THE APACHE TRAIL AND TONTO VALLEY
Fearing the wrath of John, we made a guilty start in the freshness of
the next morning. But when we paid our bill and left, John was still
heavily under the influence of vanilla, and to Miss Susan’s relief, we
did not encounter him. Even in bright daylight with no traffic we were
an hour and a half driving the sixteen miles to Fish Creek. Salt River
Valley became a narrow chasm, dark and gloomy but for the glint of
emerald cottonwoods edging the stream at the bottom. A chaotic heap of
brilliant-hued peaks filled the valley.
The road was all that had been claimed for it. Had we not been
inoculated with horizontal-fever serum on the still more precarious
Winkleman trail, we might have fallen over the precipice in sheer
giddiness. The natural hazards of a road which skipped from top to
bottom of a series of thousand-foot rocks were increased by tipping
outward up-hill and around corners, so that frequently we lurched over
steep chasms at a far from reassuring angle, while our long wheel-base
increased complications. Boulders loosened from the crumbling cliffs
above, cluttered the road at the most dangerous turns. A glance
ahead at a dizzy drop of several thousand feet, then beyond to a
corresponding climb, and still further to dips and swoops exceeding the
most breath-taking devices of Coney Island, would make me weak-kneed.
But taking the road in a near-sighted way, after one quick glance over
switchbacks to make sure we should meet no traffic, and meeting each
problem in driving as it came abreast the steering wheel, I found the
Apache Trail as safe as a church.
We breakfasted under the highest peak of all, at the little Fish
Creek inn. Here the scenery resembled the landscapes of impressive
grandeur our grandmothers received for wedding presents, with crags and
waterfalls, jungles, mountains and valleys gloomily heaped together
in a three foot canvas. Our breakfast was a simple affair of stewed
fruit, oatmeal, fried ham, fried eggs, bacon, hot biscuits, coffee and
griddle cakes. Thus securely ballasted, our chance of being toppled
off a cliff’s edge was materially lessened. Now came the climax of the
drive,--the climb to Lookout Point.
Two thousand vertical feet of rock would seem a sufficient barrier to
turn humanity back into the fastnesses whence it came. But moccasined
feet had won to the summit, and motor cars with the power of many
cayuses now roar over the same trail, a tortuous mile upward to Lookout
Point. Whether this spot was named for its scenic beauty or for a
warning, matters not: the name fits. We looked our fill. I cannot
describe what we saw. Go and see it for yourself, even at the risk of
breaking a neck. The safety of one’s neck is always inversely as the
beauty of the view.
Miles on jagged miles of mountain tops lay below us. It was not long
before we became aware of the extreme unimportance of ourselves and our
tiny affairs. The mountains shouted to each other, “GOD IS!”
With a suggestion of Bunyan, we reached Superstition Mountain next, and
left it behind. Then the scenery, having had its last triumphant fling
of grandeur, settled down to levels of gray and brown. The world which
a moment since had stood on its head for joy tumbled flat, and became
content with mediocrity.
Five miles more, and the reason for Roosevelt Dam lay before our eyes.
Five miles of blistering country, so dry, as a guide said, that “when
you spit you can’t see where it lands”; a country burnt to a crisp
by withering sunshine so intense that shadows, sharp-edged as razor
blades, look vermilion purple. Only horned reptiles, poisonous and
thorny-backed, can exist here, and plants as ungracious, compelled
to hoard their modicum of moisture in iron-clad, spiny armament. And
then, a line of demarcation the width of a street, and the Water-God
has turned this colorless ache of heat to emerald green. Thwarted
cactus gives way to long rows of poplars and leopard-spotted eucalyptus
bordering blue canals. We saw a corner of Southern France where the
hills of Provençe edge the fertile plains of Avignon. We were in the
famous Salt River Valley, the boast of parched Arizona.
We followed these shady canals into Phoenix, bumping over dismally
paved roads, and making wide detours where some irrigator greedy for
water had flooded the street. After leaving our friends at the station,
we returned, sand blowing in our faces, to the San Marcos Hotel at
Chandler. Neither town nor hotel has geographic or commercial reasons
for existing, but both are examples of one man’s patient persistence in
a fight with stubborn Nature. Chandler is typical of the whole Valley.
