The Dons Club Superstition Trek

Through the window of the dusty Jeep, the old man watched shadows stain the ribbon of river, as eastern mountains gave up the Sun. Rocks and mesquite remained black on gently sloping dunes, and tumbleweeds tangled against a wire fence, waiting for the wind.

A great gray jackrabbit bounded across the dirt road, a confusion of angles punctuating earth and sky in a staccato path.

"To look at this river now, you'd never think it had been alive with steamboats in the early days," Buck said. We were driving from the old steamboat port of Yuma, following the river to the port at Ehrenberg. He talked about steam navigation on the Colorado River.

"We used to call her Big Red, sometimes (colorado means red in Spanish). And she was somethin' to see back then. But that was before the dams went in. They built Laguna Dam in 1909, you know, and I guess the old days was over then."

Buck Bentley had lived too long to feel even an ambivalence to changes that had taken place, it seemed. The capricious river which had brought his family from San Francisco in 1879 was little more than a well-behaved stream now, stunted by dams and clogged with willows and water grasses.

"They came by steamer, all the way from San Francisco to the Gulf and then up the river by steamboat to Yuma. Took twelve days. Cost ninety dollars for the two of 'em. They came steerage to save their money for settlin' over here...."

In her diary, his mother had written, "With a cry of 'Steamboat comin'!' Yuma sprang into activity, for the arrival of a boat was a festive occasion. Boys and loafers ran down to the landing at the foot of Main Street to enjoy any possible excitement; the peanut merchant, the apple boy, and the tamale vendor hawked their wares; Americans, Mexicans, and Indians rushed noisily about loading and unloading the steamboat, the barges and the 'prairier schooners' drawing up alongside the steamboat warehouse."

Early summer skies are crystalline over Southeastern Arizona, and the wind wilting. Life itself seems stilled. But in July, the monsoon moisture coalesces high in the atmosphere, at first fleecy and tentative but finally with dark Wagnerian intensity. Clouds mantle the brooding bulwark of the Chiricahua Mountains. Afternoon by afternoon, they burgeon until they tower in seething masses of violent impatience. Nature is rehearsing one of her timeless magic shows.

Far below, at the very bottom of the valley to the west, most of a vast alkali plain called the Willcox Playa has been rainless for perhaps half a year.

The mud months ago caked and crinkled into mosaics of dark polygons along the fringes of the flat. Out on the baked center there is only hard, reddish-brown sand that sprawls away into apparent infinity.

Nothing grows there. At this time, save for an occasionally passing bird, not a creature moves. At last comes the musty scent of oncoming rain. The storms of summer are unleashed on the loftier country with thunderous psychedelic fury. Runoff tumbles through parched washes down into the lowland and casts a shallow sheet over the playa.

The muddy water soon stirs with resurgence, almost as if by sorcery. Fairy shrimps, clam shrimps, and tadpole shrimps escape from eggs banked in the sere earth a year or more ago. And within the first few sunlit hours, the once dry lake churns with millions of tiny crustaceans.

You come to me and I will give. But accept my moments as a loan, for I award no full citizenship to man. From Icarus, through Kitty Hawk, to Tranquility Base, I have tolerated Earth's wise couriers but forgiven no impious trespassers. Shakespeare called me a chartered libertine. Gerard Manley Hopkins believed my blessings mothered the world. True. Their descriptions touch my unpredictability, the invisible irritation, and seductive sanctity of my element. I am the air. And foolhardy, magnificent, stubborn, implacable, anxious, breakable, indomitable, questing man persists in taunting me.

Why your urge? What do you relish by rising in me, falling through, or moving against air and in pursuit of sport, not simply as a medium of exploration or transportation?

The quest certainly cannot be to survive my risks. That's falderal. Nature offers as much if not more of this on mountainsides and in oceans. Nay, you find a unique freedom in me. It's common to all airmen, this severing of an umbilical tie which then transforms man's earthbound, clumsy lumberings into effortless movements of smooth motion. I know a pilot's perceptible surge when tires stop clattering and squeaking against ground, lift conquers drag, and a machine is thrust aloft and once again borne to the air, borne to me .... Soaring. Skydiving. Ballooning. To each his own, and, although there is no similarity among vehicles, I allow the three avocations to merge into a single population. My citizens, in turn, harvest common benefits which transcend my gift of freedom. You find an inner superiority with me. I give you a taste of immortality unknown to lesser persons who live among concrete cubes and travel asphalt strips. You can look down. You have preeminence. There is no clarity like mine, when wind and rain have done their scrubbing. My purity becomes yours. I cleanse you. You play among my clouds and chase my winds, and I can make conundrums of both for your pleasure. Sometimes I leave you alone to hang in stillness, and there you will find peace like no other. And sometimes build a silence you can actually hear, and the only invasion will be your breathing. Dawn is my replenishment and your refreshment. I dare. You challenge. We meet again. Then we achieve communion.

