SUN, SILENCE, AND BIGHORNS

K O F A

text continued from page 38 as a young man in the 1920s. Now he was near eighty and lived with his wife Evelyn on acres homesteaded before the Refuge existed. The old man and the young man struck a deal. Kearns would board with the couple in return for work around the place.

Livingston was a kind of natural monument in this country. When the federal cartographers mapped the region, they stayed at his place. In thanks they named the range behind his house the Livingston Hills.

The old man knew decades of the desert, winter and summer. When he met Kearns he found someone ready to absorb this knowledge whole.

Livingston and his wife existed in a tent, at first, twenty miles from town. Then he roofed a nearby cement tank, and the tank became home. There was no electricity, but the well was good. While he prospected, he tinkered with his patch of ground. Later he built a two-room cabin and then dug a cellar for storing meat and goods. The old cement water tank once more became a water tank, with the addition of two goldfish. He planted olive trees, raised chickens and guinea fowl. In the winter, they heated with ironwood and cooked on a wood stove. In the summer, from May 'till September, they put their beds outside and slept under the stars.

In 1939, he began a stone house, the blocks chiseled from basalt one by one. He laid out a huge living room, two bedrooms, dining room, and kitchen. Front and back boasted two long porches.

The work took eighteen years. Behind the big house, he built a swimming pool for water storage, then a bunk house for men he hired to mine a mineral claim. In the mid-sixties, his wife died. He later remarried. A woman from Chicago. Evelyn loved the place.

They read by lamplight, cooked over wood, heated with a fireplace. Out back was the shower. A tank painted black hung above the stall; the sun heated the water in the winter. In summer the tank was wrapped with wet burlap to cool the water. The five olive trees down by the wash prospered and became a good place to hang a hammock.

Several years ago Joe died. In 1983 Evelyn Livingston's granddaughter, Mary, came out for a visit from Michigan. Ron married her. Now the three live in the stone house with no electricity. The refrigerator runs off bottled gas, the newspaper is a couple of weeks late. There is no cooler, and summer means sleeping out in the yard. Laundry often as not is done by hand. There are 1400 books, and read ing is done under a gas light. Mary sews on a treadle-powered sewing machine. Out back, the two goldfish tossed by Joe Livingston into the cement tank in the late twenties have prospered. Forty or fifty generations have lived in the water. In bred, many are blind, their colors violent patchworks of orange and white, their eyes rimmed with flaming sockets.

For Ron Kearns the brown landscape of the Kofas lives and speaks. His years have taught him the names of the plants, and they flow easily from his tongue. Here, he says, and points to a low plant, Salazaria mexicana-a good food for cattle and sheep. Nearby is Crossosoma Bigelovii and Sunlight spilling through a side canyon (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 40 AND 41) illuminates blooming ocotillo deep within the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. (OPPOSITE PAGE) The refuge encompasses 660,000 acres of pristine desert, like Queen Canyon, framed by the splayed arms of an ocotillo. (ABOVE) Getting into and out of Palm Canyon takes sure footing on the steep trail. Reward is the sight of Arizona's only native palm trees, flourishing in their own tiny ecosystem. These forty-two hardy individuals are the only plants of this species growing in the wilds of Arizona. One of their distinguishing characteristics is the ability to self-prune dead fronds.

