TWENTY PER CENT GRADES, FORTY PER CENT VANILLA.
Complications arose when we reached Tucson. We planned to see endless
places but most of them, at an altitude of a half mile to a mile
and a half, could be reached only by roads still under ten feet of
snow. The district ridged by the White Mountains was completely cut
off, its unbridged rivers flooded, and its few highways covered by
snow-drifts thrice the height of a man. The same conditions prevailed
from Flagstaff to Winslow, and while Southern Arizona picked oranges
and basked in the sun, the Grand Canyon was in the grip of winter. It
became necessary, therefore, to find a ranch in which to hibernate for
a month, till Arizona highways became less like the trains in the time
table Beatrice Hereford describes, where “those that start don’t get
there, and those that get there don’t start.”
Tucson being apparently devoid of “dude” ranches, we decided to move on
to the center of the state until we found what we sought. The shorter
and more obvious route by the Old Spanish Trail, through Florence to
Chandler and Phoenix, we discarded for the “new state highway” to
Winkleman and Globe, thence over the Apache Trail to the Roosevelt
Dam, and Chandler. Globe maintains all contact with the world by the
Apache Trail: in the huge, irregular quadrilateral between Globe and
Phoenix, through which the Mescal and Pinal ranges stray, there is no
other road. The difficulty of travel in Arizona is not that the state
has no roads, as has been unjustly claimed, but that the roads make no
pretense of linking together the widely scattered towns.
We had one other reason for taking the Apache Trail besides its widely
advertised beauty. Everyone who mentioned it spoke in bated breath of
its difficulty, “the steepest and most dangerous road in Arizona,--you
two women surely can’t mean to go over it alone? It’s dangerous even
for a _man_.”
Whatever inward qualms these remarks evoked, they made us only more
curious to try our luck. We had already learned that taken a car-length
at a time, no road is as bad as it seems _in toto_, and few situations
develop which admit of no solution. As for doing without a man, we
found Providence always sent what we needed, in any crisis we could not
meet ourselves. In Tucson we found two old friends, Miss Susan and Miss
Martha, who shared our brash confidence in ourselves enough to consent
to go with us as far as Phoenix.
One can travel north from Phoenix to the Dam, then east to Globe, or
reverse the route. Most people consider the Trail more magnificent
going north and east, but circumstances forced us to take the opposite
course. A month later, we made the reverse journey, so that we had
opportunity to judge both for ourselves. It is hard to weigh splendor
against splendor. No matter which direction you take, you will be
constantly looking back to snatch the glory behind you, but on the
whole, if I could travel the Apache Trail but once, I should start from
Phoenix.
We left town in a raw, bleak wind which became bleaker as we circled
the small hills about Oracle. For fifteen miles we had fine macadam,
though occasionally torn with deep chuck-holes. Then we left the made
road, and meandered up and down bumpy paths through forests of the
finest, most varied cacti we had seen anywhere. Steep slopes were
covered with the giant sahuara, standing bolt upright and pointing a
stiff arm to heaven, like an uncouth evangelist. Demon cholla forests
with their blurred silver gray haze seemed not to belong to this
definite earth, but to some vague, dead moon. Among them wavered the
long listless fingers of the ocotilla, and the many-eared prickly pear
clambered over the sands like some strange sea plant. In this world of
unreal beauty, tawny dunes replaced green slopes, and such verdure as
appeared was pale yet brilliant, as if lighted by electricity.
Climbing steadily, we passed Winkleman, a little, very German
settlement. Nobody had suggested we should find the scenery anything
out of the ordinary, though many had said the road was good,--an
outright and prodigious mis-statement of fact. One temperate person
had mentioned it might be “well worth our while.” If that same lady
were to meet Christ she would probably describe him as “a very nice
man.” The scenery was grand; it progressed from grand to majestic, and
from majestic to tremendous. The raw wind, with its ensuing flurry
of cold rain had died down, and the sun was out. Threading westward
into one mountain pass after another, we soon were making our cautious
way along a narrow shelf which constantly wound higher and higher
above the rushing, muddy Gila River. We had come suddenly upon
magnificence minus macadam where we had been led to expect macadam
minus magnificence.