There were never more than twenty-six of them at any one time. And they constituted as nondescript looking a bunch as you'd expect to find west of the Pecos. But they were the stuff that shoot-'em-up movies are made of an unorthodox little band of peace officers, not a few of whom were themselves ex-rogues and jailbirds. They dressed like itinerant cowboys, hiding their badges under their vests until they made their arrests. They could ride up a storm, though, and sniff out an outlaw's trail like a mountain lion tracking its next meal. And soon after the turn of the century, they helped measurably to make Arizona Territory, all things considered, a fairly decent place in which to live. These were the Arizona Rangers.

They were a pitifully small band of enforcers, fourteen to begin with a captain, a sergeant, and twelve privates. (A subsequent legislature increased their number to twenty-six.) The captain got 120 dollars a month, the privates fifty-five, and they were expected to supply their own equipment and replace any horses lost in the line of duty. They were also expected to police an area as big as New England, which meant that each Ranger covered an average of 400 miles a month, all on horseback. It was pretty hard on pants and what the pants contained.

Nature has been as strong an influence on Ansel Adams as it was on John Muir. He is a Westerner, an outdoorsman, a romantic, a mystic, and his art inevitably expresses him. Nature conditioned his boyhood, which he spent in a house overlooking the Golden Gate, exposed to sky and fog and Pacific storms and the dim shine of sea cliffs receding toward Point Reyes. Nature even shaped his face. When he was four, an aftershock of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake threw him down as he ran from the house into the garden, and his sharp, crooked, curious nose has tried to look over his left shoulder ever since. Yosemite deepened what was already ingrained in him. He never recovered from the love affair that began in the summer of 1916. Four summers of his youth he spent caretaking the Sierra Club's LeConte Memorial Lodge; several others saw him leading club mountaineering expeditions. In 1928 he literally married into Yosemite Valley when he married Virginia Best, daughter of Harry Best, a painter and concessioner of Best's Studio, in Yosemite National Park. In 1937 the Adamses moved to the Valley, and have maintained a home there and spent part of every year there for more than forty years. Even more than Muir, Adams has identified himself with Yosemite and the Sierra, and much of his most magnificent photography derives from there.

About Coronado's expedition, I concluded that the Black River near Big Bonita Creek was where he and his conquistadores crossed in the summer of 1540. And now, as our party reaches the end of the boulder-choked and rutted road scouted for us by an Apache Indian forester, the gradual slope of the ridge across the river hints that this is probably the place we seek.

My anticipation grows as we wade the river. I scarcely suppress my excitement, exclaiming: "If there is a natural trail which leads up to the Natanes Plateau, we are approaching a meadow where Coronado pitched a camp - and in a few minutes we will be walking on what doubtless is the oldest identifiable non-Indian historic trail in the United States!" Photographer Jerry Jacka pushes through chaparral and perceives evidence we are looking for.

"There's a line of rocks which seems to mark a trail over here," he shouts. We know now we are walking in the footsteps of Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The time capsule aspect of Coronado's saga and the perception that most of the landmarks he and his Spaniards saw are untouched by the passage of centuries are sources of wonder to me. It is astonishing that over eighty percent of the corridor the conquistadores followed from Naco on the Arizona border to the outskirts of Albuquerque is, even today, wild country unmarred by cities or surfaced roads. In our travels, Jacka and I decided these landforms deserve to be called Coronadoscapes - and the photographs in this issue of Arizona Highways Magazine are, for all practical purposes, a sampler of the scenery Don Francisco and his men encountered during their reconnaissance of this part of the world.

... if Coronado could make a similar reappearance, I have no doubt he would quickly orient himself. And riding along, Don Francisco might exclaim: “Chichilticale (Red House) was at the foot of that big mountain... there is the overlook where we first saw the despoblado (uninhabited country)... there is the spring where we pitched the Camp of Death... there is the stream where my hungry men caught fish... and there is the Bad Pass where the Indians of Cibola tried to ambush us.” And riding farther, he would also, at a glance, recognize the site of the village of Hawikuh and pick out unerringly the headland of El Morro and the rocky spires and escarpments of Acoma.

