Reaching For Beyond

The Sky Islands

These craggy mountain ranges rise abruptly from southern Arizona's "sea" of desert basins, forming "islands" of high-country climate zones that offer cooler, wetter retreats for great varieties of plants and animals.

The Desert

Flung out like giant arid tapestries, deserts surprise the newcomer with vibrant stitches of life worked into the harsh overall pattern.

[ABOVE] Best known for its eroded sandstone monoliths, Monument Valley hums with the rhythmic textures of jumbled stone slabs. [ABOVE RIGHT] Ancient people left their creative imprints across the smooth walls of the Vermilion Cliffs. [RIGHT] Chiseled sandstone ripples near Paria Canyon recall primordial ocean beaches.

The Colorado Plateau

Sculpted, forged or painted, rock in all shapes and colors becomes nature's art gallery on the Colorado Plateau stretching across northern Arizona.

(Continued from page 24) whites that had obliterated all the landmarks, all the trees, all the people on Earth. I was looking at infinity, at least as far as any 4-year-old mind could comprehend it, and it was magnificent and terrifying. It would be nice to claim that I had a rush of primal insight into the nature of God, or at least a stirring of appreciation for the desert's natural architecture, but all I felt was what any ordinary kid would: panic.

They found me in half an hour. The monument wasn't deserted, and I did not have the stamina to wander far. I didn't understand it until much later, but I had been given my first lesson in the power of landscape to seize the imagination and trigger the transcendent moment.

Vast and intimate: two ways of experiencing landscape, two ways of reconnecting with the natural world and discovering our place in it. Both request that we pay attention, think deeply about what we're seeing, or maybe free-associate or let our pentup emotions rip and run. There is no precise formula for absorbing and understanding beauty. There are many good ideas.

So often you go to a place with a foregone expectation of what you'll find," says Muench. "But if you go out in a meditative spirit, leaving yourself completely open, nature will astound you with miracles."

Marcel Proust said it, too: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." And also Henry David Thoreau, who advocated taking fourhour walks every day, but with no certain destination and no agenda of physical exercise. "You must walk like a camel," he punned, "which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking."

And then there is Edward Abbey, en route to Los Angeles, who stopped to roll an old tire into the Grand Canyon. While he was watching it bounce over pine trees and mule trains, he overheard a nearby park ranger saying a few words about Havasu Falls. "What I heard made me think that I should see Havasu immediately, before something went wrong somewhere," he wrote.

He never made it to Los Angeles; instead, he ensconced himself in the Southwest and wrote the classic Desert Solitaire. His free-wheeling Firestone may be apocryphal - Abbey couldn't quite be trusted as the dutiful journalist-but the principle is sound. We open ourselves to the moment. Follow impulse, pay attention, look and listen intently-and take the chance of falling in love.

Several paragraphs above, I glibly wrote "transcendent moment." The phrase may resonate in an essay about discovery, but does it really mean anything?

In its primary and best definition, "transcendent," means "going beyond ordinary limits." When we go out and Look at the world, we ordinarily limit our perceptions in numerous ways. We set aside two hours for a 5-mile hike. We pack a Walkman with tunes to feed us portable entertainment. We focus on the machinery of photography or video instead of the creek or flower.

A television commercial demonstrates an optional back-seat DVD screen (complete with parental con-trols) for the family minivan and suggests that its world of entertainment options will bring blessed peace to family expeditions. But at what price? My wife first encountered Arizona as a child from the back seatif there could be said to be such a thing-of a Triumph TR-3 roadster.

In such a minimalist vehicle, a 9-year-old can choose between studying the tachometer or the land. She fell in love with the land, an affair consummated when she became an Arizonan 15 years later.

"Going beyond ordinary limits" is the very reason we travel. We do it to help us understand the world and, more importantly, how we fit into it. We do it to absorb nature's beauty into our spirits and maybe stuff some science into our brains, and what we make of these infusions will affect-or should, at least-both how we live and how we connect with our environment.

Essayist Pico Iyer wrote that he traveled "to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine." Is there anyone who cannot relate to this? Routine responsibilities nag at my days until there's no core left; it's like being nibbled to death by a thousand ducks. At least once a day I need a vacation, an hour or two of solo walking, preferably in an unfamiliar place; at least once a month I have to slip away to a canyon, a mountain, a river or an ocean to shake off that chatter and routine. If those transcendent moments are going to present themselves, these are the conditions they will need.

