Monthly Archives: February 2016

We’ve all had the experience of revisiting some place that meant something to us when we were young, only to find it ruined by the passing years — the blight in tract homes where there had been woods we played in; the proliferation of 7-Elevens or Starbucks; the widening of roads we had ridden our bikes down and the concomitant soot-spewing storm of traffic. The divided-highway bypass and the Walmart near the exit. Time has not been good to the landscape we knew.

But I have always thought, there must be someone of a generation previous who looked at the landscape I bicycled down and thought, how much better it had been when the road was gravel and there were no houses — including the one I grew up in — lining that road.

The fact is, time is furious and eats up the land just as it eats up the remaining years of my life. “Panta Horein” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Everything changes.” Doubtless, there was someone before my elder who loved the same land when there was nothing but a footpath through the forest and thought it better for all that.

And no doubt there will be some future progeny who will look at the scene some 50 years hence and lament the loss of those same 7-Elevens, replaced by something even crasser and more demoralizing. To them, the land I now lament will have been Eden.

Holbrook, Arizona

Too often we think of the land as something permanent through which plays the impermanence of our comings and goings — a static stage set for our dramas. Its pace may be slower than ours, but the land changes, also; it has its own drama. I particularly love to see the scars of those changes, the evidence of what used to be, the peeping out from under the macadam of the buried eyes of the past.

One of the prizes I have is a Rand-McNally road atlas from the year I was born (1948). The map of Arizona has no interstates on it, and you can see that the very getting from Phoenix to Flagstaff was a detour, driving first through Wickenburg and up to Prescott before either heading north to Ash Fork and then east on U.S. 66 to Flag, or taking the more mountainous route up Alternate 89 over Mingus Mountain, down to the Verde Valley and then up the hill through Sedona and up the face of the Mogollon Rim to your destination.

Of course, there was a more direct route, through Dugas and Camp Verde, but the road was mostly dirt and rutted.

The thing is, that if you look for them, all those ruts are still there. You can, if you wish, and if your car is sturdy enough, drive those roads up through Bumble Bee, through Orme, through Skull Valley, Iron Springs or Happy Jack. Like Schliemann digging down through layers of Troy, the archeology of Arizona is there — or its fossils are.

West of Kingman

All of which brings me to the slice of Arizona across its northern tier, now defined by Interstate 40. The interstate ate up what used to be U.S. 66 — Route 66 of legend — and takes the speediferous driver across the flatter parts of the Colorado Plateau, up through Flagstaff, and down through Williams, Kingman and on to California. “You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona. Don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino…”

But, if you get off the interstate, right at the state line in Lupton, you can find the ghost road, mostly paralleling the freeway, and you can drive along it, at a steady 45 mph, watching for potholes, and see the scars of the past dug into the dry stony soil. The road is discontinuous — you will have to get back on the interstate for an exit or so, or ride over the tide of traffic to pick up the auxiliary road on the other side, where old 66 will start again. It is a ghost of itself, and along it are a few forgotten towns, many gutted old service stations with their paint peeled, their windows blown out and their driveways split by weeds busting through.

Time is fierce, it eats everything.

I admit to a weakness for these pentimenti, for the palimpsest of time, showing through the later “improvements.” They provide a glimpse of the process, of the metamorphosis — using Ovid’s word — of the constant writhing and seething of the planet and our place as people in the ferment and bubbling.

It comes in the shorter term, such as old Route 66 being devoured by grasses and crucifers, but it also comes in longer terms, such as the Anasazi ruins of Canyon de Chelly and Betatakin, the petroglyphs of Rio Puerco in the Petrified Forest National Park.

There are remaining parts of old Route 66, running through Seligman, and it is mined constantly for nostalgia. But it isn’t that I am feeding on, but the sense of sand sifting through my fingers, of time leaving. It comes out of some chthonic well and runs past us and dissipating in an ocean of we know not where. The old road is still there, and it will be there even when there are no cars — just as the wagon ruts can still be found along the Santa Fe Trail, sunk into the grasses of Kansas.

I relish all the different tickings and tockings of the various clocks running their various races.

Sliding Rock Ruins, Canyon de Chelly

You stand at the rim of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation and look down to the braided stream at the bottom that scoured this great hole out of the sandstone and wonder how long it must have taken. Then you see the tiny Anasazi relics built into the walls of the rock and realize how long people have been living here, and then you see the sandstone itself an think about how much longer ago — exponentially longer — that ancient river deltas deposited the silt that later became that stone.

White House Ruins, Canyon de Chelly

How much more do you sense these multiple time scales at this rift’s big brother, the Grand Canyon.

Marble Canyon

If you want to have the planetary feeling without racing around the globe, you can get it standing still in Arizona: with your feet planted at the edge of the Grand Canyon. In that case, you stand stock-still and let the planet do the moving.

North Rim, Grand Canyon

The first time I saw sunrise at the Grand Canyon, my wife and I were camping on the North Rim outside the National Park. We had arrived with the naive assumption we could wander in late in the afternoon and get a room at the lodge. Or failing that, we could get a slot at the campgrounds.

The desk clerk took pity on us and explained that although they were completely booked, lodge and campground, for the foreseeable future, we could find a dirt road just outside the park that would take us to a place in the National Forest where people often camped.

It was dark by the time we got to that road, and when we turned into an open place where two or three other tents were set up, it was already night.

We slept, we dreamed, and we woke before sunrise, when the earliest glow floated in through our tent flap. And when we got out to stretch and start up the camp stove, we gasped: We were about 15 feet from the rim of the canyon. It dropped out of sight below us.

If we had pulled forward just a little farther the night before in the blackness, it would have been Thelma-and-Louise time for us. We were hard on the edge.

But more impressive, the humid late-July weather had left the entire canyon as a gigantic dish of cotton. The clouds filled in the canyon-hollow like apples in a fruit bowl. A 215-mile long fruit bowl.

The mists swirled and wisped below us, over precipices and down canyonlets, in constant motion, rising and subsiding as the new-hatched sun warmed patches of the air the mist rode upon and the breezes wafted the veils.

Grand Canyon West

The Classical writer, Longinus, said that we enjoy the day-to-day things of our lives, but when it comes to awe, we get that only from the sublime. Hearth fires, he said, were nice, but erupting volcanoes make us consider a planet and cosmos larger than we are and well beyond our control. The sublime is beautiful, but it is also scary: It is the source of religious feeling.

You cannot avoid that at the Grand Canyon, with its stony layers of eons piled upon each other. The Canyon is a great wound in the Earth into which we can look and see its organs pulsating at a rate so slow as to make all of human history a mere blip on its EKG.

The Grand Canyon is a clock. It has a big hand and a little hand.

The little hand moves very slowly, telling the time in geologic terms. To see the hand move, you must wait millions of years.

In that time, you would see continental oceans lay down sediments and tectonic forces push those layers upward, only to be eroded by a river, like a sand pile washed by a hose.

One stands at the rim now and looks back into the past, washed away eon by eon, stratum by stratum, until one’s eye stands on the Vishnu schist, the Precambrian footings of the Canyon.

You hardly can take in the vastness of it. It is an earthly reminder of eternity, that time beyond time that turns our lives into flyspecks.

But this geological clock has a fast-moving big hand, too. And it changes all 200 miles of the Canyon second by second. It can seem to the observer like time-lapse photography in real time as the sun jumps from the horizon and changes the shadowed blacks of the deep walls to a burning cherry ruddiness and on much too quickly to the weathered indigo blueness of noon.

Cycles and epicycles, wheels inside wheels, the turning of time on itself in all its speeds.

The first time I saw the Canyon, I got there before dawn. My wife and I had arrived late the previous night and wound up camping in the Kaibab National Forest outside the park. I set our alarm clock for 4 a.m., and when we got up, it was completely dark.

We drove to the overlook at Lipan Point, and I set up my camera in the blackness, out on a rocky ledge beyond the guardrail.

The tripod barely could find purchase on the narrow outcrop, and my wife warned me about taking chances, especially by the glow of a flashlight.

