The Happy Land

Happy Land

This land wears its years well, although it reflects the whims of the weather. The sun and the wind have deepened the wrinkles in its face and have moulded its curious personality. In some ways the land is old, older than all creation; so old and so strange that you might expect to see dinosaurs thumping about. In some ways the land is new, as if it were designed only yesterday, and in it some versatile builder put the best features of the most excellent parts of the earth. It is a land of desert, canyon, foothill, mesa and mountain, all tied together with sweeping ribbons of sunshine, garlands of moonlight, and dusted by the same shaker of stardust. Our desert is low in elevation, it is dry and hot, protected from the hard winds and the harshness of winter by sturdy mountain ranges, loafing about in their places nonchalantly as if they were put there to be stalwart guardians and protectors of the desert land.

The desert is the delight of the botanist, an interesting and amazing field of study for the zoologist. The plant and animal life of the desert is unique, the result of adaption to environment and weather. Out of the centuries have come plants and animals admirably suited to their particular place on the planet and best equipped to survive without expecting too much generosity from Nature. And Nature isn't too generous to the desert dwellers in ordinary ways. All living things need moisture but whoever is responsible for the rain is just a mean and niggardly miser with the sprinkler system when it comes to our desert. But here begins the most fascinating drama of all the struggle for survival-so death comes to desert things either gracefully and gently with old age or violently by accident, and seldom by Nature's neglect, the cruelest way of all to die. Anyway, if it rained as much in our desert as it rains in the Pacific Northwest, we wouldn't have a desert. We'd have a lush jungle, instead.

Many men and women have wooed this desert land, but this enchantress has peculiar ways of returning the sentiment. A strong, vigorous, active person, going into the desert in summer, for instance, would be beaten down to a frazzle, while the person broken in health with hardly the strength to move gains strength and health under the spell of the strange land. Have to take things easy to get along in this place where the days are long and sunny and the night is a magic calm! Just doesn't pay to go rushing about like you were crazy, with a bunch of twitch-ing neuroses flailing you like whistling buggy whips.

It is a big, free and breezy, take-it-easy sort of land, and there's room enough to get off by yourself and sit quietly under a mesquite tree and watch the clouds cavort, or hum a tune or ponder the sweet and bitter mysteries of life or puzzle out the ways of mountains and mice and of meek and mighty men. Nor will your neighbors think you are queer. And you and you little affairs becomevery little, indeed, when placed in such spacious and majestic surroundings. Against a skyscraper in a big city man is a very big and important thing. But beside a sa-guaro or a jagged hill he becomes very small potatoes. (Please turn to page twenty-seven)

CENTER PANEL

Portrait of Sabino Canyon by Esther Henderson, showing where the desert and foothills meet not far from Tucson.

Ansel Adams, who came our way last summer, took this photograph in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Our land is big and strange. Some people say it is ugly and cruel. Others have found health here and happiness and have learned to love the big, strange land; so the land fits all tastes and temperaments. Its personality has been moulded by the sun, wind and gods of rain.

Rich in color is the happy land and it is seemingly without beginning or end. Mountains give way to the foothills, and then the desert begins.

This is a world complete in itself and distinctive. All living things herein found were designed by Nature to fit the pattern of earth and sky.

Happy Land

You live and let live in this land of which we speak. Some of life's more unattractive vanities become no more real than dust kicked up by a capering wind. Here is the hermit's haunt; here St. Francis would have felt at home. Whether it is a beautiful land depends upon the yardstick you use in measuring beauty. It hasn't stooped in servile abeyance to the gardener's tools. It bristles with sharp points and it rambles along in a haphazard sort of way. It isn't gentle or cultivated, but it is a might easy land to live with and in once you get acquainted. It is a beautiful land if to you beauty is distance, sweeping panoramas of crazy landscape and the bluepurple of faraway mountains. It is a beautiful land if you measure the land in terms of sky and earth, bright blue sky and soap-sudsy clouds, the sudden storm with the lashing rain, the white hot sun of summer burning its brand forever in the white sand. If there is beauty for you in a sunrise or sunset when the sky is so filled with color that it spills over the edges onto the earth painting the earth in the rich color of the sky then there is beauty in the land. And no matter how you measure beauty you will find beauty in the land at night when the moon is big with its own good humor and the stars are twinkling their merriment back and forth at each other and all this heavenly nocturne is reflected brightly on the land below, allowed to get in on the joke. Beautiful is one adjective that has been kicked around a lot in this superlative age of ours but when you give it a second thought it fits our land in an honest, old-fashioned kind of way. You'll find some folks who are just about tetched when they start talking about the beauty of the land. They think cottonwood trees growing along a creek bank are the purtiest trees ever put on earth and they swear there is nothing as beautiful as a mesquite wood fire on the desert at night and the way the smoke smells, and they even say a coyote telling his troubles to the moon makes right beautiful music. Of course, when the land wears her April look, that's a different story then. Spring is the only season that you really tell is around and the way she spruces things up makes the season more noticeable than ever. Ugly old cactus plants come up with the gaudiest bouquets. Even the saguaro feels the giddy spell of spring and early summer and holds clusters of white blossoms in outstretched arms, looking kind of foolish, but having a lot of fun. You would never think spring had such gay colors in her traveling bag until you see what she displays before all the world out here in this strange land some people describe as beautiful. Describe the land as you will, it sure is different. We always think of it as the happy land, because there is buoyancy and freshness to it, because it is always gay and full of bright colors, because although it never changes it always seems to be new, and because it makes us feel happy to be around it. It is big and friendly. . . . R. C.