(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, painter Barbara Rogers finds the beauty in destruction.

(Barbara) It can be any nonverbal tickle of excitement in me.

That makes me oh, I've got to check that out.

(Tom) A restaurant in Oak Creek is redefining Arizona cuisine.

You can actually taste the history and the state as a whole through our food and I think that's what we were pushing for for the longest time.

(Tom) Meet a mental health professional serving the Pascua Yaqui Nation.

(Felicia) There's just this really huge challenge of balancing between my indigenous life and who I am, and then using the Western approach.

(Tom) Snowbird Harold Wood gives us some tips on how to attract a mate and more.

(Harold) I took a bus ride.

I roller skate because roller skating is a good way to meet young ladies.

(Tom) And field notes from Flagstaff.

(David) The first time I visited Flagstaff, I had no idea I was surrounded by volcanoes.

(Guitar solo that will rock your sock off by XIXA) (Tom) Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We're coming to you today from the top of Mount Lemmon overlooking Summer Haven.

At 8200 feet elevation, This is where Tucsonans come to escape the summer heat.

And although some of that heats still with us, things are beginning to cool down.

And we can only hope that the fall temperatures are right around the corner.

In fact, this beautiful area is attracting Tucsonans year round.

There's a lot going on.

There's a new lodge, a new hotel, great places to eat, to hike and things to see and do and get some fresh air.

And in the winter, of course, come on up for a few hours and play in the snow.

We hope you get that chance.

Barbara Rogers paintings remind us of the critical importance of loving the earth.

She explores ideas of paradise, life, destruction, vulnerability and beauty on her canvases.

She's had over 42 solo shows around the world, and her work hangs in the permanent collections of many venerable museums.

And she calls Southern Arizona home.

[♪ Soft, pensive music ] (Barbara) When I was little, they gave me pencil and paper.

I would draw and be quiet.

The seed was planted.

(Marilyn) Barbara really has been a mentor to many people.

She has introduced people to art who weren't really collectors.

She is just really a force as a person and as an artist.

“So one of the things I hope will happen with this exhibition is that people will tell me what it is.

” [♪ Music continues ] (Barbara) I had to go to art school at the San Francisco Art Institute and then at UC Berkeley.

and then at UC Berkeley.

I graduated from Berkeley and won the Eisner Prize.

I was the only person that was invited to be adjunct instructor.

Then I got hired permanent faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then coming here to the University of Arizona as a full professor with tenure for really the first time in my life to live and have a studio and a garden under the same roof.

and have a studio and a garden under the same roof.

(Julie) I came to Tucson in 1995, originally to work at the University of Arizona.

That's where Barbara Rogers was teaching at the time.

When I first met her.

She was a force to be reckoned with.

This woman has more energy than three women.

What I learned over the years as I started to work with her as a curator was the evolution of her work.

as a curator was the evolution of her work.

(Barbara) When I was a grad student at Berkeley, this job offer came in from Temple Emanuel in San Francisco to teach in the Sunday school.

And they didn't say that you had to be Jewish.

The rabbi said, We have to have a talk.

And the talk was, We don't believe in heaven.

We don't believe in hell.

We believe what you create on Earth is heaven or hell.

And he said, Well, you know, you might consider if you painted about paradise, what would it look like?

I owe that rabbi, my enlightenment, My painting changed, my release from worry about Heaven or Hell.

I could design my own life and how could I design it to have it be I design it to have it be my idea of heaven?

(Julie) Her work, of course, had a photorealism focus when she was in the Bay Area.

Later, she experienced a hurricane when she was doing research and work in Hawaii.

Her work changed.

The subject that I chose to paint about was romantic kinds of gardens.

I decided I needed more exotic forms.

I flew to Hawaii in Thanksgiving of 82.

Was only there a few hours, Wind started, it ended up being a sustained wind of 90 miles an hour.

Moving in front of me were fragments of orchids and gorgeous plants.

I didn't know that I'd make it out alive.

When I came back, I just couldn't paint those romantic scenes that included beautiful people.

I spent maybe four years experimenting, not knowing what the work was going to be about.

What everybody sees today evolved from what really got to me, which was seeing everything in fragments.

And basically what remains.

