Editor's Letter

It was another long hot summer in the Sonoran Desert. Summers here are never easy, but the seemingly endless string of excessive heat warnings in July and August pushed the limits of human endurance. Conventional wisdom suggests that a 35°C wet-bulb temperature — 115°F at 50 percent humidity — is the highest number a human being can endure before losing the ability to regulate body temperature. When that goes away, heatstroke or even death becomes a possibility. That’s why our trailheads are sometimes closed in the summer. To help protect the unprepared from themselves.

The high heat takes a toll on plants and animals, too. And it’s increasing the risk of wildfires. Not just here, but in the boreal forests of Canada and across Europe, too. In July, several wildfires ripped through France, Spain and Portugal. French President Emmanuel Macron, after seeing the devastation in the Gironde region, referred to the fire there as “unprecedented.”

Unfortunately, catastrophic wildfires aren’t uncommon in Arizona, but we never get desensitized to their indiscriminate destruction. The heartbreak from the Dragon Bravo Fire remains. And we’re still reeling from the effects of the Pocket Fire, which burned 28,000 acres in the red rocks of Sedona a few months ago. Summers here are never easy, which is why we spend the hottest months hunkered down indoors, sipping iced coffee and dreaming about autumn.

There’s value in that anticipation. Studies show that our brains release more dopamine — the “pleasure molecule” — when we’re looking forward to something, such as a walk in the woods, than we get on the walk itself. Dream on. It helps.

I’ve been dreaming about a few different places. One is featured in a photograph by David Muench. It’s titled October Picnic in the Lukachukai Mountains, and it shows a family sitting around a campfire, next to a 1960s station wagon. You can smell the sweet smell of woodsmoke and feel the chill in the air. Of course, the aspens are glowing, like honeycomb in a pitcher of sunlight. I asked the master about his beautiful image, and he said he captured that scene precisely because of its “idyllic-ness.”

Every time I see that photo, I want to be in it. It’s an antidote to summer in the Sonoran Desert, and a trigger for dopamine. The same thing happens when I look at Ray Manley’s photograph of yellow-ochre cottonwoods along Sonoita Creek, just north of the Circle Z Ranch in Patagonia. I want to be the little boy standing on the shore — he’s in the perfect place. I want to be in Tad Nichols’ photograph, too, walking on the narrow forest road he captured near Hart Prairie. Those golden aspens epitomize autumn in Arizona.

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.” Those are the words of Emily Brontë. Raymond Carlson, our poet emeritus, found a muse in the leaves, as well.

“The frost comes like a silent stranger,” he wrote, “a powerful stranger, waving a wand of magic. The touch of that wand means the end is near for the green leaf on the tree. Almost overnight, the green disappears from the leaves. They take on the colors of autumn — brown, gold, dust, red. The leaves cannot resist the pull of the harsher winds of autumn. When the leaves start falling, autumn possesses the land.”

Like seeing the herd of bison in Golden Gate Park, outsiders are surprised by our landscape and how it changes color in the fall. “Even when I was teaching at Wellesley College, and in love with the autumn beauty of Vermont and New Hampshire, Arizona Highways fascinated me,” Marie Helen Pauly wrote in a letter to the editor. “As a Parisian, I couldn’t believe that landscapes like that exist here on Earth.”
 

But they do. And no one appreciated them more than Bob Albano.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you might remember Bob. For many years, he was our books editor. Sadly, we lost him to cancer on August 8, at the age of 84. 

Bob was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. He had the best smile, and was a man of many idiosyncrasies. He reminded me of Bob Hoskins. 

“One thing I remember about Bob — in fact, I can’t forget it, no matter how many years roll by — is the cartoon he kept on his bulletin board,” Gary Ladd, a longtime photographer, says. “It showed how bald men can make themselves look hairier. It still gives me the willies. Another thing I remember is working with him on Time Below the Rim, our book about the Grand Canyon. Bob never stopped trying to perfect the photo captions. He kept after every detail, trying to make the book flawless. And that’s how it turned out.”

Craig Childs was the author of that book. “I was just thinking of Bob the other day,” he said to me when I shared the news. “He was with me at a number of key moments — drop-offs and pickups in the middle of nowhere — and we backpacked together in the Grand Canyon, long ago, just the two of us. It was a memorable trip for so many reasons, including the Swisher Sweets he’d brought along. I almost vomited smoking those things with him.”

Idiosyncrasies.

“There aren’t enough hours in the day to fully express what Bob meant to me and the others who had the opportunity to work with him,” says Helen Ranney, our former sales manager. “He’d tell stories when we were on the road, and those stories always included a smile, a joke and a bit of history. He smiled with his eyes — they were a link to his beautiful heart.”

On behalf of everyone at Arizona Highways, I offer love and support to the friends and family of our former editor, whose legacy will live on in the many books he brought to life. And whose spirit will live in those of us who were lucky enough to know him.