The Southwest

Olympus, so do the Navajos revere their sacred peaks. The Papagos of southwestern Arizona look up to the peak of Baboquívari where the gods rule the elements. Why do I write again about the South-west? Because I love the land and write from love undertoned by lament. Its immigrants are often spoilers, dependent upon machines for their needs and comforts. Their cities grow like cancers. Their urban towers, incongruous casas grandes, could have been erected anywhere in the world. Their cities' streets are impacted with traffic, the skies obscured, the days and nights grown noisy. Sun, silence, and adobe are unknown to inhabitants of the concrete.

I am content to live out my life on the bajada of the Santa Catalinas, facing south to the mountains of Mexico. Do I proclaim Tucson to be the heart of hearts? It is obviously not the geographical heart, nor is it the spiritual center, which some say is at Oraibi, Shiprock, or Taos Pueblo. Tucson is to me the intellectual heart and I dwell on its slope because the Southwest's major university and research library are nearby. As a writer, my roots are nourished by the records of the past as well as by the beauty of the present. Thus I live on the edge of the Old Pueblo, a community founded the year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The only competitor for my residential affection is that even older pueblo of Santa Fe. If the City of the Holy Faith had intellectual facilities to equal Tucson's, I could happily live How should one first come to the Southwest? There are various ways, all beautiful, some more dramatic. The southern routes are the subtlest. There the plains of Texas and Oklahoma merge with those of New Mexico. Between the pages of one of my books is pressed a florarium of Highway 54, fragile evidence that all the flowers of summer once lit this way southwest.

If one comes by Roswell on the Pecos, one finds Paul Horgan - Peter Hurd country. Their stories and paintings were created here. The road tracks northwest across grasslands and up Hondo Creek into the Sacramentos, past San Patricio where Peter Hurd now lives. Then it crosses the Mescalero Apache reservation and drops into the Tularosa basin, a bolsón or pocket between the Sacramento and the San Andrés ranges.

Hurd and Horgan celebrated those lands east of the mountains; Tularosa is the domain of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, the only rangeland peer of Arizona's Ross Santee both men with power over cattle, horses, and words. Rhodes lies buried high in the San Andrés mountains. The road to his grave crosses the White Sands, now a missile range closed to public access.

Trinity Site is nearby, where The Bomb was first exploded. Man's compulsion to create and destroy distinguishes this place. Over it rises Sierra Blanca, high landmark of southeastern New Mexico. On its shoulder is the vil-lage of Cloudcroft, as poetically named as Arizona's Snowflake (the charm of which is somewhat lessened when we know that it was named for two worthy Mormons, Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake).

lage of Cloudcroft, as poetically named as Arizona's Snowflake (the charm of which is somewhat lessened when we know that it was named for two worthy Mormons, Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake).

Rhodes's pocket empties into Texas's outpost of El Paso. Three Texans glorify that city Hertzog the printer, Lea the writer-painter, and Cis-neros the illustrator. No other south-western city can boast such a creative trio. Their collaboration somewhat gentles this rough Texan counterpart of Albuquerque and Phoenix.

The mountains of southern Arizona hardly rival the Rockies. The sandy wastes of the southwestern corner are beautiful only to a viewer with time and lenses to look at them long and lovingly as Joseph Wood Krutch did. In the final twenty years of his life, that trans-planted philosopher-naturalist was the conscience-voice of the Southwest.

South from Willcox the road runs to the Mexican border. To the west lies a playa that rainfall turns into a shallow lake. To the east are the Chiricahuas, the former domain of Cochise and his Apache raiders. It is a lonely road. Few travel this route to the twin border cities of Douglas and Agua Prieta. All the land of southern Arizona rises grad-ually from the Gila River valley. Sage and juniper yield to grama grass and oak. Cattle fatten on a range enriched by the rainy seasons of summer and winter.

The high stack of the smelter heralds the company town of Douglas, where coffee may be taken at the opulent Gadsden Hotel. Beyond in Bisbee, the Lavender Pit could have served Doré as a coppery model for his hellish drawings. The old Copper Queen Hotel offers hospitality, although Bisbee suffers from a dwindling supply of profitable ore.

The road leads back to Tucson through Tombstone on its high mesquite mesa and over the grasslands and oak groves which lie between the Whetstones and the Santa Ritas. This is an Arizona without the dramatic appeal of the Painted Desert or the Grand Canyon; it is a grassy land of peace and plenty.

