FROM TUCSON WITH LOVE

Old Puebloans, old and new alike, infatuated with their city, share pride and concern for a burgeoning community.

It is loud, brassy, and unabashedly emotional, abounding with blazing trumpets, syncopated guitar strumming, rhythmic yelping, and exuberant whistling, all berded along by the tubby thumping of a guitarron, Mexico's answer to the double bass. It is the livelihood of Gilbert Velez, thirty-six, whose band, the International Mariachi America, has been judged the nation's best in three consecutive competitions. I was a student at All Saints Catholic School in 1963 when Father Charles Rourke, an Irishman from Chicago, came to be our priest. He had been a jazz musician before he was a priest, and he was a fantastic piano player. He didn't know much about mariachis, but he saw that the Mexican children in the school didn't appreciate the music of their own culture. He was afraid a whole tradition would vanish. So he got a bunch of us together in 1964, listening to records of mariachi music. We'd rehearse every Sunday in the church basement. We had to get an Anglo to play the violin. Back then Mexican boys wouldn't be caught dead with a violin; it wasn't macho. People began to hear about us, and before long they'd want us to play when there was a fiesta or something. Father Rourke was always calling us monkeys, so we named ourselves Los Changuitos Feos, The Ugly Little Monkeys.

As people graduated from Los Changuitos over the years, they formed groups. I was one of the first members of Mariachi Cobre in 1970, and in 1980 I left to start International Mariachi America.

From Tucson

It is said that a mariachi will try anything, and we do. A true mariachi has to know 5000 songs. We play all the traditional sones and rancheras of Mexico, but we also play Brahms' Hungarian Dance Number Five, and "Hello, Dolly."

In Tucson, the mariachi has become part of the culture of the whole society, not just Mexican. We play for more Anglo functions than Hispanic functions. We play for everything from baptisms to funerals. When a group has a convention here, one day has to be a fiesta with mariachis playing.

Every year Mariachi Vargas comes here from Mexico City, and every year they're more impressed. They see the kids and how professional they are, and they tell me-half joking, half serious-that pretty soon they're going to have to import Mexico's mariachis from Tucson.

In Tucson, 1985 was the year of the great flood-of billboards. As a by-product of the city's booming economy, scores of new ones popped up, touting everything from cool drinks to good works. Some citizens, fed up with seeing advertising in the desert sky, mobilized for a fight. Among them was Peggy Hamilton Lockard, fifty-four, a member of the Citizen Sign Code Committee.

The billboard people brought this on themselves. Kino Boulevard was the catalyst. When it opened to traffic for the first time early in 1985, there were already billboards on it. The transportion department was very upset, as were a number of private citizens. So the mayor and council asked us to drop what we were doing and look at the billboard issue immediately. Before we could, the billboard people were at City Hall promising "restraint"; then they turned around and filed for a bunch of new permits. So we said, "Hey, wait a minute: if this is the kind of thing that's going to happen around here, we need to be a lot stricter."

My personal view is that billboards add nothing to the environment. We could have such a beautiful city. But we don't have a great many trees. Back East billboards at least are softened by the foliage around them. In Tucson, the billboards stick out like sore thumbs, blocking the dramatic views that are around every turn.

I think the esthetics of the city are terribly important. I've been told that when companies scout a city for a new plant site the first criterion is what its government offers them, and the second is the quality of its physical environment.

Hawaii has banned billboards completely. So has Vermont. Oregon is working on it. Tourism is important in these states, as in Arizona. The billboard people say their signs are a service to tourists. But one-third of Hawaii's income is from tourism, and Hawaii has stuck with its ban.

I believe people have a right to say what their city is going to look like. Civic leaders and citizens are saying, "We don't like what's happening to our city; we want something done about it."

That's one of the wonderful things about Tucson: people care. But becoming involved in something like the billboard issue is not easy because you have to be willing to make people on the other side unhappy. You have to be willing to stand up for what you believe.

Editor's note: The Tucson City Council voted in October to ban new billboards larger than seventy-four square feet except along freeways. In an advisory referendum on November 5, 1985, voters agreed.

Ion Huang and Josephine Yeh, young marrieds from Taiwan, are graduate students at the University of Arizona. Each applied to half a dozen American universities; UofA accepted them both. They feel this was not a coincidence.

Zion: It is a miracle, I think. Before we came here, because we are Christians, we pray every day for God to show us the way. And when we pray, one sentence came into our mind from the Bible: In the desert, I can open a highway for you. (Isaiah 43:19.) Josephine: We took the plane, and we fly directly from Taiwan to Los Angeles, and then to Tucson. When we flew over the mountains to land in Tucson, we feel very surprised, because all we can see is yellow sand and little bushes. It's like Zion's father said when he first saw it from the plane: "Is this America?" He could not believe it. But when we get off the plane and go to the city and see downtown, we feel better.

Zion: We find many things different. For example, we sing in the choir at First United Methodist Church. The director is very, very precise in what he asks us to do. We all have to cut off and breathe at precisely the same time. It is not the same in our country. We learn a lot from choir here, and enjoy it.

Josephine: We find many things the same. When my mother-in-law came, she brought me a big bag of garlic. She thought I wouldn't have any here.