(Julie) It went from this rather fun look at foliage, love, empowerment of women in a very photo realist way to looking at the profound destruction and beauty from destruction.

[♪ Techno pop music ♪] (Barbara) I can start a painting one year and it doesn't leave the studio for ten years.

I have this storage area in the studio.

It's basically a rest home or paintings that are waiting for me to get smart enough to be able to finish.

I don't make a plan.

I do an underpainting.

Often that underpainting is cadmium yellow.

I like yellow.

It's so Tucson.

It's just sunshine.

It's just sunshine.

(Barbara) It can be any non-verbal (Barbara) It can be any non-verbal tickle of excitement in me, that makes me.

Oh, I've got to kind of check that out.

It either finishes easily or it's like giving birth to an elephant.

or it's like giving birth to an elephant.

When you are finished with a painting, you've used everything that you can think of to make this your idea of beautiful.

to make this your idea of beautiful.

(Marilyn) Being in her garden number seven was one of the first pieces of art that we bought in Tucson.

It was the first time she had inserted glass into her work.

She has a little flower inside this glass box.

When you look at the painting closely, the colors are layered and layered and layered.

and layered and layered.

This one is called Cambridge.

Barbara was thinking in terms of Cambridge, Ohio, which is where she grew up.

She named this piece in honor of the memory of her mother.

And this one.

I love the spray of flowers.

Just the earth itself has become my kind of religion has become my kind of religion And the work That's at Tohono Chul exhibition, is about shrines to loving the earth and doing whatever you can to help.

So the only thing you can do is to be kind.

It is really about understanding your smallness.

In the scheme of things.

Everything's temporary.

We're all just passing through this.

Do as little damage as possible on the trip.

[♪ Soft music slowly fades ♪] (Tom) Chefs Brett Vibber and Jaren Bates have been cooking together for nearly two decades in some of the finest restaurants in Arizona.

Now the two are head chefs at the Table at Junipine Lodge, which is a restaurant in Oak Creek near Sedona.

Through daily foraging for wild ingredients and incorporating indigenous foods, methods and farmers, they are attempting to redefine Arizona cuisine.

Everything around the restaurant, maybe 90% is edible, it's cultivated or it's wild and been encouraged.

So we're going to find garlic and mint and lavender, wild chives, sage as we're waiting for the grapes to come in.

We can still utilize all the leaves in it.

Make up our own Arizona version of a dolma with wild rice or mushrooms, depending on what we find.

The concept of the restaurant is Arizona cuisine, it's to define a regional kind of cuisine.

It's not Tex-Mex.

It's not Southwestern food.

Brett always had the idea of showcasing Arizona as a whole.

I had already kind of like told him my ideas for the future of showcasing not just my tribe, being Navajo, being Diné I wanted to showcase different foods from tribes all across America.

We ended up meshing the two together, so now we celebrate both Arizona's bounty that we find out in the wild, and then also showcasing Native American Indigenous food, whether it's through the culture or preservation techniques or through working with local indigenous farmers and how they grow things.

This one is called Lemonade Berry or three leaf sumac, what I know it as growing up is called Chiilchin You get a little bit of berry flavor out of it, but you get more so like the brightness and tartness of what you would get out of like a lemon.

We have picked a bunch of ocotillo flowers down in the desert.

So you have a like an Arizona version of an Arnold Palmer.

But with all Indigenous ingredients.

We don't need to import truffles, we don't need bluefin tuna.

We don't need all of those things because everything actually is provided from here.

Here you can see like a crab apple tree, Im gonna walk over there in a second.

Even though it's a busy weekend.

Bringing the restaurant here and the concept here to this building really put us in the central location of Arizona.

You're really right on the edge of where forest hits the desert.

We can walk for 45 minutes to an hour and really get a lot of cool things that will sustain the day.

My name's Sarah Estrada, and I'm the gardener here.

Started off as a landscape management kind of role, but I like to take things to the next level.

So I've implemented sort of a sustainability program here using no pesticides.

Restoring natural ecosystem spaces amongst the property.

And recently we've built a vegetable garden space for the kitchen.

When Jaren and Brett came here, our energies really did match.

They're supporting local producers.

They're encouraging me to produce more here.

