WHERE RIVERS RUN DRY

By John Skow

Here's a big, rambling, reportorial discourse on the American Southwest that seems to have begun as an investigation into the ways in which the region's history has been written since ancient times by the scarcity of water. That would have been logical and achievable--a good, sensible subject with a reasonable stopping point. But by his own account, author Alex Shoumatoff, a veteran writer about distant parts for the New Yorker, spent too much time on the project for a neat, orderly account, traveled too far, read too many books, heard too many semitruths and beguiling lies from too many plausible liars and improbable truth tellers. He also lived through about 25 years of his own life doing all this, so that the Shoumatoff who finished the book is not the same fellow who started it. (He admits to beginning as a young semi-mystic in search of the Other, and to becoming a middleaged householder wistfully attempting golf.)

As a result, Legends of the American Desert (Knopf; 534 pages; $30) is a fascinating and sometimes bewildering profusion of themes that appear, join, separate and disappear like the braided channels of a Southwestern river. It is also an impressive exercise in graceful journalism. Chapters on the Anasazi and Havasupai tribes, for instance, and the Jesuits and Franciscans, don't read like potted histories ploddingly typed from a writer's file cards. There's no dust in this desert history. Colonizers and colonized live in the author's mind; ideas about them boil up, and off he goes in pursuit.

A memorable chapter deals with the Tarahumara Indians of "the rugged southwestern corner of the state of Chihuahua, in the heart of the Sierra Madre Occidental." They are legendary long- distance runners--tall, lean, high-cheekboned men who play a nonstop kickball game over what may be two days and at distances of up to 100 miles. But when they cross the finish line, they more or less ignore the winner, acting as if nothing unusual had happened. Shoumatoff writes that the Tarahumara never accepted the Spanish culture and religion, but that lately their culture has been brutalized by narco-traficantes, drug dealers who terrorized them into growing marijuana and opium poppies. He comments wryly that pot and heroin are "the new treasure of the Sierra Madre."

The author spends time at Big Mountain, Hopi territory still settled by refusenik Navajos, "way out in the Arizona desert, off the modern grid." A traveler who has returned from the back of beyond may be tempted to claim more acceptance by the locals than was really the case, but Shoumatoff plays it straight. He made some headway and won some trust, but he reports that the wall Navajos have erected against white wannabes and sight-seeing Anglo journalists is very real.

Shoumatoff gives less space to Anglo culture, but he does introduce the reader to Stanley Marsh, the whimsical gent who buried 10 baby blue Cadillacs on end near Amarillo, Texas, and to New Age purveyors of what he accurately calls hooey in Sedona, Ariz. For the refried Spanish architecture mandatory in the tonier quarter of Santa Fe, N.M., he borrows a glorious slur from an exasperated architect that the regional hothead Edward Abbey could have said more noisily but not better: Taco Deco.

--By John Skow