Chapter 2 II THIS AIN'T WASHINGTON!

"This ain't Washington, and we don't keep bankers' hours here," was the slogan of the Superintendent. He spoke that phrase, chanted it, and sang it. He made a litany of it; he turned it into a National Anthem. It came with such irritating regularity I could have sworn he timed it on a knotted string, sort of "Day-by-day-in-every-way" tempo, one might say. And it wasn't Washington, and we didn't live lives of ease; no banker ever toiled from dawn until all hours of the night, Sunday included!

I made pothooks and translated them. I put figures down and added them up. For the road crew I checked in equipment and for the cook I chucked out rotten beef. The Superintendent had boasted that three weeks of the program he had laid out for me would be plenty to send me back where I came from and then he would have a regular place again. But I really didn't mind the work. I was learning to love the Arizona climate and the high thin air that kept one's spirits buoyed up in spite of little irritations. I was not lonely, for I had found many friends.

When I had been at the Canyon a few days the young people gave a party for me. It was my début, so to speak. The world-famous stone building at Hermit's Rest was turned over to us for the evening by the Fred Harvey people, and, attended by the entire ranger force, I drove out the nine miles from Headquarters. We found the house crowded with guides, cowboys, stage-drivers, and their girls. Most of the girls were Fred Harvey waitresses, and if you think there is any discredit attached to that job you had better change your mind. The girls there were bookkeepers, teachers, college girls, and stenographers. They see the world and get well paid while doing it.

The big rendezvous at Hermit's Rest resembles an enormous cavern. The fireplace is among the largest anywhere in the world, and the cave impression is further carried out by having flat stones laid for the floor, and rock benches covered with bearskins and Navajo rugs. Many distinguished guests from all parts of the globe have been entertained in that room, but we forgot all about distinguished personages and had a real old-fashioned party. We played cards and danced, and roasted weenies and marshmallows. After that party I felt that I belonged there at the Canyon and had neighbors.

There were others, however. The Social Leader, for instance. She tried to turn our little democracy into a monarchy, with herself the sovereign. She was very near-sighted, and it was a mystery how she managed to know all about everything until we discovered she kept a pair of powerful field-glasses trained on the scene most of the time. The poor lady had a mania for selling discarded clothing at top prices. We used to ask each other when we met at supper, "Did you buy anything today?" I refused point-blank to buy her wreckage, but the rangers were at a disadvantage. They wanted to be gentlemen and not hurt her feelings! Now and then one would get cornered and stuck with a second-hand offering before he could make his getaway. Then how the others would rag him! One ranger, with tiny feet, of which he was inordinately proud, was forced to buy a pair of No. 12 shoes because they pinched the Social Leader's Husband's feet. He brought them to me.

"My Gawd! What'll I do with these here box cars? They cost me six bucks and I'm ruined if the boys find out about it."

An Indian squaw was peddling baskets at my house, and we traded the shoes to her for two baskets. I kept one and he the other. Not long after that he was burned to death in a forest fire, and when I packed his belongings to send to his mother the little basket was among his keepsakes.

There was a Bridge Fiend in our midst, too! She weighed something like twenty stone, slept all forenoon, played bridge and ate chocolates all afternoon, and talked constantly of reducing. One day she went for a ride on a flop-eared mule; he got tired and lay down and rolled over and over in the sand. They had some trouble rescuing her before she got smashed. I told her the mule believed in rolling to help reduce. She didn't see the joke, but the mule and I did. Grand Canyon life was too exciting for her, so she left us.

A quaint little person was the rancher's wife who brought fresh eggs and vegetables to us. She wore scant pajamas instead of skirts, because she thought it "more genteel," she explained. When a favorite horse or cow died, she carefully preserved the skull and other portions of the skeleton for interior-decoration purposes.