Sand-besieged from the north, it sets a flame of verdure to meet the
devastating onslaught of the desert, blossoming defiantly till the air
is saturated with perfume. A contrast to the uncompromising shoe-box
fronts of most Western hotels, the San Marcos displayed low plaster
arcades hung with swinging plants inviting all the song birds of the
valley, cool corridors and carefully planned interiors, and gardens
framed by distant lilac mountains. Across from the hotel little shops
repeated its design of reposeful Mission. Only on the outskirts of this
little town did we meet with the crude unsophistication of the Rockies.
Yet before a week passed all this artificial fertility and prettiness
palled. It was not Arizona. Beyond the orange and olive groves of the
Valley, beyond the blooming roses and the song of the nightingale,
and all the daintiness of eastern standards inlaid upon the west we
felt the threat of the arid waste circling this little island of
fruitfulness. The dam, beneficent as it is, harnesses but does not
destroy the desert.
We found ourselves making excursions back to the untrammeled wastes of
sand beyond. Once we made a day’s excursion to Casa Grande, forty miles
away, over the Maricopa reservation.
No spot could look more untouched by human life than this wind-ribbed
and desolate palimpsest of sand on which layer on layer of history
has been scratched. The old Santa Fe Trail, from armored Spaniard to
Wells-Fargo days, ran directly over a corner of ruins since excavated.
Before 1700 Father Kino came upon this remote house of the Morning
Glow, as the Indians called it, and held mass in its empty rooms for
the tribes of the region. Coronado the ubiquitous may have seen it
since he speaks of a Great House built by Indians. Even then, the place
lay in ruins, and for how much further back? Nobody knows, and guesses
are a millennium apart. It is America’s oldest ruin.
We drove home across the desert through a world transfigured. The
afternoon sun in that pure air scattered prismatic stains over gray
mesquite and sage, and colored the translucent hills in gay pinks and
blues. Superstition Mountain loomed clear and cold on our left. But
what caught and held our eyes in this pastel land was a riot, a debauch
of clear orange-gold. Born overnight of a quick shower and a spring
sun, a million deep-centered California poppies spread a fabulous
mosaic over the dull earth, fairy gold in a fairy world, alive, ablaze.
A sunset was thrown in, and a crescent moon in a Pompadour sky helped
us thread our way home through arroyos and over blind trails.
Still in search of a “dood ranch,” we trailed all over the Salt River
Valley.
Some of the ranches where we sought board and lodging were surrounded
by orange groves. The hosts made a point of the privilege allowed
guests to pick and eat all the oranges they liked, but at the prices
charged we could have procured the same privilege in any hotel in New
York. Arizona prices do not, like the ostrich, hide their heads in the
sand. The completion of the dam made Salt River Valley realize that
the climate she had always possessed, crowned with fruit and flowers,
made her California’s rival. She began to cultivate oranges, pecans
and a professional enthusiasm for herself. One Native Son of Phoenix
of whom I was buying post-cards almost sold me a triangular corner of
his ranch, at $300 an acre. If it had been irrigated, he said he would
have had to charge more. The longer he talked the more eager I was to
secure this Paradise whose native milk and honey would keep me in
affluence and spare tires the rest of my days. Toby, however, who had
been strolling about during the exhortation and had not been splashed
by his golden shower of words, advised postponing purchase till we saw
the land. We drove out, and looked at it. One thing he had claimed was
true:--it _was_ triangular. It was frankly desert, but not even pretty
desert. Except for a deserted pigsty in the immediate foreground, there
was no view. We drove back to Phoenix.
Now Phoenix has paved streets and electric lights and a Chamber of
Commerce, a State House and a Governor. But somehow, Phoenix had no
charm for us. Phoenix may be Arizona, but it is Arizona denatured. All
Salt River Valley seemed denatured. It had taken its boom seriously,
and the arch crime of self-consciousness possessed it. For the first
time since the Aztecs one can find Arizonans trying to do what other
people do, rather than what they dam-please. And it set, oh, so heavily
on Phoenix and the Phoenicians and on the Easterners and Californians
who had come there to be as western as they dared. Finally we heard of
a little ranch away up in the country north of the dam, where we need
not dress for dinner, and there we hied us.
