Afterword...

I write this far from Arizona, on a drippingly dim afternoon in verdant Vermont. Of course, I love rain in any season. I revel and glow, in a way that the born-here natives around me, who have never been in desert country, cannot know. Yet, at the same time-whenever it rains - a deep longing for desert returns and aching memories of my Grand Canyon.

How can I explain this contradiction in my moods of rain? I think it is because, when I was young, I was a canyon kid.

Only those of us who know and love the great deserts can fully appreciate eastern rain. How can anybody understand the full wonder of wet if he has never really experienced dry? Therefore, when needed rain begins to soak my beloved Vermont acres, I know gratitude so heart-stopping that I instantly remember the rock-hard red ground of Arizona.

As the downspouts begin to dribble, then pour, and finally spurt, I am rejoicing, yet yearning to feel again the yellow dust and white stones under my swinging, sliding feet on a long downward switchback of a Grand Canyon trail: Bright Angel, Kaibab, Tonto, inner gorge.

With a tight throat, I recall how it felt to tilt my face toward the purple vault of an evening sky in which the lowering sun still sparkled with white diamonds within a half hour of its setting, without a trace of smog-orange across its searing face.

Oh, the long hot miles in the sagebrush of the Tonto slopes where, it seemed, it never rained. Rain? What is rain?

I hear my father. When I was very small, and he was ahead on the trail with my brother, he once looked off among the Canyon's buttressed pagoda-buttes to where distant cliffs rose in layers to even higher pinnacles, even grander mesas until he stopped, motioned me to him, put one hand on my shoulder and leaned down, pointing. "There," he said. "No, farther over. There. In that highest notch, that little V of white cliff with the dark line of forest on top. See? The forest is against the sky."

I echoed, asking, "the forest is against the sky?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"The Rim."

The Rim. I had long forgotten it. You see, the Canyon - when you are in it is not a gulf, a declivity, a chasm, a series of stepped cliffs going down, down, down. Oh, no! The Canyon is an enormous, fantastic, exotic desert in oriental style, under an incredibly open, wider-than-wide infinite blue sky, expansive, free, with buttes marching off in every direction, all rising from tilted sagebrush slopes into which is cut a twisting black-rock gorge wherein, almost always out of sight, there is what seems to be a very slender river, lost in this immensity.

In the Grand Canyon, the Rim is so far, far away-so low, behind so much complexity, where it can rarely even be glimpsed that it had simply disappeared from my consciousness. My father had been searching for a piece of it for miles, to show me.

"That's where it rains," he said. "That's why there is forest up there. Where you can see that green line of forest against the sky, that's the only place where you are looking at Rim. See those dark clouds to the right? See the rain draped down? Rain never reaches down here." I think he believed it.

Recently my younger sister rediscovered my father's diary. It is laconic, matter of fact, a teacher's simple record. But my age at the time-ten-says it all. How did he dare take us to the river and back, in 1924? But that was only the first time.

My brother is four years older than I am. I have his letter, and his photos, snapped for him by a passing park ranger in 1980. He is in better condition than I am, and he is pictured a mile and a quarter down the Kaibab Trail-at seventy. My envy and sadness are only surpassed by my joy for him. The great upside-down mountain range, luring the unwary too far onward "I must see around that next headland" - was no trap for my knowing brother. It was easy to come back out, he reported. He could have gone much farther in the time he had allotted.

My feelings for that helpful, unknown park ranger are warm and thankful. But no ranger, no one in the National Park Service, no one in our national government can exaggerate the importance of his responsibility to all of us who are not there.

There are no words-certainly none in English-to describe adequately what the Grand Canyon means to us-its spiritual, metaphysical, magical importance. Whose sympathetic concern will guard the Canyon for all those children who do not yet know it? Or for all of us who know it so well but are not nearby?

For many of us, you see, what actually keeps us going is this (and it is enough): We just want to awaken each dayworldwide, wherever we may be and, in those first moments before our minds wander off to what we must do this day, be able to know with that marvelously comforting certainty that it is there: the Grand Canyon is there, in all its glory and wonder, whether or not we can get to it ever again in our lives.

Just a moment. Listen. Hear that pattering rush of sound? The glass roof of the little greenhouse extends over my head. It is spattering all over, and is already wet as wet.

Ah, rain. Ah, desert. Ah, The Canyon.

-J. Duncan Campbell J. Duncan Campbell is a long-time member of the editorial board of "the other" famous state magazine, Vermont Life, which celebrated its fortieth birthday with its autumn, 1986, issue. "Retired" now, Campbell occasionally writes for magazines and is serving his eighth term as a selectman of North Bennington, Vermont.

A NOTE OF THANKS...

This, our traditional holiday issue, was printed in Phoenix by the W. A. Krueger Company on 60-pound Somerset Gloss. The cover is printed on 100-pound Warrenflo. Both papers are manufactured by the S.D. Warren Company. Headlines and text were set by ProType of Phoenix. The four-color separations for every photograph reproduced in our December issue were manufactured in the Phoenix plant of the American Color Corporation. And last but not least, the paper sculptures introducing the sections of the issue were skillfully produced by Jim Metcalf and photographed by Ed Beaty. To one and all, the editors extend their gratitude.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

DECEMBER 1986 VOL 62, NO. 12 Publisher-Hugh Harelson Editor-Merrill Windsor Managing Editor-Richard G. Stahl Art Director-Gary Bennett Picture Editor-Peter Ensenberger Associate Art Director-Lorna Holmes Associate Editor-Robert J. Farrell Senior Contributing EditorsGeorge Collins, Esther Henderson, Ray Manley, Josef Muench, Earl Petroff, Clara Lee Tanner.

Contributing EditorsBill Ahrendt, John Annerino, Jo Baéza, Joe Beeler, Bob Bradshaw, Duane Bryers, Don Campbell, Willard Clay, Ed Cooper, Paul Dean, Don Dedera, Dick Dietrich, Jack Dykinga, Carlos Elmer, Bernard L. Fontana, Jeff Gnass, Barry Goldwater, Pam Hait, Jerry Jacka, Christine Keith, Gill Kenny, Peter Kresan, Gary Ladd, Alan Manley, Herb and Dorothy McLaughlin, J. Peter Mortimer, David Muench, Charles Niehuis, Marguerite Noble, Willis Peterson, Lawrence Clark Powell, Allen C. Reed, Budge Ruffner, Jerry Sieve, Joe Stocker, Jim Tallon, Larry Toschik, Marshall Trimble, Lee Wells, Maggie Wilson.

Business Director-Jim Delzell Operations Director-Palle Josefsen Circulation and Marketing DirectorSharon Vogelsang Managing Editor, Related ProductsWesley Holden Production Manager-Diana Pollock Governor of Arizona-Bruce Babbitt Director, Department of TransportationCharles L. Miller Arizona Transportation Board Chairman: Arthur C. Atonna, Douglas; Members: Hal F. Butler, Show Low, Andrew M. Federhar, Tucson; Ted Valdez, Sr., Phoenix; James Patterson, Chandler, Harold Gietz, Safford. Issue Editor-Peter Ensenberger