What About Adventure?

 

In past years when we’ve returned to northern Michigan springtime, more than one friend there has said of my desert and mountain adventures in the Southwest, “Your blog got me through the winter!” Those readers must be disappointed so far in this season’s posts, but as the Good Book says, there is a “time for everything,” and the Artist and I are starting to get out again. We have yet to explore any thrilling new roads; however, many familiar roads continue to thrill. Such for us is the drive up Fort Grant Road out of Willcox to Bonita and on through the Pinaleño Mountains by way of Stockton Pass. 

See this building in Nicholas Cage movie "Red Rock West"

Last Wednesday we made that trip once again, and as we were driving east from the little crossroads of Bonita (long ago a town of 1,000 people, with a population that doubled when soldiers on leave swarmed in to visit taverns and other houses of pleasure) toward the pass I remarked to the Artist that one of my favorite words is bajada. I like the word for itself, for its sound, as well as for giving a name to something I see in mountain country – and also because it calls to mind one of my favorite Dos Cabezas wildflowers, the lovely, shy little bajada lupine.

As I was explaining this landform to the Artist, I compared it to a river delta: as I see it, bajada is to mountain and range as delta is to river and ocean. Then it occurred to me for the first time -- and I haven't checked on this anywhere, but it makes perfect sense to me -- why a delta is called a delta. Look at its shape: Δ. Like the Greek letter, n’est-ce pas?

How could this road ever grow old for us? Besides its breathtaking beauty, every one of the 20 scenic miles (from Bonita to Hwy 191) is by now saturated with memories for us of stopping here and there for picnics and photo shoots and explorations among rocks and alligator junipers with each other and Sarah and, later, Peasy. We miss them (little Pea we miss dreadfully!), but in the mountains, my spirit still soars.

 

Stockton Pass is up in Graham County, but familiar travels here in Cochise County please us, also. Sometimes we take the Kansas Settlement Road down to the Mustang Mall and come back what we call the Chiricahua way. That’s “going around the block” 100 miles, and as we pass the road to the Monument (or come out the road from the Monument and turn back to the north before the road once again heads west), I am always happy to see the sign announcing the distance to Dos Cabezas. It is only a ghost town, with “no services” – no gas station or convenience store, nowhere to get a cup of coffee – but for us in winter it is home.

Chiricahuas in background

From Chiricahuas home to Dos Cabezas

My armchair travel too is filled with adventure. Reading Edwin Way Teale’s North with the Spring for the third time in my life, I’m feeling as if it’s my first encounter with the book, more immediately meaningful now that I have my own memories of the Everglades and have seen for myself a painted bunting (here in Dos Cabezas two years ago this coming spring). 

 

…How many times, on overcast winter days, had we looked at pictures of bathers toasting in the Florida sunshine and thought of how happy, happy we would be if we were only there! And here we were, where we had dreamed of being, on our trip with the spring we had so long planned, in the very midst of days we would look back upon as long as we lived—and we were unhappy! I viewed myself with amazement. Yet still I wandered irritated and disconsolate along the Sanibel beach.

 

-      Edwin Way Teale, North with the Spring

 

 

Even the noted naturalist had these feelings, you see, for we take ourselves with us wherever we go, and the Teales had a special heartache, having lost their only son in battle in World War II before they set out to follow spring north from the Everglades. Weary and heartsore, they were pushed by bleak February, “the shortest and longest month of the twelve," as he calls it, to flee northern winter. Unhappy passages in the book are few and brief, however; I only mention them because they stand out to my notice now in ways they never had before.

 

Here is a wonderful, thoughtful passage more like Teale’s general outlook:

 

…Gathering driftwood for a fire is a comforting occupation. It is direct and obvious in a world of confusing complexities. The benefits can be seen at once. There are no lost or hidden links in the chain of action. Cause and effect, effort and result, are apparent at a glance. 

 

Isn't that lovely?

Another book I’m reading this week is one I was delighted to find by chance, never having heard of the author before. My delight comes from the fact that Susan Cummins Miller is a geologist and has set her mystery in the Chiricahua Mountains, right down the road from our winter digs! Serendipity comes to my rescue once again! And the boots came to me the very same day, so how lucky is that? 

 

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.

Mountain Morning, Desert Day

First morning light

[This post has been waiting "in the can" and is getting its turn today.]

Our bed is snug and warm, air in the cabin cool when morning comes, until the Artist gets up in the dark to start the propane stove to take away the chill. First signs of dawn in the east come before six o’clock, but we do not usually hurry to get up and begin our day — time enough for that when the cabin is once again a comfortable temperature. Nights, after all, are cold in the high desert: at our ghost town elevation, winter nighttime temperatures have generally been below freezing and occasionally well down into the 20s. Now, in early March, low 30s are the overnight norm, with days as warm as high 60s.

Sunrise is most often simple and uncomplicated, but it can also be as variable and colorful as sunset, depending on the morning. Whatever the sky, whether clear or streaked with clouds, the mountaintops and high slopes receive the sun before the sun has cleared what we see as the eastern horizon. Mountains are like lakes and oceans and islands. Like lakes and oceans, they never appear the same two days or even two hours in a row, and like islands seen from shore they seem to move around in the landscape, even though we, the viewers, know very well that it is our position, not theirs, that is changing as we go from place to place. 

The landscape of my ghost town can look dead and empty in winter. Where are the leaves, flowers, animals, and birds? Is there no sign of life whatsoever?

