A Day’s Contents: Sunshine, Flowing Water, Mountains, Blossoms, Primitive Road, Dust, Rain

I admit it: I was impatient to get out into the world on Monday morning. According to the forecast we could expect a couple days of rain (possibly snow in the mountains), beginning Monday evening, but Monday morning the sun was giving the clouds a run for their money. So the Artist’s suggestion that we drive up to Safford via the Stockton Pass answered my longings perfectly. It is a measure of how much we both love this trip that we are willing to endure miles of banging over tar strips on Fort Grant Road until we finally reach the county line and a smoother road surface, but the magic really begins with our approach to Bonita Junction. Trees! Big trees! Running water! Below are about half of my Monday photographs taken near Bonita. Further down in this post you’ll see why I put them in two different groups. 

Then, the Pinaleño Mountains, which still take my breath away, as if I’d never seen them before. I think I could drive through the Stockton Pass in the Coronado National Forest every day and marvel anew at its beauty each and every time. With the Artist at the wheel, it is part of the Navigator’s job (that’s me) to peer down into all the washes and creeks and report on the presence or absence of water, and I am very conscientious about performing my duty. 

A truly new and spectacular vision, a seasonal wonder, awaited us this trip as we neared the end of the road through the pass and neared the intersection with the main north-south highway. Mexican poppies were blooming gloriously in carpets of gold, sometimes in isolated sweeps but in many other places as far as the eye could see, a dizzying, breathtaking sight, both along the last of our mountain road and up the larger highway to Safford.

Gold was not the only floral hue to be seen, either, although this otherwise lovely moradilla (Western pink vervain) was rather outshone — and outnumbered — by its brighter, showier neighbors.

What more could a day bring, after such sights as floods both of water and of flowers? Sometimes beauty is almost exhausting! But driving that far from home means driving the same distance back again, no matter how tired you are, and while the return trip is made from Safford is easier and faster by taking 191 right to Willcox and skipping the mountains, that’s hard to do. Sometimes we do it, but not on Monday, even knowing those pesky tar strips lay ahead….

We realized that Sarah hadn’t been out of the car all day, a situation that would have to be remedied, and we had a stopping place in mind, but before we got to it another road beckoned. A road we hadn’t noticed before, a primitive road but with an open gate, clearly open in a welcoming way because a sign asked us to be diligent about drowning our campfire. No worries. We weren’t going to make a fire, only get out of the car and stretch our legs a bit, ours and Sarah’s.

Sarah was so excited to have a chance to explore new ground that she and I wandered quite a way up the road from the car. It’s a good thing we didn’t try deploring up this primitive road with the car, and my photos of it do not begin to capture the reality. There were stretches of it where the right tire track looked a good foot deeper than the left, with a monster hump between them. Hairpin turns and switchbacks were constant. Farther in, enormous boulders protruded from and lay about in the roadway. An ATV could probably manage somehow (it would be a bone-jarring ride), and mountain bikes could do it, I suppose (again, not in any comfort), but an ordinary little car? Even with 4WD, that would be asking for ruin. Better on foot!

Oh, but the wildness, that delicious feeling of being somewhere remote from civilization, was just intoxicating! And not only the long and high, rocky views, because, looking down at the ground, I saw one of my favorite wildflowers of the region, the tiny, modest little bajada lupine. I do hope we can return to this area when the flowers appear, because they will be nearly carpeting the ground! (Yes, I am greedy for wildflower displays.) You may think there isn’t much to see in them this early in the season, but look closely. Do you discern the drops of dew or rain held by their leaves? Like transparent pearls!

The cup of my day was overflowing so fast I could have filled three more cups with it. If we hadn’t taken the mountain road for our return trip, we might never have noticed that particular primitive road at all, so it was complete serendipity. Beyond the high point of the pass and on down, our first glimpse of the plains to come was rather a shock. Another dust storm? We hadn’t expected that — maybe rain, but not dust — and yet, what else could it be? And yes, down in the valley, we found the mountains on all sides completely obscured, hidden from our sight. Everything looked strange. Eerie. Near Bonita Junction, distant trees stood out like spectres, as if in fog, and even nearby trees and the flooding creek took on an appearance completely different from what they had presented a couple of hours earlier. 

