Living With The Desert

About The Author

Joseph Wood Krutch and his wife Marcelle have lived in Tucson since 1950. Nine of his more than twenty books were written there, and three of them deal directly with Arizona The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert, and Grand Canyon. Two others The Great Chain of Life and The Forgotten Peninsula also deal with Nature, the second being devoted to his many exploratory journeys in Baja California. More Lives than One is an autobiography; his most recent book If You Don't Mind Saying So, a collection of essays. In 1954, The Measure of Man received the National Book Award for non-fiction. During the same Tucson years Mr. Krutch also published articles in magazines ranging from The American Scholar to Playboy, and made two hour-long Color Specials for NBC of which the first, "The Voice of the Desert," was broadcast in 1963 and the second, "Grand Canyon," is scheduled for the present season. In 1964 he received from the Rockefeller Institute the Prentice Ettinger Gold Medal for "Creative writing in the sciences."

Before coming to Arizona Mr. Krutch divided his time between New York City and near-by Connecticut. He was for many years Drama Critic for the New York Nation and Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. During those years he published books in the fields of literary biography and criticism, philosophy, and social criticism notably The Modern Temper and Samuel Johnson: a Biography. Life in rural Connecticut revived an old interest in natural history and inspired the first of his nature books, The Twelve Seasons, which was followed by The Best of Two Worlds dealing with a life divided between the metropolis and the country. Because of an increasing conviction that, as he put it, "city life pays diminishing returns," he abruptly broke off his career in the East and settled in Arizona with which he and his wife had fallen in love when they visited it first as tourists in 1938 and, in the course of several years, discovered for themselves Monument Valley, Rainbow Bridge, and other, then somewhat inaccessible regions.

Mr. Krutch said at the end of the first ten years of his Arizona residence that they had been the happiest of his life and that he had never for a moment regretted having turned his back on his former career. He has also, however, spoken frankly of his distress at the increasing urbanization of Arizona and especially of the apparent lack of interest on the part of most of its inhabitants in the very things which make it unique.

For a learned and appreciative look at our desert, it is our pleasure herewith to present excerpts from The Desert Year and The Voice of the Desert, two books, incidentally, we earnestly recommend to desert dwellers and to those who aspire sometime in the future to make the desert their home.

In 1938 I got off the train at Lamy, New Mexico and started in an automobile across the rolling semidesert toward Albuquerque. Suddenly a new, undreamed of world was revealed. There was something so unexpected in the combination of brilliant sun and high, thin, dry air with a seemingly limitless expanse of sky and earth that my first reaction was delighted amusement. How far the ribbon of road beckoned ahead! How endlessly much there seemed to be of the majestically rolling expanse of bare earth dotted with sagebrush! How monotonously repetitious in the small details, how varied in shifting panorama! Unlike either the Walrus or the Carpenter, I laughed to see such quantities of sand.

Great passions, they say, are not always immediately recognized as such by their predestined victims. The great love which turns out to be only a passing fancy is no doubt commoner than the passing fancy which turns out to be a great love, but one phenomenon is not for that reason any less significant than the other. And when I try to remember my first delighted response to the charms of this great proud, dry, and open land I think not so much of Juliet recognizing her fate the first time she laid eyes upon him but of a young cat I once introduced to the joys of catnip.

He took only the preoccupied, casual, dutiful sniff which was the routine response to any new object presented to his attention before he started to walk away. Then he did what is called in the slang of the theater "a double take." He stopped dead in his tracks; he turned incredulously back and inhaled a good noseful. Incredulity was swallowed up in delight. Can such things be? Indubitably they can. He flung himself down and he wallowed.

For three successive years following my first experience I returned with the companion of my Connecticut winters to the same general region, pulled irresistibly across the twenty-five hundred miles between my own home and this world which would have been alien had it not almost seemed that I had known and loved it in some previous existence. From all directions we crisscrossed New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern Utah, pushing as far south as the Mexican border, as far west as the Mojave Desert in California. Guides led us into the unfrequented parts of Monument Valley and to unexplored cliff dwellings in a mesa canyon the very existence of which was nowhere officially recorded at the time. We climbed the ten thousand foot peak of Navajo Mountain to look for its summit across the vast unexplored land of rocks which supported, they said, not one inhabitant, white or Indian. Then one day we were lost from early morning to sunset when the tracks we were following in the sand petered out to leave us alone in the desert between Kayenta and the Canyon de Chelly.

