Back Roading Across Arizona

ARIZONA ON BACK ROADS

THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER gapes with a yellow tongue of spent cattails swaddling a thread of quiet water that creeps through the slumbering plants. The Bill Williams River seeps into the noise of the east bank of the Colorado-the Parker Strip just below lined with houses, bars and powerboats. Lake Havasu with its regattas of pleasure-seekers sits a few miles north behind a dam.

But the Bill Williams purls along at a comparative trickle and, here in its lower reaches, flows embedded in the calm of a national wildlife refuge. The surrounding Sonoran Desert tastes 1 to 3 inches of rain a year and rises from the green mash of the riverbed with a stark face of mesquite, saguaro, ironwood, paloverde and creosote.

The river, named after a famed mountain man, is more than simply green with a big forest of cottonwoods, willow, mesquite and other trees. It is studded here and there with beaver dams, perhaps the last structure anyone expects to find within a hundred yards of a saguaro.

Photographer Jack Dykinga and I are embarking on a journey that sounds a lot like a stunt-drive west-to-east across Arizona on dirt roads. We will largely pull it off with a thousand miles of dust and maybe 50 maddening stretches of asphalt to make connections. But I want to state right up front that the stunt backfires in a wonderful way. When weeks later we hit the New Mexico line, I've learned a simple lesson: If I had it to do over, yes, I'd leave the paved high-way for the dirt, and, yes, I'd still sleep under the stars rather than the roof of a motel and, yes, I'd drink black coffee in the gray light of early dawn and wait for the birdsong and then the thrumming of insects.

But what I'd never do is finish the journey. I'd get 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or maybe even 100 miles down a dirt track and park and spend all of my life that I could spare right there. I'd spend it along the Bill Williams, I'd spend it in the Mohave, spend it sprawled in the juniper-piñon forests, spend it up on the Mogollon Rim surrounded by ponderosa pines, spend it in the high country surrounded by mountains and lashed by images of spruce, aspen and fir trees. It hardly matters where I would spend the time.

The pace is everything, and dirt-road Arizona slows me enough finally to be somewhere instead of pedal-to-the-metal headed for nowhere.

I'm here to talk about slow travel, the last sane kind of movement. At the moment, I'm sprawled out on the beige dirt surrounded by the dark rock of some stilled, volcanic moment. At 5:07 P.M. a raven glides down from a cliff and vanishes into the jungle of the Bill Williams bottom. Flies buzz, the leaves of the ironwood trees seem pale like ghosts amid the yellow blaze of blooms on the brittlebush, a half moon rides in the sky.

Eleven minutes later, two ravens twirl over my head on a thermal. By 5:30 I look at the southern edge of the forest clogging the bottom and finally notice the rose-blush of bloom on the tamarisks, then gaze past that to the gleam of fresh cottonwood leaves, and on the far side of the river discover a wall of rock warped in some long ago time so that it arcs like a bow, all this beneath the flat top of a mesa banded with yellow beige and black.

Five minutes later, the white light of day begins to ebb toward golden. I look down and suddenly notice the pavement of pebbles at my feet, and stare out again and detect the bony arms of some dead paloverdes. Saguaros nibble at the very edge of the forest and swallows wheel through the sky. Around 6, a twin-engine prop plane buzzes overhead. In the past hour, the road upslope behind me has had one off-road vehicle of pleasure-seekers pass and one small truck belonging to the refuge staff.

I watch the light leave the land and track the colors that we seldom think are colors: beige, light beige, brown, dark-brown, red-brown, black-brown, gleaming black from the varnish on some rocks, black and blue like tar drippings, then I look past the dirt and rock and see yellow, green, lime-green, dark-green, a faint silver-green, yellow-green.

At 6:30 a breeze moves across the land signaling sunset. I get up and move a few feet and cross small animal tracks, some ancient coyote scat, a mesquite tree in bloom that roars with bees. A small butterfly passes, a raven croaks and an orange-brown spider with white specks strolls past my foot and forces me to notice the tracks of deer.

