We left town in a raw, bleak wind which became bleaker as we circled the small hills about Oracle. For fifteen miles we had fine macadam, though occasionally torn with deep chuck-holes. Then we left the made road, and meandered up and down bumpy paths through forests of the finest, most varied cacti we had seen anywhere. Steep slopes were covered with the giant sahuara, standing bolt upright and pointing a stiff arm to heaven, like an uncouth evangelist. Demon cholla forests with their blurred silver gray haze seemed not to belong to this definite earth, but to some vague, dead moon. Among them wavered the long listless fingers of the ocotilla, and the many-eared prickly pear clambered over the sands like some strange sea plant. In this world of unreal beauty, tawny dunes replaced green slopes, and such verdure as appeared was pale yet brilliant, as if lighted by electricity.
Climbing steadily, we passed Winkleman, a little, very German settlement. Nobody had suggested we should find the scenery anything out of the ordinary, though many had said the road was good,—an outright and prodigious mis-statement of fact. One temperate person had mentioned it might be “well worth our while.” If that same lady were to meet Christ she would probably describe him as “a very nice man.” The scenery was grand; it progressed from grand to majestic, and from majestic to tremendous. The raw wind, with its ensuing flurry of cold rain had died down, and the sun was out. Threading westward into one mountain pass after another, we soon were making our cautious way along a narrow shelf which constantly wound higher and higher above the rushing, muddy Gila River. We had come suddenly upon magnificence minus macadam where we had been led to expect macadam minus magnificence.
Suddenly looking down, I decided the scenery was becoming altogether too grand. Far below, the Gila was a tiny thread, getting tinier every moment. On the very edge of the fast deepening canyon hung the road, with neither fence nor wall between us and eternity, via the Gila River. As we climbed, the road narrowed till for a dozen miles no car could have passed us. Regularly it twisted in such hairpin curves that our front tires nearly pinched our back tires as we made the turn. Instead of being graded level, the road rose or fell so steeply in rounding corners that the car’s hood completely concealed which way the road twisted. If we went left while the road turned right we should collide with a cliff; if the road turned left and we right, we should be plunged through space, so it behooved us to get our bearings quickly.
Once, fortunately at a wide place, we met a team of four mules. Ignorant of the Arizona law requiring motorists to give animals the inside of the road, we drew up close to the cliff, while the faithful mules went half over the crumbly edge, but kept the wagon safely on the trails. I began to notice a strange vacuum where once had been the pit of my stomach. Ordinarily I cannot step over a manhole without my knees crumpling to paper, and that thread of a stream a mile, or probably only about 500 feet below, gave me an acute attack of “horizontal fever.”
At that giddy moment, on the very highest spot, I essayed to turn a sharp corner down grade, where a ledge threw us well over to the edge of the curve, and I found my foot brake would not hold. I tried the emergency. It, too, had given way from the constant strain put on it. We were already in “first,” but even so, at that grade our heavy car would coast fifteen or twenty miles an hour. The road ahead switch-backed down, down, down. I calculated we could make two turns safely and that the third would send us spinning over the chasm. I felt my face undergo what novelists call “blanching.” I stiffened, and prepared myself—no time to prepare the others—for the wildest and probably the last drive of my life. And then a weak voice from behind called: “Stop the car, please! I feel ill.”
Poor Miss Martha had been suffering all day from a sick headache, but had gallantly admired the scenery between whiles. Now, oblivious to scenery, with closed eyes and wan face, she waited for the dreadful motion to cease. I wanted to, but was in no position to obey her reasonable request. As a drowning man sees everything, to my sharp mental vision of the car spinning over and over toward the final crash, I added a picture of poor Miss Martha, bewildered all the way down, and too ill to do anything but wonder why the car would not stop. I lost fear in a glow of altruistic sympathy. Then, deciding something had to be done quickly, I ran the “old lady’s” nose into a ledge. The left mudguard bent, but we stuck.
“The car’s going over!” exclaimed Miss Susan, much surprised.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, rather crossly. As well as two paper knees permitted, I got out, and explained about the brakes. Relieved that motion had ceased, Miss Martha sank back blissfully closing her eyes. The others had not realized our danger.
It was evident the brakes must be tightened if we were to reach the bottom of the canyon alive. Neither Toby nor I knew how to tighten brakes, except that in the process one got under the car. Accordingly, as diagnostician, I crawled beneath, and in a few moments found a nut which looked as if it connected with the brake, while Toby, who is exceedingly clever with tools, and something of a contortionist, managed to tighten it. We tried the foot brakes. They held! Never had we known a prouder moment. The incident gave us courage to meet new contingencies, and never again did I experience just that sick feeling of helplessness of a moment before. While Toby was still beneath the wheels, a horn sounded, and another machine climbed around the bend. Miss Susan flagged it with her sweater just in time. Two men emerged, rather startled at the encounter, and asked how they were to pass. As the ascending car, they had the right of way, and unlike the courteous mules, intended to keep it. I could not blame them for not wanting to back down hill,—neither did I. I could not tell whether my knees would ever be “practical” again. The road was little more than ten feet wide, and very crooked. I am usually good at backing, but sometimes I become confused, and turn the wrong way,—and I hated to spoil the view by backing into it. After some prospecting, we discovered a little cubby-hole at the third turn down. At the rate of an inch a minute we reached it. The chauffeur of the other car gave us valuable advice,—never to use our foot brake on mountains, but instead to shut off ignition, shift to first gear, and if we still descended too fast, use the emergency brake at intervals. If the grade were so steep as to offset all these precautions (as actually happened later, on several occasions) the foot brake could be alternately pressed and released.
With all the Rockies before us, this information gave us back the confidence which we had momentarily lost while we poised brakeless over the Gila. Before reaching home, we were to travel over many such roads, for we motored along the spine of the Rockies from Mexico to Alberta, but never again did “horizontal fever” attack us virulently. This “fine state highway” from Winkleman to Globe proved as dangerous a road as we were to meet, and being the first encountered after the plains of Texas and the deserts of New Mexico, it especially terrified us. A month later we traversed it without a quiver.