fea I >. • - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

Sedona. There's something about
it... Grace. There's an air of grace, I
guess you'd call it, that exists beyond all
the perfect scenery, the ideal weather,
the warm, neighborly, Western hospitality.
Sedona. I guess it's one of my two
favorite places in the world. "How do
you feel about Sedona?" an editor once
asked. "I love it." "Then show me. Tell
me." And what do you say?
I
t was a well-worn path, dark, soft,
leaf-mould earth, strewn with
broken pieces of sandstone. The
trail rounded the shoulder of the canyon
and dropped steeply into the stream
bed. In the shallows the water ran
smoothly, glinting in the first morning
sun. Small rounded stones on the
bottom were rust brown with sun moss.
In the sand along the edges of the creek
the wild mint grew. In the water itself
the cress, old and tough, had gone to
heavy seed.
Two small girls, pigtailed and brownlegged,
played in the shadows. They
were as quiet as my memory, stretched
across 30-odd years. My sister and I had
claimed this place long ago, in the
privacy of make-believe. Great sycamores
drifted an occasional leaf to
become a flotilla of miniature craft on
the water below.
It hadn't changed. In all the years
between childhood's play and this warm
December morning of adulthood, Oak
Creek has shone brightly. It has remain-
22 November, 1981
Text by Virginia A. Greene
Photography by Alan Benoit (except where otherwise credited)
SEDONA
Grace in the red rocks
ed a long sword of silver through the
canyon, emerging at last to fumble and
giggle its way through the eastern edge
of town.
I poked a stick into the sand and
watched the hole fill slowly with water.
A red-tailed hawk caught a thermal draft
and circled high above.
The heart said, "Don't go." Reality
said, "It's an hour's hike back to the
coffee shop and you have a rendezvous
with a cowboy."
This was the Sedona
landscape in all its subtle,
explosive magnificence.
The long, crooked stick steadied my
course downstream and pointed the way
back to Sedona, that little Arizona
village that is known as The Lady of the
Red Rocks.
I whacked my stick against a rock,
stopped to watch a soggy, wizened-up
apple bob past a tiny rill, and thought
about the ways a person can teach
reluctant children about poetry, or how
to describe without pretention the silent
thunder of a summer's dawn, or how to
show how one little village can differ
from a hundred others its size.
There in Arizona's famous Red Rock
Country, at the southern end of Oak
Creek Canyon, Sedona draws the imagi-
nation to a way of life which has all but
been forgotten. She welcomes them
all—all the artists and writers, moviemakers
and industrialists, retirees and
schoolteachers, cowboys and tourists
who find their way to her door.
Whether they're among the 9,000 permanent
residents or the two million
visitors passing through each year, they
speak with love and respect of the little
town.
It's obvious, too, what brings them
there. Take Richard Riley, for instance.
"We drove through on our way to the
Grand Canyon four years ago and
stopped for about 15 minutes. Went on
to the Canyon, then went home to
Michigan, sold our house and came
back to stay."
What brought him back, specifically?
"All this."
His nod included the vastness of the
scene spread below the jeep he drives as
part of John and Mary Ann Minnick's
Pink Jeep Tour force. This was the
massive red sandstone buttes rising flattopped
and abruptly out of the red earth
among the Arizona cypress, the cedars
and ponderosas and manzanita. This
was the autumn sun shining with a pale
glare off the creek that winds its way
beneath golden cottonwoods. This was
the mountain range and rim country
stiffly rising immediately to the north.
This was the Sedona landscape in all its
subtle, explosive magnificence.
Scenic Oak Creek Canyon.