The Companionship of the Clouds

The Companionship of Clouds By

Ross Calvin is an Episcopal clergyman, now retired, who lives in Albuquerque, N. M., where his study window looks out at Sandia Mountain the livelong day. In youth he was a Latinist and a track athlete. By most inappropriate chance he obtained the kind of education suited to an Englishman of, say, the early 18th century which has remained to this day one of his great sources of happiness. Immersed in the Middle Ages, he took his Ph.D. in Philology (at Harvard) and began a brief career as college teacher. After still more study he was ordained, and soon became a curate in Old Trinity Parish, New York. Arriving later in the Southwest for reasons of health, he fell in love with the desert and decided to make the Land of Little Rain his home. Through hundreds of field trips he has explored it with binocular, magnifier, camera from timberline to sea level.

The records of his journeys are preserved in his Log Book, a seven-volume MS. which he began at the mature age of twelve and still continues. It is the mine from which he has quarried material for all his writings Sky Determines, River of the Sun, Stories of the Storied Gila, Lieutenant Emory Reports, and of course many articles and columns. From it he drew many years ago the first article that he sold to ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. The plane was flying through bumpy air along the flank of Arizona's historic Chiricahua Mountains whose savage fastnesses once harbored hostile Apaches. And Arizona's desert, rich in wonders and many beauties, spread out below us and sloped up in great geometrical curves to the outwash fans.

Then I became aware of a stranger standing beside my chair although my face was turned intently to the window.

"It's your first flight, I see," he said pleasantly.

"Well, not exactly," I replied. "The first one was thirty years ago." Obviously he thought that instead of looking I should be talking or else reading. Yet in a plane why should I be reading? Reading is something to be done at home, free from distraction, but not in a plane hurtling across the continent with a panorama that includes within a single glance 10,000 miles of earth's interesting surface, plus a similar area of sky.

Photographs by BARRY GOLDWATER

In a plane I don't feel a yen to read because there I can have the companionship of clouds. When the dual panorama of earth and sky is there to contemplate that's what I want to do. And it is there free, at no more cost than a turn of the head. From the window in endless variety stretch the croplands, meadows, forests, lakes; and they pass in review a thousand square miles at a time. And it is equally true that the skyscape, especially in the dry clarity of Arizona-New Mexico air, is an indescribable wonderland in its own right, better, in fact, because it has more color and changes more dramatically than any objects of earth. The ancient Egyptians called the dawn clouds that cradle the sun "Wings of Morning," and nobody ever improved on that. Today the aspect of the sky may be menacing with black, ominous nimbi; tomorrow the horizon may be draped with a silhouette of low desert mountains and terraced mesas, or both formations may appear in a single day. Or the eye may find itself gazing down Barry Goldwater is United States Senator from Arizona and candidate for the Republican nomination for president of these United States.

Before he entered public life, Senator Goldwater, then a Phoenix business executive, was a frequent contributor to these pages. His Indian studies, we feel, are some of the best we have ever published. We agree with what the late Clarence Budington Kelland has written in the preface of Senator Goldwater's recently published book, The Face of Arizona, (price $1,500): "Barry knows the Indians as few white men have ever come to know them."

A Major General in the Air Force Reserve, Senator Goldwater, who has logged 4,000 hours piloting his own private plane and 4,000 hours in military planes, has continued his interest in photography. When we were seeking illustrations to go with Dr. Calvin's The Companionship of Clouds, we found just what we wanted in Senator Goldwater's collection. Of these photographs, he writes: "I think these are interesting, because the southwestern desert is the breeding ground of giant thunderstorms, and while all of us are acquainted with their ferocity and destructive power from the level of the ground, very few of us have been privileged to see the marvelous beauty of these giants as they stretch their way to the limits of the sky.

