Pondering the Painted Desert
Digging Through Layers of Stone and History
WESTBOUND! Against a cold west wind that pushes big rigs into the wrong lane and prompts my wife to gently insist that I drive with two hands on the wheel. Outta Gallup and across the border into Arizona.
Years ago, as a young man on his first big road adventure, I hitched a ride out of Flagstaff eastbound on this same road with an elderly lady driving on a whim to visit family in Kansas City. At one point, she came to a dead stop right in the freeway lane to dig something out of her purse while semi trucks blasted their horns and blew past at 80 mph. Glad I didn’t die on my very first day of vagabonding—I cringe 21 years later just thinking about it. A few hours later we crossed into New Mexico, and the change in landscape (and road conditions) was immediate: red mesas, tall cliffs, and rundown freight yards in Gallup.
This time the change was just the opposite: between mesas, past the giant plywood teepee, and out into the great wide open of the Rio Puerco valley and Painted Desert. Suddenly the views open up, and we’re graced with gently rolling horizons and golden grasses in all directions, not unlike Kansas with distant mesas and Navajo hogans. On the interstate, the traffic is constant and the big rigs numerous, but beyond that there is almost nothing beyond falling billboards, abandoned gas stations, and the occasional half feral herd of cattle. To be sure, New Mexico has gigantic views, but the previous 100 miles of I-40, spacious as they were, felt downright cavernous compared to the panoramas of eastern Arizona.
First stop: Petrified Forest National Park. Like millions of other cross country travelers, I’ve driven past this place countless times, but I’d never stopped, let alone toured the park. But while raising kids might cramp one’s freewheeling style and force you to get your shit together and quit your lowdown adventuring ways, they open up other exciting doors, including officially sanctioned roadside attractions my younger, cooler incarnation would have snubbed.
Which was silly, as this place was epic. Seems that 225 million years ago, eastern Arizona was a subtropical forest laden with swamps and huge, slow flowing rivers. There weren’t grasses yet, nor flowering plants, but there were some big reptilian creatures with big teeth, and there were trees, lots of them. Back in the murky day, some sort of regional disaster (volcanic eruption and subsequent mudflow?) or small, everyday event (ceaseless streambank erosion) caused trees to fall into rivers, where they flowed with the current until becoming part of a logjam or sinking to the bottom of the backwater swamps, where they were then buried by mud and layers of volcanic ash. This ash and mud kept oxygen and decay at bay, and the trees were slowly fossilized as silica and other minerals in the groundwater gradually filled in the woody interstices, changing cellulose into mineral.
Millions of years passed. Tens of millions. Climates changed, mountains rose and fell, continents drifted, and the buried forests were covered a mile deep or more in sediment. Then the Rocky Mountains rose, followed soon after by the Colorado Plateau, and erosion got to work on the newly risen lands, stripping away the accumulated eons of rock and exposing the ancient trees to the light of day.
The Ancestral Puebloan people, aka the “Anasazi,” saw these strange trees first, and even built their pueblos out of the petrified logs. They lived and died in the region for a thousand years or more, pecking artwork out of the surrounding rimrock and growing squash, corn and beans wherever water was available. By 1300 a.d., they were gone, headed (probably) east towards the Zuni River or Rio Grande, or perhaps south to the higher, cooler, wetter climes of the Mogollon Rim. The crumbling walls of their pueblos can still be seen, along with bits of corn cob, arrowheads, and rock art.
Then came white men, starting with a railroad survey in 1853 and followed by Mormons and (in 1882) the railroad, including a train station right next to the site. The petrified forest was a real hit, and folks began plucking the amethyst and quartz crystals right out of the ancient stone trees, using dynamite to blow up the trees when necessary. By 1900, the plunder had become so bad that residents of the nearby town of Holbrook petitioned the Federal Government to do something, and Teddy Roosevelt declared it a National Monument—and not a moment too soon, as Route 66 was constructed just a decade later, bringing millions of motorists to the region, including, in 1937, my grandparents.
The wind was howling, so our hikes were short, but we stopped at almost every viewpoint or interpretive area to take in places like the “Crystal Forest”, “Onyx Bridge,” and “Agate House.” Stone trees poked out from absurd purple and gray badlands. Fallen stone trees bridged arroyos or capped narrow ridges. Broken bits of trees lay scattered across the land like shattered brown glass. Being November, and cold, the place was almost deserted, and we found ourselves sharing epic scenery with nobody except the rooster sized ravens that greeted us at every turnout.
We planned on an hour in the Petrified Forest. Four hours later, the sun well past noontime, we headed north by northwest to the town of Holbrook and the twin arteries/lifelines of Interstate 40 and the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe Railroad. Like every single town between Albuquerque and (as we shall see) Flagstaff, Holbrook has seen better days. Beautiful warehouses made of red stone sit empty and quiet along the railroad tracks. Trains once stopped here to discharge passengers and goods, and to load up the region’s cattle and other products, but now the trains roll through every few minutes at 70 miles per hour, and they don’t stop. Main street was the same story: a storied downtown with fading kachina murals, shuttered trading posts, abandoned rock shops, and faded neon motels. Like the freight trains, the highway traffic that once passed right through the heart of town now zooms through on the superhighway, and nobody is much interested in sleeping in a wigwam.
The reasons for this change are many and well known. The biggest one is the creation of the Interstate Highways, but the rise of corporate franchises (and our preference for bland reliability versus local color) and globalization makes it hard for once thriving roadside towns like Holbrook to scrape by. Hard for a local rancher to compete with beef from Brazil and Australia. Hard for a local motel owner to compete with the well known super chain hotel, especially when land at the coveted freeway exits is so expensive. Hard for a town to hock Navajo belt buckles when folks prefer the new Navajo casino just up the road.
One reason that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is the death of the 55 miles per hour speed limit. Thanks to Jimmy Carter and his visionary goal of saving energy, when I was a kid, everyone had to drive 55, even on the freeways. Today I drove 75 miles per hour most of the way, and was being passed by cars and trucks alike. 55 miles per hour seems absurd, and maybe it was, but at the same time, it forced travelers to slow down just enough to consider a stop in a flyblown town. If nothing else, it took longer to get from place to place, so folks would have to stop more often to pee or coffee up, which surely benefitted roadside economies.
The towns along Route 66 never had it easy, but as the old architecture shows, they were once viable towns with big hopes for the future. There were tourists and their dollars. There was the railroad and its need for section men, brakemen, firemen and conductors. There were ranchers and farmers. There is still some of each of those, but less of them all then ever before, as revealed by the abandoned homesteads, empty buildings, and the fact that Winslow’s main claim to fame is that you can “COME GET YOUR PICTURE TAKEN AT THE CROSSROADS WITH THE GIRL IN THE FLATBED FORD!”.
When reenacting a 40 year old Eagle’s song is the best you’ve got, then you know you’ve fallen on hard times.
