My Trail to Hellangone

SOMETIMES even an Old Timer in this Canyon country will get lost, wander out on a neck of ridge between canyons, to where he can go neither forward nor up nor down. Maybe night will catch him there, suspended between stars above and black emptiness below. My trail has been something like that.

There is only one way to be lonelier than when lost in the canyons. It is to be a stranger in a big town.

The loneliness of the canyons is something you pull around yourself. You pull the universe around you like a blanket, and lie look ing through the stars. The loneliness of the city is a ruthless personal act directed against you. Here you have something to resent, to hate. You hate people because they can pass within a foot of you on the sidewalk and not know that, body and soul, you are starving.

There is no moon nor stars in the city. Not even a sky. Cities are the inventions of warped brains, and cities are filled with mad men wandering around in a haze of soot and tobacco smoke and burning hamburgers and spittum, looking into each other's garbage cans for little scraps of happiness. Whoever went singing into a city?

My mother went singing into the Canyon Country. She sat on the front seat of our wagon, beside father whose only sound was a recurrent tongue-click for the horses.

That first sunset in the Canyon Country on the Arizona Strip! Yellow blossoming and odorous, the cleome was a sea that billowed and lapped about the wagon-box, fingered the horses' hames, slid along their sides and bel lies. We there were nine kids caught the pungent flowers in our hands. We forgot we were hungry. We looked at the cliffs towering in the ruddy light. The cliffs of Tumurru. They were beautiful and terrible and strange.

odorous, the cleome was a sea that billowed and lapped about the wagon-box, fingered the horses' hames, slid along their sides and bel lies. We there were nine kids caught the pungent flowers in our hands. We forgot we were hungry. We looked at the cliffs towering in the ruddy light. The cliffs of Tumurru. They were beautiful and terrible and strange.

They threw back a trembling echo of mother's song, "Mark ye her bulwarks, consider her palaces. Cry out and shout, cry out and shout! Tell it to the generations following thee!"

Mother was a poetess. She was pretty religious, also. To her this new country was all tied up with God and dreams and idyllic pur poses. Father had been a poet, too, in his earlier days, but somehow his writings had disappeared. Now his only religion was to bring water and land together. Poetry to him was green field and trees and water flowing in the desert.

He spent about twenty five-thousand dollars of his money getting preliminary work done to bring the little Virgin River out onto the Uinkaret Plateau. Then the financiers that were going to put up the other four million got cold feet. So we settled down to digging ditches to bring Short Creek out onto the land under the cliffs of Tumurru. It turned out to be a thirty-year war. But we won.

Father was a better promoter than farmer. The crops never turned out so good. Sometimes it was because the water kept breaking out of the ditch, or the rodents ate the young sprouts, or the range cattle broke through our fences and mowed the corn down. Mother blamed our ill-luck on the fact that he didn't pray and pay tithing.

One day she was pounding at the churn fit to break it. Suddenly she shouted at father, "I'm going to pay this dab of butter in tithing, then I'm going to fast for three days-and get a blessing on this goddamned outfit!" Mother did all the swearing for the family, as a rule. She knew the Bible by heart. I never did read the Good Book, but I can quote it like a minister, just from hearing mother.

We were thirty miles from the nearest school. Mother and father had both been school teachers, so they taught us our elementary grades by the light of the fire in the fireplace father had built. We boys brought down the pitchiest logs we could find in the hills, as they made the best light for the long winter evenings.

In the summer we kids slept under the stars, on the haystacks when there was a haystack. The first year it was cornfodder. We had stacked it while it was still somewhat green and it began to heat. That made it nice comfortable sleeping when the mornings began to get nippy in the autumn. Sometimes we would come in so steamed up that mother would think we had taken to bed-wetting.

We had a constant struggle to keep the water in the three-mile ditch. A half-dozen times we had to change the ditch line and make an entirely new channel. Every shower brought freshets down the hillsides, floods down the washes, to fill the ditch with mud or wipe it out. Luckily for father, mother had been enthusiastic about children and there were six sons, three of them old enough to do the work of men.

I was the fourth, and not so stalwart as the others, so they put me to work herding the flock of sheep we had accumulated. I didn't think much of ditching and farming, anyway. I liked to read books. I read all of Shakespeare and Tennyson and Browning. I read Les Miserables and David Copperfield twice each. I had decided to become a writer. I had had my first poem published at the age of eight. I never got over that first shot of drug.

