Well, any of you fellas want to say anything?
Well, seated here with me, Andy Rush, who illustrated the book,
responsible not for that photograph.
but for the watercolors that you have seen flashing by.
Andy and Drum are old collaborators.
Seated next to Andy is Susan Lowell Humphreys.
Many of you know her own wonderful writings.
Her great novella, Ganado Red.
And the Humphreys part, along with her husband,
Ross Humphreys, that's Rio Nuevo Publishing, who
brought up this beautiful book.
Andy, Susan.
Good evening, everybody.
There's one name I want to mention besides Susan and Ross,
who done just an amazing job bringing
this book into reality, and that is I
worked with a typography designer, [? Emil Baird, ?]
in the early days when we shaped this book and shaped its look.
And so I just want to acknowledge his work.
I don't know if he's here tonight,
but he's very much a part of our team.
Just a few things about the illustrations
I wanted to mention, Drum once commented
that the guests who first came down
to the remote canyons of his ranch
usually took on average five days to slow down enough
to what he called get there.
And as an aside, that I think he meant as a compliment to me,
he pointed out that it seemed to take me only three,
partially due to the fact that I came
from the art ranch of Rancho Linda Vista in Oracle.
So I was a little quicker, but not all that much.
And the illustrations in Voice of the Borderlands
are taken from the many drawings and paintings
that I have made on my many visits to Drum's home.
And some of those are here on easels today.
I've spent a lot of my life walking and sitting and drawing
and painting in the creek beds and the hillsides of his world,
trying to steal myself sufficiently to get there.
And I can testify that what Drum meant
was exactly my experience.
For me, life in the city, as we all know,
has its own power and its own imagination
on us and its own magnetism.
And that's both exciting.
But spiritually, I find it very dangerous in some ways.
When I leave the city to enter the thinly populated
borderlands of Drum's world, the cacophony of the city
is like an old familiar friend and I leave it reluctantly.
Then the paved roads gradually are left behind as we know.
And the country roads become narrower and narrower.
And the electrical grid thins out.
And in many places, it disappears altogether.
And it crushes my ears inward with that kind of silence.
After a few days, near Guadalupe,
walking in the deep recesses of the Canyon country,
there comes another kind, an older kind of hearing
that in time becomes almost mythic to me in its power.
Things Drum writes about the sound of wind,
the ripple of leaves, the gurgle of a creek,
the screech of a hawk should one be on horseback.
What is left to see and hear is the mantra like phrase
that Drum repeats in this book, throughout the book, to place
us in that stillness, where he says turquoise
stones in the creek bed, the sound of horses
who's in the sand.
So with that phrase, you are now in Drum's world,
where the elemental, molecular whirl of eternity
is almost too close for comfort.
As friends over many years, Drum and I
have shared our respective fascination, I think,
with the interaction of human life
and the almost forgotten natural world.
I think that we both begin from the same premise
that the purposes that we call art
are founded upon bearing witness to all of life,
not just our own.
And then in addition, one needs to choose a craft and a skill
to be developed and sustained through regular practice.
Beyond that, there really isn't that much
to do, but to observe and honor what
man and nature so abundantly open up to our consciousness,
or as Drum says the opportunity to tell it true.
My particular love of drawing and painting the land
directly from my own observation,
I like to think of as a kind of match
to Drum's Voice Of The Borderlands
to his telling it true.
That doesn't mean I don't think avoiding
the hard work of distilling what I see into the metaphor
that we sometimes call art.
And while only I may know how many times I've fallen short,
I like to think that the journey I added to Drum's very
wonderful book reflects our kindred spirit
and our willingness to be taught by the land, that
is the mother of his stories, and I think
it's the mother of us all.
So I had a great fun doing this book with him.
And you're seeing it's a result flashing by up here.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]