The Canyon That Broke a Fall

SABINO CANYON The Canyon That Broke a Fall

In the August night of the annual Perseid meteor shower, we tucked pillows under arms and ambled over to our neighborhood canyon, where we lay down in the road to watch the pebbles carve white streaks in the sky. I remember being disappointed by the celestial show-we want meatier meteors, and more of them!-but feeling unexpectedly comfortable lying on the still-warm asphalt, the charcoaldark canyon walls rising around like the sides of a battered and broken bowl. In that rocky cradle, I felt fully at home, embraced in a way that no house has ever quite managed. Our "neighborhood canyon" was Sabino Canyon on the northeastern edge of Tucson, one of half a dozen immense cleavages yawning out of the southern slope of the Santa Catalina Mountains. For seven years we lived a 10-minute walk away, in a location that violated my own environmental conscience-someone should have drawn a national park border around the whole range and its foothills and locked them away from development forever. But who manages a life immaculate of hypocrisy? As long as I had stumbled into the neighborhood, I intended to take full advantage of the canyon. In fact, Sabino Canyon is almost an environmental showcase in an age when success stories are hard to come by. There is a paved road in, but in 1973 the Forest Service temporarily closed it and suddenly everyone noticed how much cleaner the canyon seemed when free from the clamor and aroma of cars. It remains closed. In 1936, the canyon barely escaped with its life after Tucson summoned the Army Corps of Engineers to drown it with a 250-foot-high concrete dam and lake. The scheme folded only because Depression-crippled Pima County couldn't come up with the money for its share of the tab. All the canyons of the Catalinas are seductive places, but Sabino is the crown jewel, thanks to its perennial stream. Although in a dry season it's barely a gurgle-the Corps' dam might have had little more than a puddle to show for its mighty effort-the desert responds exuberantly. There's a tangled riparian forest of ashes, cottonwoods, walnuts, sycamores and willows, lush in summer and resplendent in fall. On some mornings, the birdsong is bedlam, the result of some 200 species in residence or layover. I've enjoyed my most prolific Arizona wildlife encounters in near-urban Sabino-Gila monsters, rattlesnakes, coyotes, javelinas, bobcats and on one occasion a great blue heron that looked big enough to stalk over and stab me in the eye with its stiletto beak had the idea occurred to it.

On my most recent return to Sabino there were lurid orange signs warning of "high mountain lion activity-enter at your own risk." After a small flurry of sightings in 2004, the Forest Service closed the canyon for several days, and the Arizona Game and Fish Department trapped and removed one cat. Protests poured in. Expert opinion on whether the risk had been overblown was perfectly divided. The Arizona Daily Star consulted seven wildlife biologists: Three said the cats indeed threatened public safety, three said they didn't and one took neither side.

My inexpert opinion is that the less we try to reconfigure nature, the better. Science has a lousy record of predicting unintended consequences, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a campaign against cougars had somehow triggered a plague of locusts. For my own sake, I like knowing there are potentially unfriendly creatures prowling Sabino: It heightens my respect and deepens my humility.

It wasn't difficult to convince myself that these daily hikes were a legitimate piece of my workday.When I lived in the neighborhood, I walked over to Sabino nearly every morning and hiked 3 to 9 miles on its network of trails. My favorite was the Phoneline Trail, a man-made ledge chipped out of the south wall 400 feet above the canyon floor. It was an intermediate step between land and sky, a part of each realm. I worked at home, and it wasn't difficult to convince myself-I didn't have to justify it to anyone else-that these daily hikes were a legitimate piece of my workday. I carried a notebook and scribbled ideas or solutions that sometimes occurred almost effortlessly. The hiking seemed naturally to untangle problems. I've never understood how or why, although Thoreau, who obsessively walked four hours a day, believed the practice invested "the more air and sunshine in our thoughts." When I bought a laptop computer, I had the idea to colonize a shady spot under a sycamore and dilute the pain of writing by doing it in a beautiful place. It didn't work for a practical reason-I couldn't stuff my library into my pack, and there were always books I needed to paw through for reference. The canyon also put up a fierce and intangible resistance that I couldn't explain, but I distinctly felt. It seemed to resent the intrusion of this infernal artifice, the computer. In two hours I struggled to write three sentences. I never brought it again. But when I taught classes at the University of Arizona, I could walk in the canyon early in the day, rehearse in my mind and later that morning give a lecture laced with oxygen and sunshine-at least it seemed so to me. And on a December morning in 1995, when a knot of worried friends and family confronted me about my drinking, I walked alone over to Sabino to sit on a rock and think hard about my life, whether I could try to face it without the fog of vodka. Ten years later, I wondered whether I could find that exact rock, and how it might feel to sit there again. I found it easily: a distinctive club sandwich of gray-and-white banded Catalina