The sun falls out of my life at 7 as a great blue heron slowly wings its way downstream. Twentytwo minutes later, a meteor re-enters the Earth's atmosphere so close I can almost hear it roar-the core white, the aura edging it green-and then disappears behind a bluff.

The Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge gets about 30,000 visitors a year, and commonly they complain of seeing no wildlife. I know what they mean because I live mostly like everyone else. But for the moment, both Dykinga and I have entered a different zone. Dirt-road Arizona, apparently a way to finally go home.

Banking on Water

THEY'RE PARKED NOW, and to their surprise, they like it that way. Pat Powell and her hus-band were long-haul truckers before they came to rest at the Planet Ranch where the Bill Williams River ripples through a slab of Mohave Desert, just above Parker. Along with Larry Byers, they ride herd on a peculiar Arizona activity-water ranching, in this case under the direction of the city of Scottsdale, which has bought the huge spread in order to bank water resources against the day when urban thirst and court decisions make it all sensible as an invest-ment. But for the moment, the ranch has a won-drously ghostly quality-cattle gone, corrals lonely and the ribbon of cottonwoods lining the river inno-cent of change. South of headquarters lurk the melt-ing adobes of what was once the community of Planet, briefly home to 10,000 during a mining frenzy. Below the calm of headquarters, the river disappears into a mild canyon clogged with beaver dams.Things at Planet Ranch (a private and locked-gate

Of course, there are occasional guests. Every win-ter a 76-year-old retiree descends from Montana and camps out with his family, his kin being a turkey, some chickens and a couple of burros. Javelinas prowl the old alfalfa fields by the headquarters and wild burros have the irksome habit of descending and turning on the outdoor water faucets. But the main beast stalking the ground is silence. You can hear yourself talk here, assuming you even bother to talk.

Time crashes against time, what with the ebbing cattle ranch, the future water ranch, the melting ruins of the old mining town, and just a bit to the north a desert airfield from World War II that is said to measure off exactly the length of a 1940s-era aircraft carrier, an abandoned runway that once trained young men to face the white-knuckle landings they would make far off in the Pacific.

Or time stands almost still here, as the saguaro, paloverde and mesquite signature of the Sonoran Desert stutters at the river crossing and soon gives way to the cooler realm of the Mohave with its giant Joshua trees and this spring a blaze of lupine staining the ground blue.Like time, Dykinga and I stall also. One of the realities of dirt-road Arizona is that it becomes increasingly difficult to move. Not because of bad roads, though now and again savage stretches of jolting four-wheel tracks come up. But because wherever we are seems like where we should remain. I hated leaving the lush bottomlands of the Bill Williams, but now I am about 30 miles west of Wikieup sitting on a rock in the creosote flats studded with the Joshua trees and I think I should stay here for maybe a hundred years. Forty miles to the north, I know Interstate 40 is lacerating the surface of the Earth, but I push this thought aside, light my tiny camp stove and make a cup of coffee. When I turn off the hiss of the burner, it's as if I've throttled some annoying boombox. Hedgehog cacti bloom with an almost acrylic rose-pink. A mule deer doe moves past, a Harris hawk wheels over my head.In the night, I hear a mockingbird rattle the darkness and smell the aroma of a herd of javelinas moving down a nearby arroyo toward a water hole. Doves begin tolling as the gray light comes on, and then I notice the yellow flowers on the creosote, the bright blooms of brittlebush and glimpse the almost whiskery appearance of ocotillo groves on the ridgelines, red flower stalks dancing on the tips of the waving wands.

We've fully entered Slow Nation, a secret country sustained by the forgotten sinews of old dirt roads and trails, nameless routes that once formed the vital links of a continent. I sip coffee and share the rhythms of our ancestors.We have ceased to maketime and simply joined time, and Dykinga and I sit around together without a schedule. Last night there was a ring around the moon and I would watch jet planes hell-bent on getting to Los Angeles disturb the ring with their contrails, then vanish over the horizon while the ring re-established its iron lock on the moon. I figure it will take me five or 10 lifetimes to absorb the half-mile of ground I can see from my camp.