Most Americans are nice. They help each other in times of trouble. But we have met some people at the university who are not very kind. For example, last semester I have to take a course that is a requirement for all the students in the College of Education, but that course I have already taken in my country. I think I can waive that course, take more advanced or helpful course. But when I try to tell the professor, he didn't pay attention to my words, and he ignored me.

Zion: We really try to maintain a straight-A. Sometimes we will be working until 3:00 in the morning. I think it comes from our environment. Taiwan does not have very good economic environment. Everybody knows from the time he is young he will have to work hard and be a very good child to your parents, but you have to express it by taking care of them.

Sometimes I feel very grave because I'm almost thirty years old, and married, and I still cannot support my parents. I work twenty hours a week at the university, and make five dollars an hour.

But last summer I brought them to Tucson and to the Grand Canyon, and my mother said a word to me which just touched me. She said, "I never have such a great time in my life!" I want to say, "Mother, I want to make you feel this good the rest of your life."

To someone who knows Spanish, la paloma means "the dove." To Tucsonans, La Paloma means the most expensive and ambitious development in the city's history: 800 acres of six-figure homes, office buildings, a resort and country club in the desert foothills forming the northern arm of Tucson's mountainous cradle. When finished, La Paloma will be worth 800 million dollars. Behind it are brothers George and David Mebl. George, the elder, is thirty-six. I came to Tucson without any intention of staying. I was on a tennis scholarship at the University of Arizona, but by the time I was a sophomore, I didn't want to be a tennis player. By the time I was a junior, I fell in love with Tucson, and wanted to make a career here.

After I graduated, my dad lent me a little bit of money, and I went out and bought some clunky old houses. I'm not a very good craftsman, but I learned a bit about pounding nails and plumbing. So I fixed the houses and sold them. Four years later, I went into partnership with my younger brother, David, and, by the late 1970s, we started developing some good-sized apartment complexes and shopping centers, and accelerated from there. Whatever market we entered, we tried to do a little better than the next guy. We have always tried to add an extra level of quality, whether it be an apartment complex, a shopping center, a townhouse project, or La Paloma.

The reason? We decided Tucson was the environment where we wanted to raise our families and spend the rest of our lives. We decided whatever we built, we would be looking at for the next thirty or forty years.

It was unrealistic for anyone to think that La Paloma property wasn't going to be developed. The county didn't have the money to buy it and make it a wilderness park. So, given that, why not let us take a shot at doing something special?

There are some insensitive developments in the foothills, and county government is as much a culprit as anyone, if not more so. They allow power lines to tower over the saguaro; they cut through the hills for roadways. On the private side, you find the same kind of insensitivity. Everything you build in the Sonoran Desert sticks out. So, in architecture, the colors ought to be the pastels of the desert, and the landscaping ought to be natural. Our dream is that La Paloma will stand as an example for future developments, especially in terms of the environment and architectural sensitivity.

Nothing is wrong with palm trees and grass, but they should not dominate Tucson. We have some unique vegetation. Even if you just look at it from the standpoint of market value, saguaros have value. Paloverdes and mesquites have value. Not to realize this is a mistake.

There are headaches and problems in this business, but the fun comes in creating environments for people to dream about and want to come to. It's almost like being in the entertainment business.

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Long known for its dude ranches, Tucson has Western appeal but also offers visitors luxury resorts; several are nestled in the foothills on the city's north side. (LEFT) The Westin La Paloma features a twenty-sevenhole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus, fitness center, competitionsize swimming pool, championship-caliber tennis court (including a sunken stadium court) - and, of course, the 488-room hotel. GILL KENNY (TOP) As with other foothills retreats, Loews Ventana Canyon Resort has taken great pains to keep its desert surroundings as natural as possible. More than 350 giant saguaros were saved during construction and transplanted on the resort grounds, which contain nature trails and an eighty-foot-high natural waterfall. ALAN MANLEY (ABOVE) You can saddle up and explore the high desert at the Sheraton El Conquistador, where trail rides and bikes into the Santa Catalina Mountains are available just beyond your room. El Conquistador also features swimming, golf, tennis, bicycling, and a health club, along with spectacular views. CARLOS ELMER

(INSETS, LEFT TO RIGHT) According to a recent survey, Old Tucson Western Theme Park is the second-most-visited attraction in Arizona, next to the Grand Canyon. DICK DIETRICH Tucson Museum of Art has changing exhibits of crafts and fine arts and a large permanent collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. ALAN MANLEY The Tucson Festival is an annual cultural heritage celebration presenting Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and pioneer American events. GILL KENNY Pima Air Museum preserves memorabilia of aviation history, from models and uniforms to fighter planes and bombers. ALAN MANLEY Stellar attraction on the University of Arizona campus is Flandrau Planetarium, interpreting the space sciences in imaginative ways. JACK DYKINGA

From Tucson

(RIGHT) Mission San Xavier del Bac, begun in 1783 and completed in 1797, ministers to the Papago Indians. DIANNE DIETRICH-LEIS (BELOW) Tucson at dusk, from Cathedral Rock in the Santa Catalina Mountains. JACK DYKINGA (OPPOSITE PAGE) Neighboring Tucson to the west is Kitt Peak Observatory, on the Papago Indian Reservation RANDY PRENTICE

From Tucson

Not very long ago, Tucson was a city with a relaxed, mellow, Type B personality. This was part of its charm, but also a wellspring of exasperationtion. People complained that sometimes it seemed awfully hard to get work done here to big-city standards. This is chang ing. Meet Frantz Resille, forty, native of Haiti, and relentless perfectionist.

