Portfolio: Visions of Four Deserts

THE ZEN GARDEN OF FOUR DESERTS SIGHS AND BLEEDS AND BLOOMS

North America's four desertscapes meet, merge and illuminate

By CHARLES BOWDEN Photographs by JACK DYKINGA

Jack Dykinga: "After scanning weather forecasts for weeks, I identified a monsoon storm heading for the Grand Wash Cliffs. In the photograph I visualized, I imagined a colorful bank of storm clouds roiling behind the strangely shaped Joshua trees below the cliffs. "Racing almost the entire length of the state from my Tucson home, I tracked the gathering clouds. As I neared Kingman, the setting sun began to color the sky. Turning east, I found my location along the road to Peach Springs. Strapping on my backpack, I raced from my truck as powerful winds kicked up clouds of dust. It looked like my many days of planning and miles of driving would result in just a scant few minutes of ephemeral light. I exposed only a few sheets of film before the sun vanished behind the lowering clouds and a wall of dust." Arca-Swiss F-line 4x5 Field Camera, 180 mm Schneider APO Symmar lens, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film, f32 at three seconds. (The same camera and film were used for all photographs in this portfolio.)

storm light

THE SUN HUNTS THROUGH

GAPS in the clouds as wind whips through the creosote, the tiny leaves whooshing like some mutant forest before the approaching storm. Nearby, the coarse woven fibers of a dead yucca form a small log on the earth. Grass grows just outside the creosote colony, but here the ground seems barren except for the small shrubs with waxy leaves of an almost obscene green, leaves that when crushed spike the nose with memories of turpentine. The gray smooth limbs host bands of black and hold the leaf clusters like parasols oriented toward the sun. Creosote is the plant almost no one photographs, save by accident, the life-form humans march through on their way to something else.

Largely inedible, dominant through a kind of toxic effect on the soil that inhibits the seeds of other plants from germinating, creosote lives in regal splendor. I once walked a creosote flat that was 33 miles long and the calm of that march still floats within me. These huge colonies of creosote create the Zen gardens of the Southwest, the place where everything falls away and nothing remains but the peace we cannot name without strong drink or prayer. Some claim it is the oldest life form on Earth (one clonal colony in the desert of Southern California seems to be 11,000 years old). I am a fool for this creosote.

I sit on the lip of a bajada just inside the eastern line of Arizona and stare at the Chiricahua Mountains and a stone formation called Cochise Head after the dead leader of the Apaches. I'm certain he never heard this designation in his lifetime and would not care for it now. As the great man of his nation, he lies in an anonymous grave-a decision made by his people lest he ever be disturbed. I sip coffee on what some think is the western flank of the Chihuahuan Desert, a relatively cold arid zone that sweeps behind me across New Mexico and into Texas and plunges deep into Mexico. Here's the rub: Arizona is the only place in the union that hosts the four major deserts of North America.

These human-conceived units all have their quirks. In winter, the Chihuahuan Desert is cold, characterized by landlocked basins, and lacks large columnar cactus. It seems a blur at first to the eye and then becomes something bewitching, an endless sweep of plants, soil, mountains and plains. The Sonoran Desert is warmer, more lush to the eye and anchored in our dreams by the saguaro, the giant barbed plant of the region. The Mohave Desert is a transitional desert, cooler and festooned with Joshua trees and wind. Finally, the Great Basin Desert caresses the eye and nose with sagebrush. These deserts thrive within the two geological enormities: the basin and range formation of mountains and valleys and the vast canyons and flats of the Colorado Plateau, which in Arizona hosts the giant hole called the Grand Canyon. Hole may sound a little plain but anyone who descends into the Canyon discovers the everyday world vanishes and the sky becomes something brilliant as if seen from the bottom of a well.

Three things should be noted about the curious fact that the four major deserts of North America meet only in one state: It may not be true (some botanists insist eastern Arizona hosts an

intermediate savannah that is not really the Chihuahuan Desert). It doesn't really matter to me-regardless of the number of deserts in Arizona, I love them all.

So I wander almost aimlessly and visit the places of my heart and they are not dry and they are not barren and, whatever their names, they are essential.

They live beneath our names and do not believe a word we say. Arizona's four deserts will not answer to the names we paste on them. Nor will they accept our word "desert." Nothing in these huge expanses of low rainfall senses it is short of water. What we see as bones the deserts feel as flesh. The earth is coated with life that grabs solar energy and has a kind of consciousness we cannot grasp as it struggles to eat the fury of the rays cascading down from space. We chop up this symphony of forms, assign seating at some grand banquet table in our minds. But when you walk into the mass of green, it is always the same whether swamp or desert-it is life humming a song we cannot quite sing and it always has just what it needs, whether in a bog or a burning flat of creosote.

So names are assigned (Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mohave, Great Basin), definitions made, lines drawn. Beneath this apparent order, the land sighs and bleeds, blooms and goes to seed. And persists. The deserts are never the lack of something, never the end of something. The deserts are always beginning, the place where a voice comes from a burning bush, a book comes to a wanderer in the sands and finally the paintings are as bold as the tubes of oil paint.

sonoran desert

I HAVE LIVED IN THE SONORAN DESERT almost all of my life and take it for granted. I assume a desert is rife with trees (paloverde, mesquite, ironwood). I assume rivers are almost always dry and then in summer briefly become raging torrents. And I never question that when I scan the dawn I will see the towers of saguaros. The Sonoran Desert, most of which exists below the border in Mexico, looks too lush to be a desert and yet is too dry to be anything else. And because of this rich botany, it has become the template for all deserts, with the saguaros popping up in advertisements as symbols for parts of the West far from this desert.

spiky giant Cottontop cactus, Cabeza-Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Tinajas Altas Mountains, Sonoran Desert. ■To order a print of this photograph, see page 1.

