Arizona's Yesterday

Camera Study By Barry Goldwater

NATURE'S exquisite architecture is nowhere better shown than on the Arizona desert. Here you find the delicateness and the precision of detail, the infinite care with the, minute particles that characterizes painstaking Nature at her painstaking best.

There are many ways to approach the desert. There is the scientific approach, where you stuff yourself with Latin names and learning and pedantically inquire into the life and habits of every desert dweller. Your study may be some tender flower examined through a microscope, or a saguaro studied fondly as a doctor studies his patient. You will learn to know each plant as an individual personality and you will be able to fit that plant into the desert pattern.

Your approach may be that of the photographer, anxious to find the grotesque shape, carefully seeking the patterns of sunlight and shadow, the admixture of light and darkness with the intricate desert foliage. You may lurk about desert's edge to catch the desert silhouette against a setting sun or breathlessly await the white ships of cloud that form delicate patterns of grandeur between Heaven and Earth. You will despair of ever attaining the effect you seek, and when you return on the morrow to try and try again your desert will always be the same; yet always different.

You may approach the desert with the eyes of the artist, not knowing or not caring to know the name of a single desert dweller; yet intoxicated by the beauty and the splendor of the patterns being formed in the desert about you, in the sky above you and in the purple mountains far away. You may not remember a single plant; yet the whole beauty of the desert will be with you forever.

You will find the desert in all of its moods. Gay and sparkling and full of laughter after the rains and clothed in the sheen of bright sunlight. You will find the desert silent and still as all the night about, as inscrutable as the curtain of darkness that has fallen from the Heavens. You will find the desert strange and sullen on gray afternoons! Contemplative and melancholy as evening falls! Fresh and alive in the early morning robes of burnished gold which comes from the rising sun over the far horizon.

You will find a cruel desert in midsummer's noonday heat; and in the winters the desert will greet you with gentle caress. It will scowl at you in the storm and give you rest and surcease from every care and worry in the blissful days of spring and autumn.

The desert will befriend you and repel you! It will frighten you and attract you in all of its moods and whims! And throughout all the days and all the years it will be as changeless as the mountains about it, and yet to you every day will reveal a different desert, always changing, alive, real, moody-fascinating and enchanting.

Such is our desert. R. C.