Gay Desert Carpet

EVEN THE LEAST OF US!

Today the desert came alive! It turned a soft, delicate green almost before my eyes, and the mountain back of the house took a purple tinge instead of its usual pink. The delicate green is desert grass, and the purple tinge is a desert flower. It is spring in Arizona. Spring anywhere is a poem. Here, it is dramatic, rather than lyric. Painters have tried to put it on canvas, novelists, poets and essayists have endeavored to do it justice, but they have not succeeded, nor of course, can I, yet I long to indulge myself in its description. Arizona is in my bones, and I have the fatuous desire to translate it into the bones of others. The sunshine is enveloping in the desert, the air is crystal pure, the sunrises are vivid, the sunsets lingering and indescribable. Moonlight, like sunshine, seeps into the soul.

If the humdrum, the ultra practical, the unimaginative of this world could be transplanted to this desert in spring, a sense of values, never realized before, would transform everydayness into lyric and dramatic inspiration. Deep in the soul of man lies poetry. The baby reaches for a star when it stretches its arms in helpless appeal; the child, dressed in Indian clothes and pretending to be an Apache Chief, indicates his desire to express something, someone he is not; the dullest mortal and the least sensitive have something in common with the Infinite, and reach out, albeit subconsciously, to that which is beyond, which cannot be explained but must be felt. Poetry is in the air we breathe, even that polluted into gaseous stenches by the devilish ingenuity of man, but in such an environment it is harder to attain the height toward which, consciously or unconsciously, we strain. It is, of course, more difficult to see the star for the fog beneath. In the desert, the universe is close, and being in tune with it, the humdrum man must feel the poetry latent within him.

Our age is mechanical. The motor car might well be its symbol, useful, but not enduring, noisy but not musical, a boon to man, and yet a curse. The mechanical devices of today, of course, will not endure. They will be replaced by others, better or worse. The noise we make is certainly not music, and the good which comes from our inventions and our so-called freedoms, is offset by the miseries that they entail. Yet, even in this motor age, the age of rattle, of quick money and sudden poverty, and of atomic bombs, the poetry born in man, though hidden, must still be there, or we could not have produced the few, but infinitely beautiful things we have produced, despite the rattle and the jumble, and a moral cult that often smells more of the barnyard than of the garden.

Poetry is that which lifts a weary man from the dusty or muddy road to the mountain, which lifts the downcast eye to the firmament. It is a magnet from the Infinite, lifting man beyond himself. Without this force, we would be lost. It is far more than a man's imagination, metrically super-imposed on paper. It is man's soul aflame with something beyond his reach, a desire so impelling that he totally forgets himself. To those scholars who are poets, we owe much. They take us by the hand, and aid our flagging footsteps. We need them, every one, but we too are poets! Even the least of us is a poet unaware. In the great cities or the little towns, or even in the ordinary countryside, one may not be cognizant of this, but in Arizona one knows!

APRIL FLOWERS ARIZONA HIGHWAYS LEGEND

"Gay Desert Carpet" Front Cover The day was just right when George Geyer passed through a poppy bed.

The Finley Boys 4 One rodeo star in a family is an achievement. There are 3 Finleys.

Lake Havasu 8 At long last we pay a visit to a beautiful lake near Parker, Arizona.

Salome 14 Larry Cardwell shows us around an interesting oasis in the desert land.

Desert Spring 18 A color pictorial of the desert in spring after heavy rains of winter.

The Central Arizona Project 24 A reclamation expert tells us just what the feudin 'n fussin's about.

Prisoner In Paradise 30 Hans Jaenisch, artist in blockaded Berlin, remembers this fair land.

My Favorite Outlaw 36 A pioneer newspaper man tells us about Climax Jim, a slippery gent.

Yours Sincerely 40 From friends, near and far, who are visited by this journal of the West.

"Desert Bouquet" Back Cover A portrait of the desert's lovely Palo Verde in bloom by George Geyer.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS is published monthly by the Arizona Highway Department. Address: ARIZONA HIGHWAYS, Phoenix, Arizona. $5.00 per year in U. S. and possessions; $3.50 elsewhere. 55 cents each. Entered as second-class matter Nov. 5, 1941, at Post Office in Phoenix, under Act of March 3, 1879. Copyrighted, 1949, by Arizona Highway Department, Phoenix, Ariz.

Allow five weeks for changes of addresses. Be sure to send in old as well as new addresses to avoid delay.

We make much ado about April flowers this issue because our April flowers should be prettier this spring than they have been for a long time. It is a question of moisture, of course, and whatever else one can say of last winter, one must admit the rains came. When you drive down the road and see the desert carpeted with little wild flowers you think of the words of that gushy ballad: "Spring is busting out all over." To pay homage to the gay season and to gay April. these pages are busting out all over with pretty flower pictures. Lovely April, we salute you!

Our subject matter this month concerns various and sundry things. We devote a few pages and a few pictures to the career of the Finley boys of Phoenix, hard riding young men whose capabilities are known and appreciated by rodeo audiences from "hyar to thar." You'll learn from them that rodeo business is a lot of fun, good money can be made as a successful practitioner of its science and skill, but you'll also learn it ain't easy. To one who has never ridden anything more excit-ing than an upholstered chair, the very thought of getting on a bronc, being shook to pieces for a few seconds, and then be unloaded with a hard bump on the ground makes us shudder. A typewriter is sufficiently exciting for us to work with. We'll let the Finley boys and other more daring young souls ride the broncs.

Our art feature this month, we feel, is of unusual interest. It concerns the work of Hans Jaenisch, young German artist in blockaded Berlin, who was a prisoner of war in Arizona. His water colors of our land are being acclaimed by European critics. Paul Lutzeier, who tells us about our "Prisoner in Paradise," is in charge of General Lucius D. Clay's Employee Utilization Section, responsible for the recruitment, placement, and counselling of all civilian employees of our Military Government in Germany. In his spare time Mr. Lutzeier entertains artists, writers, photographers, and educators in his Berlin home. We hope he and his friends enjoy this issue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS and we hope the U. S. Army can be prevailed upon to carry several bundles of these magazines into Berlin via the Air Lift.

Among the nice things about building dams out here on our rivers are the resultant beautiful lakes. Parker Dam, on the Colorado, has created in Lake Havasu, a gem among lakes. This blue jewel is in a delightful desert region. We devote some pages to the area herein and we suggest for a pleasant outing sometime, you consider this lake.

Speaking of rivers we offer a feature this month by an engineer of the Bureau of Reclamation on the Central Arizona Project. This Project, if it is approved by Congress, will bring Colorado River water into Central Arizona, and will result in man's final and dramatic victory over drought here in the arid Southwest, in a region not too long ago described as "the Great American desert." You will be reading much more about this in the public prints in the next few months and we thought a brief resume of the Project will be of interest to our readers at this time. The American people have no greater achievement to their credit than the successful reclamation projects they have built. The Central Arizona Project will be one of the greatest of all, a credit to a great Nation, eloquent evidence of the vision and foresight of her people.