I also wanted to be a singer, an actor, an artist. I memorized arias from phonograph records of the operas, and when I got far enough out in the hills that I figured no one could hear me I turned my boy-soprano voice loose. I think I was pretty good. I took the runs and trills and warbles without a hitch. As for wanting to be an artist-well, I did cover the walls of our house with brightly colored crayon pictures of roosters and American flags. From mother I learned to speak pieces. Mother had a great sense of the dramatic. It showed not only in her frequent explosive verbal outbursts, but in her reading of poetry. She had a seemingly endless ιμertory, but I liked best the ones in which she killed off the Roman gladiator or drove off the

ARROWS INTO THE SUN a novel of the canyon country by JONREED LAURITZEN A REVIEW

Of the author himself, we refer you to his own story herein, "My Trail to Hellangone," in which he tells of his life on the Arizona Strip. We first learned of Lauritzen several years ago from Ross Santee, who was director of the Arizona Writers Project, W. P. A. The project not only helped Lauritzen over a trying period in the Depression but Santee's encouragement was both heartening and stimulating.

We recommend "Arrows Into the Sun" to you not as a masterpiece but as a book interesting and full of good reading. It deals with a half-breed Navajo boy whose Navajo mother was killed by Mexicans and renegades in the massacre in Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto in the 1860's. Embittered and grief-stricken, the boy vows vengeance on all whites, but his white father, a wanderer in the Canyon Country, hoping to soften his Indian instincts, takes him to the Mormon settlements in southern Utah. In the youth is the conflict between Navajo and the white man. This conflict is portrayed clearly and without rancor. The action is sustained and the story is interesting and well-told. Some of the people will live in your memory a long time. Others seem wooden and inexpertly done. Nor does he give a particular flattering picture of some of the Mormon settlers in southern Utah, missing, it seems to us, the strength, vitality, and courage possessed by these people in carving a civilization from one of the hardest and cruelest and most bitter parts of the world.

Lauritzen arises to lyric heights, however, when he speaks of the Canyon Country itself, that vast area of unspeakable color and beauty and immeasurable distances from Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon to the great canyons and cliffs of shimmering unreality in southern Utah. He makes you see and feel the country, its bigness, its grimness. He has spent most of his life in the Canyon Country and few people know it as well, few have described it so expertly and in such vibrant language.

We have always felt that Jonreed Lauritzen will contribute something lasting to the literature of America and our West. "Arrows Into the Sun" is a mere beginning. If he holds true to his ideals and doesn't lose himself in a mire of press notices, literary teas, and the gushing of "arty" people, this young man from Short Creek may do something sometime that will not only be "good reading" but "great reading."

The novel "Arrows Into the Sun" was published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York and sells for Two Dollars and Fifty Cents, which isn't too much to ask for a portrait of the Canyon Country and a tale of life, love, conflict and death superimposed thereon... R. C.

"I builded a house quarried out of the hillsides. It took me three years, working sparetime, when I was not fencing my place, farming, writing."

Cruel soldiers from bashing out the brains of her little son. We younger kids thrilled at her furious torrents of emotion, but the older ones were more cynical. Father was the stabilizing influence in the family. He has a keen, well-balanced and a fanatical sense of order, which continually drew sparks of ire from mother's highly volatile and rather disorderly disposition. But into the bar-rage of expletives one of the boys would usually toss a joke or a wild remark that would put everyone to laughing. There was an undersurface of grimness in our long struggle with the earth and elements, but life was never visibly dull.

Father had a good science library which mother would have burned, but for her fear of a sometimes hard glint in father's eyes. I read Spencer's First Principles, and was impressed with his "homogeniety" and "hereogeniety" that I wanted to become a scientist. The first thing was to get an education. We sent for a correspondence course in high-school subjects. I read Greek and Roman history, studied French grammar, English and composition and literature, algebra, etc., while sitting in sage brushes in winter, or in the shade of junipers in summer. I would study till the bells of the sheep got out of hearing, then I would follow their tracks and round them up and sit down to study again. Out with the sheep at dawn, winter and summer, back after dark. It went on for three years. I lost a A good many sheep but I got my education that way. (With prices what they are now I think I would rather have the sheep.) Around the age of sixteen I began to get restless. We were getting some magazines that told about the unbelievable world outside. I wanted to mingle with people. I wanted girls. The ferment in me became stronger every day. I began to see the cliffs and canyons that hemmed in our plateau as the walls of a hated prison. On the way to the city I lost the money father had given me. I went three days without food. I wandered about, expecting somebody to see that I was hungry and invite me in, as we did any stranger as a matter of course in our country. I sat on a park bench and hungerily watched the pigeons fly in and out of the murky towers of the old city and county building. Then I found a few day's work in a laundry at a dollar a day which I spent for food and a ticket to a vaudeville show. Then I got some pick-and-shovel work, saved up six dollars and climbed on top of a freight train headed into the sunset. I was in shirt sleeves and the brisk dawn air was cold. I got off, stiff and trembling at Reno and bought a Prince Albert coat at a second-hand store for fifty cents. Back in the freight yards I didn't know why the other bums grinned when they saw me.