To such jaunts the war put an end. For seven years I saw no more of sand and sunshine and towering butte. Meanwhile I lived happily as one could expect to live in such years. The beautiful world of New England became again my only world. I was not sure that I should ever return to the new one I had discovered. Indeed it receded until I was uncertain whether I had ever seen it at all except in that previous existence some memory of which seemed to linger when, for the first time in this one, I met it face to face. Now and then, on some snowy night when the moon gleamed coldly on the snow, I woke from a dream of sun and sand, and when I looked from my window moon and snow were like the pale ghosts of sand and sun.

At last, for the fifth time, I came again, verifying the fact that remembered things did really exist. But I was still only a traveler or even only the traveler's vulgar brother, the tourist. No matter how often I looked at something I did more than look. It was only a view or a sight. It threatened to become familiar without being really known and I realized that what I wanted was not to look at but to live with this thing whose fascination I did not understand. And so, a dozen years after I first looked, I have come for the sixth time; but on this occasion to live in a world which will, I hope, lose the charm of the strange only to take on the more powerful charm of the familiar.

Certainly I do not know yet what it is that this land, together with the plants and animals who find its strangenesses normal, has been trying to say to me for twelve years, what kinship with me it is that they all so insistently claim. I know that many besides myself have felt its charm, but I know also that not all who visit it do, that there are, indeed, some in whom it inspires at first sight not love but fear, or even hatred. Its appeal is not the appeal of things universally attractive, like smiling fields, bubbling springs, and murmuring brooks. To some it seems merely stricken, and even those of us who love it merely recognize that its beauty is no easy one. It suggests patience and struggle and endurance. It is courageous and happy, not easy or luxurious. In the brightest colors of its sandstone canyons, even in the brightest colors of its brief spring flowers, there is something austere.

Sociologists talk a great deal these days about "adjustment," which has always seemed to me a defeatist sort of word suggesting dismal surrender to the just tolerable. The road runner is not "adjusted" to his environment. He is triumphant in it. The desert is his home and he likes it. Other creatures, including many other birds, elude and compromise. They cling to the mountains or to the cottonwood-filled washes, especially in the hot weather, or they go away somewhere else, like the not entirely reconciled human inhabitants of this region. The road runner, on the other hand, stays here all the time and he prefers the areas where he is hottest and driest. The casual visitor is most likely to see him crossing a road or racing with a car. But one may see him also in the wildest wilds, either on the desert flats or high up in the desert canyons where he strides along over rocks and between shrubs. Indeed, one may see him almost anywhere below the level where desert gives way to pines or aspen.

He will come into your patio if you are discreet. Taken young from the nest, he will make a pet, and one writer describes a tame individual who for years roosted on top of a wall clock in a living room, sleeping quietly through evening parties unless a visitor chose to occupy the chair just below his perch, in which case he would wake up, descend upon the intruder, and drive him away. But the road runner is not one who needs either the human inhabitant or anything which human beings have introduced. Not only his food but everything else he wants is amply supplied in his chosen environment. He usually builds his sketchy nest out of twigs from the most abundant tree, the mesquite. He places it frequently in a cholla, the wickedest of the cacti upon whose murderous spines even snakes are sometimes found fatally impaled. He feeds his young as he feeds himself, upon the reptiles which inhabit the same areas which he does. And because they are juicy, neither he nor his young are as dependent upon the hard-to-find water as the seedeating birds who must sometimes make long trips to get it.

Yet all the road runner's peculiarities represent things learned, and learned rather recently as a biologist understands "recent." He is not a creature who happened to have certain characteristics and habits and who therefore survived here. This is a region he moved into and he was once very different. As a matter of fact, so the orni-thologists tell us, he is actually a cuckoo, although no one would ever guess it without studying his anatomy. Outwardly, there is nothing to suggest the European cuckoo of reprehensible domestic morals or, for that matter, the American cuckoo or "rain crow" whose mournful note is familiar over almost the entire United States and part of Canada not excluding the wooded oases of Arizona itself. That cuckoo flies, perches, sings and eats conventional bird food. He lives only where conditions are suited to his habits. But one of his not too distant relatives must have moved into the desert slowly, no doubt and made himself so much at home there that by now he is a cuckoo only to those who can read the esoteric evidences of his anatomical structure.