They really kind of changed the dynamic of this little corridor of the canyon.

I think they're inspiring others to maybe do the same.

I grew up on the rez in between Farmington and Shiprock, grew up on a 30 acre farm.

We herded cattle.

I always remember my mom and my grandparents always having a garden, and there was also fruit trees on our property.

I was always surrounded by food that we had grown eating with the seasons.

We spent so much time together that you're deeper than brothers.

Two head chefs in the same restaurants quite unheard of.

But somehow it's working.

We've learned how to grow together, how to have conflict together, how to have resolve together, and to continue on with the bigger picture in mind.

You can actually taste the history and the state as a whole, too, through our food.

And I think that's what we were pushing for for the longest time.

It's not about a medal.

It's not about a trophy.

It's not about me on TV.

It's about what are we leaving to the next generation of chefs?

Will we actually define an Arizona cuisine.

Does it start something?

(Tom) Now we bring you the third installment in our ongoing series, where we spend time with mental health professionals to learn more about them and their career.

Felicia Jaimez is a cognitive behavior therapist who melds indigenous cultural practices with Western approaches to therapy to best serve her Pascua Yaqui community.

(Felicia) When I was really young, I noticed that when peers would cry and get really emotional, I just had that innate nature to want to comfort them.

I just was very nurturing.

So I saw psychology and I looked more into it, and that was, ever since then, that was what I really wanted to do.

I always worked for Indigenous communities because I'm Indigenous.

I lived on the reservation my whole life.

There's just this really huge challenge of balancing between my indigenous life and who I am, and then using the Western approach.

How do I keep the authenticity of our roots in our culture?

That was something I kind of had to learn on my own.

With indigenous communities, there isn't too much structure.

If you have that connection, you're able to use that.

It feels like a dance with clients.

My main approach or modality is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a more of a trauma focused approach.

I like to connect the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors, and really allowing somebody to see what is a pattern.

And so when that's happening, it's like, well let's look from a different perspective.

Then they're empowered to be able to make that change.

The pandemic really forced us to learn telehealth, something that we never really heard of before.

On top of that, I had clients who got really emotional because we couldn't be together.

And when we came back, how do we reconnect and relearning all of that?

Something that I'm seeing in the community that is similar to out there is this a stagnant behavior that we're seeing with our youth.

When they had to go back into the schools, we saw a high intensity of anger, a lack of motivation, just low, flat affect of not just just not wanting to be there.

And across the board, Ive even seen that with adults.

Sometimes you just see people can't handle social situations anymore because they're they haven't been used to in such a long time.

And so I'm seeing that here on the reservation a lot is how do we get out of this funk?

Because across the board, there's still a lot of people who are feeling a lot of depression or setbacks and just getting up and going to get their services.

The expectation of 8 to 5 isn't always possible for families.

Their life starts after work or school.

And while we're shutting down, they're not getting the help that they need.

And then asking a therapist to stay very long is also emotional fatigue as well and exhausting.

I think my profession is always going to be like a mirror.

I have to be aware of myself.

I have to be aware of my triggers.

I have to constantly be checking myself because that's what I'm kind of supporting them in.

It's shaped how I am compassionate, how I think what love is and healing is.

So how to be human with someone else in their journey.

I'm noticing a lot of people who are wanting to be more aware and heal on the reservation, especially historical trauma.

It's impactful.

It's hard, though.

It's not, it's not always fun and easy.

I'm fortunate and grateful enough that if you want a native therapist, you got one.

I'm here.

We don't always have that option as well.

There's not a lot of people of color of different backgrounds who are therapists, but they're coming.

(Tom) From the desert floor to the Sky Islands where we are now, Arizona is one of the most biodiverse states in the nation.

It's also a migratory route for all kinds of birds.

And as temperatures cool, we'll see a different bird, snowbirds.

These are people who come to spend their winter months in Southern Arizona, each one with their own unique story.

We recently sat down with one of them, Harold Wood, and we heard some of the highlights from his long, impressive life.

[Music] (Narrator) Originally from Canada, Harold Wood is now a Tucson snowbird.

(Harold) When I was a little boy, I would buy little pots and had a cactus and it cost about 15 cents.

And I had several at home and I had a thing about cactuses.