Suddenly looking down, I decided the scenery was becoming altogether
too grand. Far below, the Gila was a tiny thread, getting tinier every
moment. On the very edge of the fast deepening canyon hung the road,
with neither fence nor wall between us and eternity, _via_ the Gila
River. As we climbed, the road narrowed till for a dozen miles no car
could have passed us. Regularly it twisted in such hairpin curves that
our front tires nearly pinched our back tires as we made the turn.
Instead of being graded level, the road rose or fell so steeply in
rounding corners that the car’s hood completely concealed which way the
road twisted. If we went left while the road turned right we should
collide with a cliff; if the road turned left and we right, we should
be plunged through space, so it behooved us to get our bearings quickly.
Once, fortunately at a wide place, we met a team of four mules.
Ignorant of the Arizona law requiring motorists to give animals the
inside of the road, we drew up close to the cliff, while the faithful
mules went half over the crumbly edge, but kept the wagon safely on the
trails. I began to notice a strange vacuum where once had been the pit
of my stomach. Ordinarily I cannot step over a manhole without my knees
crumpling to paper, and that thread of a stream a mile, or probably
only about 500 feet below, gave me an acute attack of “horizontal
fever.”
At that giddy moment, on the very highest spot, I essayed to turn
a sharp corner down grade, where a ledge threw us well over to the
edge of the curve, and I found my foot brake would not hold. I tried
the emergency. It, too, had given way from the constant strain put
on it. We were already in “first,” but even so, at that grade our
heavy car would coast fifteen or twenty miles an hour. The road ahead
switch-backed down, down, down. I calculated we could make two turns
safely and that the third would send us spinning over the chasm. I
felt my face undergo what novelists call “blanching.” I stiffened, and
prepared myself--no time to prepare the others--for the wildest and
probably the last drive of my life. And then a weak voice from behind
called: “Stop the car, please! I feel ill.”
Poor Miss Martha had been suffering all day from a sick headache, but
had gallantly admired the scenery between whiles. Now, oblivious to
scenery, with closed eyes and wan face, she waited for the dreadful
motion to cease. I wanted to, but was in no position to obey her
reasonable request. As a drowning man sees everything, to my sharp
mental vision of the car spinning over and over toward the final crash,
I added a picture of poor Miss Martha, bewildered all the way down, and
too ill to do anything but wonder _why_ the car would not stop. I lost
fear in a glow of altruistic sympathy. Then, deciding something had to
be done quickly, I ran the “old lady’s” nose into a ledge. The left
mudguard bent, but we stuck.
“The car’s going over!” exclaimed Miss Susan, much surprised.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, rather crossly. As well as two paper knees
permitted, I got out, and explained about the brakes. Relieved that
motion had ceased, Miss Martha sank back blissfully closing her eyes.
The others had not realized our danger.
It was evident the brakes must be tightened if we were to reach the
bottom of the canyon alive. Neither Toby nor I knew how to tighten
brakes, except that in the process one got under the car. Accordingly,
as diagnostician, I crawled beneath, and in a few moments found a
nut which looked as if it connected with the brake, while Toby, who
is exceedingly clever with tools, and something of a contortionist,
managed to tighten it. We tried the foot brakes. They held! Never had
we known a prouder moment. The incident gave us courage to meet new
contingencies, and never again did I experience just that sick feeling
of helplessness of a moment before. While Toby was still beneath the
wheels, a horn sounded, and another machine climbed around the bend.
Miss Susan flagged it with her sweater just in time. Two men emerged,
rather startled at the encounter, and asked how they were to pass. As
the ascending car, they had the right of way, and unlike the courteous
mules, intended to keep it. I could not blame them for not wanting
to back down hill,--neither did I. I could not tell whether my knees
would ever be “practical” again. The road was little more than ten feet
wide, and very crooked. I am usually good at backing, but sometimes
I become confused, and turn the wrong way,--and I hated to spoil the
view by backing into it. After some prospecting, we discovered a
little cubby-hole at the third turn down. At the rate of an inch a
minute we reached it. The chauffeur of the other car gave us valuable
advice,--never to use our foot brake on mountains, but instead to shut
off ignition, shift to first gear, and if we still descended too fast,
use the emergency brake at intervals. If the grade were so steep as to
offset all these precautions (as actually happened later, on several
occasions) the foot brake could be alternately pressed and released.