"The technical data is as follows: the film is Kodachrome #2 taken with an old Exacta camera with a 35mm. lens, shutter speed 1/150, opening, believe it or not, F22. A Storm is Born (opposite page) shows the top portion of a thunderstorm over the desert, taken from an altitude of approximately 20,000 feet. Cloud Formation Over Lake Mead was taken from an altitude of 45,000 feet, flying west over Lake Mead. This shows thunderstorm clouds whose tops are about 50,000 feet, with rain coming out the bottom in the Virgin River Reach of Lake Mead. The Tattered Sky shows an interesting series of three thunderheads taken at an altitude of 45,000 feet. Clouds and Shadows, taken over the Salt River Valley from 10,000 feet, shows sunbright clouds and their shadow patterns. Cloudscape, last page of color portfolio, is a study of a large thunderhead forming over the desert. The photograph was taken from 20,000 feet."

We hope you will agree with us that what Dr. Calvin has described in words, Senator Goldwater has vividly captured on film.

Upon a rack of such snowy whiteness that it can scarce distinguish between the insubstantial vapor and the solid snow over the higher mountains in the Southwest.

There are sufficient reasons, doubtless, why air travelers are usually reading or talking unless they are asleep. Man simply is a talking animal, and so he talks. Often he does it to the exclusion of all listening or thinking. And when he reads there's a good chance that it is because he is bored. Personally I prefer the companionship of clouds. Allow me to present my case.

One dark morning under a leaden overcast which no sun could penetrate, we were rounding the south end of the Rocky Mountains near Santa Fe. The light, in fact, was about as dim as one ever sees it in this bright land. Then as we left the mountains behind, our pilot put the plane into a steep climb. Instantly the wingtips faded out. Then came something extraordinary. Before eyes could accommodate to the murk we flashed up into a glorious brightness which I have never seen equalled. To our astonishment the gleaming upper surface of the cloud layer something above 10,000 feet then suddenly appeared an eye-contracting polar snowfield, a tumbled, mounded surface that extended on every side to the limits of vision. And the firmament all the way up from our wings to the blazing desert sun contained not one wisp of vapor to sully its blueness. It was an unearthly, lifeless world of just two colors, blue and white, just blue, just white. Down on the earth where could the like of it be found? We seemed adventurers on an enchanted floating ocean under the dome of a tenantless universe.

To escape from an overcast into sunlight is a common experience, yet each one is different from all the others. One morning just out of Pittsburgh we had left behind us a late autumn rain or was it falling as snow in the murk a few thousand feet up? At any rate when visibility returned in the sunshine there stretched out a lake of blue air whose distant shore lay white in the leagues far ahead of us. At the moment the plane seemed coasting on its belly over a snowfield of infinite softness. Presently we were out over Ohio, and far in the north where Lake Erie should have been, I seemed to spy its blue waters. But the blue surface was dotted with snowy islands, promontories, shorelines which the map did not record. And the snow? I have no idea.

But a few counties farther to the west I became convinced a second time that things in the sky are not always what they seem, for we were passing a range of low mountains. Oh no, not in Ohio! Yet there they were as clear as morning sunshine could make them, nested on a vast snowy plain. Among their peaks and in their chasms lay great bluish shadows - and shadows in the snow are always blue, as everybody knows. And the peaks, too, were jagged and fractured just like other peaks. I couldn't maintain that simply because they were not on any map of Ohio, they weren't there. I submit that those mountains were real real though unearthly, and produced by an updraft from the ground.

Even more dramatic and colorful was a flight out from Chicago to Texas one summer evening which I remember. It was a little after sunset, and the west was all dark up to the horizon line; from the horizon line upward, all one rose-tinted glory. We were moving forward through a kind of three-level world, the fading yet still vivid sky above, (and whoever sold us the fiction that the sky is blue always?), the darkening earth below, and a fleet of red thunderheads beside us. Our pilot never took us directly into one; he piloted us like a ship nosing its way among icebergs, there being enough “open water” to avoid collisions. We were on the waterline, and the giant, grotesque monsters floating at only a little distance were towering high above us, and like true marine icebergs, they extended ten times as far below us. Had they been solid ice masses broken from polar glaciers their roseate substance could not have appeared more massive and opaque. In the farther distance red heat lightning kept flashing upon their summits, and from time to time businesslike blue bolts would crash from their interior straight down to earth. In the presence of such a spectacle why should I read a magazine?