A little after 4, the horizon began to appear. It was July, but it was icy cold before the sun rose. The batteries of my light meter ceased to work in the cold.

Yet it was beginning to be possible, as the far edge of the Canyon contrasted with the blue-gray of the lightening sky, to focus my lens on the ground glass of the camera. And I saw there little more than that dividing line.

But down in the bottom of the Canyon, a mile below us, there was a snaky line of a reflecting light.

It was the river, a white tube of neon cut off here and there by the mesas and buttes below us. At times, the rope of water actually seemed brighter than the sky.

I managed to take a two- or three-minute exposure of the nearly black landscape. The glow in the sky had begun to make some of the rock texture visible, but less so to the eye than to the camera.

Moment by moment, the scene changed, a slow crescendo of light that began where the river disappeared in the northeast until the fire broke the horizon and the first sliver of sun appeared.

What is most surprising is the quickness of the change. If you were to take a photograph once a minute over the course of a day, you hardly would have two alike.

When the sun is on the horizon, you actually can see it move. And as it rose and sank its light deeper into the Canyon, what had been a charcoal mass of rock mazes became lighted at the top ends of the rocks, like the cherry end of a cigarette in the dawn.

You could see probably scores of miles down the Canyon to the west and see the angle of the sun on the edge of the rock.

Nothing is so like the Earth waking up.

Looking toward the sun, the Canyon became a receding stage set of silhouettes, each lighter and grayer as it retreated toward the sunrise. Looking away from the sun, the rock faces became increasingly red, then orange, then brick, with layers of white and green thrown in.

The Grand Canyon is grandest in the dawn. Those willing to awaken early enough stare into the clock of the day playing on the stone and see their lives moving before them. If time is a stream, as Thoreau says, at the Grand Canyon you can see its rapids. The change continues all day. On most summer days, the midday hours are the least interesting. The hazy blueness of the distant rim seems steady from about 10 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m. But if you stare with enough commitment, you can see the changes even then as the downward angle of the sunlight twists slowly from one side of the cliffs to the other.

Grand Canyon West

Later, when the sun’s angle lowers to day’s end, the changes accelerate once more, taking the rocks back from blue to red and into darkness.

There is no mistaking the Earth as a clock, turning with the sun as the hour marker, moving in orderly procession around the rim of the great circle we live on.

But the two clocks at the Canyon also remind of the conflicting realities of the place. On the one hand, the slow clock tells of the everlastingness of things, their physical endurance. On the other, how can you believe in reality if the same limestone that can be red at 8 a.m. can be blue by 9?

It reinforces your sense of rock-solid reality and undercuts your belief at the same time. To live in two times at once: This is the central message of all the world’s religions.

When people find spiritual meaning in the Canyon, perhaps it is these conflicting clocks more than anything else that create that sense. Certainly, the Canyon’s vast space is inspiring, but it is time that speaks of eternity and our place in it.

Click any image to enlarge

Arizona: Imaginary road trip IV — The pits

February 24, 2016

Uncategorized

2 Comments

Miami, Arizona

Many decades ago, when I first came through Arizona, I passed through a landscape so surreal that after I got home, I could not be sure, when I went back to my job in Virginia, that I had actually seen what I had seen: mountains and mountains of grayish-tan gravel, in a town so beaten down, so weathered, so spavined and dried out, that could not be sure that I had not dreamed the whole thing during a nap after an ill-advised meal of rarebit.

When we finally moved to Arizona, I rediscovered Miami-Claypool and it lost nothing of its Twilight Zone weirdness. To those of us not familiar with copper mining, the thought that humans could build cordilleras of utter waste — post-apocalyptic poetry — was hard to credit. Part of me wanted to live there. Nothing could possibly feel day-to-day, ordinary, or boring in such a nerve-frayed landscape.

Superior

If you drive east from Phoenix, out past Mesa, past Apache Junction, into the desert past Florence Junction and climb up into the hills, you will find a string of mining towns, mostly abandoned or dying, or hanging on by their fingernails, beginning with Superior. It was one of the locations for the 1997 Oliver Stone film, U Turn, and it feels like it could have been dreamed up by a Hollywood set designer. In 2005, a sci-fi film called Alien Invasion Arizona was filmed there. It isn’t quite a ghost town, but you could easily place a season of The Walking Dead there.

Superior’s biography is like so many copper towns in Arizona part of a history that almost no one thinks about. It is an industrial history, full of smokestacks and labor disputes, and fills in the space between the six-gun Old West of popular mythology and the modern and often banal state of tourism and retirees.

Unfortunately, it is an industry that cycles with the international market price of copper: The price plummets and Arizona mines lay off workers and shut down. If the price recovers sufficiently, the mines start up once more. Mine-worker families face an uncertain life.

Superior cliffs

The history of Arizona’s mining towns is generic. Whether it is Bisbee or Bagdad, Morenci or Globe, there is a familiar tale, altered only with variations on the tune.

For each, it begins in the 1860s or ’70s, when an army officer or a prospector picks up a rock and smiles, recognizing it as ore. Usually, they were looking for gold. Often what they got was copper. Then there is a period of individual prospecting, usually ending in bankruptcy all around. Then, financiers from New York or San Francisco add capital and mining picks up on an industrial basis. Towns spring up, usually shanty towns precariously perched on gravelly hillsides near the mines. During boom years, the towns grow. Wood is replaced by brick; large hotels are built and streets are paved.

One company buys out another until huge corporations are formed with names like Phelps Dodge and Magma. Ultimately they become multinationals with many interests beyond copper.

Between the wars, the underground mines are largely replaced by the great pit mines, man-made miniature Grand Canyons of ore-dig.

Morenci

But then, after boom years and some bust years, the mines play out or are flooded or copper prices fall and the towns surrounding the mines die out.

Or, in a few cases, they persist, either as mining persists, as at Morenci, or as the towns find new purpose as tourist destinations, such as Bisbee, or county seats such as Globe.

But the past also persists, and those interested in this forgotten past of Arizona can still visit many of the best locations.

Mining hit Superior in 1870 when silver was discovered and the Silver King Mine became one of the richest silver mines in Arizona history. But in 1912, Boyce Thompson bought the mine, formed Magma Copper and the area became one of the great copper mines. The smelter closed in 1971; the mine remained in operation until 1982. The mine has sporadically been worked since, depending on copper prices. But Superior, taking a cue from Bisbee and Jerome has tried to position itself as a tourist location. The wooing of Hollywood has been part of that resuscitation and the town has its own film board.

Hayden

South of Superior, are mines at Mammoth and Kearny and Hayden, home to the ASARCO smelter complex, which services several of that company’s state mines. It is rich in mining history, and union grumbling is still part of the town: One abandoned building has “Union Yes! Forever” painted on it, with one of the “Ns” in “Union” painted backward. The first parts of the plant were opened in 1912, and now it covers 200 acres with a smelter smokestack 1,000 feet tall. Nearby Winkelman and Kearny are worth seeing, also, and the now-closed San Manuel mine is several miles south near Mammoth. The tell-tale tailings ridges run for miles.

ASARCO’s big open pit Ray Mine is 22 miles south of Superior on Arizona 177. The Ray Complex covers 53,000 acres and is the second largest copper mine in Arizona. There is an overlook off the highway that affords an unofficial peek at the mine.

But this is a detour. Back to Superior, and driving east up into Queen Creek Canyon and beyond to Miami-Claypool and its veritable Himalayas of detritus, where you will see what will be, depending on your esthetic sensibility, either a great warning of industrial environmental depredation, or an awesome visual wonderland, an eruption of surrealism in the middle of the quotidian.

Miami

The town looks like it was dropped as litter from some passing god’s chariot, scattered on the hillsides to either side of U.S. 60. The smelter smokestack rises to the north, over the black drapings of slag across one tan tailings hill.

