My Southwest

…a tribute to the Land of Sun and Sand, of Time, Scenery and Silence in words, sketches and photographs by Once upon a time, more precisely the Age of Camisoles for Women, Knickers for Boys and Streetcars for Everybody, we had a friend who had a relative who “went out to California,” as the saying went at the time. This was a costly trip by train and a risky feat by automobile. In those days anyone who went out of state made a splash in the conversational ripples, but if one went as far as the COAST... Well! Nothing thinkably farther than that existed.

In point of time, this was about two and one-half generations from gold-seeking days, so there was still a prevalent feeling that journeying westward required an adventurous spirit devoted specifically to Arizona, and only one city mentioned: Phoenix. There were no illustrations of Arizona and only one small map showing the outlines of the state. Since for a long time my knowledge of Arizona stemmed from this book, you can see why, in 1917, I thought of Arizona as a pink state with two cities: Phoenix and Tucson; two rivers: the Colorado and the Gila; and one mountain, which I later learned indicated the escarpment of the Mogollon Rim. Since all else was blank, my ambition was to visit the places on the map where the artists had drawn the most “caterpillars,” i.e., the map indicators of mountains.

plus a dash of combined idiocy and hellishness. Perhaps so, because it took us three hours to go twenty country miles for our Sunday picnic, a feat reserved for madcaps. Besides the transportation difficulties of that day in traveling west, I realized, even as a child, that there was a great spiritual impetus of some kind that would propel a person from the secure, pancake contours of Illinois into the terrifying mountain immensities of the lands that lay where the sun went down. This was indeed a mighty journey, and at the age of ten I felt mightily endowed to undertake it. In my 1917 Frye World Geography, there were just seven pages devoted to the eleven western states; eleven words The event which turned my travel resolutions toward Arizona was the visit of my mother's sister from Portland, Oregon. This elegant lady, wearing ropes of beads that looped to her knees, also possessed dresses that had more and longer tassels than we had on our best lampshades... all of which shows how impressed I was by this exotic creature. I overheard many discussions between my mother and my aunt as to the relative merits of housekeeping in Portland versus Chicago; how my aunt had a holly tree that reached to the second story and a climbing rose with blossoms so huge they sounded like lettuce heads as they plopped down on the roof. All we had to brag about was our coal soot second only to that of Pittsburgh, and the maximum times per year this required my mother to wash curtains. My mother, too, was thinking of the sundown lands when she asked my aunt where we should go for the best living if we could go somewhere. To my surprise, my aunt replied, “Arizona!” (I suppose those falling roses kept her awake.)

The years passed. I came and went across the country many times, and lived and worked in a number of cities. I learned to my delight that there were many more mountains in Arizona than there were “caterpillars” on the 1917 map, and many more rivers than hair snakes in Grandpa’s rain barrel.

Once, on a trip back to my home town, I discovered that the woods where we had picnicked and picked violets the day Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget had been turned into one vast carpet of rooftops; that Chicago curtains needed ever more frequent washings; that a new ingredient had been added to the atmosphere which caused some curtains to disintegrate in the first washing. I saw the countryside that had existed between the suburban towns around Chicago disappear into one endless complex, where now you had no sense of going from one town to the next because there were no lines of demarcation between them.

The prairie ditches that had yielded us so many lovable crawdads for bathtub pets were now all paved with streets lengthening ever westward into the farm and pasturelands. I wondered where the meadowlarks had gone: those treasures of the prairie given by a just Providence so that the prairie dwellers, who hadn’t much to look at, would have the sweetest songs in the world to hear.

Later, at a moment of decision in our lives, when my father and I were discussing our future direction, my father said we should take Horace Greeley’s advice. And we did.

My first recollected sight of Arizona was from the Pullman windows of the Santa Fe Chief, and my first thoughts concerned the shrub-junipers that can be seen for miles on end at certain elevations. These shrubs, forming a green polka-dot landscape, were so regularly spaced and uniform in size I was sure someone must have planted them, but for what reason? They couldn’t be wild because wild things are happenstance. They didn’t look edible and they were too small for lumber.

The fact that they are wild and grow in just that manner was my first introduction to the marvelous relationship that exists through nature in balance with itself. This variety of plants is exactly suited to this soil and elevation; the rainfall, moisture and soil nutrients determine the exact spacing at which it can exist.

"The Arid Land" - Monument Valley

The word “desert” is defined by Webster as a dry, sandy wasteland. To me, impressed by such movies as the silent “Beau Geste,” a desert was a place where nothing exists until a Bedouin on a camel gallops across the horizon. With this mental image I was confounded to find that a desert can be a sheet of salt, sagebrush, stones, cinders and even shrubs at uniform intervals. In fact, the western “deserts” were so covered with plant life of some kind that I began to wonder if there were any consisting of just plain sand.

There were, of course, and to this day the old plank road, still to be seen near the Yuma dunes, is one of the fascinating trails of history. No great stories have come down to us from those days but I'm sure they occurred.

If you recall some of the old roads that only a Tin Lizzie could negotiate, you'll remember those with crowns so high we drove on a constant five to eight percent slope; the “corduroy” roads made of saplings laid like ribs of grosgrain ribbon through marsh and mud. With the dawn of interstate busses, one ingenious solution to Iowa mud was this: galvanized iron drain pipes, halved and laid end-to-end so the wheels of the vehicle went down the trough thus created.

The first “paved” road I ever saw consisted of two twelveinch strips of pavement laid in single track down the center of the road. If you met another car, each pulled off to the right, thereby maintaining two wheels on the paved strip and two in the mad or whatever. I always thought if the other fellow would get off and let us by, although he would getstuck, we would then pitch in to his rescue, which was much wiser than both cars getting stuck side by side. Funny thing, I never visualized us getting off to let him by! In stagecoach days on narrow mountain roads, the down driver pulled off for the up-driver, but I never heard who pulled off for whom on the old Yuma plank road.

stuck, we would then pitch in to his rescue, which was much wiser than both cars getting stuck side by side. Funny thing, I never visualized us getting off to let him by! In stagecoach days on narrow mountain roads, the down driver pulled off for the up-driver, but I never heard who pulled off for whom on the old Yuma plank road.

"Cloud Swept Wastes" - Southeastern Utah