EDITOR'S LETTER

editor's LETTER Rodgers and Hammerstein

To get most of the credit, but we had a little something to do with Oklahoma!, too. The movie, not the musical. Like many things in the history of Arizona Highways, our involvement was serendipitous. In this case, it goes back to the 1950s, when a road crew for the production company was scouting locations for the film. They started in Oklahoma, for obvious reasons, but after racking up more than 250,000 miles in the Sooner State, they gave up and made the call. “Ummm ... hello, Mr. Hammerstein. I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news. We’ve looked everywhere, and this isn’t going to work. Not in Oklahoma, anyway. Too many oil wells cluttering the landscape. There’s no way to recreate the wide-open spaces that existed in the early 1900s. Oh, and another thing, there are too many planes in the sky.” So, Oklahoma was out, and there wasn’t a Plan B. That is, until Arthur Hornblow Jr., the movie’s producer, picked up a copy of Arizona Highways. As he was flipping through the pages, he saw a beautiful color photograph of the spacious San Rafael Valley. Most likely, it was a shot by Josef Muench. Or maybe Esther Henderson. Regardless, the lush grasslands, rolling hills and stormy monsoon clouds of Southern Arizona were enough to convince the Hollywood executive to film the exterior scenes of the movie in San Rafael, along with Elgin, Sonoita and Patagonia.

If you’ve never been to those places, you might be wondering how a state best known for its canyons and cactuses could stand in for the Great Plains of Oklahoma. It’ll make more sense when you get to this month’s portfolio. As you’ll see, Southern Arizona is different. It defies the stereotype, and just about everyone who visits wants to move there. There’s an allure that’s hard to put into words. Keith Whitney says it’s the serenity, the isolation and the simplicity of a place that hasn’t changed much since Oklahoma! was filmed in the ’50s.

Keith, affectionately known as “the Brochacho,” is our talented art director, and he’s been exploring Sonoita all his life — his grandfather bought a ranch down there around the same time Rodgers and Hammerstein showed up. For a while now, some of us have been pushing Keith to set up a satellite office on the family spread. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s pretty rustic.” By that, he means, “There’s no indoor plumbing.” But that won’t stop us from pushing. We’re dying to get out of the heat and spend our summers down there. In the same way Jim Harrison spent his winters on the nearby Alto Ranch.

That ranch is owned by Bill and Bob Bergier. In many ways, though, it belonged to Jim Harrison, the brilliant and unabashedly bawdy author of Legends of the Fall. Five years ago, Kelly Vaughn profiled Mr. Harrison for our August issue. This month, we’re running an essay that she wrote about a year ago, the day after her literary hero died at his home away from home along Sonoita Creek.

“In theory, I should never have liked you,” she writes in Dear Jim.... “The naturalist Bukowski, free with your stories of women and wine. You were rough, occasionally vulgar. You smelled of smoke and your skin had started to yellow and the part of me that wasn’t in awe of you was a little bit frightened. But you wrote from your bones, your own marrow into poetry, novellas. And you made me believe that there was something to writing.” Kelly never heard back from Mr. Harrison after her first piece, and it seems unlikely she’ll get a response to this one. However, he surely would have appreciated the uncompromising honesty and heartfelt affection of her words. Or, maybe he would have used the pages to start a campfire. Or roll a cigarette. Sadly, we’ll never know. Rest in peace, dear Jim.

Despite his larger-than-life personality, Jim Harrison was hardly representative of most men in Sonoita. Most men down there are proper gentlemen, cut from the same cloth as the singing cowboys in Oklahoma!. J.P.S. Brown, one of our good friends and a longtime contributor, is one of those gentlemen. And so is Mark Wystrach.

As I write this column, Kelly is busy writing a profile of the latter — we’re both pushing our deadlines to the very brink this month. Although I haven’t seen her story yet, here’s what I can tell you about her subject: Mark Wystrach was raised on a ranch near Sonoita, his parents own The Steak Out restaurant in town, he’s been a model and an actor, and now he’s the lead singer for an incredible Austin-based band called Midland. Last winter, Rolling Stone named the band one of the “10 New Country Artists You Need to Know.” And Entertainment Weekly calls it one of the “10 Artists Who Will Rule in 2017.” The first song off their first EP is titled Drinkin' Problem — “People say I got a drinkin' problem, but I got no problem drinkin' at all.” Rolling Stone says it “rolls along on a slinky barroom shuffle as if it’s coming straight out of a neon-lit jukebox circa 1978.” They like it. Obviously. And so does everyone else, it seems. It’s one of those great songs that get stuck in your head. People say I got a drinkin' problem ...

I think even Rodgers and Hammerstein would be singing along.