Here is what I am learning: If you get up early with the first whisper of the gray light, you can own the entire planet, be in absolute sync with its twirl as the first breeze of dawn brushes your face and the dying stars slowly leave the sky. All the engines in the entire universe seem still and only birdsong ripples through the silence.

For endless moments, you are certain that there is enough grace and warmth and food and love to sustain anything and everyone, that nothing that matters moves faster than a heartbeat and that at this very instant all the hearts beat as one.

A black-chinned hummingbird hovers near my face, Gambel's quail roost in the nearby paloverde and begin to chat up the oncoming day. Little threads of disappearing Sonoran Desert penetrate the beckoning Mohave. And on a slope just above the Big Sandy River, oak trees appear. This splatter of different botanical realms may play havoc with tidy maps dedicated to prim life zones but for me this Have you ever noticed the different ways life can design a leaf? Well, I must admit I've been negligent in this matter. But not now, not this morning. I sip coffee and finally see things that have always been right in front of my lazy eyes.

High Country Beckons

ARIZONA SELDOM HIDES ITS BONES and the dirt road wanders through brazen geologic forms. In the west are the parallel mountains and valleys called Basin and Range, then comes the wafer cake of the Colorado Plateau, here and there studded with the hot flashes of volcanic peaks. The two rock forms collide and leave a huge scar we call the Mogollon Rim, a long cliff lancing across north-central Arizona and decked out on top with a world-class ponderosa forest. That is the big picture.

The little picture is called Knight Creek, a faint, dry desert streambed that slowly rises upward, and now east and north of Wikieup, runs wet and green within the embrace of a basalt canyon. Junipers mixed with paloverdes hug the hillsides and the sky roars with an approaching storm. Down in the canyon, cottonwoods spread green along the waterway. In a day snow will be in the air but now the ground is sun-drenched with lupine and other wildflowers insisting on spring.

Fortunately, all of our maps are out of date and so for a day the journey has been a series of feints up mountain grades in the Aquarius Mountains in search of an open dirt route that reaches from the desert floor to the higher country of grass, juniper and dabs of oak. Enormities such as Burro Creek, a tucked-away canyonland that would be a national park in most of the Lower 48, have foiled several efforts. Locked gates on private property have blocked some others. Knight Creek becomes the golden route to the higher country.

I live in a city and so am almost drugged with the sensation that everything on Earth has been paved and made safe and dull. Well, I'm wrong. Out here the Earth still seems endless and free. Even the forbidding corridor of I-40 just to the north seems like a tiny thread dropped on a huge pan of wildness.

In a cafe in Seligman, I glance up at a stuffed lion killed 3 miles from my cup of coffee. The waitress explains that her husband keeps a pack of hounds and guides hunters, as did his father before him. The trucks roar by on the four-lane road but somewhere on the edge of the screams of their air brakes I know a lion is taking in the scene. Even the little businesses of the town have thankfully retained an edginess: One barroom sign advises "Unattended children will be sold as slaves."

Back on the creek, pavement and big road signs seem like voices from another planet. Up ahead is Fort Rock Ranch, a huge spread of grass and junipers, with headquarters featuring an ancient

stone house once used as a 19th-century stage station. Finally, after much plundering, the high valley appears with the old stone building looking lonely in the immensity. Pat Prosser and his wife, Debra, lean against the gate leading to the yard. Pat was raised around Kingman and has spent his life working cattle in this area-for 30 years he's cowboyed this ranch off and on. Now he is the manager and, well, he worries about the crowding. Subdivisions are popping up in the area like mushrooms after a rain and he sees ranching doom all around him. "It's ruined all of a bunch of ranches-it's subdivisions everywhere," he says softly. "They come out of those cities and find something cheap, and there they go. But they gotta go so far to make a livin'. The places they buy are too small for cows. There's not enough water for farming."