As we were leaving, we did find one person in the Valley who was
entirely free from the vice of self-consciousness. While I bought
gasoline at forty-five cents a gallon in Mesa to save having to pay
seventy-five in Payson, she spied me and came up eagerly to pass the
time of day.
“Awful hot,” she said cordially, fixing calm brown eyes on me.
“Indeed it is,” I said.
A worried expression passed over her sweetly creased old face.
“Terrible unseasonable. Hard to know what to do about your winter
flannels.”
“I changed mine today,” I replied.
Her brown eyes again became serene pools.
“Guess I will, too,” she answered.
In Boston it would have taken two generations to have reached the
subject of winter-flannels. We exchanged no further courtesies, except
smiles, and she left looking cooler already.
At a little ranch near Pine, Arizona, northwest of Roosevelt Dam, we
hoped to find lodging. Hoped, because a letter from Chandler took a
week or more to penetrate to its remoteness, and ours had not long
preceded us. Some discussion there had been as to whether the snow
would permit us to get through, but we decided to chance it, for spring
was daily working in our favor.
We had not gone far from town when the “old lady” without any
preliminary groans, stopped short. Cars have a way of doing that, but
ours till now had stopped only for external reasons, such as a tire, or
a too persuasive mud-hole. Now she stopped as though she needed a rest
and intended, willy-nilly, to take one. On such occasions I always open
the hood and peer inside, not because it enlightens me or starts the
car, but because Toby has not yet learned to regard it as a graceful
gesture, merely.
“What is it?” she asked, with the respect I liked to have her employ.
“Either the carburetor or the batteries,” I answered expertly.
A man drove by. Our silent motor, and ourselves in the despairing,
bewildered attitude common to all in like situation, were the only
signal needed, for this was Arizona. A moment before he had seemed in a
tearing hurry, but as he pulled up and offered help, he seemed to have
all the time in the calendar. He got down in the dust, wrestled with
the tools we intelligently handed him at proper intervals, explored the
batteries, and struggled to his feet.
“Batteries all right. Ignition.”
Four miles from town, with a dead motor! But before we had time to
exchange doleful glances, he asked briskly,
“Got a rope?”
We protested at his inconveniencing himself, for we had a fixed scruple
that having taken to the road regardless of consequences, we should
be willing to take our own medicine and abide by what arrived. But we
might have saved our breath. The Samaritans who passed by on our side
always answered comfortably as did this latest benefactor.
“What’m _I_ here for?”
Thus, with at least an hour’s loss, Number 10, or 11, or 12 of the
Nicest Men We Ever Met towed us to the nearest ranch, and there
telephoned for help. How welcome were the rattletrap ex-racer, and
blue-overalled mechanic with a smudge on his left cheek who came to a
dashing stop opposite our machine,--the same mechanic we had despised
yesterday for forgetting to fill our greasecups,--I was tempted to
paraphrase Goldsmith, or somebody,
“Garageman, in thine hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
But seen too oft, familiar with thy face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace!”
Smudge and all, we nearly embraced him when he took apart and put
together the whole ignition system, and came out even. Presently, at
the heart of that tightly closed metal box, on a tiny point hardly
larger than a needle he discovered a few grains of sand, memento of our
last sandstorm. Like the blood clot which strikes down robust men, it
had stopped a ton of mechanism from functioning. Philosophizing thus,
we idly watched the mechanic put together those intricate parts, little
realizing how useful the experience would prove later.
It was part of the odd luck which from beginning to end followed us
that our breakdown happened before we had re-entered the isolated
Apache Trail, with its breakneck grades. Still, our adventure delayed
us, until on entering the pass with its looming mountains and wild
gorges shutting us away from the world, darkness had closed in around
us,--the pitch-black of a wilderness night. Ahead lay the famed Fish
Creek road, fairly terrifying a week ago when we climbed it in broad
daylight. Now, in the dark, we were to descend this dizzy corkscrew
which dropped a thousand feet in a mile and a quarter. One lamp gave
only a feeble light, but the other threw a magnificent steady glare
which pierced the loneliness of that jumble of crags and forests far
below us. Would our brakes hold, and would our nerves obey us? Though
I felt cool, I admit to gripping the steering-wheel harder than good
driving required. From Toby’s direction came a funny noise.
