerk to a halt, I step out of the plane. My feet touch ground and I am mortal again.

intriguing, my native state of Arizona is by far the aerial champion, a landscape of infinite changes. Yet somehow it is not so huge from the air. Things are not so far apart. Phoenix comes as a surprise early in the evening as we descend into its gridded lights, striking down on the asphalt runways of Sky Harbor International Airport. When the propellers jerk to a halt, I step out of the plane. My feet touch ground and I am mortal again.

Arriving in the morning for the next flight, I am heading to a meeting in Kingman. I see the pilot in the small commuter terminal. We shake hands. She'll be flying me today. We both smile at each other. Secret smiles. After landing in Kingman for my meeting, we take off again and I ask if we can have a brief tour of the mountains to the west before turning back for Phoenix. Soon we are deep over the Mohave Desert.

The mountains here, in northwest Arizona, have no forests like those in the southeast region. They are barren, standing like broken glass, edges curt and sunbaked. Lake Mead is a strange blue substance filling a space where there should be a canyon. We skirt its smooth, opal edges, slipping up through the steep canyons of the Black Mountains. The view from here tells of a larger Earth than what I usually see. I spend much of my life on foot on the ground, crossing these places with a pack on my back. The study of landscapes is my occupation, and I tend toward the small: boulders and grains of sand and leaves scattered by wind. From the air, though, I see what looks like tidal forces in the land, the undulation of the entire continent. Geology out here is of similar construction to that of the sky islands: an orderly network of basins interrupted by mountain ranges aligned in an angle from the southeast to the northwest.

One might imagine that the land is nothing but a haphazard assemblage of geographic odds and ends: chasms thrown in with mountains and scattered unevenly. Hills seem to show up for no reason. From walking on the ground, I have discovered otherwise. Every boulder tells a story about where it came from and where it is going. The ground is a web of interactions, every object woven in time and space. Boulder slopes lead to a cliff that is made by a delicate balance of erosion and the strength of the particular geological formation. The root of a tree breaks into the weakness of a million-year-old fracture in the rock, causing part of a rockface to calve off, slowly turning a broad mesa into a narrow butte. Cause and effect are interlaced like clockwork.

Now, from the air, I see the same thing on a different scale. The course of the Colorado River emerges from Lake Mead, defining a gorge that in turn follows the global thrusting of mountains and the settling of basins between. Hoover Dam was stuffed into place by human engineers because the land told them this is the place: The river follows the westward geological trend that established the Grand Canyon, but turns suddenly south here, meeting a new trend, cutting into a new and narrowing canyon, a perfect place to build a dam. It is like a book below me, through the oval airplane windows, paragraphs and

sentences and punctuation defined by each mountain and canyon, laying out a well-planned story.

The pilot points to her watch. My time is up. We turn back toward Phoenix.

've looked forward to this flight around Page, at the northern edge of the state. As soon as we're off the runway, the red-stone desert of the Colorado Plateau reveals itself. The crystalline geology of faults and uplifts and synclines fan around the plane. Every hundred feet that we climb the land turns into a more and more dense orchestration. Slender canyons wind down into the bedrock. The embryonic arms and coves of Lake Powell outline the sensual sway of surrounding rock formations. This place makes the sky islands and the Mohave Desert's basins and ranges look like crude stonework. In this area, the Colorado Plateau is delicate, like a finely crafted ceramic vase. There is very little soil, hardly anything living down there, no basins filled thousands of feet thick with sloughed-off rock. The earth is absolutely naked, every twitch and fracture exposed, unveiled by wind and water.

We fly over a boneyard of stone, but it is not just heaps of random bones. No, these are skeletons, fully articulated. The long, reaching spine of Navajo Canyon is elegantly jointed into side canyons that spread away like ribs. We circle the shadow-infested depths of Paria Canyon, looking down into its smooth, ossific meanders. Buckskin Gulch is a dark thread sewn into the landscape, a place where flash floods gather as if conspiring.

In the distance, I see the convergent landmarks of Water Pocket Fold, Escalante Canyon and the Straight Cliffs in Utah. The throne of Navajo Mountain sheds countless canyons around its feet. Marble Canyon glides down below a smooth deck of earth into the Grand Canyon.

The pilot asks if I want to see anything in particular this time. No. You choose. How can I possibly pick one place over the other? To see this land from the sky is like being reborn, the world turned inside out for me. I have walked all over down there, lost in shadows, sleeping among sunken waterholes. I have often imagined what it would be like to look down from high above and see the small dot of myself in the middle of nowhere, engulfed in palaces of stone. Traveling on foot, I have come to learn the subtleties of these rock formations, how some are grained like coarse sand-paper, how others turn smooth as soap down in the deep canyons.

All of my knowledge is tied together here. The small is eternally bound into the huge. The Earth becomes in my eyes a living creature.

Now, can we go into space? I wonder. Can I tap the pilot's shoulder and point straight up? Can we fly out beyond the atmosphere and look back at this polished gemstone of a planet, knowing that within it are the flawless, isometric planes of a diamond? Molten bands of liquid rock Swirl among each other in a methodical dance within the Earth, as scrupulous as the inner slices of an orange. This molten flow ripples our thin crust of continents, forming mountains and gorges and mesas. The Colorado Plateau lifts upon the slow wave of this dance, and its surface shudders, fallinginto vast and precise canyons.

This is why people read palms. By looking at the lines, we see deep into a person's nature. We read the past and the future. We live upon a character of a planet, a place rife with personality. There is temper in the land. I can see it from the plane. A desert of emotion.

Suddenly, I think that I do not want to go any farther. I want the ground again. Down there, I can feel the stone with my hands. I can choose a mesa edge upon which to set my camp. Up here, I am only a set of eyes carrying the memory of what I have seen. I have what I came for. Now, let's go back and put this plane on theground. I don't want to be a palm reader anymore. I want to be the palm itself. I want to be one of lines, one of the boulders, one of the people walking upon the Earth.

The pilot turns the plane, and we start back for home. All Craig Childs, who lives in Colorado, regularly wanders the backcountry of his home state of Arizona, disappearing sometimes for weeks or months on end. He is the author of The Desert Cries, published by Arizona Highways Books.

Bold landforms mean bold flying for Tucson photographer Adriel Heisey, whose skeletal airplane is a fine open-air shooting platform but can be a bucking bronco in the skies above tall mountains or deep canyons.