Nicky Leach, Writer/Editor - Writing Samples

Nicky Leach, Writer/Editor - Perfecting the Art of the Possible

Writing Samples

Spirit of the West

Introduction to Apa Insight Discovery Guide: Wild West

Picture this. You’re out West, driving an empty highway bolted straight to a forever horizon, one hand on the wheel, coffee cup in the other. A map lies strewn across the passenger seat. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto soars to a crescendo on the stereo just as the sun dips behind the mountains. The smell of sagebrush and smoky pinyon wafts through the open window. As the last strains of sunset and Bach fade, you pull over and begin walking a dirt track with no particular destination in mind. Elk and deer haunt the shadows. Just over the rise, a coyote soprano breaks into a short aria. The koyaanisqatsi thrum of the big city feels like a lifetime away.

And you think: Perhaps I’ll never go back.

Sound familiar? Epic fantasies underlie almost everyone’s experience of the West. We measure ourselves against that flat sagebrush plain, the hypnotically blue bowl-shaped sky, the battered summits of mountain ranges, the bright shock of rivers surging through desert canyons, and understand suddenly why a joyful Walt Whitman wrote, “I am immense. I contain multitudes.” For all the talk of heroics, manifest destiny, and national wealth that has driven settlement of the West, the simple truth is that it is a place of personal reverie, only lately learning how to cooperate and build communities of many individual destinies - as Wallace Stegner said, “a society to match the scenery.”

The American West is young country, both physically and mentally, experiencing growing pains as it moves from willful teenage whim to patient adult understanding of the world and its processes. Today, this boundless place is learning that freedom means finding the balance between possibility and self-imposed boundaries.

The West is defined by water - or lack of it - a fact appreciated by all its Indian residents and early arrivals such as the Spanish, John Wesley Powell, and the Mormons. Dubbed an “oasis civilization,” by Professor Walter Webb, this is a land shaped by aridity, where 86 percent of its residents now live in cities along the Pacific, the Rockies, and major rivers like the Rio Grande and the Colorado. The lessons of cooperation, size limitation, and shared resources in the Indian villages were lost on many 19th-century arrivals. The interior West is littered with the ghosts of boom-and-bust mining towns thrown up without civic thought and abandoned when an insatiable appetite for more drew their residents away.

But the mythic idea of the West remains as important as grittier realities, helped along by all those willing to buy into the fantasy. Hard-working cowboys with time on their hands cling to the rugged individual image created for them by greenhorn easterners like Zane Grey and Owen Wister. Indian tribes, struggling to overcome unimaginable cultural losses, use a combination of reality and romance to promote Indian heritage tourism and show how they have survived and adapted to every century’s demands. Those ranchers who haven’t sold their land for ranchettes yearn for the days when cattle was king even as they explore different grazing practices, reintroduction of dryland-adapted species like the buffalo, and a little heritage tourism of their own.

More than half the West is publicly owned and, therefore, sparsely populated, making this the best place in America to have a direct experience of many different natural and cultural landscapes. You can visit preserved Ancestral Pueblos in the Four Corners and sacred Indian sites in every state; Spanish missions in southern Texas, southern Arizona, and California; gold mining ghosts in the Black Hills, northern California, Nevada, southern Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana; historic westward trail sites from Nebraska to Oregon; and breathtaking natural treasures like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Carlsbad Caverns, and many, many more.

Be ready to meet a place of great paradox and unearthly beauty. Open your heart and mind, strap on your sense of adventure, and come on in.

Slot Canyons

Note: Many of you will recognize the image of Antelope Canyon on the Navajo reservation near Page, Arizona, adorning my Web site. Slot canyons perfectly sum up the seductive but dangerous beauty of the Desert Southwest: they beckon us to go deeper into the heart of the land and transfix us with their elegance and forms, until we lose ourselves completely and have trouble finding our way back to the everyday world.

They are the Southwest’s secret places—the twisting water-carved slot canyons that honeycomb northern Arizona and southern Utah like catacombs beneath a giant cathedral. Far below the canyon rim, a soft carpet of sand lies underfoot muffling footsteps; in other places, rockfalls slow travel. The slightest whisper is magnified here, echoing off vertical sandstone walls that may reach thousands of feet high and narrow to less than a foot wide at times. Glimpses of sky appear then disappear. Light is a reflected memory of the real thing, illuminating magical colors among taffy swirls of sandstone. It is a world, writes photographer Michael Fatali, that “suggests qualities and objects that in reality do not exist. Only our imagination guides us.”