“I just remembered Mother’s last words,” she explained.
We both laughed, though feebly, at the perennial joke.
Night has the effect of seeming to double distances. At the pinnacle of
this crag we paused a second. Below, we looked down vast depths upon
the points of lesser pinnacles, jumbled in the valley. There was no
bottom to the Pit directly under our headlights. Used to scenery with
a bottom to it, however remote, we had rather a prejudice in favor of
it. Beyond the radius of our lights we could pierce the blackness only
in vague outlines. Then we dropped down, taking each switchback with
caution. The nose of the car swung periodically out over the edge,
daring our brakes to go the inch more which meant a mile--downward.
One loose rock, of which there were so many, might send us spinning,
crashing among the treetops below. But why harrow the reader
unnecessarily? It must be evident we reached the bottom in safety. Yet
halfway down I was not so sure of the outcome, for a spark of light and
a little click, regular and ominous, came from the engine, just when
the grade pitched the car head-down. I took the turns with my heart in
my mouth. When we reached fairly level ground again we investigated.
It was only a loose wire, connecting with the cylinders, but a little
longer descend and we might have had a cross circuit,--and trouble.
It was good to have the valley come up to us. It was very good to see
little friendly lights twinkling in the vast circle of the hills. The
lights meant the Inn, and our day’s journey ended. The host welcomed
us, rather astonished that two Easterners should have risked that hill
at night. Had there been any other way we should have taken it, but no
grassy meadows offered where we could run the car in safety; only empty
chasms or perpendicular cliffs. Once on the road we had to go on. Then,
too, we preferred the hot and appetizing food of the Inn to our own
amateur camp cooking. Food is a powerful magnet.
Toward sunset next day we had passed beyond the lake of cobalt which
science had set in the golden circlet of the desert. We had left the
haunts of motors. As we rose from one hilly crest to the next higher,
we met only an occasional prospector, afoot, or an emigrant from Utah
with an old-time prairie schooner and a flock of burros. We were on
that further branch of the T-shaped trail named Apache, and later
we turned due north, and left it for mountain ranges of sweeping
loveliness. I cannot, at the risk of boring, write of mountains without
enthusiasm. These were on a colossal scale, as befits the Rockies, but
their grandeur did not repel. They were homey mountains. As we traveled
upward over the same kind of shelf-road with which the Winkleman trail
had made us so quickly familiar, we could look down upon range after
range, their blues and ochres melting together as far as eye could
reach.
In a cup of these hills, yet so high it was itself on a mountain,
the road forked sharply, each branch leading straight up a mountain,
and each seeming well-nigh unconquerable. Below lay a little mining
settlement of half a dozen cabins. At the juncture a sign-board
bore the name of the town toward which we were traveling. It was an
excellent sign-board, plainly marked. Its only draw-back was that it
pointed midway between the two roads, quite impartially. Toby was for
taking the right fork, I for the left. We argued hotly but finally Toby
won, and we took the right-hand road. Soon the mining camp dropped
several hundred feet below, and then became a dot. Ahead, the road
circled in a twenty-mile horse-shoe on the inside of a mountain range,
seeming to lead miles into the wilderness. I announced that Toby was
mistaken.
“The Mormon said to take the right turn,” said Toby, standing to her
guns.
“And we’ve taken half a dozen right turns since then,” I answered.
Now the problem facing us was: To turn a heavy car with a 122 inch
wheel-base around on a steep twelve-foot road with a mountain slope
on one side and on the other, sheer precipice. Often in nightmares of
late I had found myself compelled to drive down Bright Angel Trail at
the Grand Canyon, turn at Jacob’s Ladder, and ascend,--and the present
reality was hardly less terrifying. It turned out later that Toby was
right, as she always was when she should have been wrong,--and we could
have been spared our acrobatics. But we should have missed Mr. Kelly.
