CHAPTER IX
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 Globeand 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 aman.”
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 seemsin 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 comesuddenly 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,viathe 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 Ifound 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 wonderwhythe 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, MissMartha 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 Tobyand 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, havetraveled 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 curiouslyhalting, 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 marksthe 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 atthe 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’rebehaving themselves.Theyaint trying to nag the life out of me asking for this and that.Theyaint 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 patientlyfor 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 ’emanythingthey 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. “Anyidea? 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 beforeshe 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.”
“Bereasonable. I ask you, lady, one thing, if possible.” Heavy sarcasm. “Bereasonable. 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.Onlyone. If you got to take my electric lights,—if you’ve sunk as low as that, lady,—all I ask is,don’ttake ’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 amtryingto 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 whitejacketed 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.