Entertainment Magazine: Entertaining Tucson

On top of Frog Mountain:
Charles Bowden

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By Sarah Streed
Entertainment Magazine
June 1987

Many Tucsonans are familiar with author Charles Bowden because of last fall's release "Blue Desert." Now, Bowden appears to be waxing prolific with yet aother book, "Frog Mountain Blues."

It is brief, but well-laid out, with exerpts from songs and quotes from old newspapers. And it contains over forty color black and white photographs, taken by Pulitzer prize winning Jack W. Dykinga.

The theme is a clear one and almost simplistic in its purity. We must save Frog Mountain (the Tohono O'odham's name for the Santa Catalina Mountain range.)

Bowden weaves his way round and about this message with private ramblings inspired while hiking on the mountain, and with laconic conversations held with old timers who have seen the mountain change and Bowden has no qualms about naming the "we" who must do the saving. It is the responsibility of all who inhabit this city and drink in the wealth and the beauty from down below while bulldozers, and picnicers, and cars destroy up above.

"Without the Santa Catalina Mountains, Tucson is just another city in a nation of urban islands. The range is the heart and soul of this community but for decades the city has sold the mountain as it clawed its way toward the magical goals of growth and wealth. The stone skyline exists in every car sold, every house slammed against the desert floor, and every steak sizzled over a mesquite fire in a cowboy restaurant. The ridges rest on the faces of people prowling the malls and wash across the bodies of thousands stalled in the daily traffic jams of the rush. We do not know who we are until we look at the mountain. We have not been able to resist our hunger for the huge stone wall that frames our lives. We plug the canyons with resorts, put our observations on the peaks, and creep up its slopes with dream homes nibbling at the National Forest boundaries."

These are the impassioned words of a man deeply committed to preserving something that not very many place a value on preserving.

But don't be fooled. This book has a much wider range than Tucson. The demise of Frog Mountain is only one example of what is happening across the United States.

As Bowden states "This wildness is the salvation of the world." And thls goes for cities that have a natural monument of any sort to preserve within sight. It is difficult because our generation is unaware of the urgency. We are "the product(s) of childhood glimpses of images in books, of tiny scraps of experience gleaned from the noise of a century hellbent on industrial growth." It takes a prophet like Bowden to warn the people of cities everywhere to look up and save what they see in the distance.

Yes, the mountain speaks through Bowden, who is vehement. However, I felt as a subject for a full length book, Frog Mountain cheated me. Bowden's prose is at best, inspiring, at worst excellent. Why wasn't there more of it? The actual words can be read in a day; why wasn't the subject explored, wormed around, picked apart, and then all tied up with more impassioned prose? That would have been a good read.

As it stands, this book is a cross between one to lie on the coffee table and one to give away to your realtor (anonymously, of course!) It certainly is a good book, I just wondering why Bowden didn't wait a little longer, write a little more, and then deliver a powerful epic? Perhaps, because time was running out for Frog Mountain. And there is the crux of the matter. Is the book a tract to convert the heathens? Or a story, a story of a mountain that has been through hell and high water and still stands?

I wanted more of that story and less of the tract.

Charles Bowden, author of "Blues Desert," University of Arizona Press, 1986.

Photo by Bill Broyles