On the Back Roads (18 page)

F
inding cool air in Arizona in the summer is a simple numbers game: the higher the elevation, the lower the temperarture. Arizona has no monopoly on this, of course. But for me, on this scorching day in June, it is a glorious reawakening to the laws of physics.

We are camped in Bullhead City, down by the river. When the sun is toasting the Southwest, it's baking Arizona and blistering Bullhead. It is hot. The water coming into the motor home, solar heated in the hose outside, is almost hot enough for instant coffee and perfect for washing dishes. I got cooler water for drinking out of the insulated hot-water tank. One day of this is enough.

Before the sun could get a grip on the day, I called Rusty from under the motor home. Her tongue was close to dragging on the ground. I packed up, pulled the plug, and headed for the town on my map of Arizona with the highest elevation: Flagstaff, at 6,905 feet.

Comfortably air-conditioned but fighting a crosswind on Interstate 40, I hadn't planned to stop in Kingman. But the exit sign read Andy Devine Avenue. What to expect from a
street named for a cowboy-movie sidekick, I don't know. Anyway, it perked up Rusty.

We stopped at a grassy park with a steam locomotive as its centerpiece. Rusty rolled and reveled in the cool grass.

A guy who looked like a cowboy hobbled by, dragging a half-leg cast. and then hobbled back. His express ion resembled Rusty's when she knows I am hiding a ball in my pocket. I could see it was coming: the last two chapters of his life, for sure, unless I distracted him from the start. So I asked him about Andy Devine.

He paused. He had to think hard. Two fingers parted his unkempt must ache. “Well, he was born here, you know, and growed up to be a bell-hop in the hotel is what I heard. Beyond that, I'm not sure who the guy was.”

Then he started on something about which he was an expert: big rocks and bad horses. It took them both, conspiring concurrently, to break his leg.

Rusty voluntarily hopped in the motor home. She had heard enough, too. I wished the cowpuncher good health. He preferred that title to cowboy. We continued east.

Kingman lies just about in the middle of the longest stretch of Old Route 66 that still exists, about 140 miles of it. Route 66 was the main street of small towns like this all along its route. That is how it got yet another nickname: “Main Street of America.”

In 1938, Route 66 became the first cross-country highway in the United States to be completely paved. Construction of our interstate highway system began in 1956. Here in Arizona, parts of Route 66 were still carrying cross-country traffic almost three decades later. That is, until Interstate 40 pulled the last of it off the old Main Street of America.

T
hough radio reception is scratchy along this stretch of Interstate 40, I was hearing news of wildfires in the Coconino National Forest around Flagstaff. It's said to contain the largest stand of ponderosa Pine in the world. Reports of road closures caused me to rethink my plans as I approached Williams.

Smoke hanging over the tree line, albeit twenty miles ahead, made my decision easy. Williams, elevation 6,752, would do just fine.

It's a tourist town of 2,500 people. For the better part of this century, it has exploited its proximity to Grand Canyon National Park. Visited by over 5 million people a year, the Grand Canyon is America's number one tourist attraction not made by Disney. The Grand Canyon's popular South Rim fifty-nine miles north up Highway 64, is an easy drive from Williams.

I got the impression that Williams would include the Grand Canyon in its city limits if it could. The chamber of commerce, in effect, already has. It calls itself the Williams-Grand Canyon Chamber of Commerce. Even the town's century-old newspaper has stretched its name to include
Grand Canyon,
hyphenated between
Williams
and
News.
The town's tit le is “Gateway to the Grand Canyon.” This is no mere nickname, casual slogan, or debatable claim. No way! Williams
own
it. And no place else in this state better use it, because they have copyrighted it. It's their trademark. It even ends with the little circled R, for
registered.

Obviously, tourism is serious business here. Their season is short. Merchants catering to out-of-towners who don't make it between Memorial Day and Labor Day probably won't get a second chance. Of the 1,316 motel and bed-and-breakfast rooms here, most of them are empty all winter, either by intent or default.

The town's historic relevance is a lesser draw for tourists than the Grand Canyon, but if you count the downtown stores involved in its merchandising, it's a much bigger deal. Of course, it's the “Mother Road” again, Route 66.