We made the turn. I never want to try it again. A few inches forward,
till a yawning gulf lay under our front wheels; then back till we hit a
steep bank, then forward, down grade to the edge; brakes, reverse, and
the fear of a plunge forward between release of brakes and the catch of
the reverse gear. We made half a dozen maneuvers before we again faced
the misleading sign-post. We passed the mining camp, drove up the left
fork, and bumped against a mountain which refused to be climbed.
“You see I was right,” said Toby smugly.
Before she had finished, a man with a refulgent smile came running up,
thrust into our hands a visiting card which he took from his wallet,
and shaking our hands enthusiastically said, “Glad to see ye, gurrls.
Kelly’s my name. What’s yourn? I’m boss of the mine here. Come on out,
and stay to supper. Stay all night. Stay a week,--the b’ys will be
tickled t’ death. You can have my room,--I’ll bunk wid the foreman. I’m
f’rm Providence, Rhode Island. Been in the Legislat’ur twenty years.
Been a horse jockey, an’ an inventor, an’ foreman of a factory. Makin’
my everlastin’ fortune in this mine just now, and no stock to sell.
Where ’ye from?”
“Boston, now! Well, say, ye’re a long ways fr’m home. Ye’ll have to
stay, neighbors like that. We got a big fat cook, two hundred and fifty
she weighs, and a crackerjack with the eats, and she says tell ye
she’ll never speak to you agin if ye don’t stay to supper.”
I looked wistfully at Toby. We had been warned we might not get through
to Pine, because of snow drifts in the passes, and it was only an hour
to dark, over twisting and unknown hill roads, but our recent trapeze
work had left us with an all-gone feeling at the belt. If we did not
eat now we might go hungry till morning. We decided not to renounce the
friendship of the two hundred and fifty pound crackerjack.
Kelly was one of Nature’s enthusiasts, but he had understated
concerning his cook, both in weight and proficiency. All of her three
hundred odd pounds billowing and undulating in the bounds of a starched
white apron waddled a testimonial to her skill. When Kelly delicately
left us under her chaperonage she overflowed with joy.
“Girls, you don’t know what a treat it is to see women-folks. I
been here all winter, the only woman in camp, and I could die with
homesickness.”
We said something appreciative of the beauty of the scenery. She
sniffed.
“This? Say, girls, you ought to see God’s country!”
“California?” we said intelligently.
“You bet!” answered the Native Daughter. “I s’pose you’re headed that
way?”
“No,--” weakly,--“we thought we’d see Arizona first.”
“Well, girls, it’s lucky you met _me_. Now I can lay out a trip for
you through California that will knock Arizona silly. There’s the
Yosemite,--and the Big Trees,--and the climate,--grandest scenery in
the world,--and San Francisco. After you reach Needles, you get good
roads all the way,--nothing like these. My! To think you’d ’a wasted
your time in Arizona if I hadn’t met you.”
“Yes, indeed. We can’t be grateful enough.”
The truth, with a little ingenuity, always serves. At this point we
were luckily called to supper, cooked early for our convenience. We
sat between Mr. Kelly, who leaped lightly from ships to sealing wax,
from cabbages to kings in a jovial torrent of brogue, and the engineer
of the mine. The latter was an Englishman well past middle age, with
a slight cockney accent, apparently self-educated but with the
thoroughness only his type achieves. When he spoke in a hesitating,
deprecating way, vastly unlike Mr. Kelly’s self-assured flood, he
exhibited a vast range of information, correct, unlike Mr. Kelly’s
again, to the last detail. His vague brown eyes, the iris blue-rimmed,
cleared and shone with faith when in a matter-of-course way he suddenly
spoke of the “spirit world,” which it seems was very near to him.
Fifty, painfully ugly, shabby middle-class, learned, and on telepathic
terms with ghosts, he piqued curiosity, as a man who seemed to have
much behind and little before him.
Kelly, on the other hand, was a man of futures, the longer and riskier
the better. He was waiting a necessary month or two for the mine to
yield him and its owners an immense fortune,--“and no stock to sell.”
Arizona was “the greatest country in the world,” and this pocket of the
hills the finest spot in Arizona. The “b’ys” who were expected to be
entranced at our advent were the finest in the United States.