With all the Rockies before us, this information gave us back the
confidence which we had momentarily lost while we poised brakeless over
the Gila. Before reaching home, we were to travel over many such roads,
for we motored along the spine of the Rockies from Mexico to Alberta,
but never again did “horizontal fever” attack us virulently. This “fine
state highway” from Winkleman to Globe proved as dangerous a road as we
were to meet, and being the first encountered after the plains of Texas
and the deserts of New Mexico, it especially terrified us. A month
later we traversed it without a quiver.
Once more into the valley, and into Globe as the lights came out. Globe
runs up-hill at the base of a huge, dark mountain, full of gold and
copper and other precious metals. Cowboys and bright-robed Apaches
still walk the streets. We knew the town was busy and prosperous, but
as usual the Arizonans had forgotten to mention its scenic value, which
any hotel proprietor back home would have envied. The air, too, blows
bracing and keen, and the town’s whole atmosphere is brisk,--except
at the drug-store, where I dropped in to shop for a cake of soap, and
spent an hour,--a delicious, gossipy hour. The druggist evidently had
a weakness for high-priced soaps which he had indulged lavishly in the
seclusion of Globe, more for esthetic pleasure than hope of commercial
gain. We were kindred souls, for Toby and I had developed a mania
for soap-collecting, and at each new hotel pilfered soap with joy. We
discussed the relative merits of French and domestic soaps, of violet
and sandalwood, of scented and unscented. He told me the kind his wife
used, and as an indirect compliment I bought a cake of it.
And so, to bed, and to dream I had driven the car to the third floor of
our hotel, when the proprietor discovered it, and ordered me to take it
away. They refused us the elevator and I was forced to bump the great
leviathan downstairs, one step at a time. How I labored to keep the
unwieldy bulk from getting beyond control! I awoke to find both feet
pressed hard against the footboard of the bed.
At the garage next morning we heard more of the dangers of the Apache
Trail. Considering nobody had thought the dangers of the Winkleman road
important enough to mention, I became extremely dubious that we would
reach Roosevelt Dam alive. Still, the weather was charming, blue sky
and hot sun. I could not believe the Lord would let anyone die on such
a day.
As if the sun were not bright enough, fields of golden stubble made
the scene dance with light. A herd of Holsteins lent a dash of black
and white, and the far hills across the Gila were pink, mauve, orange,
lemon,--any preposterous color but those a normal hill should be.
We were following the trail over which Coronado and his army rode
when, incidentally to their search for gold, they made history in
1540. Over this same road, for thousands of years, native Americans,
Toltecs, cliff-dwellers, Apaches, friars, and forty-niners, have
traveled to satisfy blood-lust and gold-lust, religion, fanaticism, and
empire building. Until the Roosevelt Dam let in a flood of tourists,
few traveled it except on grim business. The romance of a thousand
years of tense emotions experienced by resolute men haunts that lovely
sun-flooded valley.
Mormons still follow the Trail, recognizable by their long, greasy
beards. One such passed us, driving an ancient Ford,--the very one,
I should say, in which Brigham Young came to Utah. It showed faded
remnants of three coats of paint, white, blue and black. On the
radiator rested a hen coop containing several placid biddies. We
tacitly ignored a murmur from Toby about “an eggs-hilarating drive.”
A dozen children, more or less, sat beside the Mormon. Attached to
the Ford was a wagon, drawn by six burros, with a burro colt trotting
beside, and atop the wagon, under a canvas roof, a few more women and
children. We were too appalled to notice whether the Ford pulled the
burros, or the burros pushed the Ford. Following the prairie schooner
came a rickety wagon, piled with chairs, stoves and other domestic
articles. Last of all came a house. It was, to be sure, a small house,
but considering that the car was only working on two cylinders, one
could not reasonably expect more.
Later we passed a man on horseback, wearing two sombreros, one atop
the other, with a certain jaunty defiance. Whether he did it from
ostentation, for warmth, to save space, to keep out moths, or was
just moving, we could not guess. Or he may have been a half-crazy
prospector, whose type we began to recognize,--old, vague-eyed men with
strange beards, speech curiously halting, from long disuse, and slow,
timid manners,--riding a burro or rack-of-bones horse up a side trail.
In every section of the Rockies one meets these ancient, unwashed
optimists, searching in unlikely crannies, more from life-long habit
than in the hope of striking it rich. So long have they lived remote
from human beings, that if a gold mine suddenly yielded them the long
sought fortune and compelled them to return to the world, they would
die of homesickness.