Bloody Tank Wash, Miami

The town is younger than most of the mining towns in the state. In 1909 the Miami Copper Company began operations on the hills beside Bloody Tanks Wash. For a while, it was a rival to Globe, where the Old Dominion Mine was one of the biggest producers. But Globe ceased being a mining power in 1931 when the mine flooded, and Miami became the center, not just of mining – several mines are nearby, including the Pinto Creek open pit – but the major smelting location for Phelps Dodge.

Now, the townsite, with its bridges over the wash looking like Venetian canal bridges gone terribly wrong, is home to many antiques stores. Unlike many old mining towns, the industry is in full swing, and the mines and processing plant prosper and wane with the price of copper.

San Carlos Lake

Past Globe you enter the San Carlos Indian Reservation. Take a right down to Coolidge Dam and San Carlos Lake. Monuments to civilization are always so much more compelling when they are stuck in the middle of nowhere, like Shelley’s Ozymandias or Catherwood’s Palenque.

At least, that’s what comes to mind when you finally come upon Coolidge Dam, standing like a sentinel in the grass and hills of the Apache reservation.

Gila River from Coolidge Dam

Built in the late 1920s, it comes from that great era of dam building and dam architecture. Although it is much smaller than Hoover Dam on the Colorado, it shares an obvious family relationship, with its Art Deco details and horseshoe curvature. It looks like one of the great, archetypal dams.

It reaches a climax in two giant Deco eagle heads near its lip that watch over the downstream Gila River as it enters the Needles Eye Wilderness. They are eagles that pronounce the word “federal” with authority.

It was the Bureau of Indian Affairs that built the dam, to allow the San Carlos tribe to make use of the fluctuating water supply of the Gila. In 1994, the dam overflowed, with water released in such quantities through its spillways, that they had to be repaired. On the other hand, the lake has shrunk to practically nothing at least 20 times in its four-score years of life. In 1977, the lake got so low, there was a major fish kill, with an estimated 5 million fish going belly up. It took five years for the lake to recover.

At low water, the lake must look the way it did when the dam was dedicated in 1930, when humorist Will Rogers looked out at it during the ceremony and joked that, “If this were my lake, I’d mow it.”

By 2015, it could have used another good mowing, because the lake was down to about 5 percent of capacity, leaving most of the dam high and dry, exposing what is supposed to be under water. The current El Niño has raised the level once more.

Coolidge Dam

Three great bulbous rounds of concrete make up the upstream part of the dam, and they are exfoliating sheets of concrete as they age, and looking more and more like a ruins in the making.

If you take the pilgrimage to see the dam, you might as well continue along Reservation Route 500 for 30 miles until it reunites with U.S. 70 at Bylas. Few drives in Arizona are as peaceful and solitary. Just watch out for the potholes.

Black Hills Back Country Byway

Continue down U.S. 70 along the Gila River and farmland to Mt. Graham and Safford. From there you head toward Clifton and Morenci, up in the hills. There is a “short cut” — the 21-mile Black Hills Back Country Byway, which takes you through wilderness on a gravel road. This is what Arizona looked like when Geronimo hid in these canyons and arroyos. After you cross the Gila River on its Depression-era concrete bridge, you can see a parody “shining city on the hill,” Clifton, like a mirage.

“Shining city on the hill”

If you really want to see the industrial power of Arizona, you can do no better than to visit Clifton-Morenci in Greenlee County. The largest open pit copper mine in the nation has spread so many miles across, it actually ate up the original town of Morenci.

The Phelps Dodge mine can be viewed from an overlook on U.S. 191, 11 miles north of Clifton. It is a humbling experience: like looking at a manmade Grand Canyon, covered with trucks the size of five-story buildings busting dust up along the miles and miles of mine roads in the pit.

One truck can haul 270 tons of ore on tires 12 feet in diameter. The biggest trucks carry 320 tons.

Morenci is still a company town, the last in the state, where all the housing is company owned, and all the workers and families shop at the company store.

The mining potential of the area was discovered in 1865 by passing soldiers. The first mine opened in 1872, but things took off when Phelps Dodge entered the picture in 1881. The open pit was begun in 1937, since then, 4.1 billion tons of ore and rock have been dug out, leaving behind a hole big enough to see from outer space.

The industrial complex is impressive. Miles of corrugated-metal processing plants and piles and piles of tailings and slag.

Clifton, a few miles south, is practically a ghost town, but filled with the same kind of buildings that give Bisbee its period charm. Only in Clifton, they are rather more like Roman ruins.

Clifton

Seeing these old mining towns, like Clifton, Miami or Winkelman, can leave you feeling quite conflicted. They are clearly evidence of monumental environmental destruction. Poison waters run off the tailings piles and nowadays have to be captured and treated, but in the past, just filtered down to the streams and water table. Whole mountains have been turned into holes in the ground. Ash heaps make new mountains. Lives are burned up, too. Miners attempting to find better conditions could find themselves dumped off a train in the emptiness of New Mexico and told not to return. Huge corporations buy up the hard work of the original prospectors and squeeze the profits out of the land, like water from a dishcloth. The land has been turned gray and dusty, and tire tracks the size of riverbeds gouge out the roadways. The air is heavy with dust and fumes, and men swarm over the desiccated heaps like ants on an ant hill.

Clifton

“Picturesque”

Yet, it is hard not to be awed by the sublimity of such hugeness, vastness, even if vast destruction. One is left with two hearts.

In the 18th century, there was a fad for paintings of Classical ruins. Such paintings were called “picturesque,” and they depicted not merely the architecture of Rome and Greece, but the vines growing up the stones, and the peasants building cooking fires below the aqueducts. The cracked masonry, fallen blocks, glowing in a beautiful sunset, set 18th century sensibilities into a dither, fanning themselves in admiration of the beauty — a beauty that told of death and decay, of the falling of empires, and the persistence of life below the arches and gables. There is a sense of grandeur, even if we only live in reflection of it.

And while I cannot avoid seeing the landscape as some sort of movie set for a new Mad Max film, neither can I deny the grandeur of the landscape, the sense of loss that fuels the emotions, the sense of something larger, older, and more significant than myself alone.

Clifton

Much of the mythology of Arizona revolves around cowboys and Indians, some fantasy version of the “Old West.” (Somehow, Scottsdale gets to call itself “the West’s most Western town,” while in reality being a commercial real-estate empire filled with shopping malls and freeways). The mythology is a commodity. Yet, there is real myth — the feeling in your psyche of the expansiveness of history and the world — in the union battles, corporate dealings, dying towns and Dante-esque pits into the earth.

Route 191 north of Morenci

As you head north out of Morenci, you enter the mountains and head to a completely different Arizona.

Arizona: Imaginary road trip III — The southeast quadrant

February 23, 2016

Uncategorized

2 Comments

Patagonia

The area in Arizona west of Interstate 19 and south of Interstate 10 is a forgotten quadrant of the state, perhaps because it is so lightly populated, perhaps because it is so heterogeneous, and perhaps because it chooses to be. It is a place where retirees and the remnant of hippiedom are often the same people, where irrigated farms fill the flatter areas and the hills are riddled like Swiss cheese with tunnels, more often abandoned than not.

I went there often, partly because I like the less formalized regions in general, and in part because I had so many newspaper assignments there: wine country, the opening of Kartchner Caverns, the anniversary of filming Oklahoma! in the grassy fields of Patagonia, the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, historic Fort Bowie, birding in Ramsey Canyon, a tour of copper mining in the state, a travel piece about the Chiricahua Mountains.

Fort Bowie

It is home to some of the most picturesque desert and mountain landscape in Arizona, and it is also home to the army-base squalor and mini-mall-and-tattoo-parlor congestion of Sierra Vista.

This part of southern Arizona is defined, more than anything else, by what is no longer there.

Kartchner Caverns

Dozens of townsites are now only blowing grass; whole mountains have been turned into empty, terraced holes in the ground.

Geronimo’s been captured; the ores are largely played out; and the railroad doesn’t stop here anymore.

Elgin, Arizona

Yet, everywhere you turn are reminders of how things used to be. Old land grants show up on maps along with mountain ranges named after Indians. Abandoned mines perforate the hills and tell of short but acute prosperity. Former railroad rights-of-way cut across river bottoms that used to be littered with bustling towns.