The northern ways are more thrilling. They come through the passes of Raton and Wolf Creek. The former is the old Santa Fe Trail that led from the Missouri frontier by Las Vegas to the City of the Holy Faith. At trail's end is piñon and juniper country where the earth is reddish, the vegetation dark green. It was near here at Laguna that Haniel Long, the sage of Santa Fe, first came under the spell of the Southwest.

"I stepped down into the freshness and vastness of the diminutive piñon forest," he recalled, "and as I walked about among the blue-green odorous trees, I felt like a giant, for over their heads was the horizon of the mountains. On a nearby hill was the ancient town, the first pueblo I had ever seen. I was pleased that houses could be so unpretentious, built simply of the earth and leaving nothing to be improved upon. So with the little trees: they gave me the pleasure that comes of small perfect things which adapt their forces without scattering or waste."

Coming east from California, the dramatic route is over the Sierra Nevada via Tioga Pass and the abrupt drop into the Owens River valley. Ansel Adams photographed these mountains and this valley for an edition of Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain. It is a land akin to northern New Mexico, and the Sierra Nevada is a big brother to the Sangre de Cristo. The valley's villain is Los Angeles, which bought up the land and aqueducted its water. In her outrage, Mary Austin foretold doom for the Angel City. She probably meant earthquake and fire. Having covered the destruction of San Francisco in 1906 for Lummis's Out West, she knew what can happen to a city when the earth shakes and burns. Now Los Angeles's end may come from overpopulation, industrialization, and pollution. Choking and smothering also spell doom.

From the Owens River valley the road crosses the Panamints and Death Valley, through lands of less than little rain. The first collaboration between Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall produced a beautiful book on Death Valley. The sculptor Gordon Newell lives in the Panamints with stone for his chisel and unlimited crystal air of a clean world. "When you tell about this beautiful part of the Southwest," he wrote me, "consider the thought that 'Death Valley' is a misnomer, for that is where Life best demonstrates its ability to survive. From pupfish to creosote, a continuity persists that belies the name 'Death.' That a few confused tourists left their As bones there is pretty irrelevant in the scale and scheme of time and weather."

Where Utah yields the Strip to Arizona, the land rises onto the forested Kaibab plateau to end at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. From there the Bright Angel trail drops, crosses the river, and climbs to the South Rim. Although it is only a dozen miles across, by car it takes hours to drive the two hundred miles around this deep wound in the earth's body.

I was on the South Rim at Christmastime. Snow shrouded the canyon as I walked along the edge at twilight in a thin fall of flakes. Sweet chimney smoke filled the air, and that smell of burning pinewood recalled my childhood transits of territory when the incense of sawmill meant that California came on the morrow.

A darkened building proved to be the studio of the Kolb brothers, the early river-runners and photographers. There on display was the very boat that had carried them through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico. Ellsworth Kolb's book of their adventure was my first Southwest book. It was a gift from my father on my fifteenth birthday, a few months before his early death. I have kept it as a talisman.

There are other gifts that I cherish from my father's travels in the Southwest. One is an Apache basket that he bought at the Fred Harvey shop in The Alvarado at Albuquerque. Before that beautiful hotel was bulldozed for a parking lot, I often went there just to Watch the passing trains. Albuquerqueans were wont to set their watches by those Santa Fe trains: California Limited, Scout, Missionary, Navajo, Chief, Super Chief, and El Capitan. Once when speaking to a conference at The Alvarado, I paused upon hearing the sigh of relaxing Westinghouses. "What train is that?" I asked the chairman. He pulled out his watch. "Eastbound mail," he said. I resumed my talk.

have taken my place in the company of travelers in the Southwest, and I go with their books in my baggage and their ghosts at my side. They are friendly ghosts. Some are heroic, more are obscure. First came Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Although he did not find the Golden Cities of Cíbola (they proved to be the adobe pueblos of the Indians), Coronado surely had a great trip. If there was no poetry in him when in 1540 he and his men marched up the valley of the San Pedro, deep into Arizona and New Mexico and as far as the present-day Nebraska, was he indifferent to the sky's blueness and its glitter at night? To his dying day did he not remember the smell of mesquite with which his men made their fires? Four hundred and thirty-six years later, the valley of the San Pedro is still thicketed with huge mesquites. If Coronado came for gold and Kino for God, now in our time the poet and the photographer come for the glory of form and color of earth and sky.

Earlier in that same century the mystical healer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca also came this way, one of the last survivors of a shipwreck on the Florida coast, it took those wanderers eight years to cross the continent, during which they discovered they had the power to heal the sick. If I were to choose a single masterpiece of Southwest literature it might be Haniel Long's Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, a prose poem that extracts the inner meaning of the Spaniards' odyssey. "Crack the rock if so you list," wrote another poet, "bring to light the amethyst." This Long did in his jewel of a book.