Providing bighorns with a dependable supply of water concerns wildlife managers in the Kofa. Natural water holes are enlarged, artificial water tanks are blasted out of solid rock, and small seeps are developed into reliable water sources. Ron Kearns (RIGHT) inspects a windmill pump at one of several man made water tanks, and (BOTTOM) examines the condition of the browse for large numbers of desert bighorn sheep as well as deer and feral burros. Brickellia atractyloides. The names come faster and faster. A growth with the look of jimson weed is Krameria Grayi or commonly, ratany, a favorite of cattle and sheep. An herb-like plant is desert lavender, Hyptis Emoryi, favored by oldtimers as a substitute for sage or, in a pinch, tobacco. He bends over a reed-like growth, the skin a gray-green, the wands leafless. Near the end of each reed is a thickening, almost a tumor. This is desert trumpet, Eri-ogonum inflatum. For him the Latin is not a dead language, the plants are not an inventory, and the heat of July has not cremated the life from the desert. Everything is in motion, and he can sense the motion as he moves through the land. There are favorite places, and Burro Canyon is one of them. Kearns' pickup climbs słowly up the dirt road off the floor as mesquite replaces ironwood along the wash. He pulls over to examine the white trumpet-like blossoms, a desert willow (Chilopsis linearis) in bloom. The slender green leaves hang like strands of pasta; the flowers seem like a cross between snapdragons and orchids. Finally the truck surrenders to the road; we park and hike up the canyon. Vireos flutter through the brush; a Wilson's warbler flashes in a paloverde. Kearns climbs a windmill at De la Osa Well to check the mechanism. He is part mechanic, part welder, part biologist, part peace officer, part laborer. Seven people work to keep up the Kofa, and Kearns, like the rest of them, is a jack of all trades. Higher up the canyon, we come to High Tank 8, a water hole maintained by the Refuge for the sheep. It is fenced to keep out wild burros. Doves swing over the water, and sheep tracks are everywhere. On the hillside is a blind where patient visitors can wait out the day in hopes of sighting a bighorn. We are higher and moister here; brittlebush that looked incinerated on the desert floor is thriving at this altitude. Kearns plucks a paper flower, a dried bloom that looks like a daisy. The flower wavers from yellow to off-white. It is 2:00 PM. and 110 degrees. The hills above the tank are laced with game trails. High above, uric acid stains a cliff wall beneath a hawk roost. Near the truck, four mule deer, a buck and three does, stare down from the ridge. The buck is in velvet. The deer look, disappear behind the ridge, and then reappear and stare some more. They stand broadside on the hilltop silhouetted against the blue sky. They live in homes designed by the wind. The rock walls along Burro Canyon are pocked with caves scoured by currents of air working with sand. Bighorns find them good places to bunk.

KOFA KOFA

We roll down from the hillsides and spill out onto the low desert again. Kearns stops below Budweiser Spring and says this is camp for the night. The Kofas are a wall of rock to the south, the spring hidden high up in a stone cleft. Kearns sets up his cot, fires up a stove. He says there is one thing old-timers can teach you in the Kofa: get as comfortable as you can.

The Kofa does not produce events, it puts forth a flow of sensations. The way light falls on a cholla, the message of coyote tracks in a wash, the flit of a bird on the rim of vision, the stillness of the plants waiting out the heat of the day.

Kearns accepts the quiet of daily events. Once, while driving along, three badgers, a mother and two young, strolled out on the road. He stopped the truck, and the mother scurried off. But the young stood their ground and came at the huge machine. They clawed at the tires and hissed and hissed before they melted away.

That is a Kofa headline.

Usually, it is more like watching a tarantula hawk whirr across camp. Or taking in the colors as the sun dies in the west. First the world is glare, then yellow, then rose, and then, after the ball of fire has disappeared behind the mountains, it goes blood red, an intense, violent, red.

A poorwill sounds. Then a great horned owl. Then a screech owl. Then silence. Coyotes bark and howl and fall away. The sliver of a new moon slips below the horizon to the west. Night takes the Kofa, and bats course just above our heads.

"You won't believe it," Kearn says, "but I really like the summers. That time of the morning around 4:00 when it's so still, and you can hear the quail--that is the most beautiful time of day." He does not intend to ever leave. His eyes sweep the Kofa slumbering in the dark heat.

Kearns sighs, "This is my niche."

Kearns realizes that the Kofa does not offer the easiest life for him and his wife and Evelyn. He says "there's a lot of hardships living like that but there's lots of benefits."

Someday he thinks they'll get electricity. when photovoltaic cells drop in price, and they set up a solar system. But he's not too concerned. He swears he will never have a television set. He lives a life out of the ordinary. When his wife told him a rock formation in the Kofa looked like a famous movie villain of our time, he did not know what she was talking about.

Here Nolina Bigelovit means something. Darth Vader means nothing.

The place has taught Kearns the taste of pleasures lost in other lives.

He says, "Sometimes on the weekend, I'll lay in the hammock among the olive trees and hang cloth canteens from the limbs, and then, when the water cools, I'll pour them over my body and get chill bumps and be cool."

