Westward hoboes : $b ups and downs of frontier motoringDixon, Winifred Hawkridge
General
Westward hoboes : $b ups and downs of frontier motoring
Dixon, Winifred Hawkridge
Automobile travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
Toby, a beginner at Galveston, could already manage almost any ordinary
road, but not until later did she become experienced enough for
sky-climbing. Consequently I took the canyons, and for two days there
had been little else. By ten, when one of the neat state sign-posts
told us we were but five miles from the Goodfellow Ranch, our
destination, I felt nearly exhausted, nervously and physically. But the
home stretch proved worst of all. It led across a prairie to a descent
encouragingly marked “Private road. Dangerous. Take at your own risk.”
Well, to reach our bed that night we had to take it. In a moment we
were nose-diving down another canyon, which in daylight was only
moderately terrifying, but at night seemed bottomless. It was Fish
Creek over again, with two irritating additions,--one, a slimy,
skiddy adobe road full of holes and strewn with boulders; and two,
a ridiculous baby jack-rabbit, who, frightened by our headlights,
leaped just ahead of us in the ruts. He would neither hurry nor remove
himself. At times his life seemed directly pitted against ours, yet we
could not bring ourselves to run over his soft little body. It was the
last straw. When the sickening distance down the canyon lessened, and
we saw the cheery lights of the ranch through the fir trees, I nearly
cried with relief.
“Will you come in,--you must be tired,” said a pretty Scotch voice. A
little woman held a lantern. “Two ladies! We saw your lights, but never
dreamed you’d be coming down in the dark. There’s many that think the
road none too safe in the day.”
Her remark was balm to my chagrin at having let a jack-rabbit unnerve
me. All our lives, it seemed, had been spent driving down the edge of
hair-raising precipices in the dark; to be free of them at last, to
enter a warm, lighted, snug cottage, where a friendly Papago servant
led us to the cleanest, most luxurious of beds,--this was heaven.
Natural Bridge can be reached two ways from the world,--south from
Flagstaff ninety miles, or by the Apache Trail from Globe or Tucson.
The northern road lay under twenty feet of snow, and this while a huge
apricot tree,--the oldest in the state,--bloomed pink, and the alfalfa
floor of the little canyon was varnished with emerald. Next morning we
looked on this budding and blossoming world, hedged in with red cliffs
and lapis lazuli hills. A few neat cottages and farm buildings nestled
together,--but where was the bridge, large enough we had been told, to
hide three or four of the Virginian variety under its arch?
They laughed at our question. It is the standing joke at the Goodfellow
ranch. They pointed to the five acre field of level alfalfa, edged with
a prosperous vineyard. “You are on the bridge.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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