All my sheltered life I have been fascinated by stories of women who man fire towers, live on islands, in lighthouses on fogbound coasts, in wilderness cabins. Wondering what it would be like, wishing to do it. It occurs to me now, joltingly, that always they have had a sturdy man a ranger, husband, supervisor, a friendly neighbor with strong arms and protective instincts, to support them. I have no one. Seventy-three years old seventy-five-miles from city, friends, stores. No communication. My car two miles down canyon. A city woman with an arthritic shoulder, a gimpy hip, no resourceful abilities. How crazy can I be? How did I get into this...? I stand at an altitude of 4500 feet in the Upper Austral Life Zone in the Baboquivari foothills of Arizona, southwest of Tucson... Baboquivari Peak... three thousand feet above me.

The trees on Baboquivari are snow-covered. There is a skim of ice on the old pots and pans Rancher's Wife scatters everywhere for the peacocks to drink from. I can't net birds in this weather. They need every bit of their energy to stay alive, not to be pestered for scientific purposes. Even on a normal day, if it is chilly, a feathered scrap like a kinglet or a verdin will collapse in my hand, or cling to my warm fingers when I release it. I have a remedy for this. I tuck the bird down my front, where it just fits in that cozy, sweatered hollow. Warmer and revived it will scritch and scratch, demanding to get out.....I like words, day after day, no one to talk to but myself, I string words together as I run the nets. Using as subjects the flowers that have come into bloom along my paths, wind in the new mesquite leaves, the horses thumping the ground as they canter off, the cattle grouped, staring, by a fence. Shifting a word here and there; adding, subtracting, until their sounds and shapes satisfy me. When you are alone, your interior landscape is as important as the exterior, so I also build stories in my head about what I think and feel -all discarded when finally I find a bird in a net....I leave paragraphs in the air behind me as I do footprints in the sands of the creek. Like the footprints, a few of them may last and get written down in the evenings - a form of doodling to occupy me once I have recorded the day's meager scientific data, while the lamp hisses and the mice rustle....

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

APRIL 1985 Vol. 61, NO. 4 Publisher-Hugh Harelson Editor-Don Dedera Managing Editor-Richard G. Stahl Art Director-Gary Bennett Picture Editor-Peter Ensenberger Associate Art Director-Lorna Holmes Associate Editor-Robert J. Farrell Contributing Editors-Bill Ahrendt, Jo Baéza, Joe Beeler, Bob Bradshaw, Duane Bryers, Ed Cooper, Paul Dean, Dick Dietrich, Jack Dykinga, Carlos Elmer, Bernard Fontana, Barry Goldwater, Pam Hait, Jerry Jacka, Gill Kenny, Peter Kresan, Herb and Dorothy McLaughlin, Ray Manley, J. Peter Mortimer, David Muench, Charles Niehuis, Eari Petroff, Lawrence Clark Powell, Allen C. Reed, Jerry Sieve, Joe Stocker, Jim Tallon, Larry Toschik, Marshall Trimble, Lee Wells, Maggie Wilson.

Business Director-Jim Delzell Operations Director-Palle Josefsen Circulation Director-Sharon Vogelsang Marketing and Sales DirectorAlberto Gutier Governor of Arizona-Bruce Babbitt Director, Department of TransportationWilliam A. Ordway Arizona Transportation Board Chairman: Sondra Eisberg, Prescott; Members: Hal F. Butler, Show Low, Lynn M. Sheppard, Globe; Andrew Federhar, Tucson; Ted Valdez, Sr., Phoenix; Arthur C. Atonna, Douglas; Don Cooper, Mesa.

PICTURE THIS...!

On April 21, noon to five, Arizona Highways Magazine will celebrate its Sixtieth Anniversary. Among attractions:

Come join us for a festive afternoon at the magazine's headquarters: 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona.

Even by expanding pages from a normal forty-eight plus covers to fifty-two, this issue could not take notice of all deserving contributors. Since 1925 there have been more than 700 issues published. Basic arithmetic decrees space for only one-seven-hundredth of our heritage. Unsung, too, are our popular related products, such as calendars and prints and books of the Southwest. As we were going to press, an old-timer chided: "Can't you find room for your readers' favorite photo?" So, here it is-The Brave Poppy, by Esther Henderson, from December, 1949. Esther abandoned a career as ballet dancer to study at the New York Institute of Photography. For more than thirty years, she and her late husband, Chuck Abbott, wandered the Southwest in search of the perfect image. Esther today dwells in Santa Cruz, California, where she assists Salvation Army projects and teaches underprivileged youngsters. No stranger to tragedy, Esther through her life and her lens provides a symbol for her land and her journal... as the spirit of the poppy... victory over adversity.