When Coronado marched over the Apache Trail, he saw far above him a
walled town built in the recessed cliffs, whose protective coloring
made it nearly invisible to the casual passerby. The Spaniard, seeking
the Seven Cities of Cibola, imagined he had discovered one of their
strongholds, but when he rushed up the steep path, more breathless,
doubtless in his heavy armor than we four centuries later in our
khaki suits, he found the swallow’s nest deserted, and the birds
flown,--where and for what reason is the great mystery of the Southwest.
So cunningly hidden are these sky parlors that we drove by them
without seeing them, and had to inquire their whereabouts at the
local postoffice. At Monte Cristo they show you the very window from
which the Count did not leap; at Salem any citizen will proudly stop
work to point out the hill where the witches were not burned, but the
postmistress in a Georgette waist knew of the cliff-dwellings only as
a fad of crazy tourists, although she could have walked to them in the
time she took to remove her chewing gum before answering us. Out West
they have not learned the art of making their ancestors earn an honest
penny.
We lunched at the Tonto ruins, and that lunch marks the beginning of
Toby’s mania for hoarding bits of broken pottery, charred sticks and
other relics of the past. She learned to distinguish between the red
and black of the middle ages, the black and white of an earlier era,
and the plain thumb-nail of remotest antiquity. She never could resist
adding just one more bit of painted clay or obsidian to her knobby
collection, and the blue bandana in which she tied them grew steadily
larger, until it overflowed into the pockets of the car, and the food
box, and after awhile she clinked as she walked, and said “Ouch” when
she sat down absent-mindedly.
Leaving the ruins and following the shelf high above the blue lake,
we came quite unexpectedly on the dam, not five miles further. It was
a surprise to reach our first night’s stop with half the dread Trail
behind us, and no thrilling escapes from destruction. We learned at
the Inn that the worst sixteen miles lay ahead on the road to Fish
Creek. Indeed, the Apache Trail, although narrow, full of turns and
fairly precipitous in places, proved a far simpler matter than the
unadvertised “highway” out of Winkleman, while the scenery itself was
hardly lovelier.
Rounding the shoulder of a massive cliff, we swung sharply down hill to
a narrow bridge of masonry, the arm holding back the great artificial
body of water. In front was the dam, one of the largest in the world,
and in difficulty of construction, one of the most interesting to
engineers. Yet the flood twice Niagara’s height pouring over it, is
dwarfed to a mere trickle by the majesty of the cliffs above. To get
its full impressiveness you must descend to the bottom of the masonry
and look up at the volume pouring over the curved wall, which has
made a quarter of a million acres of desert the most fruitful section
of this continent. You observe a man walking along the steps which
line the concave wall of the dam in close formation, and notice that
his shoulder is on a level with the step above. Gradually, isolated
from its dwarfing surroundings, the handiwork of Man impresses you.
There has been talk of placing near the dam a memorial to Roosevelt,
but no fitting memorial could be placed there which would not seem of
pigmy significance. The best and most appropriate memorial to the man
of deeds is the dam itself, and the fertile and prosperous Salt River
Valley below it.
At the Inn built on the borders of the lake we asked for rooms. The
innkeeper, a plump and rubicund Irishman, seemed flustered. His eyes
swam, and he looked through us and beyond us with a fixed glare. His
breath came short and labored--very fragrant.
“Don’t hurry me, lady,” he replied pettishly to Miss Susan, “can’t you
see the crowds waiting for rooms? They ain’t trying to get in ahead of
their turn. _They’re_ behaving themselves. _They_ aint trying to nag
the life out of me asking for this and that. _They_ aint pushin’ and
shovin’. Now, lady,” fixing a stern eye upon her, and speaking like a
man whose patience would outlast any strain, “I’m at my wit’s end with
all these people. Can’t you be reasonable and wait till I git ’round to
you?”
As we were the only people in sight, we were forced to conclude he was
seeing us in generous quantities. Possibly, too, we were not standing
still, but were whirling around in an irritating way. So we waited
patiently for an hour or so, while John made frequent trips to the
back of the house. As the afternoon shortened, and John’s temper with
it, the crowd steadily increased.
