A Californian Looks at Arizona

A Californian Looks at

TEXT BY JOSEPH E. BROWN ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEVIN MACPHERSON Another answer to the question: What is it about Arizona that makes thousands of seemingly sane and otherwise conservative residents of other states pull up stakes and bead for this part of the inland Southwest?

"Though California is the country's leading agricultural state, I can't ever remember having to yield to a cow on a public road at home...."

A hawk circled lazily overhead, searching for breakfast. I had no doubt he'd find it without half trying. At every bend in the dust-brown dirt track we were following between Cave Creek and Cordes Junction via Seven Springs and Bloody Basin, squirrels scampered, rabbits hopped, and lizards wriggled toward the sanctuary of latespring-blossoming paloverde, ocotillo, yucca, and prickly pear.

Our hawk enjoyed almost total immun-ity from man's intrusion. At Seven Springs Campground, six miles north of where The paved road from Phoenix ended, a few families were camped along a gurgling brook, enjoying the Memorial Day weekend. But that was all. North of the campground, in more than three hours and sixty miles, my wife, Bobby, and I were to encounter only two other vehicles as we set out to explore a small, off-thebeaten-track sampling of our neighbor state of Arizona. Even to a Californian jaded by a lifetime surfeit of Sierra, seacoast, and wild, remote hideaways, it seemed incredible. Only a few miles to the west, midway Through a holiday weekend, Interstate Route 17 was acrawl with cars, trailers, campers, and recreational vehicles rumbling north to high, cool Flagstaff. The Arizona Republic newspaper later was to report 30,000 weekenders jammed elbowto-elbow and bumper-to-bumper along the Salt River, another 100,000 along the lower Colorado River. By Monday night, State Route 87 between Phoenix and Payson had become one long, gridlocked parking lot. Yet here we were, sharing our private world with one lone, hungry hawk. Only the man-made road beneath and the jet contrails above convinced us we hadn't time-warped back a century or more. That's Arizona.

During the more than half a century I've chosen to live as close to the Pacific Ocean as I can without falling in, I have visited Arizona often, though all the previous trips were fleeting ones. Always I'd assumed I was a fairly typical Californian, one of the thousands who visited Arizona on occasion, but who never would consider actually living there. Imagine my consternation, then, when I discovered not long ago that in 1983-'84-the latest period reported by the Arizona Statistical Review more Californians moved to Arizona than the other way around. Not just an errant handful, mind you, but 28,613 new Arizonans! It was as if every man, woman, and child in the California town of Imperial Beach had packed up surfboards and sprouts, piled themselves onto Interstate Route 8, and trundled forever eastward across the Colorado River.

Holy Eureka! As a second-generation native of the country's most ballyhooed Lotus Land, I had to be rankled by such statistics. California, as the world knows, is the place everybody moves to, not from. California, epitome of the American Dream, now at twenty-five million souls the most populous state in the nation. Yet I couldn't doubt the accuracy of what the Statistical Review reported; so it was to explore the implications of its heretical figures that Bobby and I had begun pokFor most of a week, we rummaged about Arizona's midriff, starting and end-ing in Phoenix, meandering where and when whim dictated. Admittedly, it's not fair to size up any state as large as Arizona in a six-day, 800-mile ramble. But our route did at least put us in intimate touch with Arizona's amazing diversity: the Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe megalopolis; desert and mountain meadow and pon-derosa forest; modern high rise and an-cient Indian ruin. Every mile, Arizona grew on me again.

gic nerve. For me, no tour ever had a more unusual patter, and it gave me some curious insights to a state I'd never looked at seriously before. "There," she said at one point, "is where I learned to swim. I had to, my cousin shoved me in." And, farther on, "There's where a rattlesnake bit me." I had heard the story before. Now, with the knowledge that rattlers still lation density is impressive. Fully 158.6 people are now crammed into each of California's square miles, on average, whereas in Arizona the comparable figure is but 26.1. While San Diego Tribune editor Neil Morgan may be correct in Absolutely lost in Arizona. Just before Bloody Basin Road terminated at 1-17, it went through a corral. I don't mean just through a ranch, I mean the corral itself. In one gate and out the other. I could imagine the problems this would create at roundup time. Though California is the country's leading agricultural state, I can't remember ever having to yield to a cow on a public road at home. We drove on north to Camp Verde, then paralleled 1-17 a few miles for a look at Montezuma Castle National Monument. I wasn't surprised to learn that, after the Grand Canyon, Montezuma is the National Park Service site most visited each year by "I wasn't surprised to learn that, after the Grand Canyon, Montezuma Castle is the National Park Service site most visited by Arizonans themselves...."