In later centuries there came the Jesuit Kino, and Anza, the Sonoran commander, and Garcés, the Franciscan priest. It was Garcés who crept to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and in 1776 rode his mule into Oraibi on that fateful fourth day of July. He was turned away by the Hopis. They preferred their gods to his.

My roll call of heroes includes Kearny, who seized the Southwest from Mexico; Cooke, who blazed the first wagon road to the Pacific; and the Apache chiefs Mangas Coloradas and Cochise, fighters to hold their domain. "I think continually of those who were truly great," wrote Stephen Spender; and as I travel in the Southwest, I repeople it with its heroic leaders. With them at my side, I am never alone nor lonely.

West-southwest of Tucson, the Papaguería yields to Sonora. This is still the domain of Padre Kino, although three centuries have passed since he came this way on foot and horseback, setting records of endurance that have never been equaled. The Papagos are a solid race whose bulk conceals their poetic legendry. "People of the Crimson Evening," they have been called. Their land was not coveted by conquistadors, missionaries, gold seekers, or settlers.

"So the Papagos wandered, calm and smiling, back and forth across the waste of brilliant barrenness," wrote anthropologist Ruth Underhill. "They shot the ground squirrels and the rats and birds. They picked the caterpillars from the bushes. They shook the seeds from every blade of wild grass. They brushed the spines from cactus stems and roasted them for hours in a pit with a fire over it. I have never heard one of them object to this plan of life. Rather, an old woman telling me of it sighed and said: 'To you Whites, Elder Brother gave wheat and peaches and grapes. To us, he gave the wild seeds and the cactus. Those are the good foods.' "

The peak of Baboquívari rises above the desert floor to visibility for a hundred miles around. At the other end of the range stands Kitt Peak, upon which astronomers have built a great national observatory. "Men with Long Eyes," the Papagos call them. In granting the scientists rights on their mountain, the Indians retained those to the native wood - the slow-burning, gray-barked Arizona oak, Quercus arizonica Sargent.

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(continued from page 17) There are many devices on Kitt Peak whereby astronomers scan the sky. I leave them to their devices. When I go up the mountain, it is to picnic among the jay-haunted oaks. In the summertime the air is cool up there. The ground is strewn with tiny acorns. I once saw children gathering them, and this dialogue took place: "What are you going to do with those acorns?" I asked.

Sell them to neighborhood children."

"For how much?"

"A penny a handful."

"May I buy some?'"

The children thought a minute and then one said, "No."

"Why not?"

"Your hands are too big."

Water is what these Indians worship," Coronado reported to his viceroy, "because they say it is what makes the corn grow." The early Spaniards observed that the natives' worship included the offering of painted sticks, plumes, powders made of yellow flowers, and pieces of turquoise which were placed by springs.

The Indians still acknowledge the divinity of water. The Hopis employ serpentine rituals to call down the rain. The Papagos sing for power over the essential element.

Anglos also recognize water as the Southwest's basic element. Who owns water, owns all. They have made it serve us with dams and canals to create power and irrigate crops. Yet they waste water as if it were an inexhaustible resource. They fail to realize that there could come another drought such as the one that ended human life on the Mesa Verde.

The water gods must be propitiated. One way is for each community in the arid lands to dedicate a fountain to the divinity of water. Where water is abundant, as in St. Louis, a fountain is less meaningful, beyond the mere beauty of it, than a fountain where water is scarce. Southwesterners should be taught from childhood that the source of their water lies beyond the faucet.

I have gone time and again to the great river dams of the Southwest to Laguna, Imperial, Hoover, and Glen Canyon on the Colorado; to Roosevelt on the Salt, Coolidge on the Gila, and to Elephant Butte on the Rio Grande. Only for two Laguna and Roosevelt do I have especial affection. Is it because they were the only ones known to my father? To them he made the hard journey by mule-drawn wagon that was necessary in 1909. Laguna and Roosevelt were the first dams to be constructed under the Reclamation Act of 1902. Then a horticulturist in the United States Department of Agriculture, my father came from Washington to inspect these new sources of life and light and power.

Laguna Dam on the Colorado above Yuma was originally a mile-wide, Indian weir-type barrier of rock and brush, meant to restrain the river's spring flooding and to furnish water for crops on reclaimed desert land. Laguna was eventually made obsolete by nearby Imperial Dam.

