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In my office 1,500 miles away from Arizona, a small watercolor of a Spanish Colonial Revival courtyard in Tucson hangs on the wall. Anyone who knows me well might be surprised to find it here. I used to scoff at such places during the decades I lived in Tucson - how could architects revive a history of dashing dons and grand haciendas that never existed? But the image of the counterfeit villa now hangs on my wall, threatening to make a lump of raw dough rise in my throat if I stare at it long. In the painting, the light falls as softly as a mother's smile, a gnarled olive tree filtering it into clumps of mottled shade on the brick pavers. A ristra of dried red chiles hangs inside the loggia like a lantern signaling a welcome. Concrete benches with curlicued legs await passersby lost in daydreams, love or prayer. The courtyard is an oasis, a refuge. The locals cherish certain places in Tucson, and this is one of them. They are not all found in guidebooks, and sometimes they stir up conflicting feelings even among their partisans. Visitors from moist, green places may not understand why a waterfall that fails to perform at least 300 days of the year and entails some misery to get to when it is running should be considered an attraction at all. But Tucson is not like other Sunbelt destinations; it doesn't eagerly turn itself inside out for the visitor, or even the resident, all at once. If you want to know its soul, you have to do some work. Sometimes you even have to move away. I first saw South Convent Street in 1973. I had come for a job interview, and my prospective boss was showing me the tattered fringes of downtown Tucson that had escaped urban renewal. South Convent was the heart of the barrio libre, a 13-block neighborhood of adobe row houses and Territorial bungalows. The University of Arizona College of Architecture had just concluded that the neighborhood stood "as the sole reminder of a Tucson that existed a century ago," not because it was being cherished and preserved but because it had been forgotten. Developers and urban planners had simply overlooked it. I wrote several stories about the barrio during the next 20 years, detailing sporadic pulses of renovation and gentrification. There was occasional conflict between old residents and affluent newcomers, and not all the restorations were graceful. But I revisit the barrio every time I return to Tucson, as if adobe has a gravitational pull. It forms a living connection to Tucson's Hispanic past, and I find the unevenness of the handmade walls refreshing after the sterility of most modern residential streetscapes. Rick Joy, an architect who works out of one of the adobe row houses, won a sprinkle of national acclaim in 1997 for a cluster of four small studio apartments on Convent Street. Three are entirely new, crisply contemporary buildings, although they reside on a courtyard behind a 19th-century adobe wall that used to form the facade of a now-crumbled house. Thus the scale and mood of the street are preserved, and past and present join hands with no awkwardness.

An Insider's Look at What Makes Tucson Unique

"I strongly believe it's wrong to falsify history in a fragile historical setting like this," Joy told me. "To fake an old building degrades the importance of the real thing."

Convent Street could have become a theme park packed with boutiques, or a slum. As it is, it's still a work in progress, illustrating the fitful-but-honest struggle of a city to come to terms with itself. It's also a lesson in urban desert livingcourtyards instead of lawns, pastel colors that seem to drink the sunlight instead of fighting it.

At downtown's other end is the historic district of El Presidio, an omnium-gatherum of turn-of-the-century mansions, bungalows, adobes and a few gate-crashers from the late 20th century. I once took a friend's daughter, a high-school senior considering a major in architecture, for a walking tour of El Presidio, and I could point out most of the last century's architectural history inside a few blocks: Sonoran, Territorial, Tudor, Italianate Victorian, Mission Revival, Modernism. It's all there, mostly restored and deeply cherished.

El Presidio's struggle has been to preserve at least some of its historic residential character (from 1880 to about 1910, it was Tucson's prestige neighborhood). Almost all of the large homes, however, have become lawyers' offices. One of those lawyers once showed me his conference room an intimate parlor with oak floor and bay window and flower garden view and begged to go off the record. He didn't want his colleagues to think he was nuts. "I really believe this environment has a magic effect on people," he said. "I take depositions in here, and I swear that people tell the truth in this room."

I believed it then; I do now. The neighborhood's buildings and courtyards have a palpable feel of reality and purpose, as if they exist for something more enduring than speculative profits. Walk around the neighborhood, and you absorb this through the skin, as if by spiritual osmosis.

I have a private El Presidio ritual whenever I return to Tucson: I buy a red chile burro at Tony Peyron's El Rapido (takeout only; since 1933), walk two blocks to the Tucson Museum of Art courtyard and eat on a bench. A great swath of Tucson's history comes wrapped in this simple ceremony: the five historic houses built between 1850 and 1907, now incorporated into the Museum of Art complex, and the Peyron family's red chile, which has not changed appreciably since Tony's grand-mother devised it in the 1930s.

There are Tucsonans who think the city's soul has little to do with its architecture or urban history. "Tucson is like a strange form of animal," said my friend Les Wallach, who is, oddly, an architect. "Its soul is its skeleton, and that skeleton is on the out-side the mountains."

