We Are All Going in the Same Direction

Where did we go on Saturday? Read on and find out.

It is remarkable how much there is to see in a single American county. If you spend enough time looking into nooks and corners, as well as at the grander vistas, rather than speeding through on expressways, every region has its natural beauties and remnants of the past. This is certainly true of Leelanau County, Michigan, which the Artist and I have been exploring for decades, and it’s true as well of Cochise County, Arizona, where we have now spent part or all of six (I think it’s six) winters.

 

For example, the road into the trailhead to Cochise Stronghead is reached via a large modern development called Sunsites, but the post office for the development goes by the name of Pearce. The original Pearce, largely a ghost town today, is not far south of Sunsites and lies within close view of brutally gouged buttes, the town having come into existence by virtue of a late nineteenth-century mining boom kicked off by the discovery of gold in 1895. 

Although we have driven through old Pearce before and stopped once or twice so I could photograph buildings (the largest, most impressive one presently for sale), we had never taken the road west, the direction intriguingly marked (to my mind) with a sign pointing to a historic cemetery. Saturday, at last, we took that less-traveled road (not worrying much about rattlesnakes along the way in January).

I found the cemetery enchanting. The “non-perpetual care” idea is feasible here in the arid West, where no forest is going to retake the land and obliterate the lovingly marked and personally tended graves.

There are miners buried here, and farmers, and at least one blacksmith.

 

Information near the entrance gives statistics on causes of death in the mining period, the numbers broken down into Hispanic and non-Hispanic “communities” (as the explanation read). Tuberculosis and other lung diseases were common in both groups, what with rock dust underground and coal- and wood-fired stoves, unpaved roads, and trains filling air above ground with a variety of particulates. Stillbirths and infant deaths were more common among Hispanics, childbirth deaths for non-Hispanics, but there were a lot of baby graves in the cemetery for both groups. 

Interestingly, the same statistics tell us that non-Hispanics were more likely than Hispanics to be shot or otherwise murdered, as well as to die of alcoholism, while accidents rank sixth in both lists (“all mining-related” in the Hispanic list).

As is true of the pioneer cemetery in Dos Cabezas (our own winter ghost town home), some graves are beautifully elaborate, while others, equally touching, could not be simpler. There are wrought iron or adobe enclosures and statues of saints in the same vicinity as crossed pipes and rows of natural stones outlining graves. People have left small tokens on and near many graves.

The newest resting places are farthest from the entrance, some still decorated for Christmas, for the cemetery is still very much in use today. There are gravestones with 2018 and 2019 dates and a few plots of fresh earth not yet marked with tombstones. ‘Tombstone’ – there’s a word not often used any more. We usually say ‘headstone’ or just ‘stones’ when we speak of grave markers. To de-emphasize thoughts of death?

There is something terribly moving to me in old cemeteries. The simplicity of it all. Names and dates, marriages and military service, “beloved mother” and other brief notations. The wind was whipping across the Sulphur Springs Valley on Saturday, raising a white cloud from the playa as we crossed from Dos Cabezas to Pearce. “Dust in the wind,” the Artist commented, referring to an old Moody Blues song. [Correction: The recording group was Kansas. The Artist had said Moody Blues, and I love the name of that group, and immediately I found a YouTube video giving credit to the wrong group. Sigh! Loved the visual there, too....] It seemed an appropriate song and thought for a day to visit a cemetery. Cemeteries remind us that none of us is here forever, even those who make the biggest names for themselves while alive. Benefactors to humanity, perpetrators of crime and war, ordinary working people providing for families -- we are all going in the same direction, with our common end, that of us all, no more than metaphorical dust in the wind. The time given us to live and love and work and become worthy of being remembered is hauntingly brief, for the longest-lived human being as well as for those whose lives are cut short in relative youth.

 

Aside from general associations and feelings I find in all old cemeteries, this particular spot on earth outside an old ghost town is especially moving to me because its backdrop on the western horizon is the Dragoon Mountains, a range that always, for me, has its heart in Cochise Stronghold. I cannot look toward the Dragoon Mountains without my eye going to the Stronghold, and I cannot gaze upon the Stronghold without giving thanks each time for the fact that Cochise himself did not die on a reservation but there in his mountain home, in historic Apacheria.

We are here now, the Artist and I. That is, we are alive and together on this so-precious earth, in the presently troubled United States of America, and, for now, here in winter in Cochise County, Arizona. With all that’s going on in the country at large, we continue to look for moments of peace and hours of contentment, not to waste all the time remaining to us in storms of the soul. And we have not yet exhausted the possibilities for exploration of nature and history in this corner of the American West. 

 

The road from Pearce to the cemetery, for instance, continues west through Middlemarch Pass to Tombstone. I have noted on other occasions the Tombstone end of the road and now need to ask someone about the road through the pass. How mountainous is it? Is it frequently traveled? What is the highest point? Is it like the high, narrow, twisting road over Onion Saddle in the Chiricahuas, or more like Stockton Pass through the Pinaleños? Perhaps we will find out this winter. Certainly, we will continue our Arizona adventures while we can, before we too become dust in the wind.

