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.

 

Turkey Creek Deep

Where are we? Where are we going?

TURKEY CREEK

El.: c. 5000’ 

From 1880 to 1884 a man named Morse had a sawmill on turkey Creek where he prepared lumber for use in the Copper Queen Mine at Bisbee. The timbers measured one foot in diameter, and Turkey Creek was the only place where timbers of such size could be found. Morse is said to have named Turkey Creek for the wild turkeys found along it.  

- Will C. Barnes, Arizona Place Names, revised and enlarged by Byrd H. Granger

When I look at a map of the state of Arizona, the more so a map of the entire United States — all of North America, a map of the entire world — I realize how small is the majestic expanse of Cochise County that I call my winter home. Though two valleys, the Sulphur Springs Valley and the San Pedro, stretch through it from north to south, and along the easternmost side of the former lie the Dos Cabezas, Chiricahua, and Peloncillo mountain ranges, most Americans have never heard of the Chiricahua Mountains and never visited the Chiricahua National Monument. Those who make the visit usually drive down from I-10, venture up Massai Point, and then leave. It’s understandable. Ours is a big country, and even a vacation of several months is insufficient to cover the West.

Just as there are two schools of thought about life experience in general, so there are two schools of travel thought. Basically, the question is whether to go deep or wide. Whether to sample as many experiences as possible, though it means each sample will be, of necessity, strictly limited — or to stay with one mate, in one line of work, through thick and thin, to settle down in one place (or a few chosen places), to sink roots, to go ever deeper. I propound no single, universal decision here for all human beings. The decision can only be made by each individual.

Long before I made my first trip to France, though, I knew what I wanted from being there. I wanted to live, in Paris, for the four weeks I had. That meant I would not see the chateaux along the Loire (I still have not and perhaps never will) or the Normandy coast or the glitz of the French Riviera. When it came right down to it, I did not even see Chartres Cathedral that year, reasoning on rainy days that it would be a shame to visit Chartres without sun coming through the famous stained glass windows — and, on sunny days, feeling it would be a shame to give up a single sunlit day in Paris! When the sun was shining, I could make a cup of espresso on the sidewalk last two hours, and when the weather was cold and wet I could milk a single museum entrance fee for an entire day. Shopping? On my income? Please! Being there was all I asked. 

Just so, now, I find a great deal of contentment in my quiet Arizona ghost town, building a personal Southwest home library and making small increases to the comforts of seasonal retirement housekeeping with additions to our simple kitchen — one day a beautiful used stock pot from a thrift shop, another, a fresh jar of mesquite flower honey for the table. Expeditions from the cabin to the greater world outside are not always grand adventures, either. Sometimes only mundane errands. And that’s all right, because we are not on a cruise — we are living here. 

But oh, those glorious adventures! 

A year ago we turned one day onto Turkey Creek Road, but the jarring washboard surface quickly convinced the Artist, who was driving, to turn around. This year our first venture took us as far as the first creek crossing, and that was a thrill. So when the Artist proposed on Wednesday that we should explore farther up the road, he got no argument from me. 

The dry wash behind and alongside our rental cabin only runs with floodwater during summer monsoons, when we are back in Michigan, so the very sight of a small stream of flowing water within the largely dry banks of the San Pedro River is a rare treat. Imagine, then, our delight over a roaring, rushing, tumbling, foaming creek! We could not stop grabbing for our cameras — and yet, I realize that no photograph will convey a fraction of our excitement, just as photographs of Paris from the Seine did nothing to prepare me for standing on a bridge, being there. We had been exclaiming with wonder at the beauty of our surroundings long before we came to a sign alerting us to prepare for a “scenic road” along the next five miles. The sign struck us as very funny, as if the road commission thought we might have been unaware of beauty ahead without the sign. And what of the beauty we had already enjoyed that had not been noted with signage? 

Our wonder did increase as we penetrated farther into the forest, however, I must admit. It didn’t feel as if we were climbing, and yet we must have been gaining elevation, because there were more and taller and different species of trees as we went along, with mountain rocks much closer to our ever-narrowing road. 

Only many miles in did we reach public land of the Coronado National Forest, which, like the Marquette National Forest in Michigan, consists of discontinuous pieces of land in the Pinaleño, Chiricahua, and Dragoon mountain ranges. Beware of bear, and watch out for water and fire debris and rock slides, signs warned. 

What ruins lurk behind this alligator juniper?

Ruins of stone cabin lost in forest fire

There were other cabins in the forest land, obviously still rentable, and yet we saw no signs that anyone was staying in any of them. There were deer here and there, but no other human beings. Well, fine! When the rocky road reached a campground, it seemed incredible that there was not a single tent in sight and no picnickers at the tables, either. We left our car and settled down long enough to eat a simple late lunch and enjoy the creek (at our very feet!) before deciding that the air was already very cold and would quickly grow colder as dappled sunlight retreated up the mountainside. Short winter days are even shorter in the mountains, nothing at all like prairie evenings or the late afternoon light on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

Reluctantly leaving Turkey Creek, we sped east to the Mustang Mall and returned to the ghost town by way of the Kansas Settlement Road, looking across the valley to what looked like a big, dark storm over the very mountains where we had spent our afternoon. We arrived home before sunset (as splendid in the east as it was in the west) and were delighted to have visitors before darkness fell. It was another deeply satisfying day in our little corner of the world. We did not drive all that many miles, but most of them were deliciously slow.

Looking west

Looking east

Enjoying evening visitors