IF WINTER COMES

BY JOYCE ROCKWOOD MUENCH PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSEF MUENCH WINTER, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, IS DIFFERENT IN ARIZONA. There are three kinds, depending on where you are. Only the high mountains - the White Mountains, the San Francisco Peaks and the Santa Catalinas - know the real sleighbell-galosh and snowdrift variety. On rare and delightful occasions, those pranksters, Snow and the gamin' Jack Frost, play truant from the heights, making brief raids down onto the mesas of the High Desert to organize masquerades among Joshua Trees or to powder the Sage's hair. When the Sun catches them at their innocent revels, the filmy white costumes, glittering icicles and lacy filigreed ornaments are whisked away, like Cinderella's ball gown at the stroke of midnight. Lower still, in Saguaroland, as palm trees whisper intimately to shimmering blue swimming pools, the traditional winter of ice and snow is only a memory, a halfforgotten experience which happened to someone else. Thus, the astringent season, which takes arbitrary command of a considerable part of the nation, approaches Arizona more in the guise of salesman, offering tantalizing goods to be selected or refused. In those other states where snow, constant or intermittent, lies on the ground for months and low temperature is on constant guard to enforce Winter's edicts, an almost martial law prevails. The diluted sunshine is rationed. Heavy clothing becomes a uniform. Curfews, sounded by chill winds, drive young and old earlier to their cozy homes. All the annual flowers succumb; roses hibernate. Birds and Big League Teams fly south while the populace makes do with football, skiing and the Opera Season, just waiting for cold-war restrictions to be lifted.

This admittedly prejudiced viewpoint might well be challenged, but it becomes the accepted one to those happy mortals wintering under gay patio umbrellas or even tending fields which can be miraculously replanted as soon as cleared of their last yield. The months clustering around Christmas are like a tossed coin. If you are lucky enough to turn up heads - meaning Arizona - you must paint your Yule windows with artificial snow crystals. If it's tails - and you have to remain behind the Snow Curtain - then the Frost King will do it for you. Having thus disposed of Winter as wholly undesirable, let's turn about completely and look at its charm - Arizona brand, of course.

ARIZONA'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS, natural or adopted, would be the first to admit that snow - the more the better - has its place: Up on the roof. Covering gabled peaks of the White Mountains; over forest-shingled stretches of the Kaibab Plateau and the open balconies of the San Francisco Peaks; and where frosty dormer windows in the Santa Catalina Range look down on Tucson's brilliantly sunny valley. These are the capacious frozen lockers that hold spring and summer supplies of water for the state's rivers and lakes.

This admirable arrangement keeps one of Arizona's most carefully husbanded natural resources on ice, while transmitting, as well, a pleasant coolness to the lower living quarters. The sun takes a subdued course across the heavens, never achieving summer exuberance, and winds from the mountain's natural refrigerators help maintain a pleasant crispness of night on second-floor mesas and the downstairs Desert. There are further advantages which the practical-minded will suggest for keeping a cool head. Foresters point out that the best timber grows slowly, under the restraining hand of low temperatures. That is why Nature has planted some 200 miles of Ponderosa Pines in the highlands, to be wrapped in snow for several months every year.

They breast Arizona skylines from the Utah border, sweeping up over Buckskin Mountain (the Paiute's name for the Kaibab), spreading over the shoulders of the San Francisco Peaks, to flow in a dark green river, south and east across the Mogollon Plateau through the White Mountains, on into New Mexico. National Forests protect, by restrictive use and selective cutting, the finest virgin stand of this species left on Earth. High slopes in the Chuska Range are similarly guarded and harvested by the Navajo Indian Tribe.

Nature, combining business with pleasure, makes Winter in Arizona's high country both useful and beautiful. You should be there sometime, among the mountains, for its advent. There comes a day when the embers of autumn are almost burned out. The gold is gone from the Aspen Trees, the red from Maple and Sumac, yellow from Oak and Willow. You go to bed wondering when Winter will come, and wake up the next morning to find the miracle accomplished. Even before your eyelids or window shades are opened, the ear has caught the hush which only soundproofing snow brings. Outside, the world has been translated and the forest children have hastily put on winter underwear.

Whatever the view from your window showed yesterday, today there is a hand-woven tree-to-tree carpet. The sun is already drawing sparks of cold fire from it, as though the luxury-minded carpet-maker had tossed out a bucket of diamonds for a final touch.

