“We might put a golf ball over it,” I suggested, watching the Golfer polish his brassie. “I don’t believe that’s been done.”
“Guess it hasn’t,” laughed the guide. “Wait till you see the Bridge.”
“Won’t do any harm to try,” said the Golfer.
Then Murray and the Golfer and the guide began discussing whether a golf ball could or couldn’t be driven over the arch. The guide bet it couldn’t, and to make things interesting, we took him up. The Golfer modestly deprecated his skill, but thenceforth he was observed practising his drive on every occasion.
We were to drive to Kayenta, and take horses from that point to the Bridge, a hundred miles further on. While the guide packed the car, we took in the sights of Gallup. Thriving though unlovely, facing the dust of the desert, it has a stronger flavor of the old West than most railroad towns, for roads from remote regions converge into its Main Street. Old settlers from all four states rattle in over the dusty trails, no longer on horses, but in the row-boat of the desert, a Ford. They gather at the Harvey lunch-room, and see the latest movies. The Santa Fé thunders by with its load of eastern tourists. Gentle-eyed Zunis wander in from their reservation to the south. Occasionally cowboys in blue shirts and stitched boots ride in, or a soldier in khaki from the Fort. The shops are hung with the silver every Navajo knows how to fashion from Mexican dollars. We saw a group of fat chiefs decked in their best, their henna faces etched with canny lines, fingering and appraising the chunks of solid turquoise and wampum chains on each other’s necks as a group of dowagers would compare their diamonds.
We started at noon, our faithful car sagging like a dachshund under a thousand pounds of bedding, tents, food and suitcases, in addition to six passengers,—a load which was a terrific test on these roads. As we left Gallup, passing the “Haystacks” and other oddly shaped landmarks, the road became an apology, and later an insult. High centres scraped the bottom of the weighted car, so that our spare tires acted as a brake, and had to be removed and placed inside, to form an uncomfortable tangle with our legs, wraps and baggage. But in spite of cramped positions we were hilarious, knowing we had actually started on this long-planned adventure, and that before us were eighteen days of companionship, with unknown tests of our endurance, our tempers and possibly our courage, riding hard, sleeping hard, living a roofless existence, without benefit of laundry.
An arid place in the scorching sunlight of lunch-time, the desert toward late afternoon became a dream of pastels, isolated mesas floating above its surface in rosy lilac, its floor golden, washed with warm rose and henna tones, with shadows of a misty blue, under a radiance of reflected sunset light.
When the color faded, mesas and buttes stood out sharp and black. The desert was no longer a pastel but a charcoal sketch. As vision disappeared our sense of smell was heightened. Freshened in night dew after a parched day, a million tiny flowers seemed concentrated into a penetrating essence, with the aromatic sage strongest of all. Our headlights pierced a gloom miles long. It was ten hours before we reached the twinkle of Chin Lee lights, where we were glad to find shelter and beds.
On the next day we averaged exactly nine miles an hour in the eighty miles to Kayenta. In a jolty handwriting I find my auto-log for that day, “Rotten road. High centres, deep arroyos, many ditches. Sand. Part of road like painted desert.”
It was a treacherous country to drive in. There were no maps, no sign-posts. Most of the day we met only Navajos, speaking no English. From the few white men we met, we would get some such instructions: “Bear northwest a ways, follow the creek till it forks; a way down on the lower fork you pass a mesa, then bear east, then west.” This over a distance of eighty miles! It was worse than Texas, where we were expected to get our bearings by Uncle Henry!