High Sky and Wide Silence

As you leave Sky Harbor, Phoenix's international airport, the cityscape at first seems endless-high-rise clusters, shopping centers, subdivisions. Then, sudddenly, you are in the desert, and the distinctive topography sends its own message. Before an abrupt, low mountain backdrop, tall saguaro cacti stand at roadside with their hands in the air like holdup victims and wander across the flat sandy plains, disappearing into the distance. The feeling would be Disneyland diorama but for the immensity. The sheer size of the Southwest is what first makes you catch your breath: the long distances of empty air, light that goes traveling for miles and miles. The vast expanse ends far away at the base of purple mountains, faded and indistinct just as a stage backdrop would be. At the guest ranch, we shed our city garb and city gaits and moseyed on down to the corral where we met Tom, the manager of the stables. He was a sincere and shy man in his thirties who, although he never said "Howdy" and we never

HIGH SKY & WIDE SILENCE

Japanese visitors ask, How can this strange American Southwest be occupied and yet remain so wild?

saw him mosey, nonetheless immediately took shape in our minds as a real cowboy. A newborn colt stood in the next corral beside its dozing mother, and it watched us watching Tom shoe one of his own horses. Tom was born in Nebraska and had always lived in the West. His voice was melodic and even, like the sound of a horse walking through the soft dust of noontime, stepping with rhythmic, regular gait. He watched over the stables here, arranging the group rides and caring for the two herds of horses. One was seasonal and one year-round. The seasonal herd spent the summer at the cooler ranches of Colorado or Wyoming. The situation with people working at the ranch was much the same. The population was in inverse proportion to the temperature. Most people left the resort when it closed for the hot summer months when temperatures could reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and waited to return until the cool air shifted the balance and gained a little each day on the heat.

TEXT BY ELLEN FRELL WATERCOLORS BY JAMES METCALF

The sheer size of the Southwest is what first makes you catch your breath: the long distances of empty air, light that goes traveling for miles and miles. The vast expanse ends far away at the base of purple mountains....' Not many lived there all year, and most of those stayed because they had no other choice. Few remained because they wanted to. Tom was one of the few.

The original cowboys, those men of the myths and the movies, spent the better part of a century taming the Southwest. They funneled through such gateway cities as St. Louis and fanned out, like ripples in a still pond, over the plains and mountains. The Southwest was tough and relinquished its valuables reluctantly, but what it didn't want to give, they battled for and simply took.

Decades later many of them abandoned the lure of the legends along with the curses of the hardships. Those who stayed, and remained cowboys, who loved the land year-round, not for what they could take from it but for what it voluntarily gave, saw wave after wave of new commercial explorers and adventurers surge over and around them, leaving them standing still in time holding a philosophy that had reversed into a mirror image of its original: Tame the Southwest had become Save the Southwest from Being Tamed.

The Southwest is vast. In the past, it had room enough and future enough for hundreds upon hundreds of miners, laborers, cowboys, and settlers. But the new immigrants, the more recent ones, are not so easily accommodated. The goods to which they lay claim are not so much the things of the land as the land itself. The new residential subdivisions stretch for miles, the rooftops of often identical houses barely visible behind patio walls or tall fences.

There are new commercial cowboys. The real estate developers, encouraged by growing populations seeking more comfortable climates, literally gain ground every day. They confront, philosophically, cowboys like Tom, descendants of the first land developers, who, through the irony of life and the passage of time, now find themselves on the opposite side of the fence. It has always been the American tradition to tame a frontier, but now the thoughtful ones wonder. Every day there is less to tame.

For Tom, it is difficult to challenge the tradition of forebears and of country, and difficult to maintain the status quo of something he sees as beautiful and, for all its ruggedness, fragile. Today's developers are jockeying for profit, that valued cornerstone of the American way of life. Whereas they are still taming the frontier, those other cowboys, Tom's kind, would un-tame it if they could. But of course that is not possible; they are fighting trends even more overwhelming than the coun-try they wander.

Three years ago, Tom spent several seasons with the Forest Service in Colo-rado. He was given two horses and supplies and turned out into his assigned 40,000 acres to patrol mountains, forests, hiking trails, and campgrounds, guarding the land against fire and human carelessness. When he encountered people, they were usually backpackers, and he would instruct them on minimal-impact camping. It was, he says, a dream job. He was alone for days at a time with his horses and his land. Then the government cut back on spending, and there was no money to support his job. He was forced to look elsewhere.

The ranch at first had only limited appeal. The job would be with horses and nature, but it would also be with people, and cowboys are more comfortable with horses and nature. We watched Tom carefully as he shoed his horse; we asked him how the job was working out. He looked up, eyes squinting in the sunlight, and thought carefully before he answered.

He said it was the Japanese who came to the ranch who had made the difference. They usually stayed only for a day or so, on their way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on a group tour of America. They would often arrive late at night, when they were unable to see the landscape; and they would wake up in the morning to the sight of uninhabited land rolling away in all directions, out over the flats and the

HIGH SKY & WIDE SILENCE

Here they rode horses across a landscape that seemed to them incredibly empty of everything but beauty.... They took away with them an entirely new idea of space, of people, of culture, of the planet and its treasures, and of wildness...

foothills and up to the top of distant mountains. They would come down to the corral and stand, eyes fixed on ranges that were many miles distant across a desert where no one lived.

Their own land had been tamed centuries ago. Here they rode horses across a landscape that seemed to them incredibly empty of everything but beauty, an indulgence impossible on such a scale in their own country. They would stare and memorize and photograph. They took away with them an entirely new idea of space, of people and culture, of the planet and its treasures, and of wildness.

The Japanese long ago tamed their islands until the land was almost completely in their control, producing efficiently and routinely but leaving them with no frontiers to conquer except internal ones.

They live now in densely crowded cities. Their homes are small; their pets often are birds. Their art is the art of a single bonsai tree to symbolize the forest, of flowers assembled in relation to the distances between them. Their art takes into account the void, the absence of things, sheer space, because there is so little of it. Their frontiers have been reduced to symbols: rocks meticulously arranged to elicit the greatest mental peace when viewed from any possible Angle. It is human rearrangement of nature; it is composition, order, and above all, control. It also implies a necessary limiting of human behavior for the sake of survival. In Japan there is no room remaining in which to run wild.

So the Japanese tend to be enamored of the American Southwest, of its history, of its space-room enough for more people, more mountains, more individuality. They arrive already in love with the mythology of the Southwest, with impressions fostered by a hundred American movies. And instead of being a disappointment, the visual reality is even bigger and better than the myth. It is one of the rare instances in life where the introduction of the actual does not destroy the validity of the imagined.

The Southwest is bigger than they thought it would be, better than the movies. They take more pictures, then stop, as if they know they can never cram it all into their lenses and are glad of it.

Tom would guide them over the long trails, under the wide skies, through the deep silences. The ranch buildings became dots in the distance as they crossed dry riverbeds and circled strange rock formations; then the corrals grew in size again as they neared the ranch, and everything returned to normal proportions. They would dismount, amazed that America had tamed this land yet had left so much of it in its natural state.

Tom's horse is now almost ready, hooves newly filed and shod, saddle in place for the next ride. The riders are assembling at the edge of the corral. Today there are no Japanese, only Americans ready to spend two or three hours weaving among the cacti and over hills that seem to go on forever. At least one of them will be riding out across a Southwest perhaps tamed, but clearly wilder than it was an hour ago.