He worries about spilling the details of his life because he does not want anything to get in the way of the Kofa and the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge and the things he sees, tastes, smells, senses in this place. He does not want a conflict between his love for this land and the land itself.

In one of Kearns' stabs at explaining the Kofa and understanding the Kofa, he said, "You have to spend four or five summers here without any cooling. Yes. Yes, indeed.

"Hear that?" Kearns asks, "hear that drip, drip, drip?" That, he allows, is a rare sound here.

We are at Jasper Springs where a slender pipe seeps water drop by drop into a tank for the sheep. A green tongue of grass licks down the wash fueled by the trickle of water. The spring is surrounded by a metal fence to keep out wild burros. The burros would drive off the sheep, foul the water, devastate the plants. The sheep can clear the fence, the burros cannot.

The burros have been largely trapped out of the Kofa and put up for adoption. Kearns has seen them come up to the fence and stand there for half an hour and stare. Then they turn and go back into the dry desert.

We head north to High Tank No. 2. Kearns wants to show off the sheep of the Kofa. They are, after all, the reason the place was originally set aside. The small water hole sits high on a mountainside, Beneath lie feathers from doves where a bobcat dined. Scott's orioles dart from tree to tree; doves skim the water. A prairie falcon waits patiently on the hillside.

High up, three sheep, a ram, a ewe, and a lamb, browse. Their white rumps reveal their presence. They watch us and drift up the rock walls.

We wait. After an hour a ewe climbs out on a ledge nearby. She stands in the open, her shedding coat a patchwork of hair. Her color blends in perfectly with the stone and grass and shrubs and trees and cactus of the Kofa.

There is not much to say about a bighorn on a mountain of cliffs in the morning sun in the Kofa. The power can be felt. The thing is complete. The life of the land is summed up in one glance.

The sheep stands minute after minute after minute.

We are silent.

Kearns says this is a place he brings his wife.

COMING YOUR WAY

or stirring adventures in the South-west's glorious outdoors, try places where recreation and scenery and education often blend with colorful history: Arizona's nineteen state parks. Come...expand your leisure travel horizons. In the January, 1986, issue.

Meet Arizona's Old Pueblo, Tucson, through the folks that call this Sun Country Wonderland home. Doctors, teachers, legislators, painters, students, homemakers, the man on the street, and a host of other interesting Tucsonans share their love letters to their own hometown. In the February, 1986, issue.

Thousands of acres of Arizona recently were designated wilderness... areas scattered in all parts of the state, many never before seen in the pages of Arizona Highways. Explore these natural treasures in mountain, desert, and canyon, through the eyes of our photographers and writers. In the March, 1986, issue.

Arizona and just about every other state in the Sun Belt is turning a pleasant shade of gray. And we're celebrating with most of an issue. Our story will tell about the dramatic social and economic impact of Americans who are living longer. Also read about retire-ment communities throughout Arizona. In the April, 1986, issue.

SHARE THE ARIZONA ADVENTURE, start an Arizona Highways gift subscription. You can send 12 months of adventure to your friends and family with our special gift subscription offer. Order a one-year subscription at the regular $15 price, and each additional gift subscription is only $13. That's an $8 savings off the newsstand price. Call us today at (602) 258-1000 or write us at Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.

BOOKSHELF

ARIZONA LANDMARKS. Text by James E. Cook. Produced by Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009. (602)258-1000. 1985. 160 pages. $35.00, hardcover. Available through the enclosed order form.

Arizona Highways Magazine is sixty years old this year, a time of maturity and the arrival of wisdom. Throughout the year, various events have been scheduled and items created in observance of the sixtieth anniversary. The dinners have been held. The speeches made and faded from memory. A festive afternoon of celebration with music, balloons, and souvenirs was enjoyed by some 3000 people. The last song has been sung. The balloons busted and the souvenir T-shirts have been through four washes. Now comes something with an element of immortality.