Clearly, second homes puzzle him as a concept. Piled up near his boots are the giant racks of some elk that wander the ranch. At 60, Pat looks like an ad for ranching - lean, leathery and calm. His son stands near him and sports the large champion belt buckle of a rodeo winner. Lucas, a year-old border collie, watches. "He's workin' already," Pat notes with pride.

Looking out from the Fort Rock headquarters, it's hard to believe anyone is feeling crowded here but then space is the ultimate drug in Arizona and one not easily surrendered. Just to know that 10 or 15 miles away a cluster of houses has suddenly erupted can put a hand off his feed. I once lived in a valley where I could not see an electric light at night and I found then that anything but a star glowing in the dark was offensive to me.

All I can see is grass and juniper, a kind of private park, and the Fort Rock Ranch abuts another giant sanctuary, the Baca Float, a green universe based off an old Spanish land grant. For two hours, the dirt track slowly winds through a plateau of green splattered with the yellow shouts of mustard and then on the eastern edge of the Baca Float the first stands of ponderosas appear and then recede as this kingdom of piñon and juniper reasserts itself.

I suspect the most neglected treasures in Arizona are the vast stands of these small evergreen trees that decorate what is called the Central Arizona Highlands, a huge crescentlike swatch that cuts just above the hot deserts and just below the big forests of the high country. People like myself seem to race through them on their way to cool stands of pine. Ranchers have historically begrudged them their existence and tried various ways to remove the trees so that more grass might grow-efforts that have generally cost more than the resulting grass was worth.

Thanks to the sensible pace of dirt roads, I'm finally tasting this huge forest and realizing the error of my ways. On the second day in the junipers, we cross a fork of the Verde River near

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 13

CANYONS MEANDER A THOUSAND FEET BELOW. The walls are red, gray THE GROUND IS STREWN WITH ROCK MUCH LIKE

Perkinsville, a town now down to two people. The little valley gleams with green grass, and just to the east is the opening dive of Sycamore Canyon, another huge set of rock gorges that feels as wild as when Bill Williams and other mountain men were first coming into the country.

Just past the Verde, a thin slot in the stone, maybe 10 feet wide and 20 deep, knifes downward, the bottom smooth punch bowls from thousands of years of thunderstorms.

I walk off and sit among the trees and hear nothing but a faint whisper of wind rustling through the piñons and junipers. Behind my head, the huge wall of the Mogollon Rim towers, but in this place the ground seems safe and tidy with the trees evenly spaced and a soothing blue sky overhead. The hot desert now seems like a sonata and this perfect forest of regularly shaped trees more a piano concerto.

The Rim Country is clearly a symphony and I can sense nearby the crash of kettledrums and the surge Of course, this part of the country seems to demand metaphors from us and all the metaphors seem inadequate when one is out on the ground itself.

Just south of Flagstaff, the route begins to climb on a ridge between Cedar and Bear canyons, and finally snow blankets the ground. The sun works the piñon pine and slowly sloughs the white off the green branches. The road itself turns into a red gumbo of mud and snakes ever upward. Finally, after many switchbacks, the top of the Rim is gained and a new world opens up, one with eight deer standing together and then a short way down the path, three elk grazing. One bony finger, Sycamore Point, reaches off the Rim and probes south.

The ponderosa pines thicken and then give way at

PEBBLES ON A BEACH and small cacti poke up here and there.

the tip of the point to a huddle of junipers and piñons. Canyons meander a thousand feet below. The walls are red, gray and sand-colored strata. The ground is strewn with rock much like pebbles on a beach and small cacti poke up here and there. Tire tracks have vanished for some hours and two bull elk stand nearby. Looking south, there is the central highlands forest, seeming like the landscape of some model railroad with junipers dotting the ground. I feel like a voyager looking out the porthole of a spaceship at a receding world. We're in the pines now, on the Rim, and the huge drop spilling off at our feet makes the deserts and the highlands a foreign nation.

