LAND OF DREAMY DISTANCES

Distance speaks of far-away places. The erudite Mr. Webster devotes nearly a half column of fine type in his big and learned book to a discussion of the subject. His remarks range from "the space between two objects" to "remoteness in any scale," and from him we learn "distance" as a word has a distinct technological meaning in such diversified arts, crafts and skills as fencing, military science, music, navigation, psychology, racing and track athletics.

Out here in the West distance has a special meaning. It is the soaring view of far horizons, like Tennyson's "O'er the hills, and far away beyond their utmost purple rim," a line wonderfully suited to Arizona publicity writing.

Here is a big country and the distances are big. The clear atmosphere emphasizes the far awayness of things and places and evokes thoughts of wonderment about all that lies between the intervening miles which the sight of eye and thought of mind encompass in a fleeting glance.

Distance stresses the bigness of our land, its loneliness, the sparseness of its population. Here is the land where a man complained about neighbors being fairly miles away, grumbling "country is getting mighty crowded these days" and all who heard him understood he was not a recluse or an unneighborly person, but just didn't want to be shut in. A Navajo thinks nothing of going twenty miles on his horse to a trading post for a pound of coffee, a sack of flour, a tin of tobacco and the chance to pass the time of day with more distant neighbors when he gets there. It is not strange that a Navajo family in a wagon drawn by two scrawny ponies will cross the entire Navajo reservation to attend a stag, even if it takes days to get there and days to get back. A Papago family, living on the reservation near Sells, does not hesitate to make the trip to Magdalena, Sonora, for La Fiesta del San Francisco, jogging for days through the wildest desert on earth, enjoying completely la fiesta and the trip thereto and back. Here in the land of big and dreamy distances one does not express surprise when a neighbor or a friend casually announces "I'm going to drive down to Nogales tomorrow morning. Be back by evening." A day's auto hop of three hundred sixty miles or so with shopping thrown in on the side is nothing to show surprise about. It is an ordinary occurrence.

You can see so far out here in the big land the horizon is a constant challenge. The miles have the elasticity of a rubber band. Time and space dwindles. Distance weaves a dreamy pattern of sky, earth, atmosphere, the shimmering purple that tells of far horizons that are not the end but the beginning....R. C.