This is my winter home.

Tucson has got special memories for me.

I had business meetings here 40 years ago.

[dog barks] I was born in Gilbert Plains, Manitoba, a farm community on February 16th, 1919.

(Narrator) Yes, you heard correctly.

That makes Harold 103 years old.

(Harold) I graduated from high school in 1935.

(Narrator) This was the height of the Depression era, and with very few jobs to be found, Harold competed for a job as a junior chemical technician and got it.

(Harold) What ended my job as a chemist was I was conscripted into the Army and I hated it so much, I decided to join the Air Force.

(Narrator) The year was 1940 and Harold was sent to England as part of the Royal Canadian Air Force to attend radar school for six weeks.

He installed identification friend or foe transponder stations along the east and south coast of England.

He witnessed the end of the Battle of Britain and the bombings of London during the Blitz.

After the war ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb, he attended the University of Toronto and earned a degree in engineering physics before moving to New York.

(Harold) I took a bus, I took my roller skates because roller skating is a good way to meet young ladies.

I landed at Grand Central Station and they have kiosks with ladies giving advice.

So I headed for a kiosk and she looked at me, she said, "Where are you from?"

I said, "Toronto."

She said, "Son, the best advice I can give you is to get back on the bus.

New York will eat you."

(Narrator) On the contrary, in fact, Harold had a blast.

(Harold) I found a room for $7 a night, opposite Central Park.

It was a stroke of luck.

I made full use of my time.

I attended the opera, I went to the stock exchange and I went to Central Park and Dinah Shore was the featured singer.

She sang "Oklahoma" it was one of the highlights of my life.

(Narrator) After his time in New York, Harold went on to earn a bachelors degree in science and engineering physics and then began his career at Southern California Edison where he moved up the ladder, becoming a consultant engineer for the long range planning department.

It's there where he met Louise who would become his wife and when he retired in 1983, they both went on to have many more adventures.

(Harold) After we married, we had two sets of twins and that was very unusual.

Three boys and one girl.

After our kids left the nest, we bought a motorhome and traveled the entire United States.

We kept active all the time.

(Narrator) Sadly, Louise passed away in December of 2016.

Harold misses her very much.

He still finds plenty to occupy his time.

In Tucson, he goes for daily walks, enjoys dinner with friends and family, operates a ham radio, and frequents the Tucson Public Library.

Often.

(Harold) The Tucson Public Library is a gold mine.

And I make big use of that.

[music] Well, I have four lovely children, and I have six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

I really feel that I have fallen into everything good that I have.

[music] (Tom) In this latest installment of our Field Notes series, we head up to Flagstaff.

From the highest point in Arizona to deep underground, Arizona Illustrated producer David Fenster visits landscapes transformed by volcanoes.

The first time I visited Flagstaff, I had no idea I was surrounded by volcanoes.

This mountain is known as the San Francisco Peaks, but it is also known by different names in many different languages.

It is what remains of a volcano and contains the highest summit in Arizona but it is thought to have been much larger before its last major eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Nearby is Sunset Crater National Monument, home to a much more recent eruption.

This volcano erupted around a thousand years ago.

Apache Plume grows out of the volcanic soil and it's difficult not to see the seed heads as hundreds of tiny eruptions.

Twenty miles or so west of Sunset Crater there's a Ponderosa pine forest with a giant hole in the ground.

This is the mouth of Lava River Cave.

This mile long lava tube was formed around 700,000 years ago.

The floor ceiling and walls of the tube cooled and hardened before the middle, where a river of lava continued to flow.

It's pitch black in here.

When I would turn off my headlamp, I couldn't tell any difference when my eyes were open or closed.

And even though it was over 80 degrees outside, in here, it was cold enough for ice to form.

The volcanoes around Flagstaff are like so many things in the natural world.

They were invisible to me until I noticed them.

And then they were everywhere.

(Tom) Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

(Adam) The process is everything.

Like, that's where the joy is.

You kind of get out of yourself, out of your mind, and time slows down and you're just really are completely focused on what you're doing.

And I think that's really the most exciting thing about creating art.

And then hopefully you have something beautiful at the end of the process.

(Tom) Thank you for joining us from up here on Mount Lemmon.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week with another all new episode.