Ruby, Gleeson, Charleston and a score more towns like them are now only crumbling adobe, gray weathered boards and unhinged tin roofs banging in the wind.

Lopez Pool Hall, Patagonia

The area south of Interstate 10 is a gigantic history museum, and that history is based largely on copper, cattle and crops and the water needed to exploit them.

Drive to Bisbee and see the Copper Queen Mine, or drive east of Douglas and see the John Slaughter ranch, or drive north in the Sulphur Springs Valley to the farming community of Kansas Settlement where the irrigation still coaxes green out of the brown dirt.

It is a history of hard-working people wrestling an existence out of the ground beneath them.

You can see it in the drawn faces that stare out of century-old photographs: the Cornish miners, the Mexican vaqueros and the Mormon farmers. They lived hard lives and when the mines played out, or the ranch lost out to urban encroachment, they moved on.

Warren pit head, Bisbee

What they left behind more often than not, was the weathered bones of their existence, the frame houses, mine-shaft timbers and empty general stores.

The boom of the late 1800s died down. In 1882, Tombstone had an estimated 10,000 people and was the largest town in Arizona. By 1940, that number was just over 800. There were fewer people in Cochise County in 1950 than there were in 1910.

The first big wave of prospectors came to southern Arizona in the 1860s after the California gold rush. They came for gold and silver and found found what they were looking for.

In Tombstone, 5.8 million ounces of silver was mined in 1882 alone.

Dragoon

But because the water needed to process the silver ore wasn’t to be had in Tombstone, a series of satellite communities were built along the San Pedro River, some 10 miles or so west of Tombstone, where Millville and Contention City gave rise to stamp mills that processed the ore that was hauled in in wagons.

Charleston and Fairbank arose to provide food and dry goods to the miners and mill workers. Fairbank became something of a shopping mall.

Built beside the railroad that followed the San Pedro, the town supplied Tombstone with its food and goods until well into this century. There were no groceries in Tombstone; residents had to ride the 10 miles down to the depot and the Fairbank Commercial Company. The town never had more than about 100 people, but it did have a hotel, and for a while, a Goldwater-owned store.

Texas Canyon

That all changed in 1884 when the Tombstone mines began flooding out. By 1888, the Contention City post office closed; other communities followed.

Fairbank lasted into the 1970s, with a population of 3 in 1971. Now there is only the volunteer site host for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, living in a trailer near the back of the “town.” The store and post office — built in 1883 — are still standing, as is the schoolhouse built in 1920 and a couple of homes and outbuildings.

Where the Montezuma Hotel used to stand, there is now the asphalt of Arizona Route 82, which runs past the site.

The pattern of boom and bust played out all through the region. Claims were filed, mines opened, saloons opened, mines played out, people left to move on to the next new ore pit.

Bisbee

One town that has lasted longer than most is Bisbee. It owes its existence to copper, which was discovered in the surrounding Mule Mountains in 1875. Three years later, it was profitable enough to haul ore to the railhead in Benson and send it on to Pennsylvania for smelting. By 1901, smelting operations were moved to Douglas, only 25 miles to the east, when a railroad was built.

The Bisbee mines successfully produced copper and its related metals for 90 years. Over that time, miners extracted more than 8 billion pounds of copper, worth about $2 billion. The mines also yielded 3.9 million pounds of lead, 3.8 million pounds of zinc, 2.7 million ounces of gold and more than 1 million ounces of silver. In the process, some 2,000 miles of tunnels were drilled through the mountains.

By the turn of the century, it was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco, with 20,000 residents. With Brewery Gulch and a red-light district, it had all the color you could as for, and after a major fire in 1908, the city rebuilt largely in brick.

Those buildings still survive, largely unchanged, giving visitors a peek at what life was like back then.

The mines thrived, copper prices went bust, the mines suffered. There was union activity. In 1917, there were strikes at most of Arizona’s major mines; Bisbee’s answer was to round up 1,200 strikers, herd them into railroad cars and ship them east to New Mexico where they were dumped unceremoniously. This was the infamous Bisbee Deportation.

Lavender Pit, Bisbee

By then, new technology allowed the introduction of open pit mining and the face of Bisbee began changing forever. The most famous of these pits opened in 1951: The giant Lavender Pit mine operated by Phelps Dodge dug a monster hole into the ground just south of town. It eventually wound up some 900 feet deep by the time it closed in 1974.

Bisbee itself might have closed down soon after, but its residents liked living on the mountainside and a host of retirees and later, artists and lingering hippies, now long of beard and wide of girth, joined in to keep the town alive.

Where once you would find a miner tossing down rotgut whisky, you are now more likely to find microbrew or a hazelnut latte.

My favorite vista in the quadrant is the Willcox Playa, a huge dry lakebed that functions as a landmark along I-10. You can see it from dozens of miles away, and when you are traveling west on the interstate, it is when you know you are back home in Arizona. In the summer, dust devils whip the white dust into mini-tornadoes of grit and sand. Sandhill Cranes roost in the area. The giant white circle in the flatness of the desert is so dry you know you have to find something to drink.

In Willcox, you can grab a soda at Rodney’s.

Rodney Brown has run his tiny eatery in Willcox for 20 years. It has a kitchen the size of a closet and no dining room at all — you find a seat out back at a picnic table.

“If you want an interesting place to eat, you should try Rodney’s,” says John Ware, director of the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, about 20 miles to the west. “But it is kind of funky.”

It may be a measure of a traveler’s adventurousness to eat at Rodney’s. The building on Railroad Avenue, two doors down from the Rex Allen Museum, is barely large enough to qualify as real estate, and its walls are cracking.

“This crack in the concrete started only yesterday,” he says, pointing at the wall just outside the screen door to his backyard refectory.

Things are informal. If you want a drink, grab one from the ice-filled sports cooler on the floor.

There’s nary a vertical or perpendicular line in the building, which leans a bit, and the floor is wobbly at best. The screen door to the backyard doesn’t open all the way; it catches on the uneven ground.

Rodney stands behind the counter, taking your order, then spooning the dark, gooey barbecue into a tin pot to heat it up.

The food is good. Lots of customers back up in the street at lunchtime, waiting for a chance to get inside and order.

Like a barber on caffeine, he keeps the conversation going, stirring your food, pointing to the signed picture on the wall: “To Rodney, all the best, Lorenzo Lamas,” it says.

Next to it is another celebrity photo that looks like Willie Nelson, but, says Rodney, “It’s not really. It’s a Willie Nelson impersonator. But he’s really good.”

Rodney moved to Willcox 20 years ago after working in Sierra Vista for 10 years. In Sierra Vista, he ran Rodney’s Southside BBQ.

Asked why he moved to Willcox, he says only, “We don’t know yet.”

Another freight train rumbles by across the street, rattling everything in the joint and drowning conversation. Rodney stops in midsentence, only to pick up again as the train passes and the dishes stop jumping.

“Ambience,” he says.

On the eastern side of the quadrant, you find the vinyards of Patagonia and Sonoita.

East of Sonoita, the road weaves through more yellow grasslands, with the torso hills getting closer and closer to the road, finally coming together at a pass between the Mustang and Whetstone mountains and dipping then into the wishfully named Rain Valley.

Sonoita Creek

The same road then continues down to the wooly bottomlands, thick with willow, along the San Pedro River. That’s San Peedro, if you want to fit in. All among the trees, the birds are thick as thieves and noisy as conventioneers. Looking down from the aging iron bridge into the water’s flow, you can see the green waterweeds individually pulled in direction of the current.

On a cold windy morning in spring, the blow twists the riverbank grasses the same way.

Patagonia Lake State Park

From there, the road goes south to Coronado National Memorial in the Huachuca Mountains. You gain altitude constantly from the river lowlands until you are under the mountain peaks. The pine trees are greenish black and burning in the late afternoon sun. When the pavement gives out, the switchbacks take you up Montezuma Canyon to the pass, where to the east you can see most of the San Pedro Valley and down into Mexico and to the west, you can see as far as Baboquivari and Nogales.