I have gone there on the river in the blazing heat of August. Now motorized campers abound. Few if any know the history and meaning of man's achievement in subduing the Colorado. None knows why I go there with thankful heart to honor my father and to marvel at the hydraulics. Sluiced water roars into the desilting basins and is canalled into the Imperial Valley of California to irrigate carrots, cotton, melons, and lettuce. Birds bob on the lake. Arrowweed and tules line the banks. The mountains look as if they had been cut out of cardboard. The air shimmers with heat.

East of Phoenix the road leads to the junction where the Apache Trail enters the domain of the Tonto Apaches. Men of that tribe were a main source of labor when Roosevelt Dam was built during the years 1905-1911. President Theodore Roosevelt himself, for whom it was named, dedicated the dam with a mov-ing peroration: "I do not know if it is of any consequence to a man whether he has a monument. I know it is of mighty little consequence whether he has a statue after he is dead. If there could be any monument which would appeal to any man, surely it is this. You could not have done anything which would have pleased and touched me more than to name this great dam, this great reservoir site, after me, and I thank you from my heart for having done so."

Then and now, Theodore Roosevelt Dam is the greatest masonry dam in the world, built of sandstone blocks quar-ried from the very walls of the canyon whose river, the Salt, is dammed. This majestic barrier has meant more to Arizona than any other single undertaking. By its mastery of the Salt and the lower Gila, the city of Phoenix and the sur-rounding Valley of the Sun were made to flourish and be fruitful.

I have gone there to Roosevelt Dam in all seasons. In winter the land is the most beautiful, its strong colors subdued and made restful to the eyes. Then are seen soft greens, browns, and blues under gray skies. The water behind the dam is then olive green instead of the blue of summer.

Coolidge Dam on the Gila lies south-east of Roosevelt Dam. It was built of concrete of an odd bulbous design. From a vantage point downstream, the dam's face is seen to be ornamented with great cement eagles. Green water from the penstocks streams languidly into the canyon that carries it through the mountains to the lower lands it irrigates.

Lake San Carlos fed by the capricious Gila that rises in the wilderness of the Arizona-New Mexico boundary. When Coolidge Dam was dedicated in 1927, the water was very low, a circum-stance that led Will Rogers to quip to President Coolidge, "If this was my lake, I'd mow it."

Few people go there except to fish in the lake. In summer the heat is fierce. Then the sotol sends up its golden-candled stalk. The Pinals dance in the sun. This is the land celebrated by Ross Santee horse-wrangler, artist, writer, laureate of the Arizona range.

Each of us seeks his state of grace. I have tendered here ways by which I have found mine. The Southwest has many hearts, synchronized by configuration and color. Even though we cannot define and delimit the Southwest to the satisfaction of all its lovers, we all know when we have reached it, whether it be west of the Pecos, south of the Mesa Verde, east of the Sierra Nevada and, the Colorado, or north of the Sonoran rivers and the mountains of Chihuahua.

Salmon-colored cliffs, dove-colored deserts, rocky peaks and wooded ranges; hogans, wickiups, ramadas, and concrete towers; dust storms, flash floods, and red skies at morn and evening nowhere do they come together with such beautiful meaning as they do in the Southwest.

Whose Southwest is it? Does it belong to the Indians? They were here first. Yet they were not always here. They too came from elsewhere, from South America or Asia. So did cattle, sheep, and horses. Then what is native? Ocotillo and saguaro. Copper, gold, and turquoise. The horned toad and the cactus wren and the rivers that run when the weather comes from off the ocean of storms.

The Papagos have always known from where the weather comes. In ancient times when they made their annual journey to the Pacific for salt, they sang this song: By the sandy water I breathe in the smell of the sea, From there the wind comes and blows over the world.

By the sandy shore I breathe in the smell of the sea, From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world.

When one is far from the Southwest or when one in no longer able to roam, how can one best evoke the colored lands? Imagination serves. Photographs help. On walls at home one can see Shiprock at sunrise, the White Sands by moonlight, or the towers of the White Dove and the helmet of Baboquívari.

Maps lend the illusion of distance. There is a geological map of Arizona in pastel colors to delight as well as inform. And paintings that exalt our view of earth and sky. Maynard Dixon is my favorite painter of the Southwest. His technique was ever equal to his vision. He never stopped growing as an artist, so that the work of his old age was the most daring of all. Navajo painters portray horses as wingèd creatures of light. Painting is an act of worship and glorification.

There are simpler evocators of the Southwest. Copper lumps and chunks of turquoise. Blue shells from the gulf and bits of petrified wood from the Painted Desert. White sands of gypsum trickling through the hourglass. Or a page from the Northland Press up in Coconino County.

Books are truly the Southwest's most magical surrogates. We have only to read them and be transported onto the continuum of history that carries us back to when man first entered this great old dry and wrinkled land.