Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness

The Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico sizzles in the sun. Daytime temperatures commonly soar above [actual symbol not reproducible]. The parched, mineral earth gets less than three inches of rainfall a year on average; some years, none at all. Plants of the region even drop their leaves to hold each precious drop of moisture.
Yet this desert is one of the most fascinating and beautiful places in North America. A large variety of plants - creosote bush, the fabled boojum and numerous other cacti and succulents - flourish here, as do a wealth of birds, insects, and small mammals. Man is an uneasy resident, however, and although modern cities such as Phoenix and Tucson use artificial water supplies and air-conditioning to survive on its fringes, the natural heart of the desert still rejects all but the most intrepid sojourners.
Two who know this desert well are Jack Dykinga and Charles Bowden. Each has confronted it on foot over the course of many years. Bowden, who now lives in Tucson, recently said, "I go to it like a thirsty animal goes to water. Something happens when you walk for a hundred miles in the desert and don't see a footprint. Once I turned around and saw someone else's footprint and it really shook me up. Then I realized it was my own."
No casual visitor, Bowden expresses his feelings and experiences in words. He looks not only down at his own footprints, but also back in the historical record - to the Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, to an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest who cast for souls for seventeen years in Baja California. He recalls a Sand Papago Indian shaman who knows the desert like a medicine chest and plans to live forever; and he affectionately remembers both the madness and the sanity of his late friend, desert lover, and fellow pleader for preservation, Edward Abbey.
Dykinga recaptures for us the way the desert looks and feels in exquisite color photographs. He has walked and sweated and camped the length and breadth of this place and brought back hundreds of brilliant large-format camera views. More than 120 are preserved here - most never before published.
Interwoven together, the personal visions of these two remarkable observers evoke the Sonoran Desert with extraordinary power. We may or may not wish to be in the desert as they have been, but in these pages we will come as close as it is possible to being there.