THE DESERT AS DWELLED ON

There are great deserts in the world. I have flown over two of the greatest, the Arabian and the Sahara, and have book knowledge of those of Asia, Australia, and Southwest Africa. During most of my life I have lived on the edge of our Southwestern desert and come to know its components Mojave, Colorado, and Sonora.

Until recently I had never lived in the desert. By then I was too old for the primitive life of John Van Dyke, Wharton James, and Smeaton Chase, whose books were blended of sand and sweat. I also followed the late Joseph Wood Krutch who settled in Southern Arizona as he neared sixty and crowned the remaining twenty years of his life with The Desert Year and The Voice of the Desert. His example gives me faith that I too can find a new life there, from which my best work will come.

And so, as we did nearly twenty years ago when we moved to the Malibu and suffered a sea-change into something rich not strange, we moved to the bajada at the base of the Santa Catalinas. This time the guiding vision was Fay's. As before, we saw the house and knew before entering that it was ours.

There we are putting down roots in the rocky ground. Everything is new to us seasons, weather, fauna and flora, and the night sky. Tucson is more southerly, and so that second brightest star, Canopus, arcs higher above the horizon. The move is both rerouting and re-rooting. Life is not hard in the civilized setting, nor should it be at our time of life. Without demands on the body, the mind is freed and the imagination flourishes.

Now I can draw on what may prove to be the final reservoir. At 66 one should not tarry nor should he hurry. The first few years are crucial. I know from the Malibu that the knife edge is sharpest during that honeymoon time. Though knowledge increases, sensitivity dulls. Therefore blot it up, then precipitate the essence in words precise, simple, and sensuous.

What is a bajada? The word is Spanish for slope: the weathering of a mountain range of Pleistocene antiquity. For a million years the wind and the rain have been bringing down the Catalinas. At their base, Dr McGinnies, the sage of Arid Lands, says, the bajada is a thousand feet deep, thinning to a small fraction of that at its extremity five miles below. A contest is going on between the city, creeping up the slope, and the mountain descend-ing on the plain. Time is on the latter's side.

Such lean soil means that nature alone can best gar-den it. Foolish are the efforts of easterners to make New England gardens there. Nature succeeds even with scant rainfall. Most of it falls in summer when the monsoons arrive from the Gulf of Mexico. They made the bajada and their work never ends, as each storm brings down more of the mountain. Water that doesn't run off is swallowed by the thirsty ground.

The flora has learned to gulp & store, then to flower and fruit. It is a beautiful flora saguaro, palo verde, acacia, and an occasional mesquite which prefers the bottom lands. Trees are interspersed with bushes - creosote, jojoba, burr sage, brittle bush, desert broom & fairy duster, all flowering.

I have known Paris in the spring and loved the woods of England reborn in May, but never did the return of the sun warm me as it did when the bajada bloomed. Scarce is precious. Coming as I do from the land of citrus (going, going, gone), I thought the sweetness of lemon blossoms was the headiest of all. Now that I have breathed the night perfume of whitethorn acacia's golden balls (the Mexican huisache), I admit to double trouble. The birds belong to Fay. She feeds and watches and tells me how to tell them. As boy with gun I shot birds. As man with pen I don't. There is that fire-flasher, the Arizona cardinal, & the kindred pyrrhuloxia; the thrashers and the cactus wren, the bluejay and the mocker; Gambel's quail and the doves, the big whitewinged, the little Inca, & the mourning dove. The villain in the flock is the roadrunner. Dobie's paisano. He never told us that it swallows smaller birds alive, lying in wait for them like a cat; nor did he describe the sight of one making off, as it did from our patio, with the tailfeathers of a dove sticking out of its ostrich-like mouth. I rise before dawn as I did on the coast and prepare to live another day. Coffee helps. Pencil and pad are com-forters. Eventually I shave, shower, dress, eat, and then take Barlow, successor to our other toy poodle, Besa, and we go for our early walk. Sometimes we see coyotes, running easily on their tall legs. Barlow stares, then looks at me. Amigos, I assure her, vámonos. And so we proceed, the city below, the mountains above, the bajada around.

Always mountains wherever I look. Toward Mexico the saddle-backed Santa Ritas, west northwest the Tucsons and the Tortolitas. If it is very clear I see the cone of Baboquívari, sacred mountain of the Papagos, a hundred miles away. The sun rises over the Rincóns, the Whetstones beyond. Although invisible I know that the others are there and will be there until the last bajada is built. The Dragoons and the Chiricahuas, the Galiuros, Winchesters, and Pinalenos; and crowning that latter range, Mount Graham, old blue-shouldered, cloud-capped abode of the gods.

Mountains determine, I once wrote in what I thought was a farewell to Arizona. Time proved me wrong and brought me back, changed. The mountains had not changed. Building bajadas takes a long time and mountains have the time. They do indeed determine. Water they bring down brings them down, and in the end all will be brought down "and leave not a wrack behind."