Our custom paint jobs start at 1200 dollars. A restoration can cost 6500 dollars to 10,000 dollars. A lot of our work is Jaguar and Mercedes.

To paint a car correctly, you have to sandblast to bare metal. If you put paint on top of paint, a few years later it will crack. We put on eight to thirteen coats, then leave it in the sun to cure for four or five days. Then take wet sandpaper, 1200 grit, and wet-sand two or three coats off.

Yes, of course by hand! I'm lucky I don't have one arm bigger than the other.

Then you buff with a high-grade compound, buff to where you cannot even burn the paint. It will be just like glass. After that, remove all the swirl marks from the compound. Then change the pad on the buffing machine again and use fill-in glaze. This gives it that slick look, like the paint is wet all the time. And in the rain, you will find it is so slick that all the water slides off. The water molecules cannot grip the paint.

Yes, it is a lot of work. The love has to be there.

My parents in Haiti once promised me all the education I want. They said, you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, anything. And if you turn out to be a shoeshiner, then do it with class.

There is nothing wrong with painting carsif you choose to be an artist.

Rory McCarthy is a designer whose furniture is gathering international National acclaim. Last year he designed and built a 20,000-dollar desk that wears a carved oak sixteenth-century Italian ian palazzo on its front like a mask. It won one of four top awards in Progressive sive Architecture magazine's Fifth Annual International Furniture Competition. McCarthy, thirty-seven, lives in downtown Tucson with his wife and two children in a century-old adobe row house. He also works downtown. The heart of Tucson is one of his favorite subjects.

It always amazed me when I talked to people about downtown. There was this consensus, almost self-congratulatory, that "downtown is dead."

But what's amazing me now is how quickly this attitude has changed-in one year. There are a lot of forces acting on downtown now, not all of them positive, but nobody is saying it's dead.

In El Presidio, my neighborhood, law yers are picking up some of the old houses and restoring them for offices. I'm grateful they're perceptive enough to see the value in this little bit of history we have left. Otherwise it would have been bulldozed for another civic center or some redevelopment program.

On the other hand, this neighborhood is perhaps too cute for its own good. As When I came to this country in 1967, I looked for a skill, something to do. A friend of mine, a Haitian, taught me to work on cars. We worked on the sidewalks of New York. It was the easiest way to start working for myself. Ever since I was a child, I hate to take orders.

I came to Tucson in 1979. At first I had to have a job. I went to paint and body shops looking for a job that would pay at least $7.50 an hour. They would look at me and laugh. I had made twenty-two dollars an hour in New York.

That's the problem Tucson faces: people don't want to pay for excellence. When you have a person working for you, you have to create a decent environment. If, at the end of a week, you have paid a person so little he doesn't have enough to buy a tool he might need, how are you going to build the love he will need to do the job?

As the rest of downtown redevelops, there is more and more pressure on El Presidio from economic forces tending to turn these houses into restaurants, boutiques, and little gift shops.

But I'm optimistic. I think we can maintain a balance between residential and commercial properties.

Partly, our downtown renaissance coincides with the national trend to reassign value to a place's history. America developed on the idea of relinquishment, the turning away from roots. But now that we're growing up, and things are slowing down a bit, people are starting to say, "Gee, what'd we leave in the dust back there?" In Tucson, our roots are downtown. The presidio is the seed from which Tucson grew.

The other force acting on downtown is the sensation that Tucson is becoming a real city. Up till now, we've enjoyed ourselves as kind of a big town. But I think we're at a point where enough people want urban quality here that it's going to happen. The desert's wonderful; suburbia's wonderful; but there's something wonderful about a city, too.

We can have high rises, but we can keep our history, too. We can still have neighborhoods like this, where you step across the threshold of an adobe house into a cool zaguán (entryway) and feel you have stepped back 100 years.

Helen Ingram has a parable for Tucson. Two friends are at a soda fountain, sipping one soda through two straws. They are sipping very slowly to make it last. Suddenly a crowd bursts in, everyone grabs a straw, and the rest of the soda vanishes in a flash. The newcomers scatter, leaving the thirsty couple to contemplate their empty glass and mutter, "We should have drunk it all before they got here." Ingram, forty-eight, is a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. Her specialty is the politics of water resource management.

Tucson has changed its attitudes about water in the fifteen years I've lived here. We have a "Beat the Peak" program, in which people voluntarily refrain from outdoor watering during certain hours. We have a groundwater management plan to halt groundwater depletion by the year 2025. And we are not using as much water per capita as we once did.

What bothers me is this: what are people saving water for?

