PORTFOLIO

Our Holiday Gift to You ARIZONA FROM A THOUSAND FEET TEXT BY LAWRENCE W. CHEEK PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL COLLIER

“How's your stomach?” Michael Collier asks.

“Good for anything short of aerobatics.” I hang up the phone and begin to reconsider that reply, thumbing again through the portfolio of Collier's stunning aerial photography that is to appear in Arizona Highways. I'm about to go flying with him, not to take photographs myself, but to have a taste of Arizona as he sees it: from the Buzzard, a 35-yearold Cessna 180, swooping a few hundred feet over the state's valleys, canyons, dunes, mountains, buttes, and spires. And I wonder: what does he have to make this flying antique do to capture these incredible pictures, and how is that connected to his inquiry about my stomach?

My first look at Arizona, 18 years ago, was from an airplane - a commercial jet, somewhere in the lower stratosphere. I was coming in from Iowa for a job interview, and what I remember with startling clarity, as I pressed my nose to the window and studied the Sonoran Desert seven miles below, was that I thought: I won't take the job. I can't live in this place.

The barren earth appeared the color of sun-bleached cardboard. It was raked and torn and furrowed by corrosive wind and bogus rivers that would flow, with luck, 10 days a year. The mountains seemed equally desolate and hostile; from this altitude there could be no grasp of their miraculous natural architecture or the kaleidoscopic reshuffling of the biology on their slopes every few hundred feet. From that plane, the entire Arizona landscape appeared to have no life, no interest, no promise.

A person's emotional reaction to a place depends very much on the perspective from which it is first experienced, whether that perspective offers any real understanding or palpable romance. For example, consider this Grand Canyon story: Shortly after World War I, Ferdinand Foch, the French supreme commander of the Allied Forces, visited the Grand Canyon as the guest of mining magnate John C. Greenway.

Our Holiday Gift to You

Foch peered into the Canyon for a moment, then turned to Greenway and commented in French. Greenway must have been startled, but he translated for the onlookers: "Marshal Foch says that the Canyon is the most beautiful manifestation of God's presence on the entire Earth." That was pure flimflam. What Foch actually had said was: "Let's have a cup of coffee."

If everyone standing at the rim for the first time were as honest as Foch, the concessionaires would sell a lot more coffee. Many of us are not dazzled upon first view of the Grand Canyon, and the reason is that we can't grasp what we're seeing. No other landscape on Earth prepares the human brain for processing this spectacle. To understand it, you have to add more perspectives. Negotiate its trails; touch its walls. Get dumped overboard in its river. Be scared by it. Fly over it.

The deserts of Arizona present the human mind with an equally complicated challenge. Centuries of literature and generations of films have largely equated the concept of "desert" with that of barrenness, lifelessness, and inhospitality. All these are negatives; they speak of the absences of things rather than presences. The per-son coming into the desert from outside is already drag-ging the baggage of preju-dice, and, if he were to be whisked blindfolded to some of the thousands of desert places I have been in the state, and then abandoned, all that preconditioning would be confirmed. The desolation would seem utter-ly forbidding.

Coming to terms with the desert means experiencing it in the winter moonlight as well as the hurtful afternoon sun of summer; stroking its ineffably soft spring flowers and then stumbling into a grove of shindagger agave; feeling lonely and alienated on the top of a butte in the Painted Desert, and then

Text continued on page 16

Our Holiday Gift to You

Continued from page 8 viewing it from the air as the incredible polychromatic earth sculpture on the next page. All this is why I never got around to leaving this state and am not likely ever to do so. I am still being taught about it.

Michael Collier, 40, is a pilot, photographer, writer, physician and, as he puts it, "gentleman geologist." (He earned only two degrees in geology.) His medical practice, based in Flagstaff, is unusual in that it allows him time for everything else. For about half of each year, he takes over family practices for other doctors on vacation. The rest of the time he flies.