Blues DRIFT FROM THE RADIO as Dykinga and I work our way through steak and eggs in Doc's Rim Cafe in Overgaard. The Rim Country has owned my imagination for days, a smear of forest edged to the south by the escarpment and ebbing to the north as it first sputters into piñon-juniper, then grassland, and finally the over-the-top brilliantly colored desert of the Colorado Plateau. For most of my life when I've roared down I-40 to the north, I've glanced over and seen the thin green line on the horizon, realizing it was the immense forest of the Rim and yet never quite believing it, even though at times I'd spent days and weeks in it. Sandwiched between the hot deserts of the south and the cooler high deserts to the north, this crescent of trees seems impossible and yet it is actual. Doc's Cafe, with blues blasting and a massive espresso machine staring me down on the back counter, is also actual but unanticipated. But I've been surprised for days.

After Sycamore Point, the aimless route meanders toward Flagstaff where elk stand in snow, then snakes down toward Mormon Lake and the clear stands of ponderosas before (Text continued on page 19)

(Continued from page 15) heading up toward Kinick-inick, a lake I used to visit as a boy as my base camp in antelope country.

But Ashurst Run, a small lake, forces Dykinga's truck to take a one-day respite. Here is how the lake stops the machine: It is blue with a tongue of green on one edge where water percolates into it, and sur-rounded by pines and aspens. Its smooth surface perfectly reflects the San Francisco Peaks that tower over Flagstaff and all of northern Arizona. I can't help but think the lake's reason for being is simply to be a lens capturing this view of two mountains, one stabbing the sky, the other floating on the sur-face of the calm waters.

I pitch my bag in a dense stand and, as night falls, the tree trunks go black and march against the hori-zon with the dying blue of the lake between them. Later a full moon rises and walks the white ground of the forest, slips easily through the squads of huge pines and then skates across the surface of the lakes. The wind moans through the forest-a storm is coming to the high country. At dawn two mallards paddle the lake edge, the moon vanishes below the horizon and coffee and cold air greet me as the peaks once again return and relax on the lake surface.

There seems nothing to do but look and feel. This trip has become about leaving scenes and smells I either had never known or had, alas, forgotten. To my amazement, it has become a strange series of regrets-regret at leaving the Bill Williams River, regret at abandoning the Mohave, Knight's Creek, Fort Rock Ranch, the universe of piñon-juniper, the sheer cliffs of the Mogollon Rim, the elk that looked up from its spot in the forest and eyed me as the truck slipped through the silence of a glen.

That is a fact of living in Slow Nation - no mat-ter how ambling the pace, it inevitably seems just too fast. The trip with its huge variations in altitude feels absolutely flat with everything on the same level of pleasure. I keep moving because of my cul-ture, but I question this movement because of the cultures of deer and elk and javelinas and ravens and hawks crying over the canyons that make such a journey seem at best foolish and, in the end, as willfully missing the point.

All this rumbles through my mind as I take in the blues of Doc's Cafe, toss down a shot of espresso and look at a map. For a day or so, there have been false probes to the north looking for a dirt way to find a roundabout connection with the White Mountains, jaunts that have revealed to us things like Chevelon Creek, a wonderland of water and green that's hidden in a slot snaking through the junipers and piñons. Frankly, all these wrong turns have been right turns. And now the path is heading back south into what is the scene of an inferno, the Rodeo-Chediski fire near Show Low that in June 2002 devoured 700 square miles of Arizona. Doc's Cafe rests just a mile or so from the end of this colossal burn. Doc himself is Arizona-born but spent years in Alaska working. The cold finally got to be too much for his wife, Wanda, and so he returned, took over his brother's cafe in Heber, founded a blues band, got himself a suitable 1950 Chevy pickup and went at his hash-slinging with gusto. Sometimes, the summer heat does get to him, he admits, but at such moments Wanda plunks him in the cafe's walk-in cooler to calm him down.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 16 AND 17] The highest group of summits in the state, the San Francisco Peaks loom above Ashurst Run in the first rosy glow of dawn.

THE BLACKENED FOREST TELLS ME A VERY OLD TALE, that the Earth abideth forever, AND THAT IN THE WINK OF AN EYE LIFE RECLAIMS DEATH, that change is the constant.