But the most exciting skyscape of all was the one through which I went sightseeing over the Great Plains at 37,000 feet. At first it seemed a re-creation of the desert, Death Valley or elsewhere. Over a great expanse there were the exact outlines, half spherical in shape, of vast sand dunes in the sky.

Behind them, or rather rising out of them stood a great solitary peak which would have suggested California's near-by Chocolate Mountains only it had not the hue of chocolate. Instead, it was only an off-color white, a pale monochrome. In fact, the unreality of the whole scene lay in the fact that on nature's cloud palette that day there were no colors at all except off-color white.

Within a few minutes we had left Death Valley behind and entered an imaginary Bryce Canyon (Utah) where, according to the Paiute Indian description, “the tall rocks stand up like men.” This was the most fantastic creation in the sky I have ever witnessed. These sculptured stone formations there in the National Park are the creation of the Powers of Erosion as a prank, a mad holiday several million years long; but what created those tall images which peopled that place in the sky I found it hard to imagine.

Stone always is an intractable, slow material to work with; but vapor responds to a single breath of wind. It is earth's closest approach to natural magic or a dream. The dome of a fairweather thunderhead will round itself into new shades of white, pearl, or rain-blue even before the eye grows tired of watching. Or in the west when a transient cloud, back-lighted, is near the horizon, it may be edged one moment with a burst of gold flame which the eye can scarce endure, and within five minutes it may have faded into the quiet hues of a mourning dove's breast.

In conclusion, one can never talk of clouds without coming face to face at last with the ultimate, the supreme picture of all things superterranean a sunset. And for that, how incompetent, vain, foolish is human language! How idle are words to depict what the eye can see for itself! Then one becomes a direct witness to cosmos. It may be an evening of drabness; but again it may be an evening of peerless arid air above the Grand Canyon when the sky changes like some great fire opal slowly turned in the hand, when each visible cloud becomes suffused with the discolored radiance of a thousand remoter and invisible clouds. Then when the sun has completely withdrawn from the scene, all the pageantry, all the red battlements and fairyland castles silently crumble alike, their fragments prostrate and scattered, sinking into grey-blue rubble to be seen no more forever; for at the end of each day all moulds are broken, all used patterns erased. Neither on the earth nor in the sky is there anything else so lovely which is also so ephemeral.

No park or garden tended by human hands can compare with the superterranean garden of the firmament, which has no pests, no diseases, nor need of pruning. In it are no annuals, no biennials, no perennials, only eternals which are unfading, undying. Alike from morning to evening in calms and tempests, it continues forever fleeting on crosscurrents at the wind's behest; forever dissolving, then recombining, regrouping, blossoming continuously with the pure colors of the spectrum through the long reaches of time.

Has anyone spoken to you recently about the companionship of clouds? Air travelers, if I may, allow me!

WONDER

The lone rider winds his way Along the canyon floor. The red dust rises, settles slow On the burning rocks Like rusty velvet. Nothing moves but a lizard's eye A brownish winking star. And distant above a jagged peak A watchful buzzard wheels Biding his time. Dried riverbed and tinder cactus Stand, enduring remorseless drought Knowing the rains will come Sometime. Crack of a kicked stone echoes And echoes back, from walls too high For man to scale. Guarding its secret well the trail Twists onward Calling, luring, dragging the horseman on. If wonder dies then flesh and bone shall tooAll traces blown away On the dusty wind.Deep down In the canyon The shape of the river Lies, like a flung black scarf sequined With stars.

NIGHT SCENE: GRAND CANYON ARIZONA SUNSET

Blue sky above blue water where the light Faints in the arms of pine-edged, waiting night. One lone bird calls . . . unanswered, calls no more . . . And night holds all-sky, lake . . . and shadowy shore.