His passions form a perfect circle. He says he loves aerial photography because it gives him an excuse to fly; he loves to fly because it gives him a platform from which to take these photographs. Interwoven is also a deep love for the land that is Arizona the land yet untouched.

I notice, I tell him, that in this entire portfolio there's only one picture where there's any sign of human habitation.

"Right," he says.

The Buzzard is flying north out of Flagstaff through a pass in the San Francisco Mountains, a few miles to the east of 12,643-foot Humphreys Peak. We bob like a Ping-Pong ball in the wind currents clawing around the mountains the Buzzard, complete with Collier and me cocooned in it, weighs a few bird eggs short of 1,900 pounds. But it's the perfect conveyance for aerial photography: slow, highly maneuverable, with the wing overhead and the landing gear far forward, out of the field of vision.

If Collier were to win the Arizona Lottery tomorrow, he wouldn't buy a newer plane. He might treat the Buzzard to a paint job. He doesn't think of it as old but rather primordial. He recites the opening sentence of a book on light aviation: "In the beginning, Cessna made the 180...."

We curl over Sunset Crater. From the ground, this is a ghostly wasteland, a near-featureless cinder cone commemorating a forgotten eruption nearly 950 years ago. From 1,000 feet overhead, it is a sculpture garden. More than a dozen smaller cones cluster like a brood around Mother Sunset, their velvety gray surfaces whipped into dune-like ripples by the plateau's spring winds. The gentleman geologist and I agree that the volcanic field seems almost Continued from page 16 feminine not anthropomorphically; that would be too easy but in some notquite-tangible quality of softness. A new perspective on volcanism.

Our Holiday Gift to You

(LEFT) In sympathy with Nature's convolutions, an ancient creek sinuously meanders over the placid face of the San Rafael grasslands while cattle graze contentedly in this historic ranching country of southeastern Arizona.

(ABOVE) Like a huge layercake, Marble Canyon's west rim, illuminated by a westering sun, is composed of layer-upon-layer of dissimilar types of rock, from sandstone to shale, bearing witness to the incredible span of geological time.

The light is another surprise; its character changes with the landscape. Over the Coconino National Forest, as we left Flagstaff, it had seemed as buttery as the sunlight of Renoir. Now, less than a hundred miles to the north over the treeless Moenkopi Plateau, even at 6:30 in the evening, it is painfully hard and intense. I'm not complaining; it only serves better to illuminate the violently chiseled canyons below. I think of Reyner Banham's wonderful observation in Scenes in America Deserta about the desert's light being "a close brother to heat, and [it] strikes equally hard." I think of it also as a kin of Truth, as this light exposes every geologic act and transient human folly to relentless scrutiny. Deserts are no good at keeping secrets.

It's late twilight as we approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Its signature colors, the vivid auburns, greens, purples, and browns, are slowly converging into a deep mist-like saturating blue. The Canyon's sharp edges melt away in the faint light, but its sensation of mystery seems more daunting than ever. John Muir might have been seeing the Canyon in this light (if not from this altitude) when he wrote that it is "as if you had found it after death, on some other star...."

Over the Canyon, for the only time in the flight, my stomach mumbles signals of discontent. The air is still, and Collier, as a pilot, has been a perfect gentleman. But now it is as if there is no Earth under us, no welcoming civilization to return to. For the eight minutes it takes to cross the Canyon, we inhabit a universe where the only points of reference are spiritual. This is as much of a religious epiphany as I hope ever to have in an airplane. There is an infinite number of ways to experience this magic land; walking across it my usual preference is no less illuminating than flying. Walking exposes the worlds of sound, smell, and touch. Flying, in compensation, liberates one's vision. A vast new inventory of form, texture, color, and light appears. So does fresh optimism. From the air, the perseverance of Nature and the insignificance of the human struggle to control it are obvious. This is the most welcome message of all in these photographs: Earth abides.

M