On the Back Roads (26 page)

It was too good to last. At Flagstaff, I would leave Interstate 40 and head north up Highway 89. This course would put the wind exactly where I didn't want it. But life is still good. Before I got to the open expanse of the Coconino Plateau, where the wind was free, I would find shelter in the Wilderness Mountains. Covering them is the largest stand of ponderosa pine in the world. Nature creates no better windbreak.

The day began clear and sunny, but at Flagstaff it turned gray and miserable. A pall of snow covered the town. I turned up the heater. Outside, people either scurried from place to place or were clenched together like cold fists. Snow began collecting at the bottom of the windshield. For a state that makes its living by being warm, it appeared that Arizona was
having a bad day. This was early October, when seventy degrees is the norm here in Flagstaff.

Flagstaff is not typical of Arizona, though. Phoenix is. That sprawling Sunbelt mecca is in the low desert, 140 miles south of here. Flagstaff is 7,000 feet high. It has an average high temperature in January, for example, of forty-one degrees and a low of fourteen. North of town is Humphreys Peak at 12,643 feet, the highest point in the state. Up there at the Fairfield Snowbowl, they have three chairlifts and enjoyed cross-country skiing six months of the year.

Flagstaff is a big town, really, with 46,000 people. From the long string of headlights coming at me, it appears most of them are on the road this morning. Pregame shoppers, maybe? It's a football Saturday. They do have the homegrown Lumberjacks to root for. I just passed their campus at Northern Arizona University.

Leaving town, snow was still falling, but the flakes were dropping one at a time.

From her stretched-out travel position, Rusty was staring at me. Why do dogs do that? Staring back never affects her either way. She keeps doing it. It is interesting how long a stare can last without a blink. I am sure that dogs build up a memory bank of behavioral patterns of their masters. Drawing on that, they anticipate events or activities that affect them. For example, Rusty knows that when I open a closet door where her leash hangs she will probably be going for a walk. So she goes into her dance of anticipation. This staring may well be the loading process, the input into her data bank. But she is wasting her energy studying how I steer a motor home. Then again, who am I to say?

If the stare means I want to stop and get out, then I got the message this time.

I took the route to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. The choppy road to the visitor center is a two-mile dish rattler. I stopped there to see what this place was about. Opening the door of the motor home, a cold blast made a good case for putting on a jacket and persuaded Rusty to stay where she was.

“It's last eruption was 800 years ago,” the man at the desk said. “But the lava flows near the cone look like they hardened just yesterday.”

Apparently, tourists all ask the same questions, so he anticipated the next one.

“No, you can't look down in the volcano. You just look up at the rim, the volcanic cone.”

Back in the motor home, we bumped along another half mile, past the Bonito Lava Flow, an inhospitable volcanic lands cape. At the look-up point, a one-mile foot trail loops around the base of the volcano. We got out. I considered taking Rusty on the self-guided nature walk, but a sign with a dog and a red line through it said that was a bad idea. It was nippy, anyway.

Sunset Crater formed when molten rock sprayed high into the air out of a crack in the ground. The molten rock quickly solidified, then fell to earth as cinders. As periodic eruptions continued over the next 200 years, heavier debris accumulated around the vent and created the 1,000-foot cone. In its most recent burst of activity, around the year 1250, lava containing iron and sulfur shot from the vent. According to the Park Service brochure, “the red and yellow oxidized particles fell back onto the rim as a permanent ‘sunset,' so bright that the cone appears still to glow with intense volcanic heat.”

Maybe it was too cold. The cone didn't glow. It just wasn't a good day in Arizona.

O
n the Coconino Plat eau, high winds persisted but the sky was clear. I set the speed at forty-five mph. To go would tempt fate. Gusts moved the motor home as if they had hooks. They were more comfortably managed at an easy pace.

There is nothing wrong with going slow. I turned off the radio and shut out all but the here and now, remembering what Emmy had said: “the traveler who misses the journey misses about all he is going to get.”

Ahead, red-rock mesas interrupted the emptiness. But for the highway, the land was featureless.