If your vantage point be a snug weekend cabin in some highland eyrie, or hunting lodge where the season has surprised a party before the last shot, every tree and bush is touched by fantasy. Young pines bend to the ground under the accumulated weight of those delicate, geometrically shaped flakes which individually seem no heavier than a butterfly kiss. Falling quietly but insistently, they dress the woods in ermine, using trees and shrubs as adjustable dress-forms to create, now a robed monk with reverently bowed head, now a prehistoric monster stretching out its arms.

When the storm has passed there is light and airiness

through all the forest, a splendid play of beam and shadow. The blue of eyebrow-pencil underscores each bush; boulders wear marshmallow caps. The spectator may even feel an overwhelming sense of purity in this reborn world. The old is gone and will this new one so pristine in the clear air be “shaped nearer to the heart’s desire”? It’s a wonderful time to wander through transformed landscapes. Better have snowshoes. No matter how tall you are, your legs no longer reach the ground, but flounder between a crust that gives way and the unwieldy white substance which hinders progress. Usual landmarks have been shifted. Hollows are leveled out and hills and rocks assume new contours. Even the friendly trees seem strange ghosts of their summer selves. Only you are still the same. But are you? A shortened and visible breath, sharp tingles that stir the blood and put color in your cheeks, hint at the quickened spirit within, responding to the transfiguration of the Earth.

Tracks in the blinding blanket of the snow tell of wild creatures about startled into flight by your approach. The plunging step of a buck, weighted by his heavy crown of antlers, the short-set marks of the rabbit, make little wells of shadow, giving perspective in a dazzling field. The only sounds roll like ocean tides overhead, through the upper reaches of the trees, and underfoot in the tinkle and unquenchable chatter of some little stream.

The company of small creeks and rivulets seem at their merriest in Winter. Whether they be “whistling in the dark” or hurrying to keep warm, they appear determined to bolster the morale of every creature within earshot. Ice may try to dam them, but the water slithers along beneath, alert for a weak spot it can break through and ready to gulp down as many starry snowflakes as the sky will feed them. Have you noticed how the flow caresses each rock in passing, erupting in little splashes every so often to point a chilly finger, complimenting the fancy bonnets that every stone is wearing. A close second in uninhibited chatter, and running even ahead of a mountain stream in color contrasts, is a wintersport playground. Arizona has its Snow Bowl on the western slopes of the San Fran-cisco Peaks, Big Cienega in the White Mountains and a third area on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains, as well as more informal centers where sleds or slippery slats make Winter the prime playtime.

cisco Peaks, Big Cienega in the White Mountains and a third area on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains, as well as more informal centers where sleds or slippery slats make Winter the prime playtime.

Anyone who can spare camera time from the dominant urge to ride a tow-rope uphill so as to come down again at a dizzier clip, has ample material to capture. From a lonely ski-track, making unique pattern over an otherwise unblemished spread of snow, to jumpers in flight against the sky; candid shots on the beginner slope, the noisy tumult at refreshment stands. He might even catch a hint of the patent youth of even the oldest participant. Years seem to slide from the back - like a Pilgrim's sack - in the heady mountain air. Or maybe they're washed away in the first snow-drift tumble. The fact remains: Everyone is young on a ski slope.

In Arizona, ski poles aren't the only kind to be carried in cars headed for winter fun in the mountains. There are fishing rods as well. The season never closes in this state and anglers don't let a few feet of snow keep them from using line and reel. It's quite a sight. Almost reminiscent of Little America, sans Penguins, with well-bundled figures sitting in the midst of a white world, on fold-ing chairs or boxes, around holes cut in the ice. Unsuspecting trout find themselves snatched from their element and quick-frozen in the air no extra charge to the winter Waltons.

Enchanting as full-scale Winter may be to some, not for everyone are the joys of snow and cold. Most people follow the sun to Arizona and mean to stay where its rays are most potent. The myth of Ponce de León's Fountain of Youth has been rewritten in modern terms. A special potion, capable of renewing the spirit rather than aging bones, is brewed in the special clarity of air of the Low Desert. A "dry" wine, including some unknown ingredient an earlier age would have labeled magic, it unwinds tense nerves, filters off the froth of needless worry and unrecognized dreads which dog our pressured twentieth century minds. Winter in southern Arizona finds this draught most powerful. One of the recommended times for imbibing comes just after sundown when the air's particular lift induces deep breaths and a permeating sense of well-being.

For these seasonal or permanent visitors, there are no fur-lined jackets or shovelling chores, but, rather, roses blooming outside the window in January and oranges to be picked from their own doorstep - even in a "house-trailer estate." The Saguaro Cactus is their trademark against a frieze of black mountain peaks behind which the sun makes effective nightly exits.