Arizona Landmarks is a collection from six decades. It focuses on the landmarks of the state, natural and man-made, physical features which give Arizona both a varied and constant character. Four chapters of the book are devoted to the deserts, mountains, canyons, and plateaus. Many of the 180 photographs and art reproductions are two-page spreads, twenty inches across. The pages, done on a super high-quality paper, measure ten by thirteen inches. Part of the geological collage that is Arizona is on virtually every page. A desert scene with veins of malapai streaking down the sides of a saguaro-studded slope. From the high country, an SOUTHWEST COOKING: NEW AND OLD. By Ronald Johnson. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131. 1985. 304 pages. $17.50, hardcover edition.

To quote the author, "Chiles are chic." From Santa Fe to Los Angeles and now eastward, the oldest cooking traditions of the United States have grown from satisfying and simple "bowls of red" to artful interpretations of native Southwestern cuisine. One has but to glance through the pages of current food magazines to feel the heat of this whole affair. A wide range of styles are emerging from the historical base. Refined and inventive approaches of those like John Sedlar of St. Estephe in Manhattan Beach, and Mark Miller of the new Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe have actually created a contemporary cuisine overview of a ragged lawn of ponderosa pines, apparently unending. And pink, blue, purple, and blood-red canyons, which gossip about the Earth's age; formations and colors created only by eons. The plateaus, moody and modestly adorned; the pages of the planet's history which offered ease of travel for the early colonizers and Army surveys that timidly probed the land. Landmarks sometimes lost in space.

The text, written by Arizona native James E. Cook, is a mother lode of social and natural history. Cook is a gifted writer whose research was assiduously done in both book and backcountry. With his father as guide, he began a half-century ago to learn the landmarks of Arizona. With this intimate relationship came the history, facts, and folklore he so masterfully weaves into the text. History is the story of people. Cook gives us profiles of such diverse Arizona characters as General George Crook; the dynamic Sharlot Hall; the masters of creative lying, Dick Wick Hall and John Hance; and the peacemakers, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and Jacob Hamblin, Mormon apostle to the Indians.

A generous offering of art is contained within the book: artists of both lens and brush. A sixty-year collection of pictures past. The fine photography of numerous, talented people from C.S. Fly to David Muench. Here too is the work of John Mix Stanley, the first established American artist to travel and record Arizona, as well as the skillful bird studies of Larry Toschik. The bequest of artists Moran, Santee, and De Grazia all enrich the publication.

In 1925 the Arizona Highway Department began publishing a monthly bulletin giving reports on highway conditions and plans for the future. Soon, scattered among the requests for proposals and the asphalt ads, photographs depicting Arizona's scenic attractions began to appear. Then came the visionaries, the men and women who encouraged the evolutionary process resulting in the prestigious publication of today. The story of the pioneers has not been omitted. Arizona Landmarks acknowledges the contribution these pioneer publishers made to the state they loved and lived in.

Arizona Landmarks will receive well-deserved attention from the publishing world and be cherished by those who acquire it. As a gift, it will be not only welcome, it will be remembered. It is not just another book about Arizona. It is a book about beauty.

Aside from Southwestern ingredients that puts incredible polish on the old and rural basics. At the other end of the spectrum is Diana Kennedy who promotes authenticity and the continuation of indigenous cuisines and ingredients. This expanded effort by Mr. Johnson, a revised edition of his earlier Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking, is by design neither culinary virtuosity nor historical preservation. His affection and admiration is for the regional and traditional dishes he has collected and nurtured over the years. This book will serve a large portion of the cooking public quite well. The recipes are clear, complete, and rarely encompass more than one page of effort for the cook. Necessary ingredients are easily and locally accessible. In addition to the 260 pages of well organized recipes, short but helpful appendixes on regional ingredients and menus are included. With the debatable exception of the oregano in his posole, one should find little fault with this neat and tasty book. -Ted Schleicher (INSIDE BACK COVER) Palm Canyon, a rugged cleft in the Kofa Mountains of western Arizona, is the only place in the state where California fan palms grow without human help. A signed turn-off to the canyon forks east from U. S. Route 95, nineteen miles south of Quartzsite. Thomas L. Danielsen photo (BACK COVER) A sunset-streaked jet contrail creates a timeless vision of peaceful coexistence at the confluence of the Colorado and Bill Williams rivers in western Arizona. Jack Dykinga photo