Most of us scored our introduction to the mountain ranges around the city the easy way: by driving west out Speedway Boulevard to Gates Pass, the road over the Tucson Mountains. This is no secret hide-away; any Tucsonan with a tenure of 30 days can tell you that sunset at Gates Pass is the best cheap date in the city. But there's more here than the obvious. On this rocky aerie you can simultaneously get lost in the exhilarating space of the sky and feel the mothering sense of enclosure that the four mountain ranges provide Tucson. At such times I feel that no city in North America is blessed with such privileged geography and then I wonder why we violate such a harmonious union of nature and civiliza-tion by letting the city claw its way up into the mountains and ooze beyond those providential boundaries. Still, the pass fills me more with awe than annoyance. According to a geology lesson on a sign, "30 to 17 million years ago, the [Tucson] Mountains detached from the rising Santa Catalina Mountains and moved slowly to their present position here." Wish I'd been around; that must have been a spectacle.

Thirty miles across the urban sprawl is another familiar mountain spectacle, Sabino Canyon. I confess I contributed to this sprawl; my last six years in Tucson I lived in a house wrestled from a quarter-acre of desert that was practically at the canyon's entrance. Nearly every morning for six years I avoided writing by exploring the canyon and its nearby environs, and I feel more educated for having squandered time there. I now approach the thorny questions of human vs. desert with more balance - and, I like to think, a larger wisdom.

In 1937 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had the idea to slap a 250-foot-high concrete dam across Sabino Canyon and fill it with a recreational lake. The scheme died for lack of local funding, fortunately.

Actually, though, Sabino Canyon did get a dam a very modest one, built of native stone by the Civilian Conservation Corps, hidden by the cotton and sycamore bosque on the canyon floor. It backs up a small pond, which, at least to my untrained eye, has enhanced the biodiversity of the canyon.

On one of my morning meditations there I encountered a great blue heron, which would appear to have no other reason than the pond for a layover in Tucson. The lesson of Sabino Dam is that when dealing with nature, we might do best to invert the axiom attributed to the architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.” In Sabino Canyon, little plans were exactly right.

Four miles from the entrance to Sabino can be found one of nature's stirring endeavors, a waterfall that runs, with luck, two months out of the year. The hike to Seven Falls mostly follows the flat floor of Bear Canyon, so it's easy when there's no snow melting in the Santa Catalinas above. When there is water to feed the falls, the round-trip means crossing Bear Canyon Creek 14 times.

I once took a visitor who laboriously removed her shoes and socks and replaced them the first seven times, sniveling about the chilly water on each occasion until we reached the cascade. Then she stood, gaping in awe at the sheer chutzpah of a desert mountain that appears to belch water from some unseen internal source, sending it crashing through a forest of saguaros. At Seven Falls, water defines the desert in a wholly unexpected way.

Back in the city, a private park defines the desert in a different but equally unexpected way. Tohono Chul Park lay far out on the city's fringe when it was conceived in 1966, but today it is enveloped in urban bustle. Although the constant hiss of traffic and the obnoxious backing-up beepers of construction equipment surround its fragile 48 acres, the preserve makes the point that the desert can abide even with the frenzy around it.

"We have deer, coyotes, a resident herd of javelinas, even a 7-foot gopher snake," docent Don Owen, a retired lawyer and park volunteer, told me. "A pair of bob-cats raised a litter here a couple of years ago. The only problem is that they haven't killed enough of the rabbits."

This isn't a zoo, and the park hasn't been stocked with critters. By accident, Tohono Chul (the name means "desert corner" in the Tohono O'odham language) stands as a testimonial to the Earth's determination to meet its obligations to all its residents, whatever the obstacles.

And here's a testimonial, too, to Tucson's determination, as unsteady and spasmodic as it seems, to keep its unique spirit. This city's entire history in the past century has been the story of people coming in great droves, most of us failing to understand the place, planting silly grass lawns and building ridiculous steel-and-glass office towers and hatching schemes for great concrete dams, and yet never quite succeeding in turning Tucson into a mainstream American city. Its natural environment its soul is so persistent that it transforms something in its residents so that we do just enough of the right things to keep an extraordinary place alive.

We have the Rillito, an arroyo as wide as a California freeway, with a preposterous and lovely linear park along its banks. We have our enigmatic predecessors, the Hohokam, right in our midst, their millennium-old petroglyphs pecked into boulders on hilltops and canyons around the city.

I melt into the watercolor on my studio wall, the old courtyard of St. Philip's In The Hills Episcopal Church. Another special place, unimaginable in Phoenix, Santa Fe or anywhere else.

WHEN YOU GO

Location: 110 miles southeast of Phoenix.

Phone Numbers: All area codes are 520 unless noted; 800 numbers are toll-free.

Attractions: Convent Street, Barrio Historico District and El Presidio Historic District, (800) 638-8350; El Rapido, 624-4725; Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, 624-2333; Tucson Mountain Park, 740-2690; Sabino Canyon Recreational Area, 749-2861; Santa Catalina Mountains, Coronado National Forest's Santa Catalina Ranger District, 749-8700; Tohono Chul Park, 575-8468; Rillito River Park, 740-2690; St. Philip's In The Hills Episcopal Church, 299-6421.

Additional Information: Metropolitan Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau, (800) 638-8350 or 624-1817.