Coast-to-Coast Adventure

COAST COAST Memories A Father's Old Diary Describes 1924 Family Adventures Across Arizona by Virginia Thomas

Coast to coast and return -1924 diary.

These words are written in pencil on some yellowed sheets of lined paper. The handwriting is my father's, and the sheets are held together by two bent paper clips. I found them in a carton recently when my husband and I moved from the house near Philadelphia where we had lived for 48 years to a new house we'd built on a corner of our daughter's sheep farm in northern Vermont.

I sit in my chair by the big window and look out at a hundred lambs that bounce about behind the barn. But if I shut my eyes, I can see tumbleweeds bouncing across the dry desert of the Southwest, and they look like the lambs. I can smell sagebrush, and the remembered scent overwhelms the nearby smells of sheep manure. I can also still hear the high yapping barks of prairie dogs. I am 88 now, but as I sit and read this old diary that tells of our first cross-country trip-a 1924 journey that took us through the deserts of Arizona-I am a 7-year-old girl again, and this country is still fresh and new and unspoiled.

Here are the words, indicated by italics, that my father wrote on the lined paper while sitting each night on his canvas cot in the small palmetto tent with a center pole.

With good roads and not too many stops to repair flat tires, we could make 190 or even 250 miles a day. Coatesville, Gettysburg and over the Appalachian Mountains to the National Old Trails Road to Wheeling with many detours onto rutted dirt roads because of spring floods.

"Dusty roads." Do you know what those two words can mean? In your air-conditioned car, can you picture what "dusty roads" really signifies? First, the roads are dusty because it is has not rained for weeks. If you are alone on these dusty roads, it is bearable, but, "Oh! Don't let him pass, Daddy!" because then you are engulfed in a cloud of gritty, sneeze-making dust and are forced to fall back-way back. Second, the roads are dusty because it is dry and hot, well into the hundreds and with a wind that makes your face feel as drawn and old as mine does as I sit watching the lambs bounce about like the tumbleweeds.Do you, in your air-conditioned car, fully appreciate what it is like to be cool in the midst of this searing heat? But we were cool. Even the cat and the dog were cool. In an open touring car such as the one we had in 1924, there are ways to keep cool if you have an inventive mother. At every stop for gas or for more rubber cement to patch inner tubes, we would look for the town ice house and buy a block of clear, beautiful ice. Mother would sit in the back seat with this block of ice in a large pan, and she would chip off pieces for us (to eat, or to put down a brother's back). We each had a piece of cheesecloth draped over our heads, and over the cat, and on the beagle's head, atop which we lined up chunks of ice. The ice would melt, the cheesecloth would get wet, the hot desert winds would evaporate the wet and-instant air conditioning.

From Colorado, we eventually travel southward through Raton Pass, with switchbacks, and onward to the New Mexico town called Las Vegas, and on through the Rio Grande Valley, and then westward into Arizona.

The ewes are bleating for their lambs outside my window, and I find the years melding together as these Vermont sheep sounds blend with those of that Indian's sheep-and my eyes squint in the bright sun and see those five elephants all in a row once again. Do I really remember that scene as well as I think I do? Or is it because I have the old, sepia-colored photographs in an album to remind me?

There are two photographs in that old album, taken about 60 seconds apart, and I know it doesn't require those photographs to bring a vivid memory of what happened one afternoon in the desert.

In one photograph, I'm the skinny girl with a boy's haircut and wearing khaki knickers playing with my two brothers down in a deep, dry gulch. We are making roads and towns in the dirt for our little cars. Suddenly, there is a strange roaring sound. We don't hear it, but Daddy does as he stands up on the edge of the gulch taking this picture of us, and he lets out one yell: "COME OUT!" Because one always does as Daddy says on these trips, we do. We scramble up the steep cliffs just ahead of a monstrous flood of water, brown with mud, that bears whole trees on its leading wave, water that fills the dry gulch from edge to edge in those 60 desperate seconds that it takes us to scramble out. You can see in the second photograph the dry gulch that becomes a wall-to-wall roiling, muddy flood.

Today, you drive across the desert-air conditioning on, kids grousing-on paved roads, and you have probably never heard of "dips" in the road as we used to know them. In 1924, there were such bad desert roads that I remember signs saying "ROAD BAD MAKE YOUR OWN." Maybe we were the forerunners of those dreadful allterrain vehicles. In our car, which had a high clearance, we'd go off through the sagebrush, hoping we'd not have to ford too many dry gulches. The dirt roads didn't have bridges, and they didn't even have culverts. They had dips where you drove down into the dry gulch and out the other side. After one or two experiences with the way a dry gulch could change into a roaring flood in seconds, one learned to treat all dips like railroad crossings: We stopped, looked and, above all, listened before crossing.

"Left rear axle and housing broke." In the middle of the Petrified Forest, 1924, with three young children and not much food or water. When I asked my mother once, when she was almost 90 years old, what she had felt back then, she said she had thought nothing could be so bad that she'd rather be back in Brooklyn with three kids out of school and the long, hot city summer ahead of her. So the diary continues: Sent to Flagstaff for parts which arrived 7:00 P.M. Repairs completed 3:00 A.M. Camped by road while repairs in progress. 115 miles. Beautiful day and night. Rabbits.

Now the diary moves on to the Grand Canyon and a hike that we took. I sit in my chair, looking out at the Vermont hills and our pond, and remember how I sat on a boulder in the middle of the sparkling cold Bright Angel Creek and nursed my blistered feet, and I can feel the wonder of that cold water as it soothed them. The beagle was even more exhausted than I was.Daddy wrote about that day:

I can feel the ache in my legs now. But I can also hear the wonderful silence-a silence so intense that one could not even hear the muffled roar of the Colorado River as it worked away miles below, except as an occasional breeze would carry the sound up to you. No sightseeing helicopters battering the air. No high jets trailing engine moans and vapor trails. And when you got down to that mighty river, it roared at its digging with a gritty, angry sound and it looked like liquid mud. 1924. Way before a Glen Canyon Dam was even a gleam in some crazed engineer's mind. Way before the river became tamed and beautifully green-and dead, no longer digging, digging, digging.

Many more days and miles later, there's Los Angeles and Yosemite, soon Yellowstone, and then on to a South Dakota gumbo that is as gummy as chewing gum and as slippery as grease on a linoleum floor. Driving a road built on gumbo makes it clear why farmers lined up on rainy days with their draft horses to tow stuck cars out of ditches for a goodly price. Even Daddy's usual brevity breaks down when faced with describing gumbo:

I put down those yellowed sheets of paper and look out the window at the sheep that are all filing off down to the lower pasture, and I think I hear a prairie dog yip, but it is only our dog whimpering in his sleep. There are miles and miles to go yet before I get back to Brooklyn in September, and I'll no longer be 7 years old, chasing after a bit of tumbleweed-I'll be 8. No, that's wrong, I'm in Vermont, am I not? And I'll not be 8, I am 88. But the smell of the desert after a rain can still make me feel like a 7-year-old inside. All