Backcountry on the Perkinsville Road

THE DERKINSVILLE ROAD A LONG, LONG ROAD A-WINDING

TEXT BY LEO W. BANKS PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORGE H.H. HUEY He said he might not have much time, and at first I didn't believe him. He never uttered the word "dying." Directness didn't suit him. "They tell me I might be closing down," is the way he put it. Like he was a gift shop. "Oh, shoot." That's like me. I always know just what to say. He had something in mind, the reason for his call. Some years ago, he spent a day rolling through some of the biggest country in Arizona, ranch country, wide open, solitary, a continent of colors and shapes, preciously lonesome, and then perilous on its last stretch up over a hold-your-breath mountain road which was way too close to the angels, at least too close too soon. Nothing at all happened to him that day, and it was beautiful because of it. Simple, clean, and unforgettable. He'd been thinking about it and wanted to do it again, but because of his illness he couldn't. "How about you do it?" "Me?" There I go again. "Yeah. You do it for me. I'll be thinking about it, you know, at the same time, and then you give me a call and tell me how it was." "Oh." "It'll be like I was there." "Anything. Sure."

A few days later, I was roaring along the Perkinsville Road with a big dust billow spinning over the trunk of my car, following me, hot on the chase and never quite winning.

Winter shouldn't look that good. The sky was vast, a blue world. The air was clean and delicious to breathe. It was hard not to believe that this feeling would last forever, not just until I reached my destination: Jerome, the old mine town that kept burning to the ground and coming back to life, stronger, somehow unbowed. How appropriate. (See Arizona Highways, Feb. '93.) Five miles in from State Route 89, at Chino Valley, and a cow decided to test herself against my engine.

She was jet black and appeared out of nowhere at my passenger door, running shotgun, head pumping up and down, enjoying the occasion of company to run faster and faster into a draw below the road and up, in sight again, back at my side.

Kicking dust. She worked hard for as long as it was fun, then her nostrils jumped open and shut as she lost her wind and fell back.

Farther on where the road bent, I looked back, and I saw her, still staring at me as I pressed the pedal to beyond.

(LEFT) The Verde flows through the Perkins Ranch amid a swath of lush cottonwoods. (ABOVE) Viewed from Perkinsville Road at dawn, the San Francisco Peaks command the horizon.

Mile after mile and not a soul in sight. The road and all of this country belonged to me. How hard it is to have that anymore. The course was mostly straight on dirt solid enough to hold me at a steady 20 mph. It could handle much more, but Jerome could wait.

I passed a blue two-story ranch house with a tin roof gleaming in the sun and a windmill spinning above it. It was like a painting that wouldn't sell for a penny these days. Put me down for two.

Barbed wire, horses grazing on flat ground, the thumping of my tires over the cattle guards. At every cattle crossing, the hard thumping sound startled me into a different consciousness, filled me with different thoughts.

Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary, worked in Jerome as a woodcutter. Before his infamy. Hired by the town. A civil servant.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Got to get to reading those books at bedside, I thought. Voodoo River, The Rainmaker, Once They Moved Like the Wind, Vanishing Arizona.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Love to be on a horse right now, I thought. Galloping, slapping his foamy rump with my hat, hair flying back, and who knows where we would come to a stop. Ah, who was I kidding? A sun roof gives me a headache.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

I hadn't thought about him at all, driving this same red ground long ago. Oh no, not

a bit. There's a famous line from a detective novel Raymond Chandler, I think about something as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.

That was me, going along amid the pretty silence, ignoring the tarantula.

The day was violently bright. Out beyond my windshield, the flat ground rose into shrub hills that rippled and bulged as they went back mile upon mile, unfolding in waves, each rise taking on a new color before reaching the horizon, a long ridge, flat across the top, and pink from one end of the world to the other.

The farther along I traveled, the richer the pink became. Sycamore Canyon Wilderness and the Sedona red rocks. World famous. But not from that vantage point. It was a view of them I'd never had before, and neither have too many others.

Every mile the view changed, intensified, became grander. Above the ridge, far out at the limit of my vision, stood the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff.

They are the guardians of this land, the warm heart of it. Everywhere I went on the Perkinsville Road, they looked down on me, three great white snow-covered peaks, (LEFT AND ABOVE) The long-abandoned Daisy Hotel, named for “Rawhide Jimmy” Douglas' Little Daisy Mine, recalls the days when Jerome was a raucous mining camp, while a shop along Main Street reflects the retail businesses that drive the town today.

Looking positively dreamlike and unreal, plucked from a poet's pocket and stuck on the horizon for all time, above a pink ridge.

The enormity of the sight diminished everything else. For a time, I couldn't take my eyes off it, then I couldn't bring my eyes back to it. The more I looked, the more I vanished before it.

I rounded a bend and saw five deer in a scatter in front of me. They were as startled by our chance meeting as I was.

Up came their heads on cue, and they stared. Very close, giant black eyes suddenly livening, seeing, measuring, their noses twitching to haul in a scent that might explain who this was out on this empty place.