Well, if Doc's little blues oasis surprises me, that is mild in comparison to what I find in the fire zone. At its peak, the blaze hit temperatures of 2,000 degrees and everyone feared that this heat would sterilize the soil. Just a few hours ago, I was standing by a picture-perfect pond studded with dying aspens, the water backed up from the work of beavers and I thought to myself that just a few miles ahead will be scenes straight from hell. The Rim Road, a dirt track carefully following along the clifftop, glances against the most intense zones of the fire. Some patches, though severely burned, sustain scattered groves of surviving pine, fir, oak, juniper and spruce trees to repopulate the charred acres. It may take a century or so to get things back to the former towering forest level, but if this trip has taught me anything, it is that there is plenty of time once a person leaves the velocity of the interstate. I stop and walk periodically, always taking a straight line.

In the worst of the fire area, I find all the trees dead, the ground innocent of even a single track, the air bereft of birdsong, small plants and flowers shooting up everywhere, insects thrumming constantly. In the milder areas of destruction, shoots burst forth from oak stumps, rabbits colonize new caverns where once roots tunneled through the earth, and various birds zoom overhead. But now I'm in the very innermost hell and what I feel is the sheer joy of life. I have seldom felt more optimistic than when walking this black ground with the shards of exploded rocks scattered about and seeing huge yellow flowers beaming all over. The contorted shapes of the dead trees, some arcing and almost twirled by the blowtorch that killed them, are eerily beautiful.

But two things stun me. First is that even burning 700 square miles of Arizona barely makes a dent in the greenery of the high country - the ApacheSitgreaves National Forests, for example, lost 164,440 acres to the burn, but this took place in a federal reserve of 2 million acres. Second, and far more important, the blackened forest tells me a very old tale, that the Earth abideth forever, and that in the wink of an eye life reclaims death, that change is the constant. Ten thousand years ago there were hardly any ponderosas in Arizona; this huge tract was spruce. Then, the climate shifted and the ponderosas seized the high country like Europeans did at a much later date. Such facts can be lamented or celebrated, but now as I walk the fire-blackened dirt, I realize the Earth has no time for lamentations. The Earth greets the sun with life.

Finally, Dykinga and I push on and things get green and fine again. Elk once again stare at me, antelope gaze over, ravens croak overhead and ducks paddle about in the small ponds of the high country. I've gotten more than I bargained for lately: blues, espresso, the gleam of a '50 Chevy in cherry condition, and the devastation of the fire zone that despite the evidence of death manages to waft against my face like the breath of heaven. I'm sure all this was within my reach as a child. I simply had to slow down to regain this once familiar ground. And now I have.

HERE ARE THINGS I SHOULD TELL YOU. Sometime in your life, you must drop into the small town of Snowflake after days of sleeping out and listening to the moon walk across the sky. You must drop in on graduation night with the whole town up for the event and then go to the local steakhouse, have that T-bone and some iced tea and spread out the maps and have a fistful of local ranchers become your advisers as the surrounding tables fill with families having a good meal before the proud moment of diplomas and tassels tossed from one side to the other on mortarboard graduation caps.

In Touch With the Earth

And I should tell you about a guy who once wandered dirt-road Arizona and

(Continued from page 23) then left and finally died about 60 years ago fighting a forest fire in Wisconsin. His name was Aldo Leopold and he left behind the essay manuscripts of a little book called Sand County Almanac, a small thing that has never gone out of print. He had helped slaughter the wolves in Arizona and then thought twice about what he had done and wrote an essay he called "Thinking Like a Mountain." This very ground stimulated him to think these thoughts. That we cannot make it without the ground and the ground is so rich and intricate, we will spend the rest of forever simply trying to understand what it is saying to us.

And there was the guy running a sporting goods store-gas station over in Alpine near the New Mexico line. A poster in his window announced an August worm race sponsored by a local tavern. I asked him how the event went. He smiled and said, "Slow." I take note-slow has become my country.

