Roadside Rest

By Golly, You Can Get There from Here

At one o'clock on a recent afternoon, I motored away from the Grand Canyon toward Phoenix with every expectation of arriving home for an early supper. In reverie, my mind rewound more than 50 years to the first of my retreats from the Edge of Eternity. That long-ago trip required two strenuous days. Our anxious loved ones thanked God for our survival. But then was then, and now my scheduled appearance before sundown was taken for granted. For eastern America, the 20th century has been a period of refinement of the labors of centuries. But Arizona has had to advance from horse trail and cow path and Butterfield rut to boulevard, thoroughfare, and freeway in the span of a human life. When Arizona achieved statehood (No. 48) in 1912, there were fewer than a quarter-million residents: about two souls per square mile. The largest communities, Phoenix and Tucson, each counted about 20,000 residents. There being no federal highway trust fund, sparsely populated Arizona was obliged to pay for road improvements through an anemic property tax. Truth be known, individual citizens themselves opened roadways by moving rocks and lopping limbs. "The most reliable report on the condition of a road," observed a newsman of that day, "was to be obtained from the last person who used it." Much early organized public highway construction was by convicts and mules. During an economic depression, the prisoners were pulled off the jobs to make room for unemployed civilian applicants, whose names were drawn from a 20-gallon hat.While the automobile gained a U.S. patent in 1885, the first car was not registered in Arizona until 1899. Gasoline and oil were dispensed by the ounce at drug stores. Progressive-minded blacksmiths might condescend to repair automobiles. Fifteen years later, there were but 5,000 "gas buggies" licensed in the state. Premier tires were guaranteed for only 4,500 miles. In the 1914 official report of the state highway department, big budgetary items were horseshoeing, hack rental, harness repairing, and veterinary medicine. But change was on the way: The department purchased its first motor vehicle, a Ford car, for $420.05. If improvements were made, they weren't very dramatic. The most direct route between Phoenix and Globe was the unpaved Apache Trail via the new Roosevelt Dam. To venture eastward from Safford, you had to pay a toll. From Phoenix to Wickenburg, there was no road worthy of drawing on the map. The Bisbee-Douglas connection was surfaced with smelter slag. Heavy, disruptive traffic1,200 vehicles per day - was tallied on the Phoenix-Tempe road. By arrival of the mid-1920s, some 60,000 cars were Arizona registered, but the state tallied just 1,400 miles of surfaced roads. Not yet designated U.S. Route 66, the transcontinental line across northern Arizona was unpaved dirt. The north-south crossing of the Colorado River depended upon a ferry. Still undecided was a national policy question: Should westering highways be funded mainly through taxation of fuel, or by means of user tolls, as in the East? Advocates of fuel taxes won that debate, and on pennies-per-gallon America rolled to the Pacific. Modern Arizona through the 1990s has been spending between $400 million and $500 million annually on its highway system. Of the 54,561 officially certified miles of public roadways in Arizona, about three-fourths are classified as rural, the rest urban. Freeway mileage is something more than 1,250 miles only two percent of public roads, but the freeways carry 27.6 percent of the traffic. Remember the "heavy, disruptive traffic" of 1,200 vehicles on the Phoenix-Tempe road? These days the usage of Interstate 10 in the Tempe area runs to nearly 200,000 vehicles. But more the rule, the state can be crossed by automobile in any direction in a day or much less. The smoothing of the way has witnessed a refinement as well in the men and women who manage the improvements. Pioneers blazing Arizona's first automotive trails were a salty, fiesty bunch. To wit: In 1914 the state engineer, Lamar Cobb, was baselessly accused of favoring one roadway contractor over another. Cobb denied the charges and drafted a testy letter to his detractor: "Your letter of the 24th ultimate, which contains insulting insinuations as regards myself, is received. I hope that upon your next visit to Phoenix you will afford me the opportunity of personally kicking you out of my office."