Ranger Fisk and I took refuge in her parlor one day from a heavy rain. Her husband sat there like a graven image. He was never known to say more than a dozen words a day, but she carried on for the entire family. As Ranger Fisk said, "She turns her voice on and then goes away and forgets it's running." She told us all about the last moments of her skeletons before they were such, until it ceased to be funny. Ranger Fisk sought to change the conversation by asking her how long she had been married.

"Ten years; but it seems like fifty," she said. We braved the rain after that.

Ranger Fisk was born in Sweden. He ran away from home at fourteen and joined the Merchant Marine, and in that service poked into most of the queer seaports on the map. He had long since lost track of his kinsfolk, and although he insisted that he was anxious to marry he carefully kept away from all marriageable ladies.

Ranger Winess was the sheik of the force. Every good-looking girl that came his way was rushed for a day and forgotten as soon as another arrived. He played his big guitar, and sang and danced, and made love, all with equal skill and lightness. The only love he was really constant to was Tony, his big bay horse.

Ranger West, Assistant Chief Ranger, was the most like a storybook ranger of them all. He was essentially an outdoor man, without any parlor tricks. I have heard old-timers say he was the best man with horses they had ever known. He was much more interested in horses and tobacco than he was in women and small talk. But if there was a particularly dangerous task or one requiring sound judgment and a clear head, Ranger West was selected.

He and Ranger Fisk and Ranger Winess were known as the "Three Musketeers." They were the backbone of the force.

Sometimes I think my very nicest neighbor was the gardener at El Tovar Hotel. He saw me hungrily eying his flowers, and gave me a generous portion of plants and showed me how to care for them. I planted them alongside my little gray house, and after each basin of water had seen duty for cleansing purposes it went to water the flowers. We never wasted a drop of water. It was hauled a hundred miles in tank cars, and cost accordingly. I sometimes wondered if we paid extra for the red bugs that swam around in it so gaily. Anyway, my flowers didn't mind the bugs. They grew into masses of beautiful foliage and brilliant blossoms. I knew every leaf and bud on them. I almost sat up nights with them, I was so proud of their beauty. My flowers and my little gray kitten were all the company I had now. The fire guard girl had gone home.

One of my neighbors asked me to go with a group of Fred Harvey girls to visit the Petrified Forest, lying more than a hundred miles southeast of the Canyon. As I had been working exceptionally hard in the Park Office, I declared myself a holiday, and Sunday morning early found us well on the way.

We drove through ordinary desert country to Williams and from there on past Flagstaff and eastward to Holbrook. Eighteen miles from there we began to see fallen logs turned into stone.

My ideas of the Petrified Forest were very vague, but I had expected to see standing trees turned to stone. These big logs were all lying down, and I couldn't find a single stump! We drove through several miles of fallen logs and came to the Government Museum where unique and choice specimens had been gathered together for visitors to see. It is hard to describe this wood, that isn't wood. It looks like wood, at least the grain and the shape, and knotholes and even wormholes are there; but it has turned to beautifully brilliant rock. Some pieces look like priceless Italian marble; others are all colors of the rainbow, blended together into a perfect poem of shades.

Of course I asked for an explanation, and with all the technical terms left out, this is about what I learned: "These trees are probably forty million years old! None of them grew here. This is proved in several ways: there are few roots or branches and little bark."

The ranger saw me touch the outside of a log that was covered with what looked to me like perfectly good bark! He smiled.

"Yes, I know that looks like bark, but it is merely an outside crust of melted sand, et cetera, that formed on the logs as they rolled around in the water."

"Water?" I certainly hadn't seen any water around the Petrified Forest.

"Yes, water. This country, at one time, was an arm of the Pacific Ocean, and was drained by some disturbance which brought the Sierra Mountains to the surface. These logs grew probably a thousand miles north of here and were brought here in a great flood. They floated around for centuries perhaps, and were thoroughly impregnated with the mineral water, doubtless hot water. When the drainage took place, they were covered by silt and sand to a depth of perhaps two thousand feet. Here the petrifaction took place. Silica was present in great quantities. Manganese and iron provided the coloring matter, and through pressure these chemicals were forced into the grain of the wood, which gradually was absorbed and its cell structure replaced by ninety-nine per cent silica and the other per cent iron and manganese. Erosion brought what we see to the top. We have reason to believe that the earth around here covers many thousand more."