Slot canyons are one of the most remarkable and beautiful geological features of Canyon Country, existing in great numbers where streams have cut straight down through sandstone like a knife through butter. The opposite of differential erosion, in which rocks of differing compositions and hardness weather into stepped-back cliffs and hoodoos, slot canyons form when the bedrock is of uniform composition from top to bottom. Water entering joints finds little resistance and accelerates during times of runoff, when sediment- and debris-laden flashfloods roar through these narrow recesses with the speed of freight trains, often fueled by unseen storms upcountry that arrive with little or no warning.

The most celebrated slot canyons—Zion Narrows in Zion National Park; Antelope Canyon, on the Navajo Reservation near Page, Arizona; and nearby Paria Canyon--are more visited. Others, such as the many slots in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, offer rock scramblers and canyon lovers solo adventures aplenty. All slot canyons may snare a human life as quickly as a venus flytrap. Be careful here during the summer monsoon season, and try to plan a visit in early summer or fall when flashflood danger is lessen

An Archetypal World

from Introduction: Arches National Park: Where Rock Meets Sky

It’s an unusually cool summer’s morning in Arches National Park. Heavy monsoon rains the day before have broken southeastern Utah’s unprecedented drought conditions and washed away the dust of the last six months. High clouds stipple the soft blue sky. The sun is still hiding behind 12,000-foot Mount Tukuhnikivats, one of the highest summits in the La Sal Mountains to the east, “where the sun lingers,” according to early Ute Indians. A breath of wind exhales gently over the high desert of the Paradox Basin, five miles northwest of Moab. Still moist from the rainstorm, the great rolling plateau of eroded Entrada Sandstone glows with a vibrant desert artist’s palette of salmon, vermilion, ochre, and buckskin tones. It promises to be a great day for hiking.

I stop at the Balanced Rock parking lot to walk through the Windows, the most popular section of the park. What would New Mexico artist Georgia O’Keeffe have made of this landscape, I wonder as I walk? A lover of elemental forms, sensual textures, and uniquely eroded rocks, O’Keeffe would surely have been fascinated by the thousands of keyholes, windows, spans, and hoodoos at Arches. Whole canvases could be filled with flying buttresses of stone, framed mountain views, junipers clinging to sandstone, the enormous white trumpets of sacred datura at dawn. I can imagine sculptor Henry Moore, whose pale holed abstracted sculptures dot verdant British hills, peering through Double Arch and murmuring appreciatively over the clever use of “negative space,” then returning to his studio reinspired.

Artists filter the natural world through the lens of their unique perceptions.

Landscapes are never just landscapes but a human experience of what is there—as individual as a fingerprint. Nature is the artist here, though. Working in the medium of sandstone, using the twin chisels of water and wind and flowing underground salt, she uplifts, collapses, sculpts, and molds. It is a work-in-progress, a performance art piece that is never finished, and therein lies its very perfection. Artist Cristo wraps up whole landscapes, giftwrapping them for us as if we were Christmas shoppers. Delicate Arch is an iconic presence the world over, Utah’s most recognizable landmark. How easily we begin dimishing the things we most love, domesticating them, until they lose their ability to startle us by their very familiarity. Forget all your preconceived notions, though. Nothing can prepare you for the real Delicate Arch. Its fragile beauty resists all preconceived notions. Nature’s icons cannot be bought, sold, or bartered.. And therein lies their power to tranform us.

Artistry is the heart of Arches’ appeal. This is a landscape that defies the laws of everyday perception. Rocks balance precariously on pedestals. Massive sandstone arches are so impossibly slender, only a wing and a prayer seem to hold them up. Cliffs tilt at steep angles like dominoes caught in a slow-motion freefall. We imagine that this archetypal landscape never changes. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. Gravity is constantly at work on the exposed sandstone fins, taking down, grain by grain, what was once lifted up, in a constant search for Angle of Repose. Landscape Arch, Delicate Arch, Double O Arch, and all of its siblings will eventually crash to earth when least expected, probably with no witnesses to mark their passage. Dust to dust, sandstone to sand. All things must pass—even our most cherished landmarks.

At 10 a.m., I arrive in the parking lot of the Fiery Furnace for a three-hour hike into the heart of the sandstone maze of fins. While one ranger leads a group through the trailhead gate, Ranger Miriam Graham invites me to join her as she roams through Fiery Furnace, checking on climbing groups and backcountry hikers with permits who have elected to explore on their own. Deeper and deeper we go, walking in washes and on slickrock to avoid cryptobiotic crust, the dark biological soil alive with cyanobacteria, lichens, and algae that forms the building block of life in the desert.

The twisted branches of ancient shaggy junipers point the way at the junction of the parallel canyons. They begin to look alike. I’m glad that Miriam knows which direction to go. The outside world fades away. Life simplifies into a pleasing rhythm of one boot in front of the other, heart beats and breath, hand over hand up a pouroff, friction-walking along ledges, avoiding the fissures in the slickrock that groundwater continues to widen. Moment follows moment. I feel completely alive and present and very happy.