“The last stoplight on Route 66 between Chicago and Los Angeles was right outside our door. It was a constant car-accident and horn-blowing caravan those final months before they opened I-40. The sound of a half-dozen semis with jake-brakes roaring and tires screeching was quite a clamor. And it happened, I think, every time the light turned red. When the light changed, it was almost as bad with everybody in low-gear unison,” John Holst told me.

“The day they opened the interstate I will never forget. People walked out in the middle of the street and just stood there, marveling at the emptiness. I did it myself. It was like somebody threw a switch on the track and sent the train in a different direction.”

John calls himself an innkeeper now. He operates the Red Garter Bed and Bakery. It's in a building on Old Route 66 that he has given a magnificent new life. The labor has consumed seventeen years, the better part of his. “Some guys want a ‘67 Chevy. I always wanted a class ic old building to rehab,” he said.

While enjoying fine coffee in John's ground-floor bakery, he showed me pictures and spoke of his reborn building with the enthusiasm of a proud parent.

Upstairs, now guest rooms, was once a bordello with eight cribs, each ten feet square with twelve-foot ceilings. The two front rooms, John said as we walked through them, were the “best-girl rooms.” Their windows look out over the railroad tracks across the street, which were the focus of Williams around the turn of the century. The windows made promotion and sol ici ting easy for the girls in those front rooms, which may account for their occupants being the “best” girls. Then again, who decided who was best, and how was it determined? John would not even guess.

Downstairs was a Saloon, one of many along this Saloon row, and an opium den. Attached to the back of the building is a two-story outhouse. That is, the toilet seats are on the second floor. The visual imagery here is just too real to pass up. Yes, it was a long drop.

The Grand Canyon Railway now uses the railroad tracks across the street. Second to Amtrak, it may be the most advertised railroad in the United States, surely in Arizona. It runs sixty-five miles to and from the Grand Canyon every day, except Christmas and the day before. It was built in 1901 to offer tourists an alternative to the eight-hour stagecoach ride from Flagstaff to the South Rim. It outlived the stagecoach but could not compete with the automobile. It quit running in 1968.

Although Amtrak does little more than blow a whistle going by here today, all the old passenger trains once stopped in Williams. There was even a Harvey House: the Fray Marcos. Everyone knows that Harvey Houses were a chain of railside hotels and dining rooms that spanned the country with the Santa Fe Railroad. Of course, you know that.

Service on the Grand Canyon Railway, with an old steam engine in the lead, was restarted in 1989. The depot is the original 1908 Fray Marcos. This “ride into history,” as they call it, hauls about 150,000 people a year. The daylight trip to the South Rim takes a little over two hours each way.

A subtle but important benefit of the railroad is that it cuts back on the vehicle traffic at the South Rim, where there is little room for it anyway. A few eccentrics still pound the podium
and say that we should never have opened the Grand Canyon to cars in the first place. Some say we should never have opened it to people. But those kind are hard to find around Williams.

N
orth of the Grand Canyon, the flat, empty mesas of Arizona suddenly give way to the rugged ridges of Utah. Sudden is the change of scenery. As if decreed by the two state legislatures. Bound by the Color ado River to the south and east, and elsewhere by the borders of Utah and Nevada, this 12,000-square-mile mesa is called the Arizona Strip. The only sign of life on it—human or otherwise—is this road.

Around 1895, half a million cattle grazed this flat land to death. For reasons known only to nature, the vegetation never has recovered. Not yet, anyway.

Passing into Utah on Highway 89, I immediately entered Kanab. This town lived its first fifty years practically isolated. It is still alone, but now easily accessible. Kanab is located in the true outback of southwest Utah, just two miles from the Arizona line, in the most uninhabitable terrain in the continental United States. And the most gorgeous.

Wagon trains didn't pass this way. Roaming migrants who settled the far-out places of the West never happened on it, either. Why? For a couple of big reasons: the gorge of the Colorado River is on two sides, the peaks of the Wasatch and Rocky Mountains on another. Even the arrival of the
cross-country railroads did not make it less remote. In fact, Kanab for two decades held the dubious national distinction as the incorporated town the greatest distance from a railroad.