“All good b’ys,” he proclaimed while, eyes downcast, they shoveled huge
knifefuls of beans to conceal their embarrassment, “good b’ys, and
refined,--not what you usually get in mining camps. You won’t hear them
speak a wor’rd before you not fit for ladies.”
He was right, there, for they opened not their mouths, except to fill
them, while the boldest mumbled a “pass the butter!” Yet, without
vanity, I think the company of “ladies” did give them a kind of
agonized pleasure. When we left they watched us out of sight.
“An’ d’ye know what stopped the war?” continued Kelly, taking a jump
we could not quite follow. “Ye thought Wilson did it, didn’t ye? He
did not. It was copper. Copper did it. And Kelly. I saw how things
was goin’--I wint to the Secret’ry of the Treasury, an’ I says to him,
‘McAdoo,’ I says, ‘Ye know as well as meself that this war has to stop.
An’ why? Copper,’ I says,----”
The inside story of the armistice we never did learn, for an
interruption came in the shape or shapelessness of the Native
Daughter bearing a four layer cake, which we hardly finished before
the gathering dark warned us to leave. We could barely withstand
the pressure to stay overnight, to stay a week, or a month, or
better,--“Come and settle. There’s land enough; ye can pick y’r spot,
and I’ll have the b’ys put up a bungalow f’r ye. They’ll be tickled to
death to do it.” As a sop to propriety he added, “Me old woman’s coming
out next week.”
“It’s good to see women,” said the little engineer as he quietly shook
hands. His vague eyes looked more haunted than ever. “It--it gets
lonesome here.”
“Give my love to California,” screamed the cook, taking our destination
for granted.
As we gave one last look at those hospitable miners, friendly as dogs
who have been locked in an empty house, and a last look over the
wonderful landscape rolling below us for miles, we too felt a pang at
leaving.
“We’ll stop in on our way back,” we promised.
Toward dark, we began to encounter snow drifts. The first were easily
passed, but as we climbed higher and the night thickened we found
each drift a little harder to conquer, though the mild air was hardly
tempered with frost.
Toby, a beginner at Galveston, could already manage almost any ordinary
road, but not until later did she become experienced enough for
sky-climbing. Consequently I took the canyons, and for two days there
had been little else. By ten, when one of the neat state sign-posts
told us we were but five miles from the Goodfellow Ranch, our
destination, I felt nearly exhausted, nervously and physically. But the
home stretch proved worst of all. It led across a prairie to a descent
encouragingly marked “Private road. Dangerous. Take at your own risk.”
Well, to reach our bed that night we had to take it. In a moment we
were nose-diving down another canyon, which in daylight was only
moderately terrifying, but at night seemed bottomless. It was Fish
Creek over again, with two irritating additions,--one, a slimy,
skiddy adobe road full of holes and strewn with boulders; and two,
a ridiculous baby jack-rabbit, who, frightened by our headlights,
leaped just ahead of us in the ruts. He would neither hurry nor remove
himself. At times his life seemed directly pitted against ours, yet we
could not bring ourselves to run over his soft little body. It was the
last straw. When the sickening distance down the canyon lessened, and
we saw the cheery lights of the ranch through the fir trees, I nearly
cried with relief.
“Will you come in,--you must be tired,” said a pretty Scotch voice. A
little woman held a lantern. “Two ladies! We saw your lights, but never
dreamed you’d be coming down in the dark. There’s many that think the
road none too safe in the day.”
Her remark was balm to my chagrin at having let a jack-rabbit unnerve
me. All our lives, it seemed, had been spent driving down the edge of
hair-raising precipices in the dark; to be free of them at last, to
enter a warm, lighted, snug cottage, where a friendly Papago servant
led us to the cleanest, most luxurious of beds,--this was heaven.
Natural Bridge can be reached two ways from the world,--south from
Flagstaff ninety miles, or by the Apache Trail from Globe or Tucson.
The northern road lay under twenty feet of snow, and this while a huge
apricot tree,--the oldest in the state,--bloomed pink, and the alfalfa
floor of the little canyon was varnished with emerald. Next morning we
looked on this budding and blossoming world, hedged in with red cliffs
and lapis lazuli hills. A few neat cottages and farm buildings nestled
together,--but where was the bridge, large enough we had been told, to
hide three or four of the Virginian variety under its arch?
