Come to where the EAGLE still flies
on the side of MT. Cleopatra, is JEROME, ARIZONA Once a booming copper mining town   Travel with me back in time. The scenic views of Jerome, the
mountains and the valleys within the vicinity were taken by me somewhere between
October, 1986, and the same time the next year. A friend I had met in Bloomington,
Indiana was again living near Jerome. When he found out I was travelling to the
Southwest, he invited me to visit.  BOVE, you see Mt. Mingus.
bluish in the
distance behind what was Jerome's hospital
in its heyday as a boom town. On the main street - US89A thru Jerome - Houses will
have three floors, with porches. As 89A curves up above Jerome there are a few
local town streets. On the local street, only the top floor of the house here in
the picture in level with the street! Most of the houses still habitable in
"Downtown" Jerome have multilevel porches. I'm a porch "freak" from a small
fifties Jersey town. I thought I was in porch HEAVEN!
is what the sign that the Park Service has posted near the parking
lot close to this view. So many people had been removing pieces that taking any
has been made illegal...funny, I never noticed the person standing behind the
juniper tree, until I got the image "up" here. What some people come to this
scenic overlook of North Central Arizona's Verde Valley to do is Hang Glide...it's
about 3500 feet above the valley here...not a cliff, but quite precipitous,
nonetheless! What a "lift" it was watching people leap off the ramp constructed
near this view, drop into thin air, and then "catch" a thermal like hawks, falcons
eagles, and buzzards do...soon - nothing but a point in the sky out over the Verde
river, miles away!As
I've mentioned
elsewhere on my Early Songs page,
the feeling one gets from realizing what produced the pumice you see in the
foreground of the photo is tremendously humbling. Each piece is the product of a
huge volcanic eruption...the wonders of this world abound for those who have taken
their eyes out of their pockets...like the Narrator in Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man
advises Mr. Jones
to do.Speaking
of eyes in pockets, I'm reminded of a conversation I overheard while
bus-ing tables on the outdoor patio porch of the English Kitchen breakfast and
lunch restaurant - at the time, in 1988, the oldest continually open food
establishment in Arizona. The English Kitchen was around the corner from one of 3
bars in Jerome - the Spirit Room. Down the street was Spook Hall, where I attended
what has to be the biggest costume turnout ever for Halloween in my life. A couple
from Brooklyn, by the sound of their accent to my NJ ears, was having breakfast.
The wife, in her fifties, was having nothing of this little side-trip her husband
had insisted on. They could have been right out of "central casting" for all it
mattered...the woman said, "Waddidya bringus heah for, theah's nuttin'tuhsee..."
She was looking straight across the Verde valley to the Mongollon Rim - 2500 feet
of red sandstone and limestone escarpment, the color of which is forever changing
hue hourly, from day to day in the sunlight at Jerome's latitude...on top of that
- LITERALLY - sits Arizona's highest point, the San Francisco mountains,
over 13,000 feet in elevation. It was still snowcapped. Her husband replied, "OK,
ok, dear, (audibly sighing) we'll reach Vegas tomorrow." Whatever turns you
on? NE NIGHT, during
my stay with a family near
Jerome, I decided to take a walk to
check out a "boot hill" cemetery near my friends' property. A long "finger" of the
mountainside ran toward the valley below, thinning out to a point. On one side the
walls of it were quite steep. Across the canyon between was the Stephen Douglas
mansion, built during the "heyday" of his "little Daisy" copper mine. The boot
hill was enclosed by steel tube railing, like exists in many older cemeteries. It
not yet dusk when I got there. The most recent burial date on any headstone was
1907! Talk about history!! As the night "fell", I noticed the thin sliver pecan
shape of the newly waxing moon was over the slope of Mt. Cleopatra, which - from
my perspective at that moment - was behind the center of Jerome. There were very
few street lamps in Jerome, which was about a mile away from where I stood. Very
little artificial light "pollution".As the
sliver
of the moon set, I beheld a most stunning sight! When the orb of the
moon began to "drop" below the horizon of the mountain, the part reflecting sun
light changed color from a yellow to a brilliant fire-y WHITE!!! I had never seen
anything like it before. A torch in the sky!!! Then, once the lit part of the moon
was out of sight, the remaining top sliver of the moon still actually above the
horizon took on a dusky yellowish hue!!! Simply amazing...easily explained
scientifically, what with atmospheric refraction, and such, but on a more PRIMAL
level, a totally fullfilling moment...then it was gone, and the Milky Way was
splashing all over the pitch of the night. You've never seen anything like it, if
you've been confined to a city or a "look-at-all-we've-made" suburb with neon
lights and sodium arc lights screaming I'M HERE! Do yourself a
favor. Be someplace where you can see such a moon-set AT LEAST ONCE. URING ONE of my three visits to Jerome
between 1986 and 1988, I spent a good deal
of time helping my host rebuild the stone walls around the grounds of the
property. It was fun. Zen rock garden indeed. Where do you toss the last pebble?
How do you know when such an unmortared wall as I was building is done? There is
no "formula" - that's for sure! The house my host and his father had constructed
had a porch deck with an entrance on the second floor. I could sit there and read
or meditate, or simply gaze upon day after day of completely different sunsets making
a shadow show out of the Mongollon Rim across the Verde Valley. People who have
seen limestone exteriors of buidings know how the refraction of the light from the
sun looks on this stone as old SOL "sets". The Mongollon Rim consists of sandstone
AND limestone, so the colors are simply magnificent, and defy description in all
but superlative terms.I've
headed
this entry with a soaring eagle for a different reason, however. The
unpaved drive away from my host's drive ran down a "shoulder" of the mountainside,
then doubled back along the other side of the ridge of this shoulder to reach
Hiway 89A coming up from the Verde Valley. Along the drive was a trailer, which
served as a home for a family with a child young enough to require a play pen for
its outside time. The child was playing contendly in this playpen. As I gazed on a
golden eagle, which had "rode the updraft" from the valley below began to circle
overhead. My attention increased. I had never heard or read of eagles attacking
infants, yet in that moment, I felt apprehensive for the child. The eagle came
down to about 30 yards above the playpen, circled a few times and flew off. The
child was so interested in what it was doing that it never noticed the bird with
the five foot wingspan. URING another visit to Jerome, my host let
me use his camera to shoot a roll of film.
He accomodated my desire to photographed in certain places...for "posterity" or
some such...One place no picture could do justice to. Below I'm perched at an
overlook above Oak Creek Canyon, near the southern end of the Kaibab Plateau.
We've just ascended nearly 2000 feet of switch-back, snaking hair-pin turns on US
89A, headed toward Flagstaff. There's a precipitous drop-off right behind me. The
wind was doing that thing that happens at sunset, when the air whooshs up out of
canyons and sttep valleys. It was roaring so loud we had to shout to each other.
You can see some of the cliffs of the canyon in the photo. Oak Creek carves a
magnificent small canyon by the time it reaches the Mongollon Rim. Sedona is
situated right where all the Sandstone shapes like Cathedral Rock are...What a
town...it'd make anyone forget Manhattan...maybe even for more than a "new york
second" or two hundred thousand... |
walk
the "cyber" rail
to an Adriatic island!
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*****All materials copyrighted 1998-99 Jesse Slokum*****
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