“Are our rooms ready yet?” I finally asked. His eye wandered past me
and lighted upon Miss Susan. He fixed upon her, as a person who had
given him much trouble a long time ago.
“What! You here again?” He had a fine exclamatory style. “Lady, you’re
giving me more trouble than all the rest of ’em put together. Here,
Ed,” he called a clerk, with great magnanimity, “take ’em. Give ’em a
room. Give ’em the hotel. Give ’em _anything_ they want. Only get ’em
out of my way.”
They led us to our tents, where the beds were still unmade. The clerk
left, promising to get John to send a chambermaid. We felt less hopeful
than he, for as we were banished from his presence we observed him
feeling his way, a cautious mile or so at a time, to the far reaches of
the kitchen. We made one or two trips to the hotel to induce somebody
to make up our beds, keeping Miss Susan well in the background, for the
sight of her seemed more than John could bear. But he pounced on her.
“Have you any idea of the troubles of a hotel keeper?” His forbearance
by now had become sublime. “_Any_ idea? No, lady, I can see you
haven’t. If you had you’d be a little patient.”
Our beds were made, but an hour later we were still without towels and
water, while one tent had no lights. The rest of us were thoroughly
cowed by this time, but opposition had stiffened little Miss Susan to
the point where she would risk being hurled over the dam before she
would be brow-beaten. We timidly followed, giving her our physical if
not our moral support, while she stated our case, which she did quite
simply.
“We’ve been here some hours, and we still have no towels or electric
lights.”
“_Be_ reasonable. I ask you, lady, one thing, if possible.” Heavy
sarcasm. “_Be_ reasonable. I’ve got my troubles, same as you have. All
the world has its troubles. Now why can’t you stand yours with a little
patience?”
“I’m sorry for your troubles,” said Miss Susan, sympathetically. “But
we are paying for towels and electric lights. Why shouldn’t you give
them to us?”
At this John became violent.
“Lady! Go!” He pointed dramatically to the dam, and the road out into
the wilderness beyond. “Go! I don’t want you! And never come back
again. Lady, if everyone was like you, I’d go crazy. You’ve been asking
for something ever since you struck the place. Why, since you’ve come
here, the help has all come to me and give notice. Now, get out!”
For fear he might carry out the eviction on the spot, and send us
on sixteen miles of precipitous darkness, we again retreated. After
supper, facing the terrifying prospect of feeling her way to bed,
lightless, and with no lock on the door to keep out inebriated
landlords or mountain lions, Miss Susan resolved on action. She tiptoed
to the dining room, and was in the act of unscrewing a bulb from its
socket when John appeared from the vicinity of the kitchen. At sight of
his arch enemy thus outraging his hospitality, anger and grief swelled
within him. Probably the only thing that kept Miss Susan, dauntless
but scared, from being completely annihilated was that he could not
decide which one of her to begin on first.
“Lady!” he exclaimed, sorrowfully, as if he could not believe his
eyes,--and possibly he could not--“Lady! Off my own dining-room table!”
He reached wobbly but sublime heights of forbearance, his voice filled
with reproachful irony.
“Lady, I got one thing to ask you. _Only_ one. If you got to take my
electric lights,--if you’ve sunk as low as that, lady,--all I ask is,
_don’t_ take ’em off my dining-room table. I’ve seen all sorts of
people here in my day,--all sorts, but none of them would steal the
lights off my dining-room table.”
“I have never been so insulted in all my life,” exclaimed Miss Susan.
“Lady,” said John, swaying as by an invisible breeze, “I am _trying_ to
be as nice as I know how.”
A few scared employes later sought our tents, to apologize for John.
“John is never like this,” said one succinctly, “except when he’s this
way.”
“I thought Arizona was a prohibition state,” I said, remembering the
sheriff of Pima County, “where does he get it?”
Their eyes wandered to the horizon, and remained fixed there.
“Vanilla extract,” said one.
The scientifically minded Toby made an excursion to the Inn, and came
back with a satisfied sniff.
“It wasn’t vanilla,” she reported positively.
Upon the hotel porch, we could see John’s white jacketed fat figure
mincing up and down before a group of late-comers holding an imaginary
skirt in one hand. First he was Miss Susan, red-handed and infamous;
then he became himself, majestic yet forbearing.
“Took them right off my dining-room table,” we heard him say.