Outside the Gray Mountain store Chee stretched. ... The snowcapped shape of the San Francisco Peaks twenty miles to the south looked close enough to touch in the clear, high altitude air. ... The only clouds this morning were high altitude cirrus so thin that the blue showed through them. Beautiful to Chee. He was back in Diné Bikéyah, back between the Sacred Mountains and he felt easy again — at home in a remembered landscape.

That excerpt from Tony Hillerman's novel The Ghostway perfectly defines how the beloved author and journalist, who died on Oct. 26 a year ago, at age 83, felt about the Southwest and its Native peoples. For him, beauty, wisdom, tradition, observation, and justice were made manifest in landscapes of nearly unbearable beauty.

Laden with time yet bright with the promise of every new sunrise, Hillerman's vistas are ideal frames for his 18 mystery novels starring Navajo detectives Sgt. Jim Chee and Lt. Joe Leaphorn. In those settings, old meets new; Anglo meets Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi; and justice triumphs.

Author-journalist Anne Hillerman (Hillerman's daughter) and Anne's husband, distinguished photographer Don Strel, have commemorated the master's spirit of place in Tony Hillerman's Landscape: On the Road With Chee and Leaphorn. With text by Anne and images by Don, the work has just been published by Hillerman's longtime house, HarperCollins. The introduction was written in 2007 by Hillerman himself.

Santa Feans can get an inside look at the work and its settings on Sunday, Nov. 8, when a multimedia presentation and book signing takes place at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Wes Studi, who has famously played Leaphorn on the big screen and for TV, reads excerpts from the novels. Santa Fe Community Foundation president Billie Blair is master of ceremonies, and proceeds benefit Santa Fe Public Library programs.
A similar program in Albuquerque on Nov. 5 raised money for the Hillerman-McGarrity scholarship program at The University of New Mexico.

The book has been in development for several years, and Hillerman and Strel were keeping her father apprised of progress and inviting suggestions along the way. They made many trips into Hillerman country, visited hundreds of places, made extensive notes, and took thousands of photographs of the places featured in the elder Hillerman's novels.

"We originally were working with Dad's longtime editor at HarperCollins," Hillerman said. "Last summer [2008] she retired, and we were assigned a new editor. She had so many projects to take on, they didn't mind extending the deadline for us for another summer. Then Dad passed away, and they said, 'You have one more month.' They wanted to get it into production so it could be published in a timely manner as a tribute." And that meant fast work as well as changing the book's size and concept.

"I was supposed to submit 250 photos, ultimately, for the book, and then they said, 'Let's get going," Strel said. "They only wanted 120. It was a tough cut! I have 10 unused photos for every one used." In terms of text and approach, Hillerman said that she had to "change my concept of having a chapter for each book, to combining the Hopi books in one chapter and the three books that are set off-reservation in another." They also had to exclude 1975's Finding Moon, set in Southeast Asia, and The Fly on the Wall (1971), set in the Midwest.

"We tried to set the trips up on a map, but it was too linear," Hillerman said. "So we figured we'd just get into the car —"

"— and keep driving," Strel interjected, "till we found the spots, sunsets, storms, rainbows. We kept going till we got them all. We had to balance the beautiful spots. Every chapter in every book had something that would be a stunning photo." Hillerman added, "We spent a lot of time during storm season hoping we'd be lucky. It's always good to get caught in the rain in the Southwest, but it's not good for pictures!"

Asked if they had any writer-photographer squabbles along the way, Hillerman and Strel looked at each other and burst out laughing. "Yes!" they said together. Strel added, "The too-many-words versus too-many-photographs discussion went back and forth a lot. I was hoping the editor would back me up, but then she'd say, 'Write a little more about this,' or, 'This is an interesting thing; what did your dad think of it?' They gave us a number of pages but not a number of words, so we had to work hard."

"The first chapter was the hardest for me," Hillerman said, referring to "A Daughter's Recollection." "As a journalist, you don't write about the personal self. You do research, you practice detachment, you call up experts to discuss facts." But, Strel pointed out, "Anne's editor on occasion would say, 'Get a little more personal; get away from the journalistic aspect. What did it mean to you? What did it feel like? Why was it important to your dad?'"

"I had finished the draft somewhere from six months to a year before he died, and then I had to go on and finish the story," Hillerman remembered. "It was hard, but it was important to do."

Her father made friends in every strata of society during his long life and full career, but his relationship with the Navajo was special. The Diné came to see him as one of them, and he was proud to be honored as a "special friend of the Navajo" in 1987. Where did he gain the ability to meet, see, talk with, and understand people who have such an ancient and proud tradition?

"I think some of his training as a journalist, some of his experience as a teacher — I think both of those threads worked together to make him a good observer," Hillerman said. "He was always respectful about not asking invasive questions. I think his childhood growing up, too — his going to school for his first eight years as one of the few boys and one of the few non-Indians at an Indian school in Oklahoma. There were Seminoles, Potawatomis, Cherokees there. Then he went to a Potawatomi high school. It taught him right away that Indians are people like everybody else."

"I think he could approach people as one of them, as a country kind of person," Strel said. "He often said there's a lot more difference between city folks and country folks than between a country boy and a Navajo."

One thing Hillerman and Strel regretfully dropped from Tony Hillerman's Landscape was a detailed map of Hillerman country, with references to books, characters, and incidents as well as locations. It had to be cut because of time, space, and cost constraints, but they would love to see it produced.

One area that will appear on any future map but that they didn't visit in person — and apparently the only location in the books they skipped — is Salt Trail Canyon in north-central Arizona. "It was mentioned several times in the books about the Hopi country," Strel said. We finally found someone who had hiked it in Flagstaff."

"We met these guys who were pretty macho," Hillerman said ruefully, "and they said, 'That was the gnarliest hike I ever did.'" And when Hillerman and Strel got there — "11 miles off a dirt road," Strel recalled — it turned out that part of the trail had to be traversed holding one's backpack to the chest and backing along a narrow trail with a 3,000-foot drop. They both decided discretion was better than a first-person visit.

But as Tony Hillerman often did — alone, with Marie, his wife of 60 years, or with all the family's six children — Hillerman and Strel will go back to these memorable spots time and again. "Not a lot has changed out there since Dad used to go," she said. "There are a few more double-wides, a few more power lines. There are so many references in Dad's books to that sky."

details
Tony Hillerman's Landscape: On the Road With Chee and Leaphorn , book signing and multimedia presentation by Anne Hillerman and Don Strel
4-6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 8
Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy St.
$20 in advance from the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St., 988-1234), $25 at the door; benefit for Santa Fe Public Library