Peace in a Shady Grove on the Gila

To the road and looked back and saw the beautiful sight of my son on the silver ladder in the green alfalfa. His shadow ran a quarter-mile. The next morning, Colin flew back to college. My only plan was to call the tribal offices and find out whose field that was and go see the man so he didn't ruin any farm equipment while accidentally harvesting aircraft. But at home I got a phone message: "Yeah, say, Ron Carlson, this is Dave, and we've got your plane. Harry's got your plane, and it's a funny story how we found it. It was the Channel 3 helicopter that spotted it."

I didn't know who Dave or Harry were, except probably pilots at the Scottsdale model-airplane field, the kind of helpful guys you meet in the model-airplane world. Colin arrived safely back in Boulder and was glad to hear about the airplane. Ten days later, as I drove by on the freeway, I saw the field had been cut and the green bales lay in a rich array. It was strangely easy to imagine one with red and white wings coming out of each side.

Ron Carlson of Scottsdale loves to seek adventures all over Arizona, but he finds it especially sustaining to visit unusual places in and around Phoenix-like the model-airplane field. His most recent book is his story collection, A Kind of Flying. He teaches writing at Arizona State University.

GILA RIVER Peace in a Shady Grove

Not far from the spot where it leaves San Carlos Reservoir at the Coolidge Dam, the Gila River enters a steep, volcanic canyon, its bottom strewn with fallen boulders and flanked by thickets of salt cedar. The canyon runs for just a few miles, descending through the Granite Mountains at a steep grade. If it is a year of sufficient rainfall, the river runs swiftly through it, revealing in the plunge, before finally making a big bend just outside the lit-tle mining town of Winkelman.

There, below a low granite cliff, the river forms a sandy beach lined by tall trees whose branches stretch across the water, sheltering the stream from the hard sun. The natural arcade makes a little miniature environment all its own, cooler in summer than the surrounding desert by a dozen degrees or more, frost-free in winter, pleasant almost anytime.

For years, I have been escaping there, taking soda breaks on the way from Tucson to the Mogollon Rim, watching birds, working over notes, taking advantage of the river's generosity to dangle my feet in the cool water, read a book, eat an apple and hide out, far from ringing telephones and insistent computers. Close as it is to what we like to call civilization, the bend of the river seldom sees visitors; at least I've never felt crowded there, even on the hottest days. Quiet and solitude are commodities not so easy to come by these days, and for that reason alone the place stands tall on thechecklist of magical spots that I keep in my mental atlas-cummedicine bundle against the day when escape seems advisable. Call it a holdover from an early life spent along great rivers such as the Rhine, Potomac and Missouri, but rivers rank very high on that list-especially those that, strange though it may be for an Arizonan to imagine, flow all the year-round.

It wasn't always so quiet there in that dense thicket of cottonwood, velvet ash and willow trees, dark enough that ferns and grasses can grow, cool enough to make even the fieriest summer day survivable. A dozen years ago, a small frame house stood perhaps 15 yards from the stream, surrounded by mesquite trees in whose branches hung a couple of dozen red-and-yellow hummingbird feeders. The nectar they held drew scores of hummingbirds from the surrounding desert, so many of them that, approaching the house, you might think you were coming up on a great swarm of noisy bees. It was just the busy whirr of dozens of wings coming and going in that avian version of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, a crowded airway that could be heard from a quarter-mile distant.

The place met all my standards of paradise, with its cool water, its grasses, flowers and trees, its abundant wildlife. I suspect it met the hummingbirds' idea of paradise, too, and that of the odd fish that floated by, and the odd eagle that lofted above and the odd mule deer that came to drink at riverside. But times change, and so do places. For a few weeks in the winter of 1993, and again the following year, and again a few years after that, the Gila River, fueled by a strong El Niño weather pattern born in the western Pacific Ocean, came roaring down the steep-walled, steep-pitched canyon, pulling out trees, tearing the thin beach away, sending the house and its hummingbird feeders far downstream-and making the place altogether quieter.

As long as the birds return, as long as the water flows ... this bend in the river will remain a treasure, part of our geography of hope.

Not long ago, though, on a warm weekend morning, I wandered up to the spot, parked myself under one of the trees that withstood the flood, and watched the river roll by. The bend remained quiet, and hummingbirds came not in squadrons as before but in twos and threes. They know a good thing. As long as the birds return, as long as the water flows, fast or slow, this bend in the river will remain a treasuresure, part of what has been called our geography of hope-and just the place to find a moment or two of peace on Earth.

Gregory McNamee is the author of Gila: The Life and Death of an American River, and other books. A resident of Tucson since 1975, he grew up in greener and wetter climes and cherishes water when he can find it, collecting rivers and oases on his desert rambles and getting noticeably grumpy when the summer monsoon is late in arriving. He is now at work on a book about Arizona's San Pedro River.