MY ADOPTED HOME

1912 2012 MY ADOPTED HOME

I am glad I wasn't born in Arizona. I might have taken it for granted. To come to it after living in many other places lets me know its worth in a way that is difficult for the native.

AN ESSAY BY HUGH DOWNS

In the 1940s and '50s, a colleague of mine on the NBC Central Division Staff received copies of Arizona Highways from his mother, and he shared them with me. I did not set foot in Arizona until 1968, but the magazine, with its photos and articles, intrigued me. I remember a cover that showed Sedona's rocks, and I formed a wrong opinion of the picture: I thought it was bad photography - no rocks are that brilliantly colored. It wasn't until I got here and visited Sedona that I realized my error.

This state has been my legal and voting residence since 1969, and it continues to grow more interesting. For more than 40 years, its past was more the focus of my interest, but lately I see a fascinating future for this state that may be more promising and feasible than that for any other state in our union. I'll get to that. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote in Arizona Highways about how my wife and I decided to settle in Arizona after a single visit on the occasion of an invitation from Bill Shover to speak at the Phoenix Executives' Club in 1968. Bill was a journalistic force at The Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette, and is our most long-standing friend - not the "oldest" friend. Ruth and I had both lost our roots (and most relatives) in the Middle West, where we were born, and never felt at home in the big cities we were obliged to inhabit for career reasons. We had thought about many places to resettle, from Tahiti to Portugal (literally), but finally concluded we didn't want to live under a different flag.

It didn't take us long to realize that all the cliché statements about the heat and the humidity are true. We'd rather be here at 110 degrees than in almost any other state at 90.

I wrote about how, over time, we came to understand the way Joseph Wood Krutch felt about the Sonoran Desert when, after a career as a New York journalist, he was involved in the establishment of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson and knew for the rest of his life he was home. He told me that one of the things he liked about the desert was its politeness. Plants don't crowd you in the desert, as in the jungle or in ordinary forests. Since water is not plentiful, there has to be space between desert growths, and you can walk through them without being scratched or impeded. I learned about the Hohokam and the engineering achievements of the "people who came before," and the time-depth that outdistanced the tribal memory of Native Americans living among us now.

The practical, vital, solid life I enjoy as an Arizona resident is now complemented by an underlying pedal tone I had not heard when we first moved out here: History and prehistory are not discontinuous. The petroglyph in the almost inaccessible place, the unvisited pueblos in a cliff cave on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, the remains of ancient irrigation canals, are from the same impetus as Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport or the many new hotels and resorts built since we took up residence.

There is enormous variety within a unity that is Arizona. The tall grasses and ponderosa pines north of Prescott are one with the saguaros and ocotillos and strawberry hedgehogs and prickly pear cactuses to the south.

The variety is shown in a publicity stunt mounted some years ago, when a young man snow-skied off Humphreys Peak, jumped in a car, and the same day was surfing in Chandler, where an artificial surfing machine made this possible. How many states could offer this?

My heirs would be dismayed to know how much I would give to be able to spend one hour in Yuma during the steamboat days. Or to have been with García López de Cardenás when his party first saw the Grand Canyon. Or to have seen downtown Phoenix when it was simply a hotel and some stores at the corner of Adams and Central, and walked with Jim Hardy (who was 96 when I met him in 1970) when he ran away from home at age 13 and headed west over a formidable stretch of desert to arrive a dozen miles later in Glendale.

The state's glorious past will be rivaled by its future. We have the edge on every other community I can think of when it comes to knowledge, research and sustainability. We have the flexibility to allow partnerships between universities and industries and the potential for a symbiosis of elements. Arizona is on a path to blossoming at an accelerated rate.

Any resident can be proud of the state's universities. Michael Crow, the 16th president of Arizona State University, acting on his own statement, “American higher education cannot assume that its competitive position in the world is unassailable,” has guided the steady transformation of ASU into one of the nation's leading public research iversities. Focusing on the major challenges of our time, he has committed the university to “sustainability, social embeddedness and global engagement,” and championed initiatives leading to record levels of diversity in the student body.

This month the state will be 100, and it hasn't relinquished the right to remain yet the Arizona Territory. I am glad I wasn't born in Arizona. I might have taken it for granted. To come to it after living in many other places lets me know its worth in a way that is difficult for the native. Like a religious convert, I feel I have an added point of pride in having chosen it.