by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh - on Sunday, March 26, 2017
Frank Waters had great reverence for the Grand Canyon. In his book The Colorado and in other references found throughout his writings, he speaks of the canyon as a great inverted pyramid. It is the home to the Hopi sipapu, the beginning place, the place of emergence from the last world into this one.
So the canyon is much more than a national park to him. It is testimony to the great age of this continent, a place of profound silence and beauty, as holy, if not more so, than the sum total of all the cathedrals, mosques, churches, and synagogues on the planet.
At times, in print, Frank would call upon the words of fellow writer, J. B. Priestly, to sum up his feelings about it. Priestley wrote that were he an American he would consider the Grand Canyon as the standard by which all men, politics, and art should be tested—that is, whether any man, public policy, or work of art is good enough to exist in the same country that is home to the Grand Canyon.
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by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh - on Saturday, March 11, 2017
Exploiting the wonders of the Grand Canyon is a developer’s dream and, as such, it is always under threat of being despoiled. New exploitive schemes are forever incubating and some are now poised to hatch.
A Scottsdale-based developer is currently pushing the Navajo Nation Council to support a 1.4 mile tramway above the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers to shuttle up to 10,000 visitors a day to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The project includes an elevated walkway and amphitheater below the rim, a hotel, restaurant, RV center and numerous other resort attractions all on Navajo land and all at a sizeable investment cost ($65 million) to the Navajo nation along with on-going maintenance costs.
Just recently, the National Park Service rejected the Tusayan Project, which continues to come back, with the perseverance of an over amped vampire, despite numerous setbacks and rejections. The Italian development concern pushing to build this not-so-small city of 2200 houses and 1.4 million square feet of commercial space—at a cost of $500 million—wants to do so immediately next to the park’s southern boundary.
These kinds of urban projects, in a land critically short of water are, to my mind, not only inappropriate to the environment but also totally at odds with the history, ecology, beauty and serenity of the canyon. There’s only one Grand Canyon and you cannot get another if you ruin it.
We need to constantly be aware of the presence of the continual on-going threats to bring ever-new manmade alterations to what only nature has been able to fashion so magnificently. “Leave it as it is,” implored Teddy Roosevelt during a 1903 visit to the canyon. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
For further reading: Grandcanyontrust.org
by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh - on Monday, February 06, 2017
The West is vanishing. By this I mean the open spaces, the unplanned towns that grew up out of nowhere and retained their own unique flavor setting them apart from look-alike cities.
The sense of nature that lies just beyond the town limits, filled with sagebrush and plentiful wildlife and streams and rivers that flow without impediment, is also going. The West is filling up and where spacious tracts of land that bore little human stamp, except for an occasional water pump and strand of barbed wire fences, there are now rows and rows of cloned houses and planned communities, strip malls and miles upon miles of paved road scarring the land in all directions.
For those of us who grew up here and remember its sense of space—an unformed world of limitless possibilities—there is the pain of loss of the ‘special-ness’ of this place, of the free-wheeling spirit of those who lived here informed by their surroundings and sense of good fortune.DEEP WATERS is, among other things, a paean to that world and those earlier times, as well as a literary memoir that chronicles, in letters and commentary, the friendship between the great American writer, Frank Waters, and me.
Right from the start, it was clear that Frank and I shared common sensibilities and a deep affection for the land and its native inhabitants. The scope of our shared inquiry—psychology, writing, pre-Columbiana, Eastern philosophy, Egyptology—much of it contained in the more than two hundred letters exchanged between 1968 and 1995—was further enriched by the time we spent hiking, exploring Indian ruins, and attending ceremonial dances.
The late 1960s, until Frank’s death in 1995, was in many ways the end of an era—of an earlier west, more of the frontier—that had encompassed the Taos Art Society and the intellectual salons presided over by Mabel Dodge Luhan and others. Frank had been part of that world. He was friends with, among many others, Mabel and Tony Luhan, Freida Lawrence, Witter Bynner, the cowboy writer, John Sinclair, Frederick Manfred and the painters, Dorothy Brett, Georgia O’Keefe, Andrew Dasburg, Leon Gaspard and Nicolai Fechin.
I was in those days employed by the New York publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux to look after their business in the West. This afforded me the means and rationale by which to travel widely within the region and in the process provided me with a much wider exposure to western literature and art.
In retrospect, I realize that this period in time was a rarity, peopled as it was, with fascinating characters. The experience was all too good not to share.
And here, especially, is the opportunity to speak of Frank Waters who wrote luminously about the West and its native peoples and our inability to be severed from our connection to the earth.
Photo Credit: Alan Louis Kishbaugh
by Author Alan Louis Kishbaugh - on Wednesday, February 01, 2017
DEEP WATERS, the memoir of my 30-year friendship with the pre-eminent Southwestern writer Frank Waters is less than a month away from publication.
In over two hundred letters, augmented with commentary, Frank and I explore among other things, environmental issues, the value of open space, Indians—their cosmology and politics—pre-Columbiana, Egyptology, psychology and the challenges of writing and publishing.
The Taos and Santa Fe literary communities and their parallel art colonies figured prominently on both the cultural landscape and in Waters’s personal life. He knew the writers Mabel Dodge Luhan, Witter Bynner, Spud Johnson, Frederick Manfred and many others. And he counted the artists Dorothy Brett, Georgia O’Keefe, Leon Gaspard, Alfred Stieglitz, Andrew Dasburg, and Nicolai Fechin among his many friends.
In over twenty books, Frank Waters wrote insightfully about Indian and Hispanic life and brought to the outside world a deep understanding and recognition of peoples close to the earth and ancient ways. His voice bridged entrenched stereotypes widening the appreciation for native peoples and the land that spawned and nurtured them.
Frank was an intensely private man yet here, in these letters and commentary, readers will see how engaged he was with all that was around him.I am blessed to have known him and proud to present our correspondence.
Since the 1980s Alan Louis Kishbaugh has served on advisory boards, state and local, and led many volunteer efforts to acquire open space and parkland, to protect animal habitats, and to establish viable wildlife corridors in the mountains and hillsides of Los Angeles. He lives in Southern California.