Along the Way

When I tell people I attended 14 Arizona schools before graduating from high school, they sometimes register looks of disbelief - or mutter things like, “That must have been terrible.” I smile and assure them it was just fine.

I am aware that most child-rearing authorities believe it best for a youngster to live in a quiet community, have the same friends and same schools through all grades. I have no problem recognizing the advantages of that type of tranquil permanency. But from personal experience, I can attest that a nomadic lifestyle, while rife with diversity, is not necessarily filled with trauma.

My youngest years, in the early '30s, were spent on a remote d desert homestead. Before I was five, I had held a Gila monster in my hands, nearly stepped on a coiled rattlesnake, and learned how to pan for gold.

My father was a civil engineer, and, after leaving the homestead, we went from project to project but always within Arizona. First, we moved to Tucson. One day, police surrounded the house next door and arrested John Dillinger's gang. I don't recall seeing Dillinger himself, but I frequently used the incident for show-and-tell, stating that I “thought” I saw him.

I started first grade in Jerome, a mining community on the side of Mingus Mountain, where rows of houses were perched, one above the other, on stair-step levels. Late one night, a dynamite truck carrying 15 tons of explosives caught fire on the level above our house. The sheriff knocked on our door and told us to crawl under our beds. We stayed there most of the night until the fire burned out and danger passed.

Later we returned to Tucson for part of a term, then moved to Nogales on the Mexican border. In Nogales I was a member of an ethnic minority. About 90 percent of the students were Hispanic.

After the first day of school, five of them were waiting for me in a vacant lot. The largest took me on, while the others watched. When one of the onlookers tried to trip me as I ducked a blow, my little sister stepped in to even things up. She was only a second-grader, but she was packing a heavy metal lunch pail. After a few whacks, my opponent extended his hand, introductions were made all around, and the five became my best buddies.

I attended two schools in Nogales. Then it was on to Benson (population about 1,000) in the San Pedro Valley, where we moved into the King's Rest Motel. I was only 11, but I deduced with some accuracy that no king had ever actually stayed at the King's Rest Motel. After some three weeks in tightly cramped

CONFESSIONS OF AN UNREPENTANT AND UN-TRAUMATIZED ARIZONA NOMAD

quarters, we rented a nice house in the little farm community of St. David (eight miles to the east), and I changed schools again. We had a big artesian pond on the property, stocked with bluegill and bass. I hunted quail in the nearby desert, learned to ride a horse, and frequently helped a classmate with his chores: milking cows, slopping pigs, and collecting eggs.

A month before the end of school, we went north to Williams on old U.S. Route 66. I finished the term there; then we moved 32 miles east to Flagstaff, where I climbed to the ancient volcanic rim of Sunset Crater, explored the Indian ruins at Wupatki, and fished for trout in Oak Creek Canyon, 20 miles to the south.

Next stop was Kingman, 143 miles west of Flagstaff. North of the community, I could wander through the crumbling remains of long-abandoned mining towns. I visited Hoover Dam; standing at the top, I tried to spit 726 feet to the Colorado River below.

We left Kingman before the end of the school year and moved to Phoenix, where we rented a house in an outlying agricultural area. One of my schoolmates was from a family of farm workers, and, on a memorable Saturday, I went with him and his parents to try my hand at picking cotton. The brief experience encouraged me to study harder.

Shortly thereafter we moved back to Tucson. This time I lived near the foothills of the 9,453-foot Santa Catalina Mountains, where my pals and I often searched deep canyons for the legendary Mine with the Iron Door. We never found it.

In the fall, I switched to a private school, where the junior-high football coach was a diminutive nun in a black habit. In a few months, we left for Globe, in the rugged mountains of east-central Arizona. My dad was surveying on the San Carlos Indian Reservation. When summer arrived, I frequently accompanied him to work, made friends with the Apache Indians on his crew, and scoured the hills looking for those green gemstones called peridots.

By fall we were in Holbrook, a small town on the periphery of the sprawling Navajo reservation. I visited remote back-road trading posts where Navajo men in high-crowned black hats came to exchange their turquoise for supplies. To the south of Holbrook were the pine-covered White Mountains, where I could fish in sparkling streams and, in the winter, hunt for deer and turkeys. We stayed a full school year in Holbrook, then moved to Prescott, a town of 12,000 nestled against the soaring Bradshaw Mountains. Prescott was a Western version of a Norman Rockwell town, and benevolent fate let me complete my final three years of high school there.

I'm not sure why moving never bothered me. But I tend to believe, for reasons unknown, that I simply viewed all of Arizona as my home. I moved from town to town as easily as a youngster in an ordinary house would move from room to room. And I seemed to realize that the highways that led to new adventures also could lead me back to the old towns and old friends. Maybe that's all that was needed to save me from trauma and give me comfort: just knowing that all roads run both ways.