After that all soaked in I asked him what the beautiful crystals in purple and amber were. These are really amethysts and topazes found in the center of the logs. Formed probably by resin in the wood, these jewels are next hardest to diamonds and have been much prized. One famous jeweler even had numberless logs blown to splinters with explosives in order to secure the gems.

The wood is very little softer than diamond, and polishes beautifully for jewelry, book-ends, and table tops. The ranger warned us against taking any samples from the Reserve.

We could have spent days wandering around among the fallen giants, each one disclosing new beauties in color and formation; but we finally left, reluctantly, each determined to come back again.

It was quite dark when we reached the Canyon, and I was glad to creep into bed. My kitten snuggled down close to the pillow and sang sleepy songs, but I couldn't seem to get to sleep. Only cheesecloth nailed over the windows stood between me and all sorts of animals I imagined prowled the surrounding forest. The cheesecloth couldn't keep the noises out, and the cry that I heard might just as well have been the killing scream of a cougar as a bed-time story of a tree frog. It made my heart beat just as fast. And although the rangers declared I never heard more than one coyote at a time, I knew that at least twenty howling voices swelled the chorus.

While I was trying to persuade myself that the noise I heard was just a pack rat, a puffing, blowing sound at the window took me tremblingly out to investigate. I knew some ferocious animal was about to devour me! But my precious flowers were the attraction. A great, gaunt cow had taken the last delectable bite from my pansy bed and was sticking out a greedy tongue to lap in the snapdragons. Throwing on my bathrobe, I grabbed the broom and attacked the invader. I whacked it fore and aft! I played a tune on its lank ribs! Taken completely by surprise, it hightailed clumsily up through the pines, with me and my trusty broom lending encouragement. When morning came, showing the havoc wrought on my despoiled posies, I was ready to weep.

Ranger Winess joined me on my way to breakfast.

"Don't get far from Headquarters today," he said. "Dollar Mark Bull is in here and he is a killer. I've been out on Tony after him, but he charged us and Tony bolted before I could shoot. When I got Tony down to brass tacks, Dollar Mark was hid."

I felt my knees knocking together.

"What's he look like?" I inquired, weakly.

"Big red fellow, with wide horns and white face. Branded with a Dollar Mark. He's at least twenty years old, and mean!"

My midnight visitor!

I sat down suddenly on a lumber pile. It was handy to have a lumber pile, for I felt limp all over. I told the ranger about chasing the old beast around with a broom. His eyes bulged out on stems.

Frequent appearances of "Dollar Mark" kept me from my daily tramps through the pines, and I spent more time on the Rim of the Canyon.

Strangely, the great yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the sun's pitiless glare. Many skeletons, half buried in sand, have been found to tell of such tragedies.

It was only in the evenings, after the sun had gone down, that I could feel at ease with the Canyon. Then I loved to sit on the Rim and look down on the one living spot far below, where, almost a century ago, the Indians made their homes and raised their crops, watering the fields from the clear, cold spring that gushes out of the hillside. As the light faded, the soft mellow moon would swim into view, shrouding with tender light the stark, grim boulders. From the plateau, lost in the shadows, the harsh bray of wild burros, softened by distance, floated upward.

On a clear day I could see objects on the North Rim, thirteen miles away, and with a pair of strong field glasses I could bring the scene quite close. It looked like a fairyland over there, and I wanted to cross over and see what it was really like. White Mountain advanced the theory that if we were married we could go over there for our honeymoon! I had to give the matter careful consideration; but while I considered, the moon came up, and behind us in the Music Room someone began to play softly Schubert's "Serenade." I said, "All right. Next year we'll go!"

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