San Francisco was dark, chill, strange to a kid just off the bright mesas of the Canyon Country. I hugged the walls of Chinatown and gagged at the sight of octopuses hanging in the dirty little markets. I wandered along the Embarcadero and stared fearfully into the waterfront cafes. I didn't see inside the Fairmont, the Palace, the St. Francis, the Golden Pheasant, if I did have on a Prince Albert coat. There was no job in San Francisco for a sixteen-year-old with an unwashed face and experience only in ditch-digging, sheep-herding, farming, aria-singing, rooster drawing. My ability to quote Shakespeare, Browning, Tenny-

son

We looked at the cliffs towering in the ruddy light. The cliffs of Tumurru. They were beautiful and terrible and strange. They threw back a trembling echo of mother's songs.' My son and the Bible, was no equipment even if I had revealed it.

I shipped out to the San Juaquin Valley, where I worked on farms, nurseries. In the bunkhouses at night I lay and listened to the incredible obscenities of the professional drift-ers and roustabouts. Days off I found romance on the banks of the tree-draped Toulumme river, in contrast to the nightly tales of man's brutality to man, bestiality, depravity. I had women still high on a pedestal, but the more I saw of men, the more I admired jackasses, horned-toads and coyotes.

I saved enough money to see me through a few months of art school in Berkeley. I tasted a little of decent living, of creative satisfaction, then an emergency on the ranch called me back to another spell of ditch-digging and farming.

I finally escaped again and went back to the coast. This time, having shed my fifty-cent coat and some of my rusticity, I was able to get a clerical job. Spare time I spent writing. Savings I spent on singing, dramatics, art lessons. I had little time for sleep, but sleep was a waste of life, anyway. I took a little cottage in east Oakland, began to grow roses and dahlias, finally got myself into the nursery and landscaping business and out of office work. But I came off loser in my own private war with the Jap gardeners. Depression drove me to the ranch again. After nearly ten years of struggle to adjust to urban life I was somewhat bitter at having to go home in defeat.

The next ten were years of frustration and further defeat. Marriage brought some happiness and content. It brought mind-searing tragedy, for which I and whimsical fate were solely to blame.

I builded a house of stone quarried out of the hillsides. It took me three years, working spare time, when I was not fencing my place, farming, writing.

None of my writing satisfied me. Nor did I expect it would satisfy an editor. I never had a rejection slip. Perhaps that entitles me to some sort of distinction. Maybe not, since I never submitted anything. Novels, plays, articles, sketches, stories all went to join the dusty heap on the special shelves I built to hold them.

More frequently as the years and months went by in tedious procession there came the hideous thought that I would go mad to escape final and inevitable failure. The life that was to have had everything was becoming a void. The career that was to have been deliberately ordered, rich, varied and full, was twenty-five years gone in debacle. My few real, friends had perhaps long since forgotten I existed. There were no opportunities to go outside and begin again at another job. Nor would I have taken a job had it been offered me. I would I write my way out, or stay in banishment. That was my ultimatum to fate.

I wandered into remote places in the canyons, alone, with knapsack and camera and blankets. I tried to express what I saw and imagined. My failure to do so deepened the feeling of frustration.

My farm went to weeds, my house went unfinished. Everything I had or did fell into the pattern of failure.

I had forgotten that there was a part of Arizona south of the Grand Canyon, that it was filled with people of warm enthusiasms and a friendly spirit. Some of my writing happened to fall under the eyes of Ross Santee and Raymond Carlson. Together they came and yanked me out of the grave I was digging for myself.

The article "Toroweap" appeared in ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. My first paid writing in over fifteen years (except for a little work done for the Associated Press). The longest training period in the history of journalsim was maybe about to end.

I forgot my farm, my house, my family. I wandered more and more in the canyons and on the high plateaus. No longer aimlessly, but with a purpose. I had an audience. People had heard my song and written from as far away as the British Isles, Hawaii, Egypt.

I began to spend more time with fiction. Pure description did not satisfy completely. I had written several drafts of a novel of the Grand Canyon, and put them all on the shelves. To write of the Canyon Country one needed human drama that would come near to matching the color and grandeur of the setting itself. I knew it was impossible to invent such drama. But I knew also that I could not be satisfied until I had done my best with it.

One morning I woke up at three o'clock "a-burning within." The first twenty-five pages of Arrows Into the Sun were on paper before sun-up. Next morning I brought the pages up to forty-eight. Then I dashed in to(Continued on Page Thirty)