LASTING IMPRESSIONS

LASTING IMPRESSIONS Thoughts on growing up in the 48th state by Arizona native Sandra Day O'Connor
On the day of the Arizona Centennial, Sandra Day O'Connor will be celebrating at the state Capitol. It's fitting, considering that O'Connor the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court has deep roots in the state. She grew up on the Lazy B Ranch near Duncan (pictured above), and it's there that her oldest memories were made. As she writes in Lazy B (Random House, New York, 2002): "The Lazy B Ranch straddles the border of Arizona and New Mexico along the Gila River. It is high-desert country dry, windswept, clear, often cloudless. Along the Gila the canyons are checked with cottonwoods and willows.... The water flowing down the riverbed from the Gila Wilderness to the northeast is usually only a trickle." What follows are O'Connor's reflections on the Lazy B, rain and her hopes for her home state.I'd need an airplane if I had only a day to show off Arizona to people who've never been here before. "Of course, I loved the ranch where I spent so much time as a child. It's probably not Arizona's most beautiful spot, but it meant so much to me and I covered so much of it on horseback or in a Jeep. I treasured it. "At 4,000 feet, the ranch tended not to be as warm in the summer, but what I remember always was the sky that big sky. We watched it day and night. During the day, we watched it hoping for big cumulus clouds. In the summer in late July and August we'd get some moisture, and it would form those clouds. We always needed rain, so we prayed that those clouds would produce it. "Some years, my father would produce silver-iodide crystals to be a coalescent for rain. My brother had a plane, and would sometimes fly into those clouds and put the crystals out. Rain. After a downpour, it was always exciting to go out and see what emerged, to go out and look at things. The birds would always start squawking. The rain made us feel like there was hope that the grass might grow, that we'd survive another season. "At night, we'd look up there wasn't any light from Phoenix or Tucson and we'd see stars and planets and things in the sky that just seemed so close that we could reach out and touch them. No one can imagine a desert sky like that. Pure magic. I'll never forget that. "Arizona is a beautiful state. We have marvels that anyone from anywhere in the world would want to see. Nothing equates to the Grand Canyon. Then, there's Monument Valley. And I always liked going to the Hopi mesas and Canyon de Chelly. There's nothing like Canyon de Chelly. I'd go there and think, We have places no one else has. Magical places with magical things. "Becoming a state had to have been the proudest moment in Arizona's history. I hope that over the next 100 years it can maintain a sense of its good fortune in being what it is and where it is. I hope that we can manage to maintain everything that I love about it, despite increases in its population. We should teach all of the young people in Arizona to appreciate our state, that they should value and treasure what we have here wide-open spaces, magnificent sky and a diversity of plant and animal life. "Take good care, Arizona. There's no more unoccupied space in our corner of the world. We have to treasure and care for what we have." -Interviewed by Kelly Kramer
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