The
Arizona/New Mexico desert is beautiful. It is flat, mostly, with large
and small washes running through it, the country sometimes gently rolling,
sometimes there are steep hills. The sage brush can be green or grey or
just dusty. The sand and rocks are bright-colored and are all the colors.
Once in a while you will see a well-decorated bird flashing through the
sage. The one thing to remember about this beautiful, dramatic land, however,
is that it is unforgiving. If you make mistakes, you can be in great trouble.
Therefore, when people travel there, they try to travel with someone. That
is why, in those days, you would not often see one automobile. Usually
there were two.
My
mother and father were on a journey through New Mexico sometime in the
late 1920s. They were driving a Studebaker, which, at that time, had the
reputation of being the most trustworthy car for that country. There were
other people with them and there was