Yule Tree in July

Someone removed the door and windows from the rotting log cabin maybe 15 years ago. That was about the time the U.S. Forest Service decided General Springs was a historic site.

Without glass, the crooked window opening in the south wall gives the cabin the look of staring vacantly. My father cut that window with an axe and a crosscut saw in 1940 or '41. I imagine that now the ghosts of my childhood can flow in and out, and maybe they won't be there the next time I visit.

I equate that cabin with many of the best seasons of my life, and yet we never spent a December there. Such a waste of a classic setting! The snows were too deep at 7,300 feet, and the roads and vehicles of the 1940s too rudimentary. But my grandmother and I decorated some memorable Christmas trees therein July. In summer, my father was a fireguard for the Forest Service, on duty at the cabin 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In winter he found To my parents, the cabin was just another of the exotic places we lived. It was better than a tent house but not as comfort-able as the Phoenix gas station that had been converted to a home.

Mom cooked on a wood stove at General Springs, and the outhouse was beyond a little hill. In the evenings, we read by lantern light or listened to such favorites as “Fibber McGee and Molly” on a battery-powered radio. We hauled water in buckets from a little spring that Brig. Gen. George Crook had lent his title of rank, if not his name, in 1871.

When General Crook located the spring, he had just come to Arizona Territory to subdue the Apache and Yavapai Indians. Crook ordered a road built along the crest of the Mogollon Rim, and it became a key artery in the history of Arizona. It was rebuilt in the 1930s.I knew it as the jolting, unpaved Rim Road,

and it is not much improved today. In 1882, after Crook had gone east to fight the Sioux, some Apaches refused to stay subdued. One band engaged U.S. cavalrymen in a classic battle at Big Dry Wash, seven miles from General Springs. Our clearing had been a staging point for both the fleeing Indians and the pursuing soldiers. In 1883, a promoter sought to build a railroad from the mining town of Globe to the new Santa Fe main line at Flagstaff. He tried to bore a tunnel through the Rim at General Springs, but he ran out of money. I didn't begin to appreciate the history of the place until I was an adult. Apparently a Forest Service carpenter named Louis Fisher built the cabin near the spring in 1915. Its back room, which we used for a bedroom, was originally a shed for tack and tools. A rancher in the Rim country told a friend of mine that he lived in the cabin in 1923. He said he shot a rat under the sink with a 30-30. He must have meant that he shot a rat under the dishpan, because there was no sink. Other rats survived well into the 1940s. I told Mom that story, and she said matter-of-factly, "Dad never used anything bigger than a .22 in the house." That was true. One night he looked out the window and saw a skunk molesting my basketball. He fired through the open window and killedthem both with a single shot. We were frequently lonely there. It was at least 80 miles to any pavement. When World War II brought rationing of gasoline and tires, people didn't do much traveling. But my grandparents came to visit every summer, driving up from Phoenix in their 1938 Plymouth coupe. Grandpa hiked with me to the beaver dams downstream from the cabin. And once we walked down the Rim to the mouth of the aborted 1883 railroad tunnel. Grandma had an odd sense of humor that disconcerted adults but made sense to her grandkids. Her father had been a Methodist circuit rider on the plains, and she knew how to create fun wherever she was.

them both with a single shot. We were frequently lonely there. It was at least 80 miles to any pavement. When World War II brought rationing of gasoline and tires, people didn't do much traveling. But my grandparents came to visit every summer, driving up from Phoenix in their 1938 Plymouth coupe. Grandpa hiked with me to the beaver dams downstream from the cabin. And once we walked down the Rim to the mouth of the aborted 1883 railroad tunnel. Grandma had an odd sense of humor that disconcerted adults but made sense to her grandkids. Her father had been a Methodist circuit rider on the plains, and she knew how to create fun wherever she was.

During each of her visits she grinned conspiratorially and suggested that we decorate a "Christmas" tree, just the two of us. We found a little fir with a perfect shape. We festooned it with flowers that grew wild-Indian paintbrush, daisies, violets, sunflowers, columbines. It's illegal to do that today, and not very smart; enough people visit the Rim country that they could decimate the floral population in short order. But in those days, flowers vastly outnumbered humans. "We need more red flowers," she'd say, and I'd look for Indian paintbrush. We laughed and joked and decorated until every branch had its flowers. A large sunflower served as a golden star at the top. We stood back then to admire our fanciful tree. Grandma's face crinkled up in the grin that acknowledged our childishness and validated it. "Isn't that grand?" she'd ask. We shared other Christmas trees, in more appropriate seasons, for many years. But none seemed more in har mony with its setting than that flowered little fir tree of summer, high up on the Mogollon Rim.

James E. Cook writes a column about Arizona history for The Arizona Republic. Ray Roberts has appreciated the Arizona landscape since he studied at Orme School. He is a graduate of California's Art Center.