The Land That I Love

THE LAND I Love How OW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's rapturous sonnet idolized the husband who like a Prince Charming had rescued her from dark imprisonment and filled her life with "Lyric love, half angel and half bird."

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

Humans who have known such love consider themselves supremely blessed. God, they sing in the old hymn, is love. And they may grow into the knowledge that love shines inexhaustible and infinite that love is the essence of friendship and the exquisite emotion that fortunate people may feel toward family, pets, society, culture, Nature, and... a certain land called Arizona. Land that I love, let me count the ways:

THE LAND I Love

"Great White Father, the place where I and my people are kept is bad for us. Let my people go home [the Chiricahuas]. Let me die and be buried in my country."

GERONIMO

"I'm glad I wasn't born in Arizona. I might have taken it for granted. To come to it after living in many other places lets me know its worth in a way difficult for a native. Like a religious convert, I feel I have an added point of pride in having chosen it."

HUGH DOWNS

THE LAND I LOVE

"The Apache Trail combines the grandeur of the Alps, the glory of the Rockies, and the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, and then adds an indefinable something that none of the others has. To me it is the most awe-inspiring and most sublimely beautiful panorama Nature has ever created."

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 26TH U.S. PRESIDENT (Of the Apache Trail, flanking the Superstition Mountains) Beyond a patch of yucca and agave, the fabled Superstition Mountains loom above the Apache Trail. WILLARD CLAY "My annual expedition into the Superstition Mountains in search of gold is a grand adventure to be with compadres, to dress in costume, and act out a pageant from the past, to be on our own in an elemental landscape now that produces emotions almost beyond description. My heart is lost on the most beautiful country in the world."

TED DEGRAZIA ARTIST

THE LAND I LOVE

PAUL HARVEY

RADIO PERSONALITY

ALICE COOPER

(VINCE FURNIER), ROCK MUSIC PERFORMER

CHARLES BARKLEY PHOENIX SUNS AND 1993's MOST VALUABLE PLAYER IN THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

THE LAND I LOVE

"What is it exactly that makes Arizona a special place? I would argue that it's the stunning variety of climates, scenery, and wildlife. Arizona is much more than the sum of its parts. It has a natural dynamic, a synergy matched by few other places. Arizona is another planet, or more precisely, another topography. Everything I love about this state is rooted in the landscape."

"We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth . . . we are but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not . . ."

MAJ. JOHN WESLEY POWELL EXPLORER (From the diary of his Colorado River exploration in August, 1869)

The Land I Love

"The parts of the West that move me most are the canyonlands around the Four Corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet at a common point. In the Arizona quadrant, there's Canyon de Chelly and Lake Powell, incredibly well-preserved prehistoric ruins, rivers trapped inside vast gorges, native tribes occupying homelands for centuries, and horizons that tug at your senses and expand your mind. I am enchanted with that country that some of my Indian friends call The Land of the Long Eyes."

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE PLAYWRIGHT AND POLITICIAN

"The best happy accident for Arizona was the formation of its population. The pluralism. The cultural brew. The ethnic mix. We have large tribes of American Indians living on traditional homelands and waves of newcomers just getting acquainted. The human energy here is simply phenomenal."

"I have survived half my life without electricity, plumbing, central heating, air-conditioning, neon advertising, or the microwave oven. But I could no more live in a world without wilderness than I could endure a life term in prison."

"Pueblo culture has been a living thing in the Southwest for at least 2,000 years. While archaeologists and others are working on the outlines of its history, making it clearer year by year, they cannot completely appreciate the feelings and responses which come instinctively from one who has lived the culture."

THE LAND I LOVE

"Nowhere else on Earth has the friendliness and the diversity of scenery, geography, and weather as Arizona has been blessed with. Had I not been born here, I'd want to move here."

"When I was a ranch kid, my dad would take me along on trips hauling bulls out of the Patagonia country not far from Arizona's border with Mexico. I fell in love with a land with the best grass in the state, a mile-high climate, mountain views all around. My career took me away for 50 years, but when I retired I didn't hesitate. Our place is well up the western slope of the Santa Ritas, and the nearest town is Sonoita with a post office and three saloons. This land literally called me back." "Whenever I am away from Arizona, I miss the sense of vast space and distance, the cumulus clouds floating across the bluest of skies, the presence of a horizon, and the dry desert winds. All these things remind me how great is our universe and how small we are that self-reliance is important in this enormous world of ours."

THE LAND I LOVE

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Cienega Creek runs placidly through the Empire-Cienega Conservation Area. JERRY SIEVE (ABOVE) Hidden within the Superstition Mountains are lost gold, lost souls, and the seeds of countless myths and legends. DICK DIETRICH

Arizona Highways 19

THE LAND I LOVE

"Arizona - the very word goes straight to that place in the heart where Americans feel the spirit of pride in their Western heritage - the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle whether Nature or man." As painters, my wife, Louise, and I fell in love with Arizona's truly intense light. It is a bonus along with splendid weather, a relaxed but rewarding lifestyle, and a dynamic citizenry that we've now enjoyed for 23 years. The natural world ranging from sand dunes to forested alpine mountains, from enormous plateaus to rolling desert gardens - is awesome. We came here on a three-day trip and were swept off our feet."

The Land I Love

"On a given day, Arizona has 10 climates. You can use your steering wheel as a weather dial. Young people actually snow ski in the mountains and drive a couple of hours to water ski on desert lakes. Many's the time I drove from my home in Phoenix to my cabin in the White Mountains, and it was equivalent to traveling from subtropical Mexico to wintry Canada."

JACK WILLIAMS

FORMER GOVERNOR

"I had been lecturing all over the country for seven years, and never once did I go home and say, 'Pack!' But when I was invited to speak in Phoenix in 1970, that's exactly what I did. I have written everywhere, but one of my favorite places is at our cabin at Pinetop, in eastern Arizona, where I look out into a forest of trees and wildlife. I've done most of my books up there, despite the scenic distractions."

DR. JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

THE LAND I LOVE

"Living in the desert is the spiritual cathartic a great many people need. I am one of them."

ARCHITECT Although it is home to lush stands of its namesake, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument nurtures a variety of other desert plants, including teddybear cholla and brittlebush. LARRY ULRICH "I'm more alive in Arizona than in other places that I've lived in the world. It's the light, or rather the drama of the light. It can be astonishing, startling. Looking from my studio window at the tapestry of luminous colors that climbs the canyon walls around us here in Pine, I've often been snatched away from my work, compelled to pay attention, as if it were the ring of a phone."

(LEFT) A summer storm moves in near Woods Canyon Lake, above the Mogollon Rim. LARRY ULRICH (RIGHT) A heavy rain creates a series of small pools in Oak Creek Canyon. DAVID MUENCH (FOLLOWING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29) A storm threatens above Sedona's Camelbead Rock, already lightly dusted with snow. DICK CANBY

THE LAND I LOVE

"Since I arrived in 1976, Sedona has been the land I love. It is nestled at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon among majestic towering rocks which change color with the clouds and the light, from the palest mauve to a blazing orange-red. Sedona truly offers the best of everything."