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Arizona Chronicle No. 3I'm in Las Cruces, the junction of I-25 (north-south from Denver/COS to El Paso/Juarez) and I-10, the southmost corridor across the US. I will be taking I-10 across the high desert to <gasp> Tombstone… "The Town Too Tough to Die!" The first 100 miles are fairly uneventful – lots of level driving with some mild ups and downs. I will be crossing the border at Stein's Pass, the high point on my trip. An interesting landmark for me is Dona Ana county, and the Dona Ana mountain range. As a young recruit, I took my basic training at Ft. Bliss, (at El Paso) and for much of the training we walked 4 to 7 miles out to the "Dona Ana" ranges. The time was November and December, and it was cold!! The 5-man huts we lived in are gone, but the memory lives on in my mind because I know how cold the desert can be. As I drive toward the Arizona border, I cross the Continental Divide. The elevation at the crossing is 4580 feet. If you debark and stand at the Divide, and urinate with a waving motion, you can be sure that part of your output will wind up in the Atlantic Ocean, and part in the Pacific. (Isn't that thrilling?) My ol' Daddy taught me that back in 1952. As I drive, I begin to see something on the railroad line which parallels the road. Something I haven't seen for 50 years…. strings of railroad cars… hundreds of cars…. over a mile long… hauled thru the high desert by four, six, eight diesel locomotives, working as pullers and pushers!! The line is the Southern Pacific, the oldest and most famous railroad in the southwestern US. The SP was actually bought by the Rio Grande RR in 1988 and then by the Union Pacific in 1996, but both parents have kept the famous name. Wyatt Earp came to Tucson on the SP in 1879, and Rickey Zahniser and his family came in 1952, riding on The Sunset Limited. We got off the train at 5:30 on the 4th of July, and the temperature was 120. No cold high desert then. The trains fascinate me, and I will research them much further and probably write a long article, or maybe even a book about them. The freight cars are DoubleStack...notable, because each car seems to be about the equivalent of FOUR semi-trailers. I have suggested before that trains are an alternative to diesel-powered trucks, and wondered why there were no well-publicized programs to get us (and our freight) back on to trains. Now I can only wonder why the SP (which pioneered the DoubleStack) is not publicizing its efforts. There's a rest area a little ways past the pass, and I stop and chat with some of the "locals". "Is it cold? Does it snow?" Not as much as I might think, they tell me. I am wondering about Tombstone, elevation 4600 feet. How cold will it be??? We're in Cochise County now. Cochise (played unforgettably by Jeff Chandler, in the movie Broken Arrow), was the best known chief of the Chiricahua Apaches. His last home was "Cochise Stronghold" in the Dragoon Mountains, which form part of the margin for Tombstone. Look here, at "Tombstone Sky": and maybe you'll understand why I'm moving to Tombstone.
Right after we moved in, they shut down the Fort, which had been a training center for Aviation Engineers, and put it on standby. The Post Engineer became the Post Commander and my daddy, his exec., became very important!! When I graduated in the spring of '53, he had enough pull to get me a job lifeguarding at the Officer's Club pool… the only pool on post. That began my career as a lifeguard. In the fall, I volunteered for the draft and went in the Army.
Twenty-one months and 21 days later, I came back to Arizona and enrolled
at the U. of A. in Tucson. Over the
next few years, I would spend another five years as a lifeguard in Tucson. However, in 1952, I was a brand new "Desert Rat" – exploring the high desert around the Fort – elevation 5200 feet, and coping with the mixed population at TUHS, which was two-thirds Mexicans and one-third "white kids." Good practice for Belize, eh? We rode a big yellow school bus from the Fort to Tombstone every day – 30 miles. I told jokes and played my ukulele on the bus. Because I was smart and funny (mostly funny) I was elected Senior Class president. Little Rock High School had 2700 students, TUHS had 126, with 23 in the senior class!! Ben Traywick, who has written 40 books about Tombstone and this part of the West, is regarded as a real old-timer because he got here in 1961.. Imagine me saying "Hey Ben, where were you in 1952????" There's a big new high school now in Tombstone, altho the town only has 1500 people!! But…it had 850,000 visitors last year!!! Why? That remains a topic for another Chronicle. Rick Z. (Oct 2008)
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