Okay, for all you non Arizonans out there, here\u2019s an Anglo version of a pronunciation guide for that particular word. Pell on see yos. \u00a0With the emphasis on the see. \u00a0That pair of double Ls in the middle of the word turns into a Y, and don\u2019t bother asking me why. \u00a0If that\u2019s turns out to be some kind of cultural misappropriation, bite me. \u00a0Because the Peloncillos–a forty-mile-long mountain range that straddles the Arizona\/New Mexico border\u2014and I have a long history.<\/p>\n
Speaking of long histories\u2014I\u2019ve been writing this blog for a long time, which is to say eleven years or so. \u00a0That\u2019s a lot of blogging. \u00a0I have a sneaking suspicion that somewhere along the way may have written about a long ago Sunday ride with my folks, one that went horribly wrong, when my father decided to take his wife and five of his seven children on an afternoon excursion to Skeleton Canyon. In the Peloncillos.<\/p>\n
After church we drove from Bisbee to Douglas and then headed east from there through the San Bernardino Valley on The Geronimo Trail. We were riding in my Dad\u2019s several year-old 53 DeSoto which, I have it on good authority, was traded in shortly after this adventure. My folks were in the front with my baby sister, Janie, while my three brothers and I rode in the back, without the benefit of a single seatbelt among us, duking it out as to who got to sit by the window. Two windows four kids? You can bet there was a whole lot of sniping and griping going on<\/p>\n
At the time Geronimo Trail wasn\u2019t much of a road\u2014it still isn\u2019t\u2014and not far out of town it got a lot worse. There were plenty of switchbacks and plenty of washed out washes to cross, but there wasn\u2019t water in any of them. It was slow going, but we finally made it to Skeleton Canyon where we exited the car in order to have our traditional traveling snack\u2014dead store-bought, day-old sweet-rolls, studded with raisins, and luke warm pineapple grapefruit juice. Whoever thought even one of those combinations was a good idea.<\/p>\n
If you have a nodding acquaintance with American History, you may have heard about the Mormon Battalion, a group of people who traveled by wagon from St. Louis to San Diego. \u00a0You may be assuming that this was a group of pious religious zealots, Books of Mormon clutched in hand, setting out to save the West. \u00a0I have no doubt that there were a few devout Mormon missionaries in the group\u2014none of them wearing white shirts, ties, and riding bicycles, I\u2019ll wager\u2014but the majority of the people there were looking for a cheap and easy way to get from St. Louis to San Diego. And the route they chose, took them across the wilds of west Texas and southern New Mexico and straight into Arizona. Through the Peloncillos. At Skeleton Canyon.<\/p>\n
When they got there, the grade was so steep that they had to dismantle the wagons and use a block-and-tackle arrangement to move everything, livestock included, from on side to the other. Does this sound easy to you? Cheap maybe, but definitely not easy.<\/p>\n
Our father, Norm, was a history buff, so while he was regaling us with all these interesting details, a rainstorm blew in\u2014and out again, almost immediately. When it was time to head home, my mother who always served as co-pilot, took over\u2014not driving but directing. Evie was a woman who didn\u2019t chew her cabbage twice and didn\u2019t like going the same way twice either. So instead of turning around and heading back to Douglas\u2014the easy way\u2014she wanted us to go home by way of Animas.<\/p>\n
And so we did. We headed off down the mountain. Did I mention this was the Fifties? Did I mention there was no such thing as THE WEATHER CHANNEL? And just because it hadn\u2019t been raining in Bisbee and Douglas on the west side of the Peloncillos didn\u2019t mean it hadn\u2019t been raining on the east side. \u00a0As we started down, we began going through running washes. At first there wasn\u2019t a lot of water, but pretty soon there was \u00a0a whole lot more. That\u2019s how you get flash floods in the desert\u2014water runs downhill. At one point, after we had almost high-centered on a boulder I heard my dad say soto voce <\/i>to my mother, \u201cI don\u2019t think we can get back up this.\u201d \u00a0And that was a problem, because to get to the town of Animas and get home, we had to drive across the Animas Playa.<\/p>\n
A playa in the desert is an alkali flat or a basin with no outlet that periodically fills up with water which, in this case, was exactly what had happened. When we finally made it down out of the mountains and into the desert, we had raging floods behind us and a long flat expanse of water stretching ahead. My father said nothing, although I\u2019m sure he was sweating bullets. Instead, he took a heading in the middle space between the tops of two sets of parallel fence posts sticking out of the water, on what he hoped was either side of the road, and away we went.<\/p>\n
The fighting for position in the back seat came to an abrupt halt as soon as water started seeping in under the door.\u00a0 When we made it to Animas finally, the whole town\u2014all twenty-five people or so\u2014were standing on the deserted railroad track, waiting to greet us. We were the first car that had come through in a week.<\/p>\n
That trip was one of the highlights of my childhood, and it\u2019s one of the reasons there\u2019s a flash-flood in the Joanna Brady book named Skeleton Canyon. In fact it\u2019s the whole reason there\u2019s a book by that name at all!<\/p>\n
So why am I talking about the Peloncillos this week? Because in the course of the past few days, Joanna Brady and I have spent a lot of time lurking around a crime scene there. Actually that\u2019s not true. The crime scene is fictional. In reality I\u2019m sitting on my patio in Tucson, imagining the landscape and writing about it. \u00a0And it turns out, Joanna isn\u2019t there either\u2014at least not yet and it may end up that she doesn\u2019t get to go. After all, she\u2019s still off work on maternity leave.<\/p>\n
But if you somehow decide to visit Arizona and want to have an idea about the Old West, the real Old West\u2014take that trip from Douglas to Animas. Imagine crossing that stretch of trackless desert in a wagon.<\/p>\n
You might want to schedule your trip at a time when the John Slaughter Ranch Museum is open. \u00a0When Texas John Slaughter was elected to the office of sheriff, it was a forty mile horseback ride from his ranch in the San Bernardino Valley to the county seat in Bisbee. \u00a0Tombstone was another thirty miles beyond that. \u00a0He had one of the few phones in the county. \u00a0If someone called reporting trouble in, say Tombstone, he\u2019d get the combatants on the phone and tell them they\u2019d better straighten it out on their own, because if he had to come all the way there, they would be sorry.<\/p>\n
Skeleton Canyon is where the Clanton Gang of Wyatt Earp fame hung out.<\/p>\n
If you decide to go, give yourself plenty of time. Take food and water\u2014no fast food joints anywhere around. You could just as well leave your cell phone at home, because there won\u2019t be any service. Your preferred vehicle should be four-wheel drive, and by all means pay attention to the weather reports on both sides of the Arizona\/ New Mexico border.<\/p>\n
Even with all those cautions, however, I promise you, it\u2019s a trip you\u2019ll never forget.<\/p>\n
I certainly haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n
And with all that, if it turns out I\u2019ve written some version of this some other time? \u00a0I\u2019m sure someone will let me know. Unlike my mother, I don\u2019t mind chewing my cabbage twice.<\/p>\n
So thanks for the memories, Norman and Evie.<\/p>\n
You made growing up great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, for all you non Arizonans out there, here\u2019s an Anglo version of a pronunciation guide for that particular word. Pell on see yos. \u00a0With the emphasis on the see. \u00a0That pair of double Ls in the middle of the word turns into a Y, and don\u2019t bother asking me why. \u00a0If that\u2019s turns out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,5,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bisbee","category-family","category-traveling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-oP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1544,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}