They looked for several seconds, alert, afraid, and unmoving, then one of them leaped over a ridge of dirt at the side of the road, and the other four followed. But one of them, a horned buck, couldn't contain his curiosity and stopped and swiveled a proud head toward me, every sinew of muscle in his shoulders and legs rigid.

Together they took another moment to investigate, five animals watching. I slowed in an effort to lengthen their lingering, convince them I was no threat. But they had had enough of me. They had plans.

The buck suddenly jumped a cholla, and the spring in his spindly legs sent him airborne. Then he and the others bounced and zigzagged through the low brush, stopping and turning to look back, once, twice, three times, and they were gone.

Twenty-one miles from Chino Valley, I came to an intersection. I went left, a side trip of two miles down to the Verde River, its water running beneath a one-lane silverbeam bridge covered with weathered wood planks that rumbled like a hurrying army as I drove across.

The sound alerted the cattle in a post corral beside the bridge, and they craned their necks, studying me, wondering what the commotion was about.

They watched as I walked to the riverbed layered with rocks and listened to the sound of the water and the barely perceptible creak made by the wind hitting the giant cottonwoods spread along the bank.

I stayed in this spot an hour, not thinking about the reason I was there and not having a cattle guard handy to help me think about anything else.

When I got into the car and started back across the bridge, a curious cow mounted a dirt pile in the corral and let out a high, brazen call, as if to say good-bye. The wooden planks pounded out my response.

The afternoon moved, making its shadows. Jerome was 16 miles ahead. ForLest Service Road 318 ran flat at first, then climbed onto Woodchute Mountain, a narrow corkscrew of red dirt attached to the side of the mountain by little more than a wish.

In the early 1890s, a mining company called the United Verde ran a railroad over the mountain, and a five-mile stretch of it came to be called the crookedest on Earth, a reputation well earned. No guardrail, a bottomless drop-off, a

A LONG, LONG ROAD A-WINDING

Into a womblike hole in a hillside, at crawling speed. High red walls on both sides of me curled with the road over a sun-shaded stretch of some 70 yards.

I emerged from the "tunnel" and chanced another peek over the edge, a few feet to eternity, and something popped into my mind, something I had read about Jerome. Unlike other Western mining towns, which were inundated by bedbugs and other tor-turing varmints, Jerome had none.

The sulphur fumes belched out by the smelters killed them off. Everybody slept like a wagonload of wood in Jerome.

A hundred twenty-five hookers in its heyday, and on Christmas Eve, 1897, the night the town went to flames, free whiskey for everyone.

When the saloonkeepers realized that all was lost, and their whiskey was beyond saving, they yelled The sound of water buckets hitting the ground could be heard all over Cleopatra Hill. Men came running to toast the end. But it wasn't the end. Jerome should've died with the dreams of a thousand miners, but it kept coming back from nothing, holding a craggy hand up to the world and saying, "Not so fast."

The sky was still aglow when I ended my descent of Woodchute, past the Gold King Mine and down onto perfect pavement. Jerome with its old buildings and shops and galleries teemed with cameras and Bermuda shorts and straw hats and fanny packs. On the streets, minivans packed to the windows with faces, and on the sidewalks, the whiff of sunscreen and Obsession.

I had a drink at Paul and Jerry's, a fine old saloon, and went out and found a pay phone. It was up a set of stairs on a platform overlooking Main Street, a perch from which I could see down between the old buildings onto the magnificent Verde Valley, peaceful under cottony white clouds. He answered on the first ring, a hard energy in his voice, a fight and a promise.

"Well, was it a good day?" he asked cheerily.

"Great day."

"Me, too. I feel better. I think every-thing's going to be okay."

Standing there above Jerome, in the falling sun, I believed him.

Referred to the miners fighting the fire, "Come and have a swallow, boys!

the fire, "Come and have a swallow, boys!

It's on the house!"

In 20 years in Arizona, Tucson-based Leo W. Banks had never before driven the Perkinsville Road. George H.H. Huey has lived in Prescott for much of the past 25 years, but he'd traveled the Perkinsville Road just twice before. Huey's latest book, with author Rose Houk, is Wild Cactus (Artisan, New York).

WHEN YOU GO

To re-create our author's trip to Jerome from Prescott, travel north 17 miles on State Route 89 to Chino Valley. Stop at the Chino Valley Ranger District office, on the right side of the road, to pick up a map of the Prescott National Forest. Less than a mile past the office, take a right off State 89 onto Perkinsville Road, which is marked as County Road 70 on the Prescott map. It is paved for a short distance, then turns to dirt. Follow this road 21 miles to an intersection. The left fork leads down to the railroad bridge over the Verde River, and the right fork, County Road 72 on the Prescott map, leads to Jerome. As County 70 crosses Woodchute Mountain, it becomes Forest Service Road 318. Only the most current maps show the new county road numbers.

Take plenty of water. Don't attempt to drive over Woodchute Mountain after a rain as the road can become slick and dangerous. Before setting out, call the Verde Ranger District, (520) 567-4121, for current weather and road conditions.