ALL WHO WANDER

Heart-stopping Light Can Heal Even Heartbreak in a Place That Smoothes the Mind

THE APACHES BELIEVE that certain places smooth your mind and make you wise if you just listen to them. As this issue demonstrates, so do our writers and photographers. Is it the same for you? Is that why you read Arizona Highways, to find those places that smooth the mind? Perhaps you will write to me about the places your heart has embraced, as a cottonwood root grows around a stone. Send me a paragraph about your favorite place and why you love it, then I'll post it on our Web site (arizonahighways.com). Just write me at the e-mail address below or the address on our mastheadIn the meantime, enjoy this issue as mystery novelist Tony Hillerman finds the perfect Navajo dog, writer Larry Cheek revisits the rock in a canyon where he found solace, iconoclast Charles Bowden watches the stars with a brilliant old man at the end of his journey and Navajo journalist Betty Reid remembers the blizzard that broke her heart in boarding school. In visual counterpoint, the best landscape photographers in the country capture photons bouncing off the places they love, freezing them in this celebration of light and place.

As I read these wise, sometimes-funny essays and marveled at this magical light, I found myself thinking of a place that healed me.It was a decade ago as my rented boat spattered across the choppy surface of Lake Powell. My sons Noah and Seth, then 9 and 11, sat in the open front, laughing and gasping in fear and delight. I muttered a faint curse, realizing I'd once again overstayed the light. I'm a lackadaisical luffer of a photographer, lightaddicted but undisciplined. Real photographers plan their whole day around sunset, but I blunder about until the light suddenly red-shifts toward magic before searching frantically for foreground.

But I'd gotten so caught up in exploring with my boys that the only foreground in sight was a rusted-red slump of an island. So I spun the wheel, which rolled Noah into Seth and provoked a fresh flurry of elbows and laughs. The sound lanced a gleam of happiness through the shadow of my grandfather's recent death. Walter Jennings grew up poor and built his own glider soon after the Wright Brothers proved it possible. He ran his own construction business, married, divorced, remarried and lived a rich life, brimming with joy, loss, courage, insecurity, love and regret. I loved him fiercely,for I was his shadow. He dropped out of grade school after an argument with the teacher, but spent one week with me in college attending my classes. His extravagant joy in learning about ancient China and constitutional law has made me revere books ever since. He died hard, but only after the prostate cancer got into his brain. The last time he remembered me. I took him out of the nursing home to sit at the end of an airport runway watching the jets pass overhead. He was a child in his glee.

So I had come wounded to this intersection of water and skythe most beautiful of lakes made by drowning the most exquisite of canyons. But seeing my boys roll about in the burnished light, I felt a renewed throb of life. They have taught me most of what I know, although they won't understand that until they have forgotten those essential things and learned them afresh from their own children. The moment we reached the island, the boys leaped from the boat, Seth in the lead as always and Noah following him like a duckling imp with a crooked grin. I hastily looped the bow rope around a rock before turning to survey the photographic possibilities. The boys had run out across a ridgeline riffle of red sand. Seth was dancing along the ridge, intoxicated by the light. Noah shadowed him with demented, sorcerer's apprentice leaps to ensure that his small feet landed precisely in his older brother's footprints. They each cast a manic shadow 30 feet long. They danced in perfect tune to the wind and the water and the sky and the rock. I was struck dumb. For the surge of a yearning, I wished that Walt could see them. But I understood then that I must see it for him, as my boys must one day watch for me. Belatedly, I fumbled with my camera as thebest light I've ever felt washed over me. Then I stood and watched them; my grief shrank to a ripple of sand. Finally, I turned back to the boat. Freed by the wind from my careless mooring, it floated 50 feet from shore. "The boat, the boat," I cried as I stripped off my clothes. Noah and Seth ceased from their dancing and watched me in wonder. I plunged into the cold water, swam through the choppy seas, clenched the bow rope in my teeth and somehow breaststroked it back to shore against the wind. The boys laughed until they rolled on the ground when I emerged from the water, naked and exhausted. Chilled, I sat on the red sand in the last lightperfectly happy with the spirit of that perfect place.