 

Faraway Jewels

I bought the book Chiricahua Mountains: History and Nature, by William Ascarza (Charleston, SC: Natural History Press, 2014) over at the Southwestern Research Station near Portal, an expedition you haven't heard about yet, but only started reading it after David and I took a picnic lunch over to Faraway Ranch at the Chiricahua National Monument. The deeper one gets into Chiricahua history, the richer every visit to the place becomes. Coincidentally, we had also met a member of the Riggs family a few evenings before at a gathering here in our ghost town neighborhood. On our next drive to Chiricahua, then, we stopped at the Riggs Family Cemetery on the way. 

I did not photograph every grave in the cemetery and do not now remember the oldest person buried here, but I'm pretty sure she was 97 and born before the Civil War. My favorite headstone, though, was the one just above, a large natural rock erected on the grave of Edward Murray Riggs, son of Thomas J. and Eula Lee Riggs. Edward lived from 1885 to 1950, and I'll transcribe for you the entire text that appears on his stone, because it tells a lot about why the family is so important in this area, other than their considerable ranching history:

HE GAVE TO THE WORLD THE WONDERLAND OF ROCKS. HE ENGINEERED THE CONSTRUCTION OF ECHO TRAIL. HE WISHED THIS TO BE HIS MONUMENT. HIS CURIOSITY AND LOVE OF NATURE INSPIRED HIS DISCOVERIES. HIS ENTHUSIASM AND TACT ATTRACTED OTHERS TO HIS FIND. HIS TIRELESS EFFORTS OPENED THE AREA TO THE WORLD. WHERE HE BUILT THE FIRST TRAILS, THE TRAILS OF TODAY FOLLOW.  

HIS WAS A FAITH THAT LOOKED ACROSS THE RUGGED MOUNTAINS TO THE PLEASANT VALLEYS BEYOND; A GENTLE KINDLINESS LIKE THE WARM SUN ON A SHELTERED SPOT ON THE TRAIL; A REGARD FOR BEAUTY THAT MADE LIFE A PLEASANT VALE; A SKILL AND PERSEVERANCE THAT CONQUERED HIS WORLD. 

The Chiricahua Mountains are a most appropriate backdrop for this small jewel of a cemetery. 

Faraway Ranch itself was the homestead of Neil and Emma Erickson, Swedish immigrants who settled in Bonita Canyon in 1888. Three miles from the the Erickson ranch was that of Brannick Riggs and his wife, and it was Lillian Erickson, daughter of Neil and Emma, who married Ed Riggs, grandson of Brannick. 

Ed and Lillian operated their property, as had Lillian and her sister previous to the former’s marriage, both as a working cattle ranch (500 head) and as a guest ranch, offering horseback tours through what they called the "Wonderland of Rocks." Chiricahua National Monument was established by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, largely due to the efforts of Ed Riggs. The National Park Service acquired the Faraway Ranch property in 1979. A more beautiful -- or more remote -- setting for a home can hardly be imagined. Familiarity could never, of this I am sure, breed contempt for Faraway Ranch. Stunning mountains, sheltering trees, gracious home, dear domestic details, and lovely nearby Bonita Creek (not to be confused with the crossroads of Bonita and its creek up in Graham County) insure that every visit will increase love for this exquisite place. Completely content forty miles from Willcox, Lillian Erickson Riggs herself had no desire to live anywhere else. Here are her words, reproduced on a sign on the land she called home:

“The only sure thing, Lillian Erickson Riggs wrote in 1954, in the early days of her widowhood, “is that I love my home. And there is a feeling of safeness and security in the very walls and in the length and breadth of the spacious rooms.... Death will be far preferable to giving up my Faraway home.”

Chiricahua National Monument is less well known than other, larger federal monument and parks in the West. Before we came to Dos Cabezas in 2015, we had never heard of it. Now, however, we treasure its nearness to us -- just down the road -- and at the same time rejoice in its remoteness from urban sprawl, which exists even in parts of Arizona. A certain amount of effort is required to reach Chiricahua National Monument and Faraway Ranch — we wouldn't have it any other way. 

Last June Evening, First July Morn

Something called me to St. Wenceslaus last night, after dinner was over and I’d hung laundry out on the line. (It will finish drying today.) It must have been the light. Everything was peaceful in the lengthening shadows of the last evening in June.


All were peacefully sleeping, whether under markers ornate or plain...



Whether under a small garden or simply beneath the grass.



Images wrought in iron assisted a contemplative attitude.


This morning a different impulse called me to Leelanau Township’s Peterson Park, where Lake Michigan was as blue as blue can be, drenching the horizon.



Among rounded rocks still in the shadow of the bluffs, the black ones seemed to hold onto their dewy moisture.


One rock looked like a beautiful egg from outer space.


The cracked ones seemed sad until I reflected that the waves would smooth them until they seemed wholes, not parts.


Another seemed to be the morning sun greeter.


I placed one rock atop another as my thank-you to the beach.


Gravity is the culprit, making the stairs seem longer on the way back up. Young Sarah was not at all out of breath. She would not have paused for pictures without my command.




We had our early walk/run on the beach, did our errands in town, and then our bookstore day began, with a brand-new OPEN flag to match the flowers in the windowbox.