It was almost as if we were transported back to the Illinois prairie, with trees and telephone poles appearing out of a haze.

To see how much difference a dust storm makes, below are a couple of images that show its edge. Amazing, n’est-ce pas?

It was so windy (as well as dusty) in Willcox that we were practically blown from our car into the grocery store and back again, but on our way out of town, heading home to the cabin in Dos Cabezas, the rain began. 

As we gained elevation, we left the dust behind but not the wind or rain, and now on Tuesday morning, the cabin being pounded by rain and shaken by wind, after a night of much of the same, I am immensely grateful for our Monday expedition. We can hole up now and be cozy for a couple of days.

And indeed this morning we are being battered by wind and rain. Pounded. Hammered. The rain falls so close and so thickly that the mountains are again hidden from sight, as they would be by fog or dust.Will we see snow? It’s possible, but I suspect at this altitude it will just be rain. But it is all good as it is. Rain or snow, either one is good for the land. Either one brings water to the thirsty earth.

Meanwhile, we are curtained off from the world, and we have plenty to read....

And Yet Another Place of Ghosts

[This is another one that's been "in the can" for a while. I'll have something new soon.]

Dos Cabezas and Pearce are not the only former townsites in southeast Arizona now gone sleepy. Much, much sleepier is a dusty T intersection on the back roads from Willcox, in Cochise County, to Safford in Graham County to the north. Astonishingly, there is a modern elementary school at Bonita (which I always want to call “Bonita Junction), but little else other than cows and wildlife.

Coming down from the mountains, Bonita Creek cuts across the east-west road and takes a shortcut southwest to cross the north-south road south of the intersection and school. The path of the creek is easy to follow with the eye. Like the course of the San Pedro River over on the other side of the Dragoon Mountains, the creekbed here, too, is lined with cottonwoods, and now, as they begin to come into leaf, their soft grey-green crowns winding across the land tell where water flows.

No matter how many times we pass this way, I am fascinated by the old store at Bonita, the only remaining once-commercial establishment of the former town. Other fans of the noir Western “Red Rock West” may recognize the building, but it isn’t a cameo appearance in a film that stops me to look again and again at the old store. (We first came this way before I had ever seen the Nicholas Cage movie.) The building itself, with its straight, true lines and faded paint, has a presence and obviously holds innumerable stories and secrets.

Arizona Place Names, by Will C. Barnes (and revised and enlarged by Byrd H. Granger), gives a hint of what some of Bonita’s secrets might involve. 

When Fort Grant was in its heyday Bonita was a town just outside the military reservation where the soldiers poured in every payday…. There were then about one thousand people living in Bonita….  

Payday for the soldiers occurred three times a year. Approximately one thousand soldiers descended on the town. Added to this were the girls who flocked in from Willcox. The eight or ten saloons did a rush business, as did the girls. 

Today Bonita is a quiet and sleep spot. 

Indeed it is! Where would the “eight or ten saloons” have stood? Where were the houses for the 1,000 inhabitants, and how could over 2,000 people have made this place “roar,” as the author says they did three times a year? It truly boggles the mind.

I position my camera to shoot through the chainlink fence (keeping nosy parkers like me from getting too close to the old building) and zoom in, hoping to investigate the interior, but all I can see are reflections on the store windows of the empty land behind me. 

How long has the store at Bonita stood closed to the public? What was sold there back in Bonita’s “heyday”? In less distant years, what children made this little foot-powered merry-go-round spin?

We sigh and turn out sights toward the mountains, anticipating our climb to the pass and perhaps a stop among junipers and oaks along the way, and as we cross Bonita Creek once more, we muse about the lives of those who settled here (post office established 1884), undoubtedly attracted by the running water that still, when flowing, helps supply the town of Safford.