Long ago at White Sands, I'd had my frightening encounter with infinity, or what looked like it. And there was the intimate creekscape in Oak Creek's West Fork almost 50 years later that shook the memory awake. This was not entirely coincidence, because Muench and I were working on a book we'd titled Vast & Intimate: Connecting with the Natural World.

The vast and intimate had been much on our minds.

Muench's artistic signature has always been the grand and sweeping landscape with a provocative foreground detail-an intricately textured rock, a spiky agave, a wind-rippled expanse of sand. And for this special project, he wanted to stretch this envelope, probe farther out to the horizon and closer in toward the lens, exploring all the intricate aesthetic and spiritual connective tissue between the great and the small. My job was to find the words to make sense of it.

For a 160-pound biped with bad eyesight, an actuarial probability of expiring in the next quarter-century and no great religious conviction, vastness is a tough rock to chew. At times the implications of vast space or time hit me as incomprehensibly abstract, like a man trying to explain the First Amendment to a cat. But I can get a grip on it by contemplating a mountain-something that has existed, immutably, for tens or hundreds of millions of years.

Of course mountains do change: They thrust up, blow up, tilt, erode, exfoliate and fall down; but this seldom happens on our clock. "There is nothing like geology to take the urgency out of the morning's news," wrote Scott Russell Sanders. I think this explains why we like to huddle our cities around mountains. Their massive hulks teach us humility, they reassure us; at our best, they even inspire us.

And now comes intimacy. To learn to conduct ourselves to better effect on this biosphere, we need to observe nature's workings at close range. This is especially critical in the desert, where the native varieties of flora and fauna could teach us how to live here within our means. To conserve and recycle. To treasure shade and water. To avoid overwhelming a land that is inherently unsuited to great masses of people. To sneak off from work on a blistering summer day, like the bark scorpion, and take a long nap in a cool, dark place. To create the beautiful and extravagant artistic gesture, like soaptree yucca sprouts suddenly erupting within the water-gathering swales of a dune field. Carpe diem, as nature does.

Taken together, the inspiration of vastness and the intimate observation become lessons in the nature of beauty and the conduct of life. What more is there to learn? AH EDITOR'S NOTE: David Muench and Lawrence W. Cheek's latest book, Vast & Intimate: Connecting with the Natural World, explores the art, harmony and relationships flourishing in the Southwest's deserts, sky islands and the Colorado Plateau. Hardcover, 160 pages, $39.95 plus shipping and handling. To order, call toll-free (800) 543-5432 or go online to arizona-highways.com.

One of Arizona's greatest mysteries exploded onto front pages of newspapers across the country in December 1925. One man's find of seemingly ancient crosses and swords buried in the earth outside Tucson raised the prospect that Europeans had lived in Arizona 700 years before Columbus. If true, history was going to get a substantial rewrite.

That rewrite never happened, of course, but the discovery of what were later called the Silverbell artifacts touched off a furious debate. The controversy sent reputations spiraling, spawned bouts of intellectual mud-wrestling and led to charges of fraud and fakery.

After all that-and more than 75 years of expert inquiry-the principal questions surrounding the mystifying leaden objects still remain unanswered.

On September 13, 1924, a World War I veteran, Charles E. Manier, was returning to Tucson with his wife, son and father after a picnic at Picture Rocks, north of town. Out of curiosity, he told his son, who was driving, to pull over at an abandoned lime kiln on Silverbell Road, 8 miles northwest of town, on what is now private property.As he inspected the kiln, Manier saw an object protruding from the bank of a wagon path out into the wash. He tapped on it with his father's cane and saw that it was trapped in solid caliche, a thick rocklike crust that forms underground from lime leaching out of the soil.

Hammering with an army pick, he dug out an 18-inch-long cross that weighed 64 pounds. After taking it home and washing it, Manier realized it was two crosses riveted together with lead. When he separated the pieces, he saw inscriptions of Latin wordsand phrases, including the date A.D. 790. Manier brought in on the discovery his friend and fellow veteran, Thomas W. Bent, who eventually homesteaded the property. The two men, with help from some University of Arizona professors, continued digging, and, by November 1925, they had unearthed 27 lead castings, a number that eventually would grow to 32.

The cache consisted mainly of swords, but also included crosses and spears. The items, inscribed with dates ranging between A.D. 760 and A.D. 900, were decorated with a mixture of symbols-a Christian cross, a Moslem crescent, a Hebraic seven-branched candlestick, freemasonry emblems and Latin phrases. Hebrew words adorned two of the crosses.The story broke on December 13, 1925, with both the Arizona Daily Star and the