The Reasons I Want to Write This Book

It seeps like fingers of rain
Soaking parched valleys in winter.

Whatever field we must cross, it
was crossed; whatever melody we
hear, it was heard.

Say that you don't seek these
notes distant like snow in the canyons...


One of the main reasons is that I've been taken, in one way or another, by this crazy wild land.

In painting and literature circles, it's common to say a that the landscape you are creating in effects the landscape of the mind.

And so, perhaps, it is.

But I do not mean that in a sugared, all-things-beautiful way at all. For there are many things here that are quite frankly, ugly. I begin to wonder, as a South African hotel concierge I met in San Diego a few years ago--who was working as such because this was one of the hotels his family owned--whether desert and tropical environments cause a lack of planning in the develpment of human beings. Whereas, I am almost sure he would theorize this is only inherent in dark skinned people, I would extend that to all people, and maybe especially some whites in this area and in those who initially settled this area.

I have never seen such poverty and wealth living side by side. The cities don't have it beat--not for the sheer disparity.

Down the road from me, this house which has been here for over 150 years, is a housing development with horse 'ranchettes,' all literally yards and yards of white picket fences mixed in with custom designed adobe mini-mansions. All of them--or most of them--looking uncomfortable and far too cavernous. A few miles a way, near a local high school, there are people living in old camper tops with lean to's built on to them with goats tied out in the front 'yard.'

People who live in the East or the Midwest, although they may be used to the inner city, have never seen such things, and never great poverty and great wealth spaced so close together.

And the place is truly what one would term 'Post-colonial,' with a mishmash of cultures and outlooks competing with each other and surviving into the millenium.

Indian art shops displaying artifacts abound. Oddly enough, it is mainly the Anglos who are interested in these cultural items. Or maybe we just like to institutionalize things. And the Indians--a numbered some--Yavapai, Apache, Navajo--are strangely more interested in the acutrements of traditional (our) status symbols than they are in any art.

This is the first time in my life, even though the term has gone Hollywood, that I have ever heard the term "Redneck" used on almost a daily basis. Also competitions as to which little hamlet has residents with the fewest teeth.

But then there is the land.

Inspiring greats such as D.H. Lawrence and Ansel Adams to record their impressions. And much to see, take in, digest. It has taken me a few years to understand the weather patterns and the micro-climates produced by the different elevations. How some little valleys can be alight in fall color while in other areas winter has already made its reach. What violent upheavals formed much of the texture of the rock walls of canyons, how steady and slow forces carved and continue to carve the largest canyon on earth--and how all that may be used in metaphor; in a story.