You must go out into it on foot, unhurried. Soon you hear a bird and look for it in a nearby stunted tree. It rarely works to chase after birds. The surest way to see them is to choose a spot, a shady spot if you can find one, and stand still as a statue, watching the sky and branches and ground around you. The birds soon appear. Brightest these mornings is the cardinal, a reliable visitor. More exciting to me, because we have them not in Michigan, is the pyrrhuloxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal.” 

cardinal

pyrrhuloxia

mockingbird

Most beautiful singer, of course, is the mockingbird. Most numerous birds are sparrows, but not every dull-brownish bird is a sparrow, and morning may bring others close enough to photograph and subsequently identify with the help of good field guides. See below a cactus wren in two different settings, followed by a less-than-optimal shot of a curved-bill thrasher, identifiable not only by his bill but also by the golden eye visible between two twigs.

cactus wren

cactus wren

curved-bill thrasher

A rabbit frequently appears around the cabin in the morning, but I have not caught him or her on camera, though I keep trying. We also have yet to see other notable backyard visitors of 2015, a rock squirrel and a Western fence lizard, the latter flashing his brilliant blue throat in the sunlight. I will be watching for lizard and squirrel as winter gradually warms into spring.

Meanwhile, from the window over the sink, I see a cow and calf ambling down the dirt road behind the cabin, as nonchalant as early morning flaneurs on the Champs Elysées, leading their lives without reference to any human watcher.

On the way to town on morning errands, we see roadrunners, sometimes as near as our own driveway. Surely the roadrunner is the drollest bird in Arizona! People must have found them amusing long before the cartoon character’s invention, the cartoon an effect rather than a cause. When a single day may bring as many as five of them to our attention, the Artist thinks I should start taking them for granted, but I cannot. Not yet. They surprise and delight me every time. Well, except for a dead one on the highway one morning. I could hardly believe my eyes, seeing a roadrunner, unlike his cartoon doppelgänger, reduced to permanent squashed immobility. I wanted him to jump up, pop back into his former, rounded, quick-footed self, and go hurrying off to new adventures.

At a certain mile marker on our road between Dos Cabezas and Willcox, I always begin looking for hawks. Wires close to utility poles are productive sites, but a tall mesquite or occasional small tree can also hold a hawk, and it’s a rare day that we don’t see at least one. I would like, eventually, to be able to tell each species from a distance, either at rest or in flight. That, however, is a long-term goal.

So far we have been able to watch sandhill cranes only in flight formation, high above our heads. Their voices may first alert us to their presence, and we scan the air overhead, trying to see them, but other times, long before we hear them, I spot in the distance something that looks like a faint, drifting scarf of dark smoke. No, it doesn’t move like smoke: it is, once again, a shifting, graceful, phantasmagoric cloud of cranes. 

At closer range, the flock in the sky — and often several smaller flocks gradually come together, the aggregate number gradually increasing into the hundreds or maybe thousands — has the appearance of an enormous school of ocean fish, changing direction like a single animal, wheeling and swirling and changing shape like ink dissolving in water, except that the birds do not vanish in the air. Instead we see a thousand small black marks in motion, and then, as they wheel in the sun, all at once the school flashes shining silver. I notice that long before they are low enough to be seen as individual birds, and even without hearing their voices, we know at our first distant glance that this distant aerial dance school is one of sandhills. This is because while geese or ducks are directional in their flight, clearly going somewhere, sandhill cranes seem to join together and fly for the thrill of flying and the joy of each other’s company. I'm sorry my little still snapshots fall so fall short of the experience of watching cranes in flight.

“WATCH FOR ANIMALS NEXT 21 MILES” reads a typical sign along Southwest roadways. “I do little else,” I commented to the Artist as we passed one such sign, and he laughed at the truth of my remark.  Always I am hoping to see one of the high desert’s larger mammals, perhaps the coyotes we hear at might, a herd of mule or white-tailed deer, or another family of javelina — this time when I’m ready with a camera, please! But the large animals are wary, and rightly so. One day I wanted to stop to inspect a road-killed deer to determine which species it was, but we were on a curve, with another car right behind us, and by the next morning the deer carcass was gone. A dead skunk, now — that can lie on the shoulder of the road for two weeks. And it has, too. Even scavengers are passing it by. “A dead skunk is a hard sell,” the Artist observed.

Of course, I am always scanning fenced enclosures for horses, and there are never enough horses to see and never a horse not worth closer inspection. In the least glamorous herd, there will always be at least one with a beautiful face. And now, having been reading a book on reining horses, we look at conformation with more specific points in mind. Would this horse be good at reining events? Does it exhibit the correct, symmetrical trapezoid form? Would we be able to tell?

The Artist was at the wheel on the day we were once again on our way to the Stockton Pass through the Pinaleno Mountains when I spotted a javelina ahead in the road. Luckily there were no other vehicles in sight in either direction. “Slow down, slow down!” Quick, the camera! Yes! Success! My day is made!

The javelina is locally called “wild pig,” or, more derisively, just “Pig!” Its Latin name is Tayassu tajacu, its proper English name collared peccary, and because it is largely nocturnal, it is more often heard at night than seen during the day. It has that in common with coyotes, though we are accustomed to coyotes around our northern Michigan home, and their sounds at night are nowhere near as nerve-wracking as that of a herd of marauding javelina. Javelina generally travel in groups, looking for trouble, as it were — breaking down fences, raiding gardens, getting into garbage, and generally annoying homeowners — and so this solitary soul near the Coronado National Forest was a mystery, but as it lost no time in hurrying across the road and down into heavy brush that camouflaged it very effectively, I wondered if perhaps its family members were not far away. Would you, driving by, have spotted the hidden javelina? I certainly would not have suspected its presence. And then one naturally wonders, how many animals are around us here all the time, in this “empty”-looking landscape, blending into the monochromatic winter scenery right before our unsuspecting eyes?