It is a sad comment that so many people in modern America can't imagine a place like this, where you can gaze into infinity without fences, pools, or houses to mar the view. Sadder still, few have any idea why it even matters.

Just before Cameron, I entered the great Navajo Nation. It is the largest of all Indian reservations, almost as big as West Virginia. It fills most of the northeastern part of Arizona. Covering 25,000 square miles, it spreads into neighboring New Mexico and Utah. At the center of the reservation is Hopi territory. It's a rectangle, the boundaries of which the tribes can
not agree upon. Although the Hopi have lived here longer than any other surviving people, they are now, by our decree, totally surrounded by their old enemies, the Navajo.

I passed through the Painted Desert. Wind had textured big drifts of orange sand into rills. Spaced sporadically along the edge of the highway were display stands made of scrap boards and flapping sheets of black plastic. Wind-blasted signs pitched so wildly that it was impossible to read what was for sale, or would be, on a better day.

In an earlier era, whites came through here in wagons to trade beads with Indian tribes that they knew little about. Now whites come to buy beads, driving sport utility vehicles named after Indians.

I arrived at Tuba City about sundown in a flurry of blowing sand. Founded in 1870 by Mormon missionaries and named for a Hopi chief, Tuba City is totally Navajo now.

The trading post here has been a landmark in Arizona since the 1880s. Now fully restored, it is perhaps the last remnant of Tuba City's Anglo heritage. Appropriately, McDonald's is across the street.

For one who lays low on holiday weekends, leaving them for crowds who use them as mini-vacations, my visit here was bad timing. Three tribal squad cars at the prime intersection in town were an indication. But I wrote it off as Saturday-night normal, until I learned that this was the final night of the week-long, Twenty-Nineth Annual Toh'nanees Dizi' Western Navajo Fair. The rodeo was already underway, as was the powwow at the high-school gym. The “redneck” country dance was next.

I hightailed it to the RV park behind the Quality Inn. There, the people in line at the checkin desk all spoke German. The two young girls running the place spoke English, the high-school variety.

A stupid policy of the Quality Inn threatens to turn a simple communication problem into an international incident, the Navajo Nation versus Germany. A key is required to turn on the water at each RV site, itself an inconsiderate and dim-witted idea. Obviously, if you are paying $19.50 for a full
hookup, you want water. The Quality Inn wanted a deposit of $5.00 on the key. The Germans, three families in three motor homes, apparently did not understand that the money would be refunded. Finally, it was agreed that they would rent one key for all three families to use.

My turn. I think the girls were relieved to see an American, native or otherwise.

Then one dropped a comment. “But you know, we are an hour behind Tuba City.”

“Who is?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“The hotel, the trading post, the restaurant.”

“Why is that?

“Tuba City is on daylight time.”

“Aren't we in Tuba City?”

“Yes, but this is county land.”

“It's not the reservation?”

“Yes, but the county is on mountain time.”

“Oh, so the whole reservation in on daylight time.”

“Yes, except for right here.”

“Isn't that con fusing?”

“No, we're used to it.”

“I mean for customers.”

“Don't know. Why should it be?”

That's the way that day ended. I climbed into bed, telling Rusty I wouldn't want to live it over.

T
he next day, a much better one, I crossed the Navajo Nation. On the other side, Highway 160 cuts across the corner of New Mexico before entering Colorado. I was headed for a Colorado town named Dolores. By day's end, I set up housekeeping there next to the Delores River at the Outlook Motel and RV Park.

An interesting thing about this town: after forty-eight hours here, I had met more Texans than locals, of which there are 986. I can say the same for guys from Arkansas and Louisiana. Orange hats and camouflage pants are everywhere. It's deer-hunting season.

They pull in here at the RV park red-eyed and unshaven in anything that has four-wheel drive and a trailer hitch. Behind them, under waterproof tarps on flat hay trailers, are what they have packed for a week in the mountains and maybe a couple of all-terrain vehicles. Five-gallon cans lined the back of one trailer—two for gas, twelve for wafer. Long horse trailers, their roofs covered with bales of hay, haul horses and mules. Several pickups carried electric generators. Not just for campsite power, they are to operate refrigerated compartments on the way home, a nonstop trip that can take
eighteen to twenty-four hours. The sport may be in the hunt, but on home turf, the fresh venison and elk in those coolers are what they have to show for their week in the Colorado Rockies.