In a soaring alcove of rosy sandstone, we stop and eat trail mix, drink water, and sit in companionable silence, enjoying the setting. I write notes in my journal. Miriam’s radio crackles. In another canyon, we come upon Skull Arch high above our heads. For long moments, we watch as clouds give way to blue sky through the eye sockets and the noontime heat builds. In a neighboring corridor, we can hear a group of climbers calling to each other. Miriam winks at me, takes out her Indian flute, and begins to play a haunting refrain. The voices suddenly go quiet. Magic is restored.

As we leave, we come upon the strewn backpacks of the climbers. In a moment of playfulness, we debate hiding the packs behind a huge rock before our better judgment prevails. We settle for moving the equipment tidily to one side and begin to leave. But I can’t resist having one last bit of fun. I tear a sheet of paper out of my notebook and scribble a note that will keep the climbers guessing for the rest of the day. KOKOPELLI WAS HERE, I write. Laughing, we continue on our way, back to the real world.

Puerto Penasco: Where the Ocean Meets the Desert

Sunset Magazine

It’s a seaside-postcard Saturday afternoon in the Mexican fishing port of Puerto Penasco, where the Sonoran Desert meets the 700-mile-long Sea of Cortez, 60 miles southwest of the Arizona border. In front of the monolithic Plaza Las Glorias hotel, rusting shrimp trawlers ride at anchor, their nets stretched to dry in the 70-degree winter sunshine. Brown pelicans dive into glistening sapphire waves to grab tiny silvery fish that jump up then fall back with a soft plop. Weekenders from Arizona beachcomb on the shell-sand beach and barter for souvenirs with beach vendors.

The town Americans know as Rocky Point has been a popular vacation spot since Prohibition times, when gangster Al Capone smuggled mezcal across the border and stayed in the village’s first permanent rock structure, the Marine Club, a casino in Old Port. Owner John Stone eventually burned down the premises for the insurance money, but it was rebuilt in the 1930s as an inn by Benjamin and Tecla Bustamante. Newly renovated, the charming Posada La Roca is still welcoming guests today, a stone’s throw from the bustling Fish Market on the Malecon.

Puerto Penasco was founded as a fish camp in 1928 by families from southern Sonora ports lured by totoaba, a large corvina fish endemic to the shallow, sediment-laden waters of the Upper Gulf of California, where the Colorado River enters the Sea of Cortez. As totoaba declined the market for Gulf shrimp took off, and shrimp trawling became big business. Puerto Penasco has prospered from this “pink gold” and burgeoning U.S. tourism.

The Sea of Cortez is one of the richest marine environments on earth, with 6,000 named species of invertebrates and vertebrates, 1,432 of which inhabit the Upper Gulf. But all is not well in paradise. In 1940, writer John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts surveyed the Sea of Cortez and warned of overfishing. Today, Gulf fisheries are in crisis. The totoaba has been fished to extinction and shrimp have drastically declined after overharvesting of the sea bottom. Hundreds of other species incidentally caught in nets are also losing ground. Of most concern is the disappearance of the vaquita, a small, cute porpoise endemic to the Upper Gulf that frequently tangles in gill nets. Less than 600 vaquita remain. It is now the world’s most endangered cetacean.

In 1993, the Mexican government acted to save the vaquita by creating the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve. At the forefront of international conservation efforts has been The Center for the Study of Deserts and Oceans (CEDO), a marine biology field station in Puerto Penasco. Founded in 1981 by Tucson marine biologist Peggy Turk Boyer and her educator husband, Rick Boyer, CEDO has grown from a modest university shrimp hatchery study into an international nonprofit research, education, and conservation membership organization, based in Tucson and Puerto Penasco.

The indefatigable Boyers work closely with international government agencies and local fishers to study sustainable fishing practices in the Sea of Cortez. Among their successes have been voluntary no-fish zones, adjusted fishing seasons, and improved education within the fishing community. Biologists use CEDO’s wet lab, library, and some of the greatest tidal fluctuations in the world to study unique marine life. Environmental educators work closely with Mexican and American public schools and host school field trips, summer camps, and ecotour groups.

More than 12,000 people a year now visit CEDO, which is located in the quiet community of Las Conchas, just outside town. The field station has grown beyond a distinctive, whitewashed, two-story building above the dunes to include a sustainably built Earthship visitor center, exhibits on the natural and cultural history of the Sea of Cortez, a gift shop, and photo-op finback whale skeleton. Regular public talks on the area are offered in English and Spanish, along with scheduled excursions. Most popular are tidepool explorations; kayak trips in the nearby estuary of Estero Morua, home to a women’s oyster cooperative; and winter tours of the Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, a dramatic volcano-and-dune preserve adjoining the marine biosphere to the north.

