ALONG THE WAY

Coyotes and Roadrunners, Icons of the Desert, Miss Their Day in the Sun on Sonoran Stamp

The old aphorism has it that travel broadens, which I take to mean it gives one a panoramic perspective on long-held but possibly narrow-minded thoughts and attitudes. We go around basking in the comfort of platitudes, assumptions and cliches, but as the prologue to the X-Files declares: The truth is out there. My recent trip to Arizona was a case in point. I'd always thought of the desert as an essentially stark and lifeless place. Boy, did I get a wrong number! I came away from southern Arizona thinking that the desert is really as lively as Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch's 16th-century masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is to say, teeming with dramatic and colorful activity.

A few days after my return, the U.S. Postal Service issued a sheet of cardboard-backed, cellophane-framed stamps joined jigsaw-style to comprise a scenic tableau titled “Sonoran Desert.” The scene perfectly summarizes my impression of same.

In the background, the cactuses seem as profuse as coconut palms on a Polynesian beach, and there is a green and yellow proliferation of ancillary boscage.

In the foreground, there are enough creatures to upstage the denizens of any self-respecting jungle. There are the nightmare and horror movie heavies: ants, wasps, tarantulas, scorpions, rats, snakes and lizards. Then there are the birds: enough different birds to make an Audubon Society gawker do a series of doubletakes. Thumper's and Bambi's cousins are in there. And a huge turtle, prompting me to reflect that it's one of the few creatures Disney has not anthropomorphized as a leading animal in animation. Babe's cousins are present, too, milling around the base of a saguaro, snouts to the ground, as if looking for lunch.

Is there life in the desert? Is there pasta in Palermo?

My new impression of Arizona was that there's no less life in the desert than in the jungle. At night, at the resort where I stayed, one heard a polyphonic chittering, cawing and howling in the distance reminiscent of the soundtrack from a nighttime movie sequence set in a jungle or rain forest.

The movies, now that I think about it, provided my ersatz knowledge of the nature of the desert before I encountered the reality.

There's no excuse for the incomplete impressions of the desert given by American Westerns. They have traditionally portrayed a desert in which three ritual scenes sum up its life: A cowboy hears an ominous rattling sound and whirls around to plug a sidewinder.

Vultures circle something dead, usually the victim of Indians. And coyotes always howl in the background in the nighttime campfire scenes. Occasionally a scorpion gets a small characteractor part. But that's about it.

When did you last see a movie cowboy encounter a wild pig, let alone a deer, in the desert? When did you last see a horse and a turtle in the same frame?

Surprisingly, the Post Office's picture omits two desert creatures that are probably the most familiar to the general public. The coyote has traditionally had a high profile as the aforementioned background howler in the movies, and when Wile E. Coyote teamed with a roadrunner in the ever-popular cartoon series, the two became leading animals of universally acclaimed appeal.

I can also vouch for the ubiquity of coyotes and roadrunners in the real-life present-day desert. I encountered a scavenging coyote in the parking lot of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, and twice during my stay in Arizona roadrunners darted across my path. So it seems shortsighted for the Post Office to have given short shrift to these two.

For them to ignore the coyote and the roadrunner in a picture portraying the life in the Sonoran Desert seems to me equivalent to showing us a South American rain forest without its parrots or monkeys. But who knows what strange pitfalls the fine arts encounter in a bureaucratic process? Actually, the roadrunner cartoons themselves downplay the concept of life in the desert. On the parboiled desert floor, amid countless bleak, virtually surreal buttes and mesas, there is rarely if ever any evidence that the coyote and roadrunner are any less alone than, say, the proverbial last man and woman in the world in a science fiction story. Their only link with any kind of society is the Acme Novelty Company, and it, I think we can assume, is in some extremely remote place like New Jersey.

My impressions of the Sonoran Desert left me with no doubt whatever that it is not unlike the legendary Studio 54 on a weekend night. On my way to or from my cabana at the resort, I would invariably see a big-eared rabbit. And it seemed that everywhere I looked, there were birds - plenty of tawny, dun and tan ones, but also birds in an array of eye-snaring colors: yellow, red, orange and blue. And there was often more than a little furtive slithering going on at the edge of my vision. Come to think of it, those otters I saw haven't been acknowledged by the Post Office either.

Incidentally, there's as much pasta in Palermo as there is impasto in the Prado. My