Main-street Dolores loves them.

At Wagons West you can buy a sweatshirt fronted with an elk for $34.99, or for $75.00, a two-holed birdcage. Incidentally, the birdcage is made of rare, old barn boards and is dated and signed. Proprietor Sondra Childs calls the deer hunt “our Christmas.”

On a table out front, at the edge of the parking lot, is an electric roasting oven like the one my mother used for cooking the Christmas turkey. Sondra has it bubbling with ham and beans. It draws the orange-hat crowd like free drinks in a Vegas casino. And Sondra knows her customer's tastes. Next to the pepper is a bottle of McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.

Before noon today, Sondra took in $8,000 just on hunting licenses. A $95,000 day is not hard to do during hunting season. Contrast that with one day last winter when she took in just 34 cents. Her friend had bought a candy stick. Her store will stay open until midnight tonight. “Hunters just drive until they get here, which can be anytime. So we adjust,” Sondra explained.

As do the gals at the Ponderosa Restaurant. “They ask us what time we open. We ask them what time they want breakfast. They say 5:00, so we open at 4:30.” The waitress who told me that was still bright-eyed. The season, however, was just beginning. They close at 10:00 p.m. and keep those long hours throughout the month-long hunt.

At the Outlook, Ray and Darlene LeBlanc's ten motel units and three cabins are booked a year in advance. While sheets tumbled in the dryer, Darlene rested for a few minutes. “It's an exciting time with all the goings on. Many of the fellows don't even stay here. They just stop for showers. We keep a room open for them. They wash up, make phone calls, and they're gone ‘til next year.”

“No women?” I asked.

“Ninety-five percent are men, maybe more. But have you not iced each group is a family? Fat her, sons, cousins, sometimes grandsons. It's really neat.”

A hunter from Austin, Texas, told me that he has horses trained for roping but wouldn't bring them up in these mountains. “They might get hurt, for one thing. A mountain horse, now, you can't believe what it can do. They'll take ya straight up, even better than those things.” He pointed to a Polaris 4X4 in the back of a pickup. It appeared as two seats atop four balloon tires.

“That gang from East Texas brought horses.”

“Maybe those boys have worked them in the mountains somewhere, though there's nothing like these where they live. A horse is good, don't get me wrong. They walk up on a deer and won't spook it. I mean close enough to kill it. But unless a horse is gun-broke, you better get off to shoot. You can train a horse to do anything but stand still.”

For the rest of the day, they came off the mountain. Mud hung everywhere, even on side mirrors. Rusty teamed up with two other dogs to form a greeting party. Darlene's dalmatian, on just three legs {she was hit by a car}, set the pace. It was like a homecoming.

The river flowing through town took its name from two Catholic priests who passed through here in 1876. They gave it a long Spanish name that ended with the word
Dolores.
Translated, the name meant “The River of the Lady of Sorrow.” Colorful as it may have been, that long name did not survive the last century. So, in the finest tradition of American place-names, Colorado now has a river, a town, and even a county named Dolores.

Because Dolores lies in a narrow river valley, it comes and goes in only two directions, stretching along Railroad and Central Avenues. The next morning, I walked into town along Railroad, also Highway 145. Before 1953, a walk here would have been along the tracks of the Rio Grande Southern Railroad {RGSRR}.

“I remember my dad saying, ‘If I knew I was going to take it up, I wouldn't have put it down so well.' His last days on
the job were spent pulling up the track that he had worked to keep down his whole life. He came here in 1916,” Ruby Gonzales told me.

Ruby, at age sixty-four, is a volunteer at the Dolores Visitor's Center, where we met. It's in a Victorian-style building, a replica of the town's original train depot. Inside are pictures of Dolores' railroading days, which began in 1891.