PUERTO PENASCO PLANNER

Puerto Penasco is four hours from Tucson or Phoenix via safe, paved highways. The easiest border crossing is Lukeville, Arizona, just south of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. No immigration documents are required. Carry a driver’s license, passport, or “green card.” Cheap Mexican car insurance, essential for travelers, is available at the border. Calling code for Puerto Penasco from the United States is (011-52-638). Further information at www.puerto-penasco.com and CEDO. Also recommended is The Rocky Point Gringo Guide to Puerto Penasco, Mexico by Mary Weil, available through Southwest Publishing, 925 W. Baseline Rd. #105-H1, Tempe, AZ 85283-1100.

To reach CEDO, enter Puerto Penasco from the north on Blvd. Benito Juarez and continue to the traffic light at Blvd. Fremont and turn left. Turn right into the Las Conchas development, opposite the PEMEX gas station, and stop at the gate for directions. Visitor center and gift shop open 9-5 daily; free public talks in English 2 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Box 249, Lukeville, AZ 85341; 382-20113. Log on to www.cedointercultural.org for information on upcoming excursions. Natural and cultural history tours that include stops at CEDO are offered by La Ruta de Sonora Ecotourism Association,110 S. Church Ave., Ste. 4192, Tucson, AZ 85701; www.laruta.org.

BEACHES AND FISHING

Puerto Penasco is famous for its clean, sandy beaches, tidepooling, and great fishing.

Playa Bonita ("beautiful beach") sweeps in a great golden arc from downtown all the way to Cholla Bay, and is the main beachfront for the numerous hotels, condos, and luxury resorts in Puerto Penasco. Its far end, Sandy Beach, has the best stretch of sand and ocean. Beach access is free; RV and tent camping are available for a small fee. Next to Sandy Beach is Cholla Bay, where a rocky headland protects a quiet bay and a postage-stamp beach, with views of the Pinacate to the north. Away from the bustle of downtown, this is a great place to enjoy a drink at J.J.'s Cantina, sunbathe, swim, snorkel, tidepool, and watch panga fishers hauling ashore blue crabs. Visitors to CEDO, in the quiet gated community of Las Conchas, may access the beach next to the marine research center for excellent tidepooling on the huge exposed reef at low tide, swimming (wear protective booties), and wildlife viewing (watch for nesting ospreys and dolphin feeding frenzies in the late afternoon). To get out on the ocean, contact one of several fishing charters. Sun n' Fun Dive ShopEnterprise, andday trips to view sea lions and birds on Isla San Jorge (Bird Island). Fishing charters offer the chance to reel in grouper, pinto bass, red snapper, yellowtail, Cortez halibut, dolphin fish, marlin, sailfish, sierra, and black skipjack, and paloma pompano. Contact Sun n' Fun Dive Shop and nearby Pompano's (011-52-638-34419), as well as Santiago's Ocean Services at the Marina Penasco slip near Balboa's fish restaurant. Fishing permits are required. (011-52-638-35450), at the entrance to Old Port on the right, offers snorkel and scuba rentals, instruction, sunset cruises aboard the

LODGING

Hacienda del Mar Bed and Breakfast. InLas Conchas. Two upstairs rooms, a studio, and a guesthouse. $105-130/nightly. P.O. Box 410, Lukeville, AZ 85341; 382-0228; www.haciendabnb.com.

Oceano Rentals and Property Management. Located in Old Port. Specializes in Las Conchas rentals. 638-35413 or, in the U.S., 1-888-328-8491.

Plaza Las Glorias Hotel. 210 ocean-view rooms. $95-162/night. U.S., reservations: 1-800-515-4321/544-4686 or info@mtmcorp.com.

Posada La Roca. Historic Old Port inn with 11 quaint rooms and antique furnishings; try #6. $33/night or $22/night shared bath. Primero de Junio #2 y Malecon Kino. 383-3199.

FOOD

Cocina Economica. Where the locals eat.Go left at the Mirador/Old Port junction downtown and look for a brick-domed building with a sign saying Mariscos Lolita. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mexican specialties include superb breakfast chilaquiles. Ave. 10 Campeche. $.

Rosy’s Donut. Another authentic Puerto Penasco experience, with friendly staff and delicious cheap food in a sunny room. It’s known for its chile rellenos. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Calle No-Reeleccion. $.

Balboa’s. Tasty seafood in a tranquil setting, overlooking the marina. Try the Carlos V shrimp, the house special. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ave. 8 & Plutarco Elias Calles 89; 383-5155. $$.