Even here, where "The Sun Spends the Winter," an echo of the seasonal pattern persists. Where man neither irrigates nor plows, plants settle down, more for forty winks than for a long winter's nap. Light rains may come, but the entire floral kingdom, each member fitted with

built-in light-meter and thermometer, waits for the spring solstice as surely as its northern relatives.

Between these two realms mountains decked out in the full panoply of snow and the serene mildness of low-lands we have the High Desert to explore in its winter aspect. At any season this middle kingdom is alive with change and inconsistency, a buffer for the blending of Low Desert and mountains, sharing certain plants or climates of each, in a veritable laboratory for experimentation spelled out in unusual color and form.

Geographically, it is mesa land broad terraces planted to Juniper, Pinyon, Cypress, with generous measures of the noble Cactus Family plus a wider variety of hardy vegetation than can be crammed into half a dozen books on botany.

The terrain drops unaccountably into canyons; erupts in great uplifts, painted often in such raw colors that the conservative mind from north or east finds hard to believe.

Here are such earthscapes as the Grand Canyon the incredible mile depth from rim to river; Oak Creek Canyon broadening from paint-splashed cliffs into vermillion earthed amphitheater; Monument Valley, stabbing the sky with gigantic red fingers; Canyon de Chelly, cut in spacious meanders which look up to tiny ancient houses mortised into caves on a thousand-foot wall. It includes, among others, the Hopi Mesas, crowned by America's oldest communities, now beginning to trickle down in villages more accessible to car and electricity.

Snow in this region becomes a pageant a “ninety-day-wonder.” Visitations, seldom enough to make each a notable event, find formidable backgrounds for their dramatic turns. The white stuff, laid on perhaps through the night to achieve surprise, doesn't cover and hide it decorates. New tones, variations on red and brown, when the Sun wakes to what is going on, show off a brilliant contrast, delighting the eye with saturated colors. Sheer ramparts gain depth of tint from the moisture, by the same chemical sleight-of-hand which restores store-freshness to faded cotton dresses in the washer. Every level surface of eroded pinnacle and cliff, wide enough to hold banding of white, points up the difference between dazzling snow and the earthy tones of rock.

Above all this, the sky is piercingly clear. Seen from the foot of high walls, which the eye must first scale to reach the blue, the hue is so deep as to appear quite unreal. Snow plays other tricks on the mind among plants. Joshua Trees, always grotesque, now add quaint mimicry to their repertoire jaunty stocking cap ermine cuffs at the end of bristling angular arms. Smaller Yuccas manage equally humorous touches single rosettes may be steeped in cotton that winds a blanket close about them. Tall forms sport powdered wigs or fur-trimmed neckbands.

While the mind analyzes: “Snow is cold; the Desert hot,” the eye is digesting the joke a sort of visual Baked Alaska, ice cream browned in the oven! Frost and sleet try pranks on the slimmest blade of grass, on pebbly pavement of the Desert to transmute a whole landscape. Where sand dunes accept this new element, each ripple is uncommitted to special pattern, free to create its own new and unexpected design. Any passing breeze which cares to mix in, may carry light flakes to shape a lighthearted, horizontal snowman, complete with sticks for features. Camera or eye must be quick to register all this before grouchy Old Sol erases it with heavy hand, quite as though the harmless sketching were a personal affront naughty words scrawled on a householder's fence.

THE ARIZONA, at which we have been looking through one season's colored glasses, is Nature's workshop as well as Man's playground. If she chooses to be frolicsome or even whimsical at times, we see the hallmark of the real virtuoso craft so well in hand she can run creative variations on practice scales and still accomplish her bigger purpose.

From the highest white-clad peak down to the lowest, frost-free desert-wash, Winter is purposeful. Every melting snowflake can look toward reunion with the ocean and reincarnation as a raindrop; every leaf falls toward some next-year's flower and a dried twig may yet join the fabric of tomorrow's most amply-branching Cottonwood Tree.

If only the faulty senses of the human organism were as expansive as Man's spirit, we might actually see and hear, not just imagine in vague terms: forest and plain, canyon and mountain; rocks as well as plants and animals, moving in a grand processional toward the re-creation of Spring.

Until they are, we still have much to enjoy. Wherever you spend those evocative months, with eyes to see and ears to hear, in the beautiful, varied and complex land named ARIZONA, you can find stimulation in the profound declaration implied by the poet's query: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” AH