Arizonans themselves, according to a study by Arizona State University. And it's a place that typifies Arizona's passion for preserving the past. Compared with other states, Arizona has far more than its proportionate share of federal preserves, land set aside because of scenic, historical, natural-history, natural-resource, or recreational qualities. As one example, Arizona contains more National Park Service units than any other state including Alaska. So for the outdoor lovers among the infamous California 28,613, their defection can at least be understood if not forgiven. It is naturally tempting to use one's own state as a yardstick when visiting another. I succumbed at Jerome, which we decided to "add on" because, like many Westerners, I'm a ghost-town freak. I'd never been to Jerome, yet somehow its layout had a familiar look. "Sausalito," Bobby remarked as if reading my mind. "Drive those winding, hilly streets, prowl the art and curio shops, meet the flower children of the Eighties. Put San Pablo Bay over there instead of the Verde Valley, the Sierra over there instead of the San Francisco Peaks, and what do you have?" She was right. Only the houseboats and hot tubs were missing. Arizona has an abundance of ghost towns. Since there's nothing more intriguing to a history buff than a ghost town, and since there are a lot of history buffs in California, I could explain a few more numbers on my list of 28,613 at Jerome. Later we returned to Camp Verde, then drove east through miles of timberlands - part of the way on the General Crook Highway to Kohl's Ranch, northeast of Payson. There we stopped overnight, slumbering to the symphony of Tonto Creek. Before we dozed off, Bobby and I ruminated over the many common denominators of our two native states in addition to the mutual boundary of the Colorado River. There are differences too, of course,

but most of them seem trifling compared to what our states have in common.

Next day, rattling over another dirt road-State Route 288-then paved State 88 to Theodore Roosevelt Dam via Young, we ticked off some of the common denominators. Like the fact that both states are plagued by clichés. Many otherwise knowledgeable Easterners and Europeans still limit their mental image of Arizona to cactus, cowboys, outlaws, and desert expanses. Actually, for a long time, I was as culpable as any. As a boy I believed, as "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" taught me, that it was "...out in Arizona where the bad men are." Hollywood, despite having moved many of its own trappings to Arizona as of late, hasn't done much to dispel that cliché; nor has it bothered much to try to erase California's reputation as the world capital of surfboards, purple Mercedes, fitness centers, hot tubs, kooks, and cults. Neither image is fair, because it doesn't go nearly far enough; and certainly one cannot equate Arizona's Pinetop with its Phoenix, nor California's Lone Pine with its Los Angeles.

By week's end, with lungs cleansed and mental batteries recharged, I'd begun to nibble at the motives of those 28,613 California-to-Arizona migrants. Why they changed states could not be lumped in a single answer, obviously. The reasons were many and depended upon individual whim and circumstance. One had to be the cost of living. It was between 1975 and '80 that California real estate prices soared toward the moon and became among the highest in the nation. Even today, it costs a Phoenix executive twentynine percent less to live than his counterpart in Los Angeles, thirty-two percent less than in San Francisco. Housing represents a big part of that difference.

There's also Arizona's weather. In the average year, Phoenix enjoys more days of sunshine than any other metropolitan center in the nation, Miami included. Sun City isn't so named without good reason. The per-acre yield of six major crops in Arizona well exceeds the national average; that may explain some of the farmers among the 28,613.

On my trip I did recognize one glaring shortcoming in Arizona. Where is the ocean? As a lifelong Golden Stater and a sailor to boot, I'm downright uncomfortable if away from the ocean for very long-and it has been several hundred million years, geologists tell us, since Arizona had one of its own.

That it did have one once is confirmed by seashell fossils found in various locations, some high on the Mogollon Rim where uplifting deposited them so long ago the human mind has difficulty appreciating the time span.

Still, wet or dry, Arizona's vast, unspoiled sea of the past still gives one an enormous sense of freedom and wellbeing. And Tempe's Big Surf is an ingenious if modest substitute for those who like to frolic at the water's edge. Three hundred thousand people enjoyed this makeshift seashore last year. Who knows how many of the 28,613 ex-Californians were among them?

Joseph E. Brown is former editor of Sea and Pacific Skipper and Oceans magazines. He now freelances from bis home in Coronado, California.

COMING YOUR WAY IN THE MONTHS AHEAD

The good old summertime is peak season for Lake Powell adventures. What could be more appealing than a leisurely houseboat cruise on Arizona's "Great Lake"? Highways also salutes Aldo Leopold, whose insight and eloquence helped usher in a new age of conservation and wilderness protection. And we take readers back to the Santa Fe Railway's classic travel promotions of the 1920s which, for the first time, featured the Indian cultures of the Southwest. In June.

Some meet a modern-day rebel who is famous as a writer-photographer and artist and naturalist as well: Eliot Porter. And while we're on the road, we'll take you on a hike - actually several, as we present an exciting sampling from our latest book in the Outdoors series: A Guide to Hiking and Backpacking. Then it's up to the Arizona Strip for a look at the Hurricane Cliffs and the irrepressible Kaibab squirrels. Finally, we tell the story of Espejo, a Spanish explorer little known outside the Southwest. In July.

At summer's height, Highways presents a report on a controversial subject: how thousands of acres of public-land resources are being damaged or destroyed by irresponsible use of off-road vehicles. We'll discuss what our major federal landlords are doing to reduce the impact of such vehicles on sensitive terrain in our state. Then we travel to the Hopi mesas by means of the genius of a photographer whose lens, seventy-five years ago, captured Hopi life as it never will be again. In August, SHARE THE ARIZONA ADVENTURE: Give an Arizona Highways subscription. Use the enclosed order card or call (602) 258-1000 or (toll free within Arizona) 1-800-543-5432.