Looking at It From the Other Side

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Do you believe there are two sides to every question? Sometimes I think there many more, and often (though not always) I see one way of looking at a question as yielding a much fuller explanation than “the other side.” The question I raised the other day, however, was no metaphysical dilemma. Is there water at present in some part or parts of the Willcox playa? The answer would clearly be a fact, and the fact is now in my possession! But first, another story....

We were coming home via side roads from a little expedition over to Benson and, on the way, our first but long-planned visit to the Amerind Museum. (The Museum merits a post all its own, but owing to what came afterward it will have to share the limelight today.) The Amerind is a private museum of Native American archaeology, founded in 1937 by William Shirley Fulton, and its collection houses pieces from both North and South America, those from prehistoric sites as well as modern Native American art and culture. Associated with the museum is the Fulton-Hayden Art Gallery.

No photographs may be taken in the gallery, understandably, but I did take a few non-flash shots in the museum.

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David was exceptionally taken with the natural setting of the museum, situated in spectacular Texas Canyon, home of eye-popping balanced rock formations. Texas Canyon is home to giant igneous rocks weathered over time, similar to those in Chiricahua National Monument, but differently shaped. In Texas Canyon, the magma never quite broke through the surface as it did in the Chiricahuas, and Texas Canyon is also at a much lower altitude and without (as far as I could see) any significant stream action. So while Chiricahua is known for its columns, Texas Canyon is known for its balanced rocks. A brochure on the area geology makes the point that these formations are “relatively young” but that, even so, the dinosaurs had already been extinct for 10 million years before these rocks were formed. I wonder how long it took for them to achieve their present shapes and positions.

And now long has this old, twisted tree been growing here, and did it force its way right through a boulder?

Well, we’d already been to Lenore’s bookstore and the Amerind Museum and the adjacent art gallery, and we had enjoyed our little picnic of raisins and almonds and water surrounded by fantastic rocks (and no other picnickers!), so we were already satisfied with the day on our way back home. 

We took Dragoon Road over to 191 and turned north toward Willcox. And then, just past the power plant, I saw a sign for a wildlife viewing area! On the west side of the playa!

We followed the road in and climbed up to the viewing platform. There was water! There were birds! How satisfying! And I must confess, I felt vindicated, which can be a pretty good feeling, but seeing water is the best feeling, for someone from Michigan.

Highway 191 up to I-10 takes the high road, so to speak over the railroad line, and from the elevated vantage point it is possible to verify that the train line does, indeed, as indicated on maps, cross a corner of the playa. How I would love to ride that section of track!

Well, what a day it was -- and yet, I was torn about whether or not to post this story and these images at all because I am so excited about my next post that I can hardly wait to share it!

 

Just Beyond Our Reach

Every day it’s out there, tantalizing us in its nearness and teasing us in its remove. We drive past, too far beyond the perimeter to have a good, clear look at the great, white, dry, ancient lakebed. We strain to see farther. I try the zoom function on my camera, and we even stop to employ binoculars, but we are continually and at the same time enchanted and frustrated.

The playa! Magic word, magic name, mysterious presence! Maps say “Willcox playa,” and one book I read called it the "Willcox dry lake," but around here it’s simply “the playa,” because there is no other. And truly, you’d have to do some traveling to find anything like it.

Twelve to fifteen thousand years ago it was a lake. Lake Cochise, as geologists call it, retrospectively. Today the ancient lakebed holds water only intermittently and never, I’m guessing, in its entirety. But then, questions of when and how much water might be found out there are part of its mystery, as far as we are concerned.

One day we were driving north on Rt. 191, coming home from a little jaunt, and both of us swore we could see water out on the playa. I have sworn the same from Rt. 186, David receiving my avowals with skepticism. From 186 the water – well, the water I claimed to see, if it is there at all – the water is (or was – or was not) much farther from the road than what we were sure we saw on the other side. My sentences reek with doubt, I realize. The playa is said to hold “shallow, ephemeral ponds,” a phrase that encourages my belief, especially considering two recent days of steady rain. And yet, another source warns that distant blue mirages have fooled many a viewer before me! There is definitely standing water in pools closer to the road, but what was I seeing out beyond the grass, that sparse desert rangeland where cattle graze? Water or mirage?

One day I read of a wildlife area on the western edge of the playa, accessible from the Kansas Settlement Road, and with high hopes we set our course in that direction. Ah, but remember that the playa is the lowest portion of a low sediment basin surrounded by mountain ranges, and that when down on a flat surface one can hardly see through standing brush. Also, I must confess, the day we tried this was the only day we had no water with us! I’d taken the bottle into the house to refill and forgotten to put it back in the car. (Lesson learned!)

The sun was blazing, with no shade along the sun-baked trail. We walked over half a mile on dry, caked mud until we could finally see the bare, white, open expanse stretching ahead, very far ahead still. Alas! Every step taken would have to be retraced coming back, and we were sadly unprepared. No drinking water with us! -- And no tripod, either! (I will never be a serious photographer as long as I remain so as lazy as I am about tripods.) Well, what do you see in that wobbly, unfocused distance? Water? Mirage? And can a camera capture a mirage, or is a mirage, like an hallucination, the combined creation of an eye and a mind? 

The playa is said to be 40 or 50 square miles in area, depending, it seems, on who is doing the measuring. The area is not entirely open to the public, either, as it is full of – frightening words! – “undetonated ordnance” from its days as a test bombing range. To my surprise, however, I found online an illustrated account by someone who had been out there on a motorcycle. Perhaps certain parts are fenced off and other parts open? We may never get far enough out to answer that question. Perhaps we will keep it as a mystery.

The Willcox playa is cousin, in a manner of speaking, to the Great Salt Lake, both formed in the Pleistocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era. In geologic time, that’s recent. But sometimes, as we descend from the 5,082-ft. elevation of Dos Cabezas to 4,187-ft. Willcox (compare to Tucson at 2,584’ and Northport, Michigan, at 628’), we make an illegitimate imaginary collapse of the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Quaternary periods and imagine the playa as lake home to giant thunder lizards, guzzling aquatic greens in the shallows and thrashing ponderous tails as they feed. It isn’t much harder to picture that scene than it is to envision Dos Cabezas as home to a bustling population of three thousand, a community served by school and railroad and post office, and numerous stores of various kinds.

Like the playa, the past here seems very near and at the same time tantalizingly and frustratingly just beyond our reach.

Look here for more (much better) images of the Willcox Playa.

Today’s book recommendation: The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West  (revised & updated, by François Leydet. Informative and compellingly readable.