Tracking Windmills

The Whispering WINDMILLS of Apache County

Inspired by The Bridges of Madison County, I elected to search out such bridges in Arizona. But in more than 30 years of roaming the state, I had seen only one covered bridge, and that was a footbridge in a park in the Pinetop-Lakeside area. Undeterred, I threw open the Arizona Atlas & Gazetteer and discovered that what Arizona lacks in covered bridges, it makes up in windmills. Scattered across the state are hundreds of them, the greatest concentration in central Apache County, 69 according to my map count. With me living next door in Snowflake, Navajo County, the logic of forgetting all about covered bridges and concentrating on windmills was clear. More than 1,000 miles later across interstates, state highways, paved and unpaved county roads, roads across jagged lava flats and cinder trails going nowhere, mud roads and dead-end roads; after crisscrossing much of 250million-year-old dry Lake Bidahochi, in which the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest were once submerged - I lay face down in the bunk in the back of my pickup truck listening to a fall wind blowing across the bounds of the shortgrass prairie. I had become obsessed. I no longer cared if the windmills were photographable or not; I just wanted to find the windmills.

I climbed into the sievelike cinder hinterlands 9,000 feet above sea level, near Big Lake in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. Here conifer and aspen trees grow exceptionally well, thanks to adequate snow and rainfall. But to reach permanent water, you have to drill to about 9,000 feet.

At the Vernon turnoff on U.S. 60, on the fringe of the lava layer, however, a lady in the country store said, “At the windmill across the road, they hit water 400 feet down.” Still at $40 to $100 per foot, that's a lot of pitchers of the workingman's favorite beverage.

Apache County is 248 miles long and at its widest, 55 miles, a rectangle of 11,216 square miles. It averages 5.7 residents per square mile, and in numerous square miles I didn't even see the .7 of a resident. I did, however, see elk,

The Whispering W I N D M I L L S of Apache County

The Whispering WINDMILLS of Apache County

Continued from page 27 antelope, coyotes, jackrabbits, Abert squir-rels, black-tailed prairie dogs, Harris' and red-tailed hawks, kestrels, two golden ea-gles, and other avian species including a raven that paced me for a quarter-mile at 30 mph, and one beaver. Then there were the usual billions of flowers, varying with the seasons: paint-brush, asters, thistle poppies, coneflowers. Some of the countryside around Green's Peak appeared landscaped, and a couple of antelope grazing on that steep-pitched slope looked like those cast animals you see on the front lawns of palatial homes. Running north on U.S. 191, from near Springerville, I was walled in by head-high sunflowers. A prairie dog had excavated his home in the middle of this lonely road. There it sat on its little pile of dirt, uncon-cerned about ducking axles. One way to determine if anyone is around while chasing windmills is to drive onto private property. I had made a wrong turn, and in backtracking I saw a windmill I had missed. This taught me that it was windmill-effective to run likely roads both ways: Windmills may be hiding behind a low hill, in a deep arroyo, behind a stand of distant trees. Anyway, a white pickup truck material-ized out of the dust about the time my feet touched the ground. Yes, I was on private property. On learning I wasn't a cattle rus-tler but a photographer of windmills, the gentleman at the wheel smiled sympa-thetically and said to please take all the pictures I wanted. Which I proceeded to do. None of my maps showed any windmills on the Navajo or Fort Apache reservations, but they're out there, and I found a few near Sanders. I probed as far south as Alpine on U.S. 191, the Coronado Trail, and as far north as Interstate 40. There was a sense of achievement when I found a windmill where it was supposed to be and a sense of discovery when I found one that wasn't shown on the maps. Some windmills I didn't photograph because they looked like the last one I had photographed. The easternmost, 10 miles out in the junipers north of U.S. 60 and right next to the New Mexico border, hadno vanes. At Witches' Well, the lady said, "Haven't even turned it on lately." Her windmill wasn't used to pump water; it was just for show. My lusting after elusive windmills is hardly satisfied. As you read this, I may be "out there," wearing out my 4x4, eating dust, sliding sideways in mud, anguishing over locked gates, scanning the horizon - sometimes with binoculars. Everyone looks suspicious using binoculars, even birders, and we all know they are birders by the way they dress. One rancher accepting me at face value said it would be more profitable for him to charge for taking pictures of his windmill than raising cattle. I asked him how many people have wanted to take pictures of his windmill. He said, "Just you."