Dykinga: “In all my travels in the Southwestern deserts, I have never seen a cottontop cactus as big as this one. Nearly 8 feet in diameter and 4 feet high, this cactus is a monster. I spent several days camped nearby and often photographed its reddish spines in dawn's early light.” 80 mm Schneider Super-Symmar lens, slight warming filter, f45 at eight seconds. Dykinga: "I've photographed a lot of sunsets, but this one may be the best I've ever seen." 110 mm Schneider Super-Symmar, no filtration, f32 at three seconds.

mohave desert

Dykinga: "After seeing an explosion of beargrass flower heads on a return trip from California, I vowed to return to photograph them. After a quick stop at home in Tucson, I drove the 200 miles back in the evening, hoping that the normally tranquil conditions at dawn would produce calm conditions for photography the next morning. Thankfully, as planned, the gusty winds died down, leaving me free to photograph the delicate beargrass flowers with the first light of dawn. However, a 5-foot rattlesnake at my feet let me know he had found the location first!" 80 mm Schneider Super-Symmar lens, f32 at four seconds.

I MOVE WEST TOWARD

YUMA, then north to the Bill Williams River, where saguaros stare down from the hillsides on a stream populated by beavers. A few miles north, Joshua trees begin and the Mohave fingers into Arizona. It is that simple and that false, these lines. Thirty or 40 miles to the east, north of Wikieup, a stand of saguaros seems to define the Sonoran Desert-woven into the Mohave Desert. The Mohave is a desert of cold winters and of wind, a vista where geology is barely cloaked by plants. The saguaros of the Sonoran Desert cannot endure a temperature of 32 degrees for more than 36 consecutive hours and so their presence this far north announces a dab of warmth in the kingdom of another desert.

3 great basin desert

I AM NORTH OF THE GRAND CANYON in the lost section of the state called the Arizona Strip, a high cold desert of sagebrush-the leaves crushed between my fingers flood my senses. This portion of the state lives in isolation, thanks to the Canyon barrier of the Colorado River. It might as well be some American Tibet. Behind me loom the mountains and forests that embrace this section of the North Rim, but before me is a flat plain of the Great Basin Desert. There is one thing to always remember about this desert: You are not driving to a viewpoint, you are brushing against some sense of infinity. Park the car, get out, walk 200 yards, sit still for 10 minutes, think of nothing and then everything will begin to whisper in your ears. A photograph will look the same no matter which direction you point the camera. Here is the choice: You can fidget and feel bored to death, or you can relax and fall into a state of grace.

Dykinga: "Hiking the slickrock country of northern Arizona is my way of recharging my batteries. Each time I go, I am amazed to find that serendipity has intervened to hand me a visual gift. Trudging through a narrow defile, a beautifully designed composition of bluish manzanita and warm striated sandstone leaps forward to be photographed. This is why I truly love my profession."

chihuahuan desert I MOVE TO THE EAST,

INTO NAVAJO LANDS, and cut south along the flank of the White Mountains, spill off the Mogollon Rim, and reach the Gila River where I began, in that eastern slab of Arizona that may or may not be true Chihuahuan Desert, a debate best left to scientists. For the rest of us, it looks remarkably like the real thing.

The rains have come, a beast rolling out of Mexico and this storm blankets everything. I've been rolling under a gray sky across the Colorado Plateau, that mass of eroding sedimentary rock that defines Hollywood Westerns in Monument Valley. Today, all the deserts drink as the freak storm washes across the Southwest. The air goes raw, the dust is flattened and scent washes my body. Up in the mountains above the desert floor, snow is falling. Here in the desert rain slathers the earth and the arroyos rumble with torrents.

I stop at a ranch. The arroyos are coming up and I hear the rumble as a flash flood careens down a drainage just behind the ranch house. This is the first heavy rain of summer. At dusk as we sit on the porch, a clatter of voices suddenly comes out of the earth on all sides. The Colorado River toad (Bufo alvarius), an amphibian the size of a grapefruit, emerges from almost a year of sleep in the dry ground. The croaks ripping the desert night are mating calls. The toads have a few short weeks to meet, mate and then return to their slumbers. They are noted for secreting a poison through their skin, the bane of dogs ignorant of the region.

But the toads' range also covers three of Arizona's four deserts-depending on whose map of the deserts one prefers. Their voices now have become a din, a cry for life and sex and the future that bangs against the heavy clouds, blanketing the night with rain. For a moment I am in all the deserts of the world, that kind of ground we sometimes call wastelands and then in rare moments of lucidity recognize as the very tissue of life itself.

A while back, I read a letter written a century ago by the American poet Wallace Stevens:

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

As the toads shout life, I have left that train.

There are two phases to any journey into Arizona's four deserts. First, you will confront some sense of emptiness, a place that seems shorn of what you consider life. Then, you will suddenly feel an unexpected sensation. You will know in your bones you have come home.

The toads sing into the night and I know where I am. Home.

power of place