MOONLIGHT

Drops of moonlight fell Upon my lonely garden, Caught on leaf and petal; And the wind sobbed In sweet compassion For loveliness Unseen. Such a soft and fragile thing Is moonlight, Morning came And found its pieces scattered Here and there Like melted snow in springtime.

ARIZONA DESERT

Throne of storm-cut mesa bronze sand whirled dunes in copper sun crumbling tusks of mastodons beads of sand heaped one on one - blue lake sponged bone dry - where humps of shrubs like giant mushrooms cloak a stage for adagios by thorned bouquets of cactus blooms danced on desert spider toes beneath an icy sky.

YOURS SINCERELY NO MORE BUILDINGS, PLEASE:

Each month I await the pages of beautiful blue skies and majestic saguaros, chollas, yucca, ocotillo and the many wonders of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Twice your magazine has inspired us to "camp out" in Arizona, once in Oak Creek Canyon and once out of Quartzite in January amid the chollas and saguaros where it was just like gazing into the pages of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.

Being a city dweller surrounded by buildings and constantly longing for the beauties of Arizona, I eagerly opened the March issue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS and what to my dismay should appear but gorgeous color pictures of more buildings and "wonders" of man. I am sure the people and the Chamber of Commerce of Phoenix enjoyed the issue but as a satisfied subscriber for four years, I had a big let-down on opening your pages this month.

Perhaps I should not have waited to "gripe" at you before I wrote as I have been prompted many times before to write words of praise for the pictures of Josef Muench and others. As I sit here in the smog of Los Angeles and look at my back issues of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS over and over, I can almost imagine I smell the clean air and see the beauty of Arizona. So please, please, no more issues full of buildings. Just give us Arizona's natural beauty and also I would love to see more of De Grazia.

Mrs. Shirley Crowe Norwalk, California

Another reader has written us: "What are some of your cities like? You can't expect us to live in hogans!" We assure Mrs. Crowe and others our accent will always be on the natural beauty of our land, with an occasional community feature to please those who ask us for that information.

IN JAPAN:

Before we left for Japan last November, you were kind enough to send us a fine assortment of desert prints which were in your files. I would now like to report that the series of pictures made a wonderful "hit" at all times. At various dinners we passed the series around and each person made a choice and was very appreciative. It was of considerable interest to us to see the individual pictures selected, but everyone enjoyed seeing them all, and many had quite a time choosing. We are very grateful to you for your aid in partially solving our problem of the necessary gifts to our Japanese hosts.

Carl L. Hubbs University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California

GRAND CANYON: ADD FAMOUS FIRST SAYINGS:

W. L. Drechsler St. Petersburg, Florida

"ROUGH COUNTRY" BY DOUG KNIGHT.

Photo taken just under the rim at Buck Ridge Point where weathered buttes hang poised against the background of the wild green slopes that make up Sycamore Canyon, that spectacular wilderness area southwest of Flagstaff and south of Williams. Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta (21/4) camera; Anscochrome 120; f.11 at 1/60th sec.; Zeiss Tessar 1:3:5 lens; September; bright day; Median 200, ASA rating 32.

"TROUT WATER" BY ROBERT B. WHITAKER.

This scene was taken near Chevelon Crossing bridge on the road that slices through Sitgreaves National Forest between Heber and Winslow. The bridge is approximately eighteen miles northwest of Heber. Chevelon Creek begins to leave the pine and fir country near Chevelon Crossing to enter a more barren terrain of juniper and pinon. A bridge crossing the stream here is one of two that crosses Chevelon Creek during its wild seventy mile plunge from the Mogollon Rim to the Little Colorado. A seldom visited campground is maintained here amid a scenic setting of towering cliffs and clear blue skies. This is the last of the good trout fishing as the stream gradually becomes sluggish and warm. Rolleiflex E2 camera; Ektachrome Professional; f.16 at 1/60th sec.; Schneider Xenotar f 3.5 lens; June; bright sunlight; ASA rating 64.