If it's to keep it in the aquifer for future generations, or for environmental amenities such as public landscaping, then it seems to me those are justifiable reasons. If the real reason is so we can grow to a metropolis of 1.8 million people by 2025, as is projected, then I'm wondering if that is a sensible trade-off for the people who are doing the saving.

At current rates of growth and use, we have maybe ninety years' secure supply of groundwater. That sounds like a lot, but, in fact, we are increasing our rate of growth and accelerating the demands on that water supply.

I've been working on a paper with a colleague who has developed a model of land use and growth patterns in Tucson. He argues, with mathematical figures that certainly convince me, that without some real changes in water use, we're growing much too fast and eating up the desert with housing development much too rapidly. What that means is we are going to have to start sacrificing some amenities. It won't be just our big lawns; it will mean the end of most outdoor watering in Tucson.

I am very sympathetic toward the notion that the desert should look like the desert; that huge green lawns are probably out of character. At the same time, it would be a strange position to take that trees and greenery don't have a place where people live. If we want to make some choices about the quality of life in Tucson, it seems to me that fewer of us can live here much better. We're an awfully big town, growing very rapidly in a fragile environment with very limited carrying capacity. Water is going to become very expensive. Air pollution is going to get very bad. The dust is going to grow worse. Why do we want to do this to ourselves?

I'm not an environmentalist or a politician. I write about water policy strictly as a scholar. But I think the role of the scholar is to voice concerns that await future generations, or to advocate values that aren't strong in the current political marketplace. It certainly isn't our job to parrot conventional wisdom.

From Tucson

In recent years, Mexican food has emigrated over a hemisphere. Mexican restaurants thrive from Des Moines to Paris. In Tucson, however, it is not a mere industry, but a passion. More than eighty Mexican restaurants compete for business here, and aficionados constantly argue over who makes the wickedest machaca or the most authentic cocido. The rare local who shuns Mexican food is regarded as a creature from a distant galaxy. Alva B. Torres, fifty-three, Mexican cooking columnist, elaborates.

Most of Mexican cooking has its roots in Indian cooking. Very little has to do with Spain. And that's logical. The Spanish conquistadores married Indian women. And who did the cooking? The women. My earliest memories of food come mostly from my grandmother, who would come to Tucson from Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico, and visit for months. Mama Bella didn't cook just what we think of as Mexican food today. Mazatlán had a lot of German people, and she had combined German and Mexican cooking. For example, she would make little potato dumplings and drop them in consommé, where Mexicans would have used albóndigas, or spiced meatballs. There are many reasons why Mexican food has become so popular. It really does have a good taste. You can cook a lot of it very easily. It's not like French cuisine. If you don't know how to cook at all, you may start with Mexican food. There aren't a lot of things you can do wrong. The rules are not at all strict. We think of tacos as beef or chicken, but in Mazatlán they make them out of fresh tuna. Mexican food is pretty. Colors are bright. On the same plate you will have avocado, tomato, cheese, and chile. It can appeal to a full gamut of palates. You can make a salsa that has no picante, no hot whatsoever, or you can have a bowl of torrid jalapeños for people to chew on. We have some misconceptions about Mexican food. It's not just tacos, burritos, enchiladas. In Mexico, these are called antojitos-whimsical foods, as Americans would think of hot dogs. The middle-class Mexican or Mexican-American family eats roast, fish, chicken, and pork. But we always have beans; we always have tortillas; we always have salsa. So no matter what you've cooked, when you add salsa and wrap it in a tortilla, it turns into Mexican food.

Jimmy Stewart, forty-four, is the weatherman on Tucson's most improbably named television station, KOLD-TV. He is also working toward a degree in meteorology at the University of Arizona. Like many Tucsonans, he is a weather refugee. I was managing a radio station in Des Moines when we decided to move out West. Our best friends had already moved to Phoenix. So one January, to escape the Iowa winter, we came out to visit them. And when we returned, everybody we ran into said, "If you like Phoenix, move to Tucson. It's much nicer." So we included Tucson on our list of cities where we were looking, and it's the one that worked out. The quality of life here is very, very good. And I think that's contributed to an interesting phenomenon in television in Tucson. Traditionally, a market this size is considered to be a jumping-off place. But there are several of us in television here who've decided to stay. It's not just for the weather; there are professional rewards, too. I think television here is better than in other markets this size. I think we're as good and maybe better than Phoenix, which is three times our size. I think Tucson's character does have a lot to do with its weather, though. It's sunny most of the time, and that has an uplifting effect on feelings. I find people being very friendly here; it's as though they have life kicked. Summer here is about a month too long. So I think the ideal thing is to get away for June. Then when you come back the summer thunderstorms are about to start. They're violent and dangerous, yet they're also beautiful. The weather in almost all the United States is dominated by winds called the westerlies. As it gets warmer, they migrate farther north. Then the high-pressure area, which is normally in the Caribbean, moves toward Gulf of Mexico latitudes. There's a big clockwise circulation around it, and it brings warm, wet air into Mexico. By July, moist air from the Gulf of Califor nia and the mountains of northern Mexico pushes into southern Arizona. The winds come from the south-and the summer rainy season is under way.