And Alpine rests under the Escudilla, a massive peak crowded with trees and the meadows blue with wild iris. Up there on a ridge, I stare at an alligator juniper at least 7 feet in diameter and wonder what am I looking at? Five centuries? Six? Seven? The whistle of an elk on the slope cuts through my thought.

But mainly, I'll tell you about one night near the end of the trip, a camp made on the edge of a meadow up around 9,500 feet, near Alpine. Big Lake spread out under the stars a few miles to the west. I slept in a mixed grove of pines and fir. Toward dawn I watched a thunderstorm roll in. Bats dove near my head, gobbling mosquitoes. Suddenly the wind came up, lightning jabs danced closer and then for half an hour the heavens unleashed a torrent. I had a waterproof sack around my sleeping bag and rode out the storm as a dry but engaged spectator. When the clouds moved off, the air became rich with the odor of pine and finally, in the gray light the forest emerged and the golden sweep of the meadow began to faintly gleam. I could see my breath but could hear nothing but the soft rustling of needles in the enormous forest. Just over the hill in the next meadow, I saw two herds of elk, a good dozen in each band, grazing as calmly as cows. Then four bulls crept out of the forest.

Later, the tires crossed into New Mexico, and the tracery of dirt roads across Arizona ended.

But I hope that is not true so long as I can remember the storm, the blaze of lightning that signaled the bats to take cover, the rush of the rain pelting the earth, and then finally with dawn, the cup of coffee and my breath spiraling across the wet rich air. I want to remember the choreography of the storm and the slow creeping of dawn, not because I had some big thoughts I scribbled down on paper. Hardly that, since my mind seemed elsewhere and had been retired by my senses.

No, I think I'll hang onto the memory of the storm and that morning because they took me back to a place I once knew and a place I suspect we have all known, where not only the Earth is alive but so are we. I got there by following dirt roads in Arizona. I can't guarantee such a result but I'll tell you thisyou've got a real good chance of getting to that place on the slow dusty roads, with or without a map. All

Insects, Run for Your Lives Here comes that stinky, ill-mannered meat eater... ...the shrew

Pound for pound, inch for inch, they are Arizona's deadliest mammals. Nonstop killers with insatiable appetites, they seem to be a mixture of intervals. To maintain an exceedingly high rate of metabolism, which includes a heart rate of about ill-tempered badger, cunning coyote and malodorous 1,000 beats per minute, shrews are skunk, all bundled into tiny energized capable of consuming twice their body packages. Shrews, called "dwarf wolves" weight in food in a day. The shrew's in one dictionary, also are among Ariferocity is supported by needlesharp teeth zona's smallest mammals. and lightning speed, enabling it to deliver a paralyzing or fatal bite to the unlucky victim.

Shrews appear disguised as adorable Their obsession with food would be baby mice. Mice, of course, are rodents. even greater if they didn't have the abilShrews are not rodents, but rather fierce ity to lower their body temperature by predatory insectivores that prey priabout 20 degrees while spending half marily on grasshoppers, snails, earththeir time in deep sleep. When they worms and other invertebrates found awaken, they are out to kill. under leaf litter. Mice, small reptiles and occasionally other shrews may also Of the 322 known shrew species, six find themselves on the dinner table. reside in Arizona. Of those, only two For their weight-about that of a species live in the Huachuca Mountains near my southnickel-shrews have enormous appeern Arizona home. My assignment was to find and photites and must eat many meals a day or face starvation tograph the rarely seen desert shrew, Notiosorex crawfordi. within hours. Researchers believe shrews are active My search led me up Miller Canyon in the Huachuboth day and night throughout the year, alternating cas where shrews could find adequate nesting sites periods of hunting and sleeping in threeto four-hour within old wood rat nests or under dead agave plants. A series of small trails radiating from a decaying log pointed me to a potential shrew nest. Now I would have to apply the tricks of my trade to capture one of these tiny "Jack the Rippers" on film.

What better way to befriend a hungry, beady-eyed killer than with a tasty tidbit? In addition to the required ton of camera equipment, I was also carrying a small ice chest containing a few chilled, but not dead, grasshoppers.

In seconds, a furry gray streak about the