They laughed at our question. It is the standing joke at the Goodfellow
ranch. They pointed to the five acre field of level alfalfa, edged with
a prosperous vineyard. “You are on the bridge.”
Bewildered, we walked for five minutes to the edge of the little level
ranch surrounded by high pinon-covered walls on all sides. Still no
bridge. At our feet they showed us a small hole in the ground, a foot
deep. Looking through it we saw a steep chasm with a tangle of cactus
and trees, and at the very bottom a clear, swift stream.
Unknown years ago some strange explosion had taken place through this
tiny vent, creating the powerful arch beneath, which at this point
seemed perilously thin, yet supported houses, cattle and men. At a
crisis the accidents of Nature, like those of men, crystallize, and
thereafter become unalterable. This tiny peep-hole, whim of a casual
meeting of gases, would survive a thousand of our descendants. This
was only one of a hundred spectacles Arizona was staging at the time.
Think what a fuss the San Franciscans made of their little eruption in
1906,--and yet Arizona managed an exposition of fireworks back in the
dark ages compared to which San Francisco’s was like a wet firecracker.
But Arizona showed poor business judgment in letting all her Grand
Canyons, natural bridges and volcanoes erupt before the invention of
jitneys, railroads, motion pictures and press agents. Naturally her
geologic display attracted no attention, and today you can come upon
freaks of nature casually anywhere in the state, of which nobody ever
heard.
Even Natural Bridge, the widest of its kind in the world, is unknown to
most Arizonans; many have only vaguely heard of it or confuse it with
the Rainbow Bridge in Utah. Yet it is the strangest jumble of geologic
freaks in any equal area, outside of Yellowstone.
Standing under the arch, so broad and irregularly shaped that at no
point can it be photographed to show adequately that it is a bridge,
you are really on the ground floor of a four-story apartment of
Nature’s building. The first floor is laid with a tumbling brown
stream, flecked with white, and tiled with immense porphyry colored
boulders of fantastic shapes. Exotic shrubs of tangly cactus, huge
spotted eucalyptus, and firs, and myriads of dainty flowers dress the
vestibule. Pools and stone tubs sculptured by Father Time invite,--oh,
how they invite to bathe! The floor is speckled and flecked with
sunlight which filters under the arch. Great rocks seem to float on the
stream, mysteriously lighted, like Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. For
half a mile you push through stubborn mesquite, wade and leap from rock
to stream, finding a picture at every turn.
[Illustration: GREAT ROCKS SEEM TO FLOAT ON THE STREAM, MYSTERIOUSLY
LIGHTED, LIKE BOCKLIN’S ISLE OF THE DEAD.]
Then climbing sixty or more perpendicular feet on an amateur ladder,
whose stoutness is its only reassuring feature, built by the discoverer
of the Bridge, Scotch old Dave Goodfellow, you reach the second floor,
devoted to one room apartments hollowed by drippings of age-old
streams, and slippery with crusted lime. The cliff is honeycombed with
caves in which stalactite and stalagmite meet, resembling twisted
cedar trunks. Wolves and coyotes have made their homes here, and even
somnolent grizzlies; in the smaller niches on warm spring days one has
to take care that one’s fingers do not grasp a twining mass of sluggish
rattlesnake. In one of these caves the human rattlesnake, Geronimo,
hid for a month in the Apache revolt of the nineties, while the United
States scouts scoured Arizona to find him, and a story and a half
above, the canny Goodfellow hid in his little one-room cabin, each
fearing discovery by the other.