Once it moves in, we have really hot, humid days-perhaps 100 degrees by early afternoon. But hot air wants to rise, and if there's enough moisture in it, clouds will form, generally over the mountainous areas. The clouds grow higher and higher, to where it's really cold, and then the air starts to sink fast, creating a downdraft. It brings a lot of moisture with it. When these downdraft winds near the ground, they push horizontally along the surface. They may start out at your back, but then as the cloud moves on, they may blow in your face. At the same time, water droplets are translating into very heavy rain, and we're getting a lot of lightning. I'm glad we have a hot summer and at least some nasty weather. Otherwise this city would be eight million people by now.

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Spectacular scenery surrounds Tucson. (CLOCKWISE, FROM RIGHT) Finger Rock, Santa Catalina Mountains. JACK DYKINGA Sabino Canyon. WILLARD CLAY Bear Canyon. DAVID MUENCH Saguaro National Monument. RANDY PRENTICE

From Tucson

Text continued from page 16 In high school in Minnesota, Gary Gisselman immersed himself in both theater and theology. After graduation, an instructor at the seminary asked him to make a choice. “What's it going to be, Gary? Jesus or Shakespeare?” He replied, “Why do you think the two are mutually exclusive?” Gisselman, forty-five, has been artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company since 1980.

The first time I heard from Tucson was in 1978, when David Hawkanson, then managing director of ATC, called to ask if I would direct a play called Fashion. “We were just sitting around the pool talking about it,” he said, “and we thought you might be interested.” This was in February, and in Minneapolis, we weren't exactly “sitting around the pool.” After I had worked with David for five years, I saw this was his ploy with everybody.

This is a different kind of community than I've lived in before, and that's influenced my selection of plays. I think that people have moved here to get away from things: cold weather, families, commitments. So I've done plays like Our Town and Taming of the Shrew that I thought might help generate more of a sense of community among us.

I'm very interested in the idea of the theater as a forum, a place where we congregate as a community. If we all sit around at home watching television, then we disintegrate as a community.

We struggle with the question of what it means to be a regional theater. Should we be bringing the plays of the world to this region? Do we have an obligation to be dealing with the water problem, or Indians, or immigration? I don't know. I do know that Arizonans do not want to see plays about cowboys-unless they happen to be good plays.

I think one problem the theater should be addressing is morality. It's hard for us to talk about it in this country because we have no language for it anymore; all we have are clichés and catchwords. Another is freedom. We all talk about what we want to be free from, but what do we want to be free for? These are what I call the 4:00 AM. questions, and they are questions the theater can help us deal with.

ATC is now just about in a position to do anything we want to. We have the technical capabilities; we have the community support, and we have a reputation among actors nationwide that this is a good place to work. But the other night, someone said, “You know, Gary, we're getting more and more competent, and the technical level is extremely high, but I'm not surprised by the things we do anymore.” I think he said something valuable, that maybe we're becoming too slick. And I think that's a real danger.

Her beat is the Sonoran Desert. As the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum's “coordinator of special events,” a job she invented, Muffin Burgess leads people on nocturnal forays in search of toads and tarantulas, or on weekend trips to the tide pools of the Sonoran coast. She is an exuberant forty.

Someone once said that everything that lives on the desert will either stick you, sting you, or bite you. That makes it sound like a tough place to love, but it isn't. The love comes after you understand why they stick or sting or bite and learn to admire them for what they do to survive.

One of the neatest programs we have is called “Nightstalkers.” We go out on the museum grounds at night and talk about the night pollinators, such as hawk moths and bats. We learn about the Sonoran Desert toad, which will devour its weight in insects in one night. We've often seen rattlesnakes; we always see tarantulas. These are scary creatures at first encounter, but once you begin to understand their ecological niche, you begin to appreciate them.

I find people also learn about the desert through their palates. In June, we meet early in the morning to go out and collect the saguaro fruit and talk about why the plant is doing what it's doing.

Why, for example, are the fruits thirty feet up in the air? The answer is that the saguaro evolved in a denser environment, a thorn forest, where it had to thrust its flowers above the other plants for bats to see and pollinate.

We end with a feast of all native foods: saguaro jelly, cholla buds that we've collected with museum members in previous months, bread made with flour from mesquite pods. I've had some people say it's like a sacrament that all of us desert people are sharing.

It's easy for me to be in love with this desert. I can see things and learn about them more easily than I could in a place where they're concealed by masses of greenery. You can see patterns in the landscape. In the city, the cardinal direc-tions are defined by the mountains. And Tucson seems to have every kind of mountain. Bumpy and knobby, big and spread out, and awesome spires. I feel a mother image in the mountains. It's as if we are the children, being embraced, and the mountain is the mother.

It's a lush, colorful desert. Even though we average only eleven inches of rainfall in a year, it comes in two seasons when totally different sets of plants respond to hot-wet versus cold-wet. We have a much richer array of flora because of that.

I've taken Israelis through the Desert Museum. They come to the entrance patio, look around in bewilderment, and say, “So where's the desert?”