Apparently, nobody came here by choice except the Indians. Mormon settlers were sent here from Salt Lake City in 1858. They built a fort in 1863, which was attacked so many times that they abandoned it four years later, fearing an Indian war. Another group of Mormons arrived as missionary-colonizers. They established a permanent peace with the Indians and founded Kanab in 1870.

The name Kanab was here before white settlers. It is an Anglicized form of the Paiute word for “willows”. The Indians gave the name to the nearby creek with lush willow trees along its banks.

With high sandstone cliffs edging it on three sides and an unproductive desert on the other, early Kanab was never prosperous. They raised sheep and cattle on mountain pastures, but mostly just hung on.

With every sunrise, folks here knew they lived in a magical place, where nature's wonders extended far over the horizon. They also knew that their future lay in sharing it. They simply waited for the automobile to catch on so it could happen. With paved roads, Kanab willingly gave up another unsought title: the most inaccessible incorporated town of more than 500 people in the United States.

Highways were only a part of the story. In the 1920s, a couple thousand miles away in Washington, D. C. , Kanab's destiny was being sketched on maps and chalkboards. Politicians were extolling the wonders of wilderness and designating national parks and monuments in Utah and Arizona. As a result, 2 million acres of geological marvels were set aside for public use. After the boundaries were drawn and the political dust settled, the folks in Kanab looked around them. The three roads out of town all lead to one or more of these natural wonders that Washington was going to open, promote, clean, and protect. None was more than a two-hour drive from here.

On the other side of the continent, at about the same time, a new industry was making a boomtown out of Holly wood,
California. Westerns were in vogue, both in this country and overseas. Movie studios needed filming locations that offered wide-open spaces. Obviously, they also wanted spectacular backdrops and varied landscapes. The area around Kanab was perfect. Today, Kanab likes to be known as “Little Hollywood.” Starting in 1924, with the Tom Mix movie
Deadwood Coach,
over fifty films have been made here.

Consistent with its past, Kanab was not just happened-upon or discovered like Lana Turner, making malts in a drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard. Kanab had to work for recognition. Two local men, the Parry brothers, were sent from Kanab as ambassadors to Hollywood with a packet of pictures. They called themselves “scenery salesmen.”

The bonanza started with a production company from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer headed by Wallace Berry. The movie was
The Bad Man of Brimstone.
MGM was back two years later making
Billy the Kid
with Robert Taylor. The word soon got around Hollywood that Kanab was not just a picture-perfect location but also had people who could produce whatever else a movie company needed.

Everybody got into the act, which paid very well. Two Mormon bishops here worked as cowboy extras and stunt riders. Townswomen were stand-ins. One even doubled for Maureen O'Hara. The mayor had an almost steady job as a chauffeur for movie directors. The sheriff doubled as a location-camp cook. City councilmen worked as horse wranglers. The town barber turned out to be a good actor and even got speaking parts. Many days a sign hung in his shop window: Working on a Movie. Back at 6:30.

Consequently, the people in Kanab paid grocery bills that they had owed for months and paid tax bills that had been delinquent for years. The winter of 1938, the year MGM came to town, was the first one that every Kanab youngster attended school. In the past, many simply never had clothes to go to school.

The movie companies rescued Kanab. A blight was rapdily destroying the nearby grasslands, without which local cattle
ranches could not survive. Without the ranches, Kanab had nothing but scenery.

How the West Was Won
finished shooting here in 1979. Since then a few film crews have come to shoot commercials and TV episodes, but Kanab's days in the movies may be over. Westerns are not made much anymore.

Utah 89 runs through town and makes a sharp turn by the Parry Lodge. It is a beautiful, white-pillared, colonial-style hotel built by Whit Parry in 1931. Better than anyone else, Parry knew from his tenure as a scenery salesman that movie companies needed a nice place to stay. So he built one. In the lodge, I found just what I expected. The dining room, with hardwood floors and linen-covered tables, is called the “dining room of the stars.” The lobby is walled with pictures of movie stars who stayed here. One is three times bigger than any other. It is “Duke,” of course, John Wayne. He made four movies here. The last one,
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
was filmed in 1949.