Above this floor is a mezzanine with another nest of caverns. Three
sets of ladders riveted to a vertical shelf of rock lead you to the
most interesting cave of them all, where the fairy tale comes true of
the wizard who had to climb a mountain of glass. Toby knows no fear of
aerial heights, so I had to pretend not to. A grandnephew of the elder
Goodfellow led us where I hope never to return. We entered through
a hole just wide enough to admit our bodies, and barely high enough
to stand upright in. Then up a grade of 40 per cent over a limestone
surface glassy from age-long accumulations of dripping chemicals, we
wriggled flat on our backs, with feet braced against the ceiling
to prevent our slipping out of the cave. Only a bat could have felt
completely nonchalant under such circumstances. Harry Goodfellow
worked himself along swiftly and easily, with an extraordinary hitch,
hands and feet braced against the ceiling of the cave. After him, less
expertly, we came, using his ankles for ladder rungs, and clinging to
them frantically. How I prayed, not altruistically, that his ankles
were not weak! My imagination took the wrong moment to visualize his
grip failing, and his sudden descent out of the cave and over the
cliff, with Toby and me each frantically clinging to an ankle. However
we made the climb up safely, but going down was worse. I wonder why
human nature never remembers, when it climbs to dizzy heights, that the
go-down will be dizzier still.
I daresay I should yet be mid-way down that glass-bottomed cave, with
feet barnacled to its ceiling, had I not realized how uncomfortable
life would be spent in that position. Therefore I slid,--and jumped,
hoping the force of my descent would not bounce me out of the narrow
entrance into a clump of cactus sixty feet below. What happened to the
others at that moment I did not care.
In caves still higher up beneath the bridge we discovered bits of
baskets and pottery fashioned by ubiquitous cave-dwellers a thousand
years ago. Then turning a corner, we came upon a fairy grotto, a
shallow rock-basin filled with shining water; walls covered with moss
and glossy maiden hair fern, over which a sparkling cascade fell. All
this, built out like a Juliet balcony high over the babbling brook.
[Illustration: NATURAL BRIDGE, PINE, ARIZONA.]
From here it was only a short scramble back to the ranch-house, the
barn, gardens and orchards on floor three, from which a steep canyon
road leads to the upper world. Years ago when Dave Goodfellow, hermit
and prospector, built his shack here the undergrowth was so wild that a
calf who wandered into the brush and died within ten feet of the house
was not found till a month after. Now the tangle has been smoothed and
planted to alfalfa. Under the huge fruit trees he planted, meanders
a brook edged with mint, violets and water-cress. Visitors drop down
only occasionally, but they are always sure of good food, a clean bed,
and a whole-hearted Scotch welcome. When news finally seeped in to us
that spring had melted the snow-packed mountain roads, leaving them dry
enough to travel, we departed with regret. “Pa” Goodfellow built us
a food box out of two empty gasoline tins, “Ma” Goodfellow gave us a
loaf of fresh bread, a jar of apricot preserves, and a wet bag full of
water-cress, which provided manna for two hot, dusty days.
Spring had wrought marvels to our thrice traveled Apache Trail. The
hills were gay with blue lupin, the color of shadows in that hot land.
The valleys blazed with the yellow blossoms of the prickly holly bush,
sweeter in odor than jasmine. Dozens of times we stopped to collect
the myriad varieties of spring flowers, more prodigal than I have seen
anywhere else in the world; poppies, red snap-dragons, Indian paint
brush, the blue loco-weed which gives permanent lunacy to the cattle
and horses which eat it; little delicate desert blooms like our bluets
and grass flowers, shading from blue to white, and daisies of a dozen
kinds, yellow, orange, yellow with brown centers, with yellow centers,
and giant marguerites.
At the mining camp we stopped for a how-d’y-do with the Kellys. “The
old woman,” who had arrived from Providence recently, was brought
out to meet us. A short, asthmatic and completely suburban lady, the
beauties of the lovely scene rolling away to the horizon left her
blank. She still panted in short gasps from the terrors of the Apache
Trail.
“Awful!” she told us. “Awful! I was so scared I thought I’d die.
Straight up and down. Straight up and down. My heart was in my mouth
all the trip. I’m homesick. Look at this place,--no stores and no
neighbors--not a bit like Providence.”
Her dampening presence seemed a little to have affected her husband’s
effervescence. However, he still had the finest mine in Arizona, and
Arizona was the finest state in the Union.
“She’ll get used to it by and by,” he said. “Horizontal fever,--that’s
what the old lady’s got. Ought to heard her squeal on them turns.”
They pressed us to stay over night.
“You ain’t heard how I stopped the war,” said Kelly.
But we regretfully said we must push on. So, loaded with specimens of
ore and good wishes, we sped away.