“We did it, Sunny! We did it!”

But it was just the beginning --

I only meant to go as far as the Old Pearce Cemetery. Stopping at the library in Sunsites to return a book, then making a short cruise through the adjacent FOL bookstore, I wasn’t ready to turn around and go home yet, not quite ready to take Birch Road across the Sulphur Springs Valley and then the Kansas Settlement Road to familiar Hwy. 186, so I drove first to the Mustang Mall to get a cup of coffee and then back to Old Pearce, another mining “ghost town” like Dos Cabezas, aiming for the peace of the cemetery, a place to sit quietly and drink my coffee before it cooled, maybe look into the pages of a new library book (Becoming Animal, by David Abram). Wind fluttered little American flags on many of the graves, and as always Cochise Stronghold drew my eye off to the west. 

 

Maybe it was that view of the Stronghold that wouldn’t let me sit still for long. I thought, I’ll just go a little way up the road. Middlemarch Road has always intrigued me, especially as I’d seen the other end of it on every trip to Tombstone, letting me know that it went all the way across the mountains! I’d asked neighbors about the road, but the Artist and I had never taken it, and I didn’t plan to do the long drive last Friday, either. “We’re not going far, Sunny,” I told her, “just a little way.” I stopped by the plank bridge to photograph the deep-sided, red gulch…

 

…but couldn’t stop there, not just yet, with the Stronghold luring me on. Signs like this hold their own allure.

And then! This sign!

Well, now I have to keep going, don’t I? 

The terrain changed as we went along. After a while there were mountainsides dark with trees, like the Black Hills of my native state, South Dakota. 

 

And soon Sunny Juliet and I, having left private land behind to enter a section of the Coronado National Forest, were winding our way along an ever-narrower road amidst oaks and junipers, and somehow I had committed myself to going all the way. It was like that day last spring when I hadn’t planned to drive up over Onion Saddle to Portal but found myself doing just that, after going far enough into Pinery Canyon that it would have been absurd to go back.

I pulled over as much as I could for an ATV coming from the opposite direction. He stopped, too, and I asked, “Will this road take me to Tombstone?” (I didn’t want to go to Tombstone but did want to get to the highway.) He told me yes, “about 8 or 10 miles.” (Remember, those are mountain miles!) I asked about snow, and he assured me there was no snow “at the top” and that it was “good road” all the way.

 

The hairpin (above) near the top of the pass was not my idea of “good road.” It could have been much worse -- it wasn’t gullied or falling away at the edges -- but there were several stretches with very loose rocks, and many that looked sharp, but I put the thought of a flat tire out of my mind. No sense “borrowing trouble,” as my mother used to say.

 

Opposite the hairpin was this sign: 

No, I am not turning around to go all the way back to Pearce, and I don’t want a dead end, either (and I don’t know anything about Soren Pass). We’ll just keep going on Middlemarch, thanks very much! 

See that snowy mountain range in the far distance? Those are the Chiricahua Mountains, and we are looking down over the flat expanse of the Sulphur Springs Valley from high in the Dragoon Mountains. I was careful keep my eyes either on the road or looking off to the distance, not right down over the edge of the road, but Middlemarch Pass was not as scary as Onion Saddle. Really, not scary at all, and the views were thrilling.

 

Around a bend, one particular mountain view took my breath away. Reminiscent of the tumbled rocks of Texas Canyon, a scenic stop on I-10 between Willcox and Benson, this peak is one I knew the Artist would have loved. 

He would have loved the long, smoky vistas, too, distances that held, somewhere out there, the town of Tombstone. “Be with me, sweetheart!” I said aloud, standing in the road with my camera. 

We were through the mountains now, the pup and I. Besides mountains and trees, we had seen a creek with a trickle of water, and we had seen a very broad, very dry wash. Lots of birds. It had been a beautiful adventure. 

Now the dirt road gradually broadened again, and there was even a paved stretch before the highway -- where we turned right in the direction of Benson rather than left to Tombstone, as I said aloud to Sunny -- four or five times -- “We did it, girl! We did it!”

 

Times like these, though, I can’t help thinking it isn’t fair that the Artist should be missing these adventures with us. He would have loved the road, the thrills, the views, the vastness of it all! Then I remember – and this is true, too, absolutely – he loved the life he had. He loved our adventures together (as well as adventures he had on his own), our cozy times, our dogs, and our families and friends. He was deeply satisfied to have made his living as an artist. Books, movies, music! Long talks with friends! The two of us holding hands. “We live in a beautiful place,” he said so many times in northern Michigan, and at the end of a day in Arizona, coming back to the ghost town cabin, he would often say, “It’s good to be home again.” When we traveled across the Great Plains, he would exclaim over and over, “What a country!” He lived with joy and enthusiasm and gratitude. 

 

And that’s what Sunny and I have to do now, without him, though I miss him every day. He would want the pup and me to go on living.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone, from the girl and me. We wish you love!