When the air is clear — and it is so more often than it is in Phoenix — the valleys below are straw yellow, lined with denim-blue mountain ranges.

On Ariz. 80 out of Douglas, you pass a misplaced corner of the Chihuahuan Desert in the San Bernardino Valley, a broad saucer of tawny grass and spiky lechuguilla and yucca. The sky near the horizon is the color of a robin’s egg; just below it, the distant mountains are dusky purple and below them, the grays and greens dotted with black trees. Nearer still are the chocolate brown hills and the bottomlands of yellow. It is all spread out like a geological rainbow.

The road is long, straight and smooth and you look at the speedometer and are startled that you are doing 80. The horizon is always your destination.

The highway will take you, briefly into New Mexico, where you can turn back toward the Chiricahua Mountains.

Chiricahua Mountains

Few Arizonans, I suspect, have ever crossed the backbone of the Chiricahuas from the east, but the drive through Portal into Cave Creek Canyon is a drive through a rocky portal into Paradise. The broad green canyon is lined with cliffs and pinnacles and could easily be mistaken for a scaled down Yosemite Valley.

Chiricahua National Monument

Along the roadsides, the spring wildflowers dot the shoulders like stars in sparse constellations. They are not so thick this dry year as they have been, but the flowers are still there, lupine and brittlebush, penstemmon and globemallow. Each flowerhead pokes into the passerby’s awareness as individually beautiful and separately tenacious.

Benson

Perhaps that is why the desert attracts a certain kind of human, demanding their quirky individuality, no matter how bizarre or paranoid.

Click to enlarge any image

Arizona: Imaginary road trip II — South by Southeast

February 21, 2016

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the drive from Phoenix to Tucson along Interstate 10, is the most boring stretch of road anywhere in American experience, outside of the state of Texas.

After you pass the stucco hell of Chandler, you must endure the endless greasewood flats of the Gila Indian Reservation, passing the bridge over the Gila River — although I doubt many drivers note the fact, because the dry riverbed is nearly indistinguishable from the non-river that surrounds it: just more greasewood and a pulverous dust-and-gravel mix that can get whipped up into the air by dust devils during the sun-baked summer months, by which we mean any month except December and maybe the early weeks of January.

Mission church on Gila Reservation

Past the reservation, you hit the sprawl of Casa Grande and the junction with Interstate 8, where, as your rise up on the overpass, you can spot on the distant horizon the spire of Picacho Peak, which is your beacon for the next 45 miles. There are the pecan forests of Eloy, and, as you drone past Picacho, the ostrich farm, which is about the only meaningful punctuation in your journey until you hit the Ina Road exit, which marks the slow relief you feel as you finally approach your destination. Tucson! That outpost of civilization in the desert.

When my job took me to Tucson, I tried to find alternate routes whenever I could. The interstate is tedious, but usually, you had to find the fastest way between cities — it may surprise denizens of America’s eastern climes that in Arizona, it was not considered unusual or beyond the call of duty to drive to Tucson for an opera or a concert and afterwards, drive home to Phoenix the same night — each way a distance of some 125 miles.

Mobile, Arizona

But when I could — when it was still daytime, or when I had already spent the night in a Tucson motel — I would find some other road. If I had the whole day, I would drive up the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, through Oracle Junction and along the Pima Pioneer Highway to Florence and then west through Apache Junction and back to Phoenix. It is a much more interesting drive, though considerably out of the way.

North Kinney Road, near Tucson

More often, in such circumstances, I would attempt to drive roads that paralleled Interstate 10, but entered the towns that the interstate bypassed, and looped widely through farm country and desert, giving a drive time to enjoy the exceptional Arizona landscape. The problem is that there are a couple of places where there is no alternative to the freeway, and for a few miles you have to hop back onto the mindless buzz and exhaust of the expressway before you can find an exit that lets you back into the reality of the land.

I recommend the extra time it takes to take such a route. You see more of the state, partly because you are driving more slowly, but mostly because all the knobs and bosses on your map are wide of the I-10 right of way.

Casa Grande National Monument

You can take 51st Avenue around the west end of South Mountain in Phoenix, and head into the Gila Reservation, and you can pass through Maricopa and Mobile — which began as an enclave for African-Americans when they were less than welcome in other towns — and you can see Sacaton.

I once committed a crime in Sacaton — breaking and entering. My wife and I culled our overwhelming book collection and came up with five or six boxes of books we decided to donate to the library in Sacaton. But when we got there, the old wooden library was closed. I broke into the building, picking the lock with my jackknife and leaving the boxes on the floor of the library with a note announcing “the midnight skulker” had left the books for the residents.

Several years later, we did the same thing again, except that the library had new deadbolt locks, increased security and a fence around the property. This time, we left the books on the front stoop, assuming that they would not be rained on as long as they were discovered before five months had passed.

Red Mesa

You can drive through the pecans of Eloy, not past them.

Eloy pecans

And when you get to the land just north of Tucson, there is farmland and the old railroad, including the abandoned water tower of Red Mesa, just north of Marana. From Marana, you can drive through the east section of Saguaro National Park (nee Monument), and past the Sonoran Desert Museum, past the Old Tucson movie set, up over Gates Pass Road and down onto Speedway Boulevard and Tucson.

Pima Air Museum, Tucson

It used to be that Phoenix was the crass commercial center of the state, and Tucson was the cultural center, where you found the arts and the educated people. But as Phoenix grew, such institutions as the Arizona Theater Company and Arizona Opera migrated north to the bigger city and Tucson has its past to cling to. It is still a more livable city than Phoenix, though traffic on Speedway is getting to be as bad as that on Camelback Road.

But it is south of Tucson that things get interesting again. The corridor down Green Valley takes us past mission churches, artist colonies, copper mines and nuclear destruction.

The highlight is the church of San Xavier del Bac, built in the late 18th century and recently restored. Services are still held, and while tourists run through the nave on weekdays, it is best seen in action during Mass.

San Xavier del Bac

On tourist days, the plaza in front is often filled with crafts and jewelry for sale, and a food truck.

Asarco mine tailings

One thing that struck me, even the first time we drove through Arizona in 1980, was the prevalence of mountain ranges created by copper mines — the tailings piles that grew as large as the mountain ranges of New Jersey. They reach their Rocky Mountain stage further north, in the Miami-Claypool area, but you pass slightly newer and neater beside the roads as you head south from Tucson. The giant Asarco mines welcome visitors, and you can see a hole in the ground that makes you think someone is searching for Dante’s Inferno, having dug at least to the Malebolge. There are rings around the copper pit, just as Dante has his rings of Hell.

Perhaps a more literal hell is implied by the Titan Missile Museum next door, where you can see the implements of world destruction set out for you like a Disney attraction. For those of us who grew up in the “duck-and-cover” 1950s, when nuclear annihilation seemed a palpable and immediate threat, the nose cone of the rocket seems a round pyramid of doom. Perhaps the mines are currently more immediate harbinger of doom, as the nuclear threat has stood down. For the moment.

Tubac

South of that, the traffic really dwindles, and you find the isolated and happy community of Tubac, an artists colony, and beyond that, the ruins of the Tumacacori Mission Church, with its adobe outbuildings and its recollection of the conversion of heathen Indios, whether they wanted it or not.

Tumacacori

At Tumacacori, an ancient woman demonstrated the making of flour tortillas. At Mexican restaurants, I always specify corn tortillas, because the flour version seems insipid and pointless. But at her side, my wife tried patting out the masa triga and made a mess. The old lady made perfect circles and plopped them down on her comal, flipped them once and offered them for us to eat. The mission church has not lost its touch: I was converted. A fresh flour tortilla, hot off the griddle, is a joy and a wonder. It is the commercial flour tortillas that are tasteless wads of paste. This version was a gustatory revelation and I will never think poorly of the flour tortilla any more — although unless it is made for me immediately off the tin-plate stove over a fire of wood ash, I will continue to avoid the store-bought variety.

Down the road from Tumacacori, you used to be able to drive along back roads, dirt roads, through old farms and river beds. The drug wars have ended that. So many roads are blockaded now. Freedom of movement in Southern Arizona is severely curtailed. So, you might as well just drive on to Nogales and get a meal there.

Click any photo to enlarge

Arizona: Imaginary road trip I — Phoenix

February 20, 2016

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

I have a love-hate relationship with Phoenix, Arizona. No, that’s too strong. I have a like-frown relationship. Living in its ever-expanding confines for an entire quarter of Arizona’s statehood, I never truly warmed up to it, the way one comes to love San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans or Manhattan. There is a kind of numbing neutrality to Phoenix. It isn’t as bad as all that, but neither is there much to get excited about. It is a city with little personality.

Click any photograph to enlarge

I don’t mean that to sound too negative. There is much I miss. I loved my job; I can’t imagine being happier in employment than I was for most of my time at The Arizona Republic, or having better colleagues. When I retired, I didn’t so much leave the newspaper, as instead, the newspaper left me. It was going in directions that had less and less use for what I provided. It was time to go. But what happened to The Republic is true of newspapers all across the nation. It is journalism that left me.

There are things I miss, besides the occasional meal at the Golden Greek or El Bravo.

I sorely regretted leaving Ballet Arizona. By the time I left, ballet had become the art form I most loved. Ib Andersen had raised the local company up to a level that competed with the major troupes around the country, and even around the world. I miss the art museum and its staff (now, most of them are gone, too), I miss the symphony and the chamber music. I miss the lunches I shared with Phoenix Chorale’s Charles Bruffy. (Congratulations on yet another Emmy).

My wife and I have friends in the city and we miss them dearly.

But the city itself? Not so much. And here, I mean the whole metro area. It is hard to make any distinction between Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa, Scottsdale and Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Fountain Hills: It all turned into endless suburbia, 60 miles from east to west and 45 miles from north to south, and it continues to metastasize. The last time I drove south to Maricopa, it seemed like more of the same.

The weather was brutal, the traffic brutish, the city politics banal (and state politics worse: delusional). New gated subdivisions gobbled up huge spreads of desert. Have you driven down Dynamite Road lately? Shopping malls, freeways, mobile-phone towers, endless Circle Ks and 7-Elevens, red-tile roofs, and stucco, stucco, stucco.

But there were places I could retreat and find some character. South Phoenix, with its poor neighborhoods, houses with sun-warped wood and flaking paint, with its panaderias and tiendas. The gravel roads before they were chewed and digested into Macmansions; the old canals, not yet channelized and rinded with concrete; the farther expanses of the city limit where there are still working farms; and the old warehouses south of the railroad tracks. I like seeing the older stores painted garish colors, and the black-painted bars on windows and doors. My favorite Mexican food found at the hole-in-the-wall storefronts where the clients are all Hispanic and they still serve tongue and tripe, and where the frying is still done in lard. It isn’t so much that these things are old and I feel nostalgia, but rather that these things still have character, personality; they are not whitewashed into the great Osterized American culture. They battle the blandness of television and the chamber of commerce.

Maria’s children

In the next several blog entries, I plan to take a trip around the state, beginning in the Valley of the Sun, to see how much I can turn up of the lost and forgotten, the real flavor of the state, the part of it that I miss and wish I could experience all over again. I’ll move south through Tucson then west and north, traveling counter-clockwise around the state. Most of this virtual trip will be in photographs, with a few words stuck in here and there. They are the parts that to me feel alive and wriggling, even when abandoned or forgotten — the played out mines, the baked arroyos, the Native American ruins, the dusty places just outside of towns. This is the Arizona I miss when I remember my years there.

Goodyear Cemetery in Chandler

This Arizona is completely personal and subjective. But I suspect many of you harbor similar feelings, similar places in your psyches, whether it be in Ohio, Quebec, Idaho or Mazatlan. This is the Arizona that remains alive to me.

Here are some of those things and places:

South Phoenix

Canal and farmland

Gila River south of Phoenix

Abandoned racetrack

Agricultural buildings west of Phoenix

Pueblo Grande

Hiking around North Mountain

The real Arizona

February 19, 2016

Uncategorized

1 Comment

Near Fredonia

During the 25 years I lived in Arizona, I saw pretty much every dusty corner of the state, either on assignment for my newspaper, or on my own. I came to love the state — warts and all. And it has warts: Arizona politics is dismaying, its inhabitants sometimes astonishingly parochial, its sense of itself as “special” endearing; I’ve lived in enough different places to know that they each think of themselves as special: You can outright choke on Seattle; North Carolina Public Television crowds out PBS programming with self-congratulatory programs on local history, local events, restaurants, the cult of barbecue, its exceptionally progressive foresight, and its sports heroes. The self-regard is truly cloying. Arizona hasn’t a patch on that, even counting Arizona Highways magazine.

Brewery Gulch, Bisbee

And speaking of warts, the city of Phoenix is essentially Cleveland in the Desert: ugly with traffic, convenience stores and real-estate deals. But in Arizona, the land is essential: The desert is like nothing else.

Red Mesa, Navajo Reservation

Arizona has a particular difficulty because its image of itself is incredibly beautiful. It is the Grand Canyon State, and its landscape has filled more calendars and books than horsehair has filled sofa cushions. The Arizona Highways effect prettifies the state so to anyone with clear eyes, it is no longer recognizable. Arizona for most people is a fictional Arizona, a fantasy landscape drawn by John Ford’s Monument Valley, Ansel Adams’ Grand Canyon, or the “Tonto Rim” of Zane Grey. The landscape we mail out to the rest of the world is one of pristine wilderness and vast vistas. This is not, however, the Arizona I came to love. Quartzsite in the middle of winter is not part of this picture, neither is Apache Junction or Sacaton.

Morenci

My Arizona has been worked over pretty thoroughly, by mining companies, by ranching conglomerates, by real-estate developers, by tract housing, road-building, tourist traps, warehouses and farm tractors. It is canals, cotton gins, interstates, gas stations and Circle-Ks. And since leaving the state four years ago for retirement in North Carolina, I have often grown homesick for my Arizona.

I actually love the forgotten places, the abandoned garages on the abandoned Route 66 that parallels Interstate 40. I love the grade crossings by the trash dumps near Mobile; the painted concrete dinosaurs that advertise eateries and tourist spots; the gravel roads across dry washes; the busted-out Gillespie Dam, choked with willows; the mountains of junked cars in South Phoenix wrecking yards; the eroded bentonite hills north of Cameron; the worked-out copper pits in Ajo and Bisbee — great gaping holes in the earth. I’ve been everywhere from San Luis to the Four Corners, from Hoover Dam to the Slaughter Ranch. How can you not love seeing the white expanse of the Wilcox Playa from a distance, knowing that when you get there, you can visit the statue of Rex Allen and have some great barbecue from Rodney’s hole-in-the-wall?

Yuma

It isn’t that I don’t like the Grand Canyon. How can you not? But I love the North Rim, the 60-mile dirt road down to Toroweap, the beginning of the whole thing at Lees Ferry. Old apple trees and weathered wood buildings tell you about when old John Lee lived there and supervised the crossing of the Colorado River.

Coyote melons

I began a few weeks ago collecting material for a potential book about this Arizona, as a kind of counterbalance to all the pretty-face calendar art that oozes from that quarter of the Southwest. Whether it ever actually turns into a book or not, I thought I might share a few of my images with my readers on the blog.

Roper Lake, Mt. Graham in storm

I have some 320 pictures filed for use in the book. I will post maybe 10 or 15 at a time for the blog. I hope they spark some of the same love for the real Arizona that I continue to feel from afar.

Tumacacori

Click on any image to enlarge.

Morenci pit

The ultimate end

February 15, 2016

Uncategorized

1 Comment

“It doesn’t matter how badly they played,” said my old mentor, Dimitri, “if the symphony ends with a lot of loud, rousing brass, it will get a standing ovation.”

It is the end of a symphony, more than anything that has gone before, that leaves the most vivid impression on its audience. And I don’t mean the coda of the finale, but those last repeated chords that hammer home the end, those tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant tuttis that were so viciously lampooned by Eric Satie in his Embryons Deséchés.

Sometimes they never seem to be willing to give up and let you go home. Beethoven’s Fifth is the poster child for this cliche (not that it was a cliche when the composer first did it).

But ever since, the bringing home the tonic key and signing off a 45-minute symphony has been left to block chords pounding our ears.

There are exceptions, of course, and there are many examples of composers doing something interesting, surprising and creative with those end notes.

Here are my top five symphony conclusions:

Brahms, Symphony No. 2 in D, op. 73 — This is the symphony that Dimitri meant when he talked about rousing brass. No symphony comes close to the exciting, fresh, explosive yelling-it-out in ecstasy rah-rah that winds up this monument. It’s already loud and compelling when the trumpets, horns and winds sing out a quadruple-repeated and harmonized Nachschlag (turn) and do it again a third higher (first yellow arrow in the score). The audience is going “whoopee” and then the trombones and bass trombone hit and hold a D-major chord (which Brahms particularly marks fortissimo) over the staccato final chords of the rest of the orchestra, and finally resting on a tutti D. Wow. You always want to stand up and cheer at the end — which audiences habitually do.

Haydn, Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp, “Farewell” — Modern instruments can negotiate most keys fairly well, but in Haydn’s day, F-sharp was a pretty out-there key, which made this symphony strange sounding to begin with. There was an extra bite of instruments that could not quite play easily in key. This is the only symphony Haydn wrote in this orphan key. It is a “Sturm und Drang” symphony, full of sound and fury, accentuated by the odd key choice, but the finale ends in a whimper, not a bang. It is the opposite of the Brahms. In fact, Haydn has the instruments stop playing, one by one, and walk off the stage, leaving only two violins at the end playing a simple A-sharp below an F-sharp, as the concertmaster blows out the candle that would have illuminated his sheet music. A visually dramatic end, and a musically audacious feat.

Sibelius, Symphony No. 5 in E-flat, op. 82 — Silence is the astonishing surprise at the end of Sibelius’s Fifth, also, but loaded in between otherwise standard cadential chords. It was a really audacious thing to do — bring the symphony to a rousing climax and then stop everything for five beats, then hit another chord and wait again. Over and over at the end, with irregular silences between the bang-chords. If you count them, you can see the rests are oddly spaced, which gives the music a real off-balance feeling, like you cannot know what to expect. If you count out the rests in quarter-note time and the outbursts of tutti, you get: 1-2-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-Bang, 1-2-3-Bang. (When he wrote the first draft of the symphony, those rests were filled in with noodling in the orchestra, the effect was bland, but he left these “black holes” there instead and blew the minds of his audience.)

Mahler, Symphony No. 9 — The last notes of Mahler’s final symphony, after 80 minutes of angst and rancor, are marked “ersterbend,” “dying.” The last two pages of the symphony take a full six minutes to play, attenuated and stretched to the limit of concentration by player and audience alike. They are orchestral whispers — death-bed speech as the music quietly accepts death. When played with the proper attitude, the audience greets the final silence not with applause, but with hush. In Amsterdam in 1995, when Claudio Abbado played it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Mahler Festival, the audience stayed silent for several literal minutes before any applause, each member gazing into his or her own private abyss before coming back to reality and applauding the performance.

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 15 in A, op. 141 — This has to be one of the most peculiar symphonies in the repertoire, with its quotation of the Lone Ranger tune from Rossini’s William Tell in the first movement, and turning Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde into a waltz in the finale. But the final moments of the symphony are a complete enigma: Over a hushed pedal point in the violins, which goes on for two minutes, the percussion ding, snap and clang quietly in a mechanical tick-tock over and over, with xylophone, woodblock, castanets, glockenspiel, tympani, snare drum and triangle until a final C-sharp (the third of the tonic A-major chord) dings a final punctus, sounded on glockenspiel and celeste. What was Shostakovich thinking? He never explained. He smiled like the Cheshire cat.

One last note — There is one symphony ending that has a surprising finish that you almost never hear. It is buried under a welter of excited sound. When the chorus sings its final “Götterfunken” at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the coda that follows builds up steam quickly and drives home to a final D major chord. It is in the final chords that Beethoven hides an extra fillip: He has his fiddles, which are already racing as fast as they can go, double the number of notes they have to play — dig-ga-dig-ga to diggadada–diggadada — and the tympani doubles its speed, too. This detail is usually buried in the overwhelming drive of the rest of the orchestra, but one recording makes the change clear: a 1967 recording by Leopold Stokowski and the London Symphony, originally released on a London Phase 4 LP, with singers Heather Harper, Helen Watts, Alexander Young and Donald McIntyre. Its drive is overwhelming.

Landscape from the inside out

February 13, 2016

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

Near Pendleton, Ore.

There are books that give us pleasure in the reading, books that inform us, books we are required to read, and there are books that become so internalized, they essentially shape the course of our lives. We can probably all name such books for ourselves. I made a list, maybe 15 years ago, in a moment of quo vadis self reflection, of those books that have most shaped who I am. I stopped listing after 50 books. Since I made the list, I could add several more; after all, I keep reading.

Pageant of Life

Of course, it is the earliest reading that had the most influence — as the twig is bent, so the tree inclines. Even the best of the more recent books cannot have influenced me even a percentage of how much I was shaped by, say, the Life magazine book, The World We Live In, which my grandmother gave me on my eighth birthday, and which left me wide-eyed at the wonder and diversity of nature — volcanoes, blue whales, dinosaurs, jellyfish, rainforests, barchan sand dunes. I wear the badge of that book in my deepest heart’s core. It is the holy of holies.

But what caught my attention as I reread my old list, was that it continued to include lists of other things that shaped who I have become: music that influenced my developing psyche; art (that I saw in person, not just in books); movies; TV shows; — and last on the list of lists — landscapes.

We don’t often think of how deeply landscape affects us, guides the direction of our lives — but how different might be the novels written by Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, or Mark Twain if those authors had lived elsewhere and seen different rivers, different mountains, different forests. I think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is practically a landscape — a cityscape — spread into lines of type.

Back Bay, Va.

Joyce had Dublin; Thomas Wolfe had Asheville, N.C., where my wife and I now live. Recently, I opened the first pages of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and read his description of Oliver Gant’s trip to western North Carolina. At one point, he describes a trip up the face of the Blue Ridge from “Old Stockade” to “Altamont” — thinly disguised versions of Old Fort and Asheville — and as I read it, I knew that landscape — I knew that gravel road; I’ve driven it myself just last month. It’s still gravel and few cars venture it as it wanders and loops through the trees and snakes up the mountain. The interstate long ago made the trip faster and easier. But freeways are boring. As the old road loops and hairpins its way, you can frequently spy the railroad line as it winds its way uphill. That railroad was just being built as Wolfe wrote about it but even now, it passes just under the hill where I live, and hear the locomotive whistle blow every night. It is uncanny to read about something fictionalized that you know as real.

But, in a sense, all the landscapes that are buried in the psyche are fictionalized: They have been transformed from mere fact into meaning. They are now metaphor and their existence takes on a reality that is imaginative rather than quotidian. It is imprinted as deeply as the smells of childhood, a mother’s kisses, the woodgrain of the school desk scratched with initials and scribbles.

Hudson River, West Point

Dunderberg

My own internal landscape begins as I do, in New Jersey and New York, with the Hudson River running through it and the Catskills bumping one bank and the Taconics the other. The automobile drive around the dizzying Dunderberg north of Tomkins Bay was a white-knuckle ride when I was young, the three-lane highway incised into the edge of the cliff. My father hated that part of the drive; we kids loved it. The “mothball fleet” of rusting liberty ships off Jones Point was a living link to the war my father had returned from only a few years before. There was Bear Mountain, with its ski jump and the suspension bridge over the Hudson; there was Seven Lakes Drive through Harriman State Park, all trees and granite; there was the Red Apple Rest and its billboards on the highway.

I don’t know why, but the suburban life I lived in Bergen County barely registered as landscape. The housing developments and county roads never embossed themselves on my synapses in any significant way. But the summer vacation trips we took up the Hudson to Newburgh, NY, and to the “bungalow” that was my father’s family summer cottage in West Park burned themselves deeply into my awareness of the world. The Hudson River was the aorta that pumped the lifeblood of my awareness of the larger world.

Deep River, NC

So, when I moved to North Carolina and college, I was amused at the Tar River or the Deep River. They weren’t rivers. The Hudson was a river. Guilford County’s Deep River was a wet gully. I could have jumped across it.

I have lived many places, and in many landscapes, but they haven’t all dug wormholes into my psyche. I’ve traveled to every continental state of the union — most several times. When Hank Snow sings, “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere,” I can honestly say that I have been to the places he names in the song: “Hackensack, Cadillac, Fond Du Lac … Pittsburgh, Parkersburg, Gravellburg, Colorado, Ellensburg, Rexburg, Vicksburg, El Dorado, Larrimore, Atmore, Haverstraw” … the song goes on.

And all those places have landscapes that accompany them, the way a song accompanies each Fred Astaire dance number. They are there in the memory. But not all of them have transformed from geography to mythology. There are moments in life when you are particularly open, when your very skin seems adhesive to experience. It is like that when you are a child, but it also happens when you go through some life altering change, a first divorce, or a move across country, a close call, the birth of a child, or a new job. The rind of the psyche gets pulped, and becomes a place for a mythic sense of life to become rooted.

At vulnerable moments in the course of living, the world takes on an extra glow, a mythic noumenon and becomes fixed in the synapses as something larger than itself. The landscape thus internalized becomes an emotional nexus, a place where complex thoughts and feelings can be induced merely by seeing an image of that landscape, or reading an evocative description, perhaps even hearing a certain piece of music.

Mendocino County, Calif.

And so, these landscapes can influence the way you see the world. If you live by the river, you become Twain, if you live by the sea, you become Sarah Orne Jewett, if you live in Manhattan, you become Woody Allen — and all you write takes on the world view the land provides. Think of Faulkner and the red clay, of Hemingway and Michigan, of Henry Miller and Brooklyn (I know Paris comes first to mind, but it is the Brooklyn of the Rosy Crucifixion where you see the real Miller world view).

And so, when a seven-year relationship was breaking down in suspicion and acrimony, we took a trip up through Pennsylvania and the Delaware River to try to make things right. The heart was a sodden wet rag, and one chill fall morning at Port Jervis, the sun rose over a field by a railroad roundhouse that was choked with more wildflowers than I have ever seen before: yarrow, aster, ironweed, joe pye weed, mullein, sunflower, black-eyed susan, queen-anne’s lace. It burned into me, and is still there as a kind of metaphor for the infinite sadness of paradise.

Watauga County, NC

Years later, when I first came to live with the woman who has been my wife for the past 30 years, our house was on a ridge overlooking the New River in the Blue Ridge, and the landscape of rolling mountains and hills, divided between pastures and forest, coves and hollows, whitewashed churches and unpainted barns, took on that numinous glow. It is why we have moved back to the mountains, although the same landscape has now quieted down into comfortable daily life.

Hatteras

When I first entered college, and the intellectual world gaped open for me, I traveled several times with my friend Alexander to the Outer Banks. The sea oats and dunes, the long beach, Hatteras point — climbing illegally to the top of the lighthouse at night under a blanket of stars, feeling the steady wind on my cheeks, the smell of salt in the air — so that coming back to the dorm and listening to Debussy’s La Mer on the tiny Sears Silvertone portable phonograph, sealed the experience into the brain like a mordant fixes dye in a fabric.

In the years I was unemployed and nearly homeless, I traveled back to New Jersey with my brother for Christmas. On the way back South, we drove through West Virginia, where he had friends, and we spent New Years Day on the top of a mountain. Before dawn, I woke and dressed and went out into the biting cold, where the grass was brittle with frost and my breath clouded in front of me and I surveyed the Cumberland Plateau, bumpy with mountains, spread out to the horizon. I felt lost and alone in all that frozen landscape.

Tsegi Canyon, Ariz.

The opposite emotions were engaged the first time my wife and I drove out West, in 1980, and the first time we saw buttes and mesas. The land seemed even more expansive than the West Virginia mountains, but they seemed to offer unlimited potential. The air was clear; you could see mountain ranges a hundred miles away. Over the quarter-century we lived in the West, there were many such landscapes printed on my psyche, from Christmas in the snow in Walpi, on First Mesa, spent with a Hopi family; to driving across the Escalante National Monument alone; to spending the night camping north of the Grand Canyon in a forsaken part of the Arizona Strip, one of the least populated plots of land in the country.

Landscape functions not merely as a stage set, a backdrop of other memorable occurrences, but for themselves alone, as metaphor, as an image of the inside state of one’s emotions and mind. It can be as if the landscape were not injected into your mind through your eyes, but rather, projected outward upon existence from the deepest recesses of your mind. If you were to enter my skull and photograph what you found, it would be landscape.

Big Bend NP, Texas

From my list, other landscapes you will find inside my head include the Olympic Mountains in Washington; Schoodic Point in Maine; Big Bend National Park in Texas; the sea-swell grasslands of eastern Montana that I rode past on the Empire Builder train from Chicago to Seattle; driving by night through the Big Sur in California; and Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., which I have circumambulated half a dozen times.

I do not know if it is rare — I have not asked many people — but many of the dreams I manage to remember as I wake up, are dreams consisting purely of landscape, often highly imaginary, exaggerated like the Andes of Frederick Church. It is the space in these dreams that seems to carry meaning, the emptiness from the spot where I stand to the thing I see before me: In between is air, and the air has shape and meaning.

Ansel Adams, Clearing Storm, Yosemite

The best landscape painting and photography functions not as a record of the topography, but rather as an image of the interior state, vast and romantic, like Ansel Adams’ Yosemite in a winter storm, or Thomas Cole’s Crawford Notch. O blow you cataracts and hurricanoes, in the scumble of Turner, or cooly glow on the horizon, like the misty suns of Claude Lorrain, or the chessboard order of Canaletto.

Thomas Cole, Crawford Notch

Skull Island

When I was very young, perhaps 6 or 7, I first watched King Kong on TV, and what has stuck from then to now is the steamy, vine-clogged, rocky-cliffed landscape of Skull Island. That skull is mine, seen from the inside out.

If you want to shake the world out and make it larger again, get up at 3 in the morning and drive across the flatness of Indiana and Illinois. It is dark, the stars are thick as the July humidity. And the world seems quiet, empty and stretched once more to full size.

The sky grows upward as the stars populate it, lightyears away. Not only is the earth big, but you can see that you are a pebble at the bottom of a very deep universe.

You drive alone for miles and the only thing you see is distant headlights, like fireflies, flitting along the horizon line that shows up as the boundary between two different shades of black.

One set of headlights gets closer. You recognize a kindred spirit, someone else is driving in the lonely, vacant night. You wait a very long time for the lights to draw close. They are still miles away.

As the car gets nearer and dims its headlights — that salute of recognition in the dark — you see that it is the God of the Nighttime Highway, whose eyes are headlights and whose halogen gaze keeps the world from disappearing when everyone else is asleep.

And he passes and you drop once more into the large darkness.

Click on any image to enlarge

Baldwin County, Ala.

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Monthly Archives: February 2016

Arizona: Imaginary road trip V — Old roads to the north

Arizona: Imaginary road trip IV — The pits

Arizona: Imaginary road trip III — The southeast quadrant

Arizona: Imaginary road trip II — South by Southeast

Arizona: Imaginary road trip I — Phoenix

The real Arizona

The ultimate end

Landscape from the inside out