Despite all this, it must be confessed that not everybody loves the road runner. Nothing is so likely to make an animal unpopular as a tendency to eat things which we ourselves would like to eat. And the road runner is guilty of just this wickedness. He is accused, no doubt justly, of varying his diet with an occasional egg of the Gambel's quail, or even with an occasional baby quail itself. Sports-men are afraid that this reduces somewhat the number they will be able to kill in their own more efficient way and so, naturally, they feel that the road runner should be eliminated.

To others it seems that a creature who so triumphantly demonstrates how to live in the desert ought to be regarded with sympathetic interest by those who are trying to do the same thing. He and the quail have got along together for quite a long time. Neither seems likely to eliminate the other. Man, on the other hand, may very easily eliminate both. It is the kind of thing he is best at.

The most materialistic of historians do not deny the influence upon a people of the land on which they live. When they say, for instance, that the existence of a frontier was a dominant factor in shaping the character of the American people, they are not thinking only of a physical fact. They mean also that the idea of a frontier, the realization that space to be occupied lay beyond it, took its place in the American imagination and sparked the sense that there was "somewhere else to go" rather than that the solution of every problem, practical or spiritual, had to be found within the limits to which the man who faced them was confined.

In the history of many other peoples the character of their land, even the very look of the landscape itself, has powerfully influenced how they felt and what they thought about. They were woodsmen or plainsmen or mountaineers not only economically but spiritually also. And nothing, not even the sea, has seemed to affect men more profoundly than the desert, or seemed to incline them so powerfully toward great thoughts, perhaps because the desert itself seems to brood and to encourage brooding. To the Hebrews the desert spoke of God, and one of the most powerful of all religions was born. To the Arabs it spoke of the stars, and astronomy came into being.

Perhaps no fact about the American people is more important than the fact that the continent upon which they live is large enough and varied enough to speak with many different voices of the mountains, of the plains, of the valleys and of the seashore all clear voices that are distinct and strong. Because Americans listened to all these voices, the national character has had many aspects and developed in many different directions. But the voice of the desert is the one which has been least often heard. We came to it last, and when we did come, we came principally to exploit rather than to listen.

To those who do listen, the desert speaks of things with an emphasis quite different from that of the shore, the mountains, the valleys or the plains. Whereas they invite action and suggest limitless opportunity, exhaustless resources, the implications and the mood of the desert are something different. For one thing the desert is conservative, not radical. It is more likely to provoke awe than to invite conquest. It does not, like the plains, say, "Only turn the sod and uncountable riches will spring up." The heroism which it encourages is the heroism of endurance, not that of conquest.

Precisely what other things it says depends in part upon the person listening. To the biologist it speaks first of the remarkable flexibility of living things, of the processes of adaptation which are nowhere more remarkable than in the strange devices by which plants and animals have learned to conquer heat and dryness. To the practical-minded conservationist it speaks sternly of other things, because in the desert the problems created by erosion and overexploitation are plainer and more accurate than anywhere else. But to the merely contemplative it speaks of courage and endurance of a special kind.Here the thought of the contemplative crosses the thought of the conservationist, because the contemplative realizes that the desert is “the last frontier” in more senses than one. It is the last because it was the latest reached, but it is the last also because it is, in many ways, a frontier which cannot be crossed. It brings man up against his limitations, turns him in upon himself and suggests values which more indulgent regions minimize. Sometimes it inclines to contemplation men who have never contemplated before. And of all answers to the question “What is a desert good for?” “Contemplation” is perhaps the best.

The eighteenth century invented a useful distinction which we have almost lost, the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The first, even when it escapes being merely the pretty, is easy and reassuring. The sublime, on the other hand, is touched with something which inspires awe. It is large and powerful; it carries with it the suggestion that it might overwhelm us if it would. By these definitions there is no doubt which is the right word for the desert. In intimate details, as when its floor is covered after a spring rain with the delicate little ephemeral plants, it is pretty. But such embodiments of prettiness seem to be only tolerated with affectionate contempt by the region as a whole. As a whole the desert is, in the original sense of the word, “awful.” Perhaps one feels a certain boldness in undertaking to live with it and a certain pride when one discovers that one can.

I am not suggesting that everyone should listen to the voice of the desert and listen to no other. For a nation which believes, perhaps rightly enough, that it has many more conquests yet to make, that voice preaches a doctrine too close to quietism. But I am suggesting that the voice of the desert might well be heard occasionally among the others. To go “up to the mountain” or “into the desert” has become part of the symbolical language. If it is good to make occasionally what the religious call a “retreat,” there is no better place than the desert to make it. Here if anywhere the most familiar realities recede and others come into the foreground of the mind.