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Finding the Garden
| Article
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20203 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,919 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
Early winter, midafternoon. The temperature on the desert floor seven thousand feet below hovers near the nineties, but the rocky ledge on which I sit is a brisk thirty-five degrees cooler. Skirls and banners of storm cloud drift through the canyons that wind up to this spot, favoring the ground with an occasional splash of rain, fast and furious. Their advance is punctuated by blasts of cold air that fulfill the Pima Indian adage, "The rain is blind and must be led by the wind."
I often come to this spit of granite high in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, the desert city in which I make my home. For two decades I have wandered their cactus-studded fore range of crumbling, banded gray gneiss, scrambled through channels that falling water has carved over the millennia, picked my way over talus slopes and volcanic scree a hundred million years old, finally to arrive at this magical place. Not that every experience must be so trying a test of physical fitness: A narrow two-lane highway, built by convict labor in the 1930s, passes within a hundred feet.
My sanctuary is a maze of weathered sandstone and granite, a battlement of what geologists call hoodoos, rock columns shaped by the fanciful sculpting of the winds. The largest of these hoodoos, Duck Rock, to my immediate left, towers a hundred feet over the lip of thousand-foot-deep Molino Canyon. (When I first saw Duck Rock, it was festooned with a trio of climbers who seemed unconcerned that a quarter mile of air separated them from the nearest horizontal ground.) Other hoodoos bear similar names. Nixon Head, named for its marked resemblance to the former president in profile; the Three Sisters, a triple-pronged outcrop of red sandstone; the Apache, its sharp angles suggesting the Roman noses and high cheekbones of that famous people.
These hoodoos are rare enough in nature, found here and there in deserts throughout the world. These mountains are rare enough, too: wilderness in the very backyard of one of the nation's fastest growing cities, a quarter of a million acres of primal land bisected only by a thin ribbon of road that, on this rainy day, only a handful of automobiles have negotiated. This is a place to come to be alone, far removed from the pressures of city life. Barring the occasional sputter of a car engine or the whine of a jet plane high overhead, this is how the world might have been a hundred thousand years ago.
These mountains, I decided years ago, are my
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