Editor's note:

On October 25, 1985, Arizona High-ways-and the world at large-lost a good friend. Co-founder and director emeritus of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, William H. Carr died at the age of eighty-three. An educator, naturalist, humanist, museum designer, and writer, he helped launch in 1952 what is today the largest and most famous outdoor, liv-ing, regional natural history museum in the world. At the onset he made this state-ment, which enshrined him in the hearts of nature lovers everywhere: "The idea we are thinking of here is outdoor conservation education as typified by the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum ...education employed as a means of helping man to recognize and assume his responsibilities toward nature in order to gain some hope of assuring his future. The time for widespread implementation of this kind of endeavor is now, before man succeeds in totally defiling his habi-tat and making it unlivable." We will miss him.Robert W. Webb makes Arizona's first commercial wine since statebood. He owns a vineyard eighty miles east of Tucson, and is bottling 3000 cases yearly of vintage cabernet sauvignon, petit sirah, French colombard, and other varietals in his pilot winery in Tucson. He is forty-four, and possessed of a grand vision for Arizona's newborn wine industry. The first time we made cabernet: fiasco! We had twenty-two tons of grapes. We started pressing at 5:00 PM., and it took ten of us all night. We were working with this Italian press that we had never used before. We had people turning pumps on with the valves shut, and hoses blowing off, and grape juice all over everything, including the ceiling. That was 1980. I look back, and I'm amazed. The last time we pressed, four of us were cranking off eight-ton shots every two and a half hours. And we've been putting down some pretty good wines. I have a nice letter here. A customer had bought a case of our wine and taken it to a party in California where there were a bunch of winemakers present. She writes, "When the party was over, there were only three bottles of Webb left, which my family members quickly claimed. I would say that Webb wine did quite well in its California debut...." When I get a letter like that, all these seventy-five to eighty-hour workweeks seem worth it. We've had to overcome a lot of doubts. Back at the turn of the century, Arizona actually had three little wineries. But when we became a state, in 1912, the mood of the country was anti-alcohol. We went dry in 1913. That squelched what little tradition of winemaking we had. Decades later, with Prohibition over, the question came up, "Why isn't Arizona making a wine?" The answer: obviously, it's too hot. Step outside during a Tucson summer, and it's 110 degrees. True, grapes don't grow well in Tucson. But in the higher elevations, where my vineyards are at 4300 feet, we have ninety-five degree days and fifty-degree nights during the growing season. This is exactly what makes a good wine grape. I'll be honest: if I had known how stupid I was about winemaking six years ago, I never would have started. But I was naive enough that I just stumbled along. I have two goals: I want to see Arizona's wine industry develop into something that Arizonans can be proud of, where people will say, "Ah! Arizona wines." Just like they're starting to say about Oregon and Washington wines. And I want to get into my new winery, where we can produce 25,000 to 50,000 cases a year. The potential is here. A guy named Warren Brown has planted five acres of sauvignon blanc on the back side of the Rincon Mountains at about 4500 feet, just twenty-five miles from the middle of Tucson. I've done a lab analysis: sugars, pH, acids, and it's a textbook perfect grape! We're going to buy them all and make a premium fumé blanc. Ninety percent of winemaking is the grape. A winemaker can still mess it up, but I think I'm past that stage.

From Tucson

Morris K. Udall, sixty-three, has represented Tucson and assorted parts of southern Arizona in Congress for twenty-five years. He first ran in 1961, defending President John F. Kennedy's social programs and denouncing the John Birch Society, then active in Arizona, as a "crackpot organization." He squeaked into office with fifty-one percent of the vote. Voted last year the third most influential member of the House of Representatives, he remains a liberal Democrat, goodhumored, quickwitted, and possessed of not a trace of pomposity. His constituents call him "Mo."

In politics there are two strains of thinking, both honorable and both needed. There's the conservative, who says, "Slow down; we're losing our old values"; and there's the liberal or progressive who says, "We've got to change; this generation has the right to have new solutions to new problems." I belong to the second school. More often than not, we have to do the painful thing if we're going to get a wilderness system or Social Security or Medicare.This kind of thinking has always been more welcome in Tucson than in Phoenix, where sometimes it's unsafe to be outdoors if you're a Democrat. Tucson has traditionally been a much more Democratic-both big D and small d-city. Tucson has a competitive political atmosphere now with a vigorous, thriving twoparty system, with people interested in an activist foreign policy where we keep involved in the world and aren't isolationists. So it isn't surprising that the sanctuary movement (for Central American refugees) was born in Tucson rather than a place like Phoenix or Dallas.

I think when my history is written, if anybody writes it, there will be some credit for helping this city do something few if any other cities in America have ever done and that's to protect the natural environment around it. Putting the Arizona wilderness bill together is one of the achievements I'm most proud of. When you get to the Catalina Mountains there's a line, and the millionaires' houses aren't going to climb above it. Pusch Ridge is in wilderness; the mountain goats and desert bighorn sheep will have a home there forever. To the east, the Rincon Mountains are in wilderness. Saguaro National Monument is protected. To the south, we were able to get a big chunk of the Santa Rita Mountains in the system. And on the west, you have Tucson Mountain Park. So we have buffers. We're not going to be able to spread forever, like Los Angeles.

As for the Central Arizona Projectyou've always got the problem in public life of what's politically possible. If I could turn the clock back fifty years and do it all over again, instead of spending three billion dollars for a water plan that would let Tucson grow and turn Phoenix into another Los Angeles, I would have suggested we take land by the Colorado River, where we have the water, and build ten cities the size of Yuma. But that's brilliant hindsight. The fact is that Arizonans have always been optimistic about growth. Growth had always seemed good for Arizona, and we didn't want to question it.

A vital part of Tucson's desert scene, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was founded in 1952 solely to interpret the natural history of this Southwest desert environment. The museum is internationally renowned for the beauty and authenticity of its exhibits. (LEFT) A white-winged dove entertains museum visitors as it treads cautiously atop a rare cristate (crested) saguaro cactus. BOB BRODER (ABOVE) A bobcat, bored with the passing parade, yawns outside its desert lair. TOM BEAN

Within a cactus forest, myriad life-forms survive in a delicate environment as characters in a real-life drama. (LEFT) A vigilant great horned owl scans the desert floor of Saguaro National Monument for rodents. (ABOVE) A desert tortoise makes a meal of the fruit of prickly pear cactus. Established primarily to preserve impressive stands of saguaro cactus, Saguaro National Monument comprises two sections about thirty miles apart. The Rincon Mountain section covers ninetynine square miles, ranging from low desert to pine and fir forest east of Tucson. Twelve miles west of the city, the Tucson Mountain section protects twenty-four square miles of dense saguaro stands covering the lower slopes of volcanic mountains. GEORGE HUEY

Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt tells of an astounding scene be once saw at twilight on the rim of the Grand Canyon: a tourist had snapped a Polaroid picture of the sunset over the Canyon, and a small crowd gathered around to watch the image develop, ignoring the sunset itself. Babbitt was appalled, but the moment testified to the camera's peculiar power to create its own reality. This power is what the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography exists to study and exhibit to the public. James Enyeart, forty-two, is its director.

Four different disciplines fall under photography's umbrella. It's a creative art form. It's a means of communication. It's technology, as it enhances other kinds of sciences. And it's a medium of nostalgia.

The power of photography in all these disciplines is wrapped up with the notion of selectivity. A photograph, like writing, must be selective in order to communicate an idea effectively. And what the creative photographer selects are those qualities that can have a positive effect on our lives.

This is a research museum; we now have the archives of many of the great photographers of the twentieth century: Ansel Adams, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer, Louise DahlWolfe.... But this is a museum about the artist as much as it is for his or her work.

In this museum, people can look at a negative by W. Eugene Smith and then at the print he made from it. Anyone who makes such a study will no longer wonder where the creative process lies in making a photograph. No two people can make the same print from one negative. It is as subjective as any artistic expression.

We can also learn from his archives that Smith was haunted by a lot of ghosts: too much alcohol; he was a workaholic; there were family tragedies. He spent his career in photojournalism dealing with other people's troubles and tragedies, and it's clear to me that it was partly because so much of his own life was tragic. It wasn't as therapy, but something wholly as obsessive and poetic as the art of Edgar Allen Poe or Tchaikovsky.

Ansel Adams' memorabilia include many humorous little objects, like a sardine can with a photo of Ansel inside that a friend sent him. This illustrates another dimension of Ansel. One wouldn't think of him as a humorist from his photographs; in thought he appears as a dramatist, a conservationist-but not as a lover of terrible puns and jokes, which he was.

This is the world's premier research museum for twentieth-century photography. And one of the reasons all these things can happen is that we're in Tucson, and not in a gigantic megalopolis. We can give eight-hour-a-day access to original photographs to anyone who comes here, not just to scholars. We can accommodate the walk-in traffic, and we see that as part of our mission.

Tucson natives are rare enough, but Ruth Corbett Cross, fifty-eight, is a creature of vanishingly low probability: a tenth-generation Tucsonan. The trunk of her family tree was a farmer named Boroquez, who arrived here late in the sixteenth century. His great-greatgreat-granddaughter, Atanacia Santa Cruz, married a merchant named Sam Hughes in 1859, and one branch of the family forked toward Anglicization. Such intercultural marriages were common in pioneer Tucson. Until the arrival of the railroad in 1880, the trip here was considered too rough for Anglo women to endure.

Sam Hughes, my great-grandfather, was a Welshman working as a cook in northern California when he contracted tuberculosis. He caught a stage to Texas for his health, and he became gravely ill. The driver tried to put him off at Maricopa, Arizona. "There's no one there who speaks English," Hughes exclaimed. "Please don't leave me here to die among strangers!" The driver said, "Well, Mr. Hughes, if you die on the stagecoach, I'm not going to stop to bury you, I'm just going to push you off the seat. And you've got to get off in Tucson. There are four other men who speak English there."

The night he arrived, he went to the plaza and saw this beautiful little Mexican girl dancing. That was Atanacia, whom, four years later, he married. She was twelve; he was thirty-two.

From Tucson

I imagine her age was a little out of the ordinary for marriage, but not much. Once the girls had gone to the convent and learned how to cook and sew, there wasn't much more for them. I don't believe they were taught to read and write. I do know Atanacia eventually learned because she kept business ledgers for her husband.Their child, Elizabeth, was my grandmother. She married J. Knox Corbett, who came here from South Carolina for his health in 1880. Perhaps he was the source of my chauvinism about Tucson: he was the mayor, the postmaster, and the original love-Tucson-or-leave-it man.

He was unable to walk in his later years, so he rode around town in a little electric cart. Sometimes he'd be sitting in his cart downtown and would be introduced to some stranger who'd just come to town, and who would say, "Oh, my word, it's hot here!" Or "Oh, it's so terribly dusty in Tucson." And J. Knox, who always wore an all-white three-piece suit with a big white hat, would pull out this gorgeous gold watch and say, "You know what? You're in luck. The Golden State is coming through in two hours." Then he'd turn on the motor and add, "Now, I'm going home with you to help you pack."

I admit that when we were teenagers here in the '40s, Tucson seemed like an awfully unsophisticated place. We were amazed at what seemed like the ultrasophistication of our contemporaries from up north in Phoenix.

But when Tucson grew up after World War II, we lost something. I moved to California for one year, 1952, and when I came back, I went into Steinfeld's Department Store to cash a check. The clerk asked for my identification. I said, "My what?" Just then Mr. Steinfeld walked by and said, "Hi, Ruthie!" and kissed me on the cheek. He moved on, and the clerk said again, "Your ID, please."

When they tore down El Conquistador Hotel in 1968 for the first shopping mall, I stood and watched it and cried. I had gone to dances there as a high school student, learned synchronized swimming in that pool as a college student, and sold flowers to General Pershing in front. I feel we've made a terrible mistake in not retaining more of the flavor of our past, as Santa Fe, New Mexico, did.

But I think Tucson is still an easy place to love. The other morning as I drove to work, I passed an absolutely beautiful specimen of a wildcat sitting beside the road just outside town at Saguaro National Monument. I can still look above the shoddy subdivisions toward the mountains, and feel inspired by them. It's marvelous to think that you are still a part of nature, and that you can still have a taste of what this was like 150 years ago.

HISTORIC PRESERVATION

The Reverend Kieran McCarty, sixty, is a historian whose special passion is researching the confluence of the Spanish and Indian cultures in the Sonoran Desert during the eighteenth century. From 1966 to 1980, he was blessed with a unique opportunity to observe firsthand the long-term effects of that encounter. He was pastor of the mission church of San Xavier del Bac.

About ninety percent of what we would like to know about the building of San Xavier, we don't. We do know, at least, why it was conceived as such a daringly ambitious and extravagant building. José de Zúñiga, captain of the Tucson presidio in the 1790s and early 1800s, wrote this in 1804: "The reason for this ornate church at this last outpost of the frontier is not only to congregate the Christian Pima of the San Xavier village but also to attract by its loveliness the unconverted Papagos and Gila Pimas beyond the frontier."

There was a presumption here that the effect of this building on the Indians would have been the same as on anybody else; that they would feel religious emotion in this structure. But some hold enlightened doubts about that now. The Indian concept of the House of God is Nature, with all its vast spaces. Their sacred dances and ceremonies have always been outdoors. So I think they may not have seen this as a religious building in their own terms.

The desert Indians did not have what we call a transcendental religion, and this is generally true of Native Americans. Rather than creating a mythology of a heaven far removed from earthly life, theirs revolved around a great reverence for Nature. The more enlightened of the Spanish missionaries realized that a natural religion is the best foundation for a supernatural one and did not try to force the Indians to give up their traditional beliefs. Instead, Christianity would be presented as a separate package, and there would be a synchronism between the two.

I experienced this as pastor of San Xavier. Once a member of the parish camé to my door in the middle of the night and told me there was a lady dying. I went. And there was Jim Mayor, one of the Papago medicine men, performing his curing ritual with chanting and rattles. I had great respect for his ability to assuage pain and suffering, so I waited outside.

After a while, Jim came out. "I don't think she's going to live till morning," he told me. So it was sort of my turn, and I went in. She was a very elderly lady. Her daughter asked me if I had brought the sacrament, which of course I had. That was like asking Jim if he had brought his rattles along. "That's good," said the daughter, "because the medicine man prescribed holy communion for her."

That was a wonderful experience for me. I was respecting Jim's art of psychosomatic medicine, and he was respecting my art of pretty much the same thing.

COMING YOUR WAY IN THE MONTHS AHEAD

Almost half a century ago, Arizona Highways introduced Native American arts to the world at large. Now another Highways first: an entire issue devoted to innovators whose skill and imagination, blended with new technology and exquisite materials, have propelled Native arts and crafts to the level of fine art. The New Individualists. In May.

As a group, older citizens are healthier and happier today...and living longer, too. And that's having a dramatic impact on life-styles, travel, where we choose to live, and much more. Don't miss The Graying of America. In April.

Ever wonder how the Grand Canyon really was created; how the San Francisco Peaks got so tall; the Colorado River so long; the desert so dry? We've gathered all the answers in a rollicking look at the realm of myth and legend, Southwest-style. In June SHARE THE ARIZONA ADVENTURE: start an Arizona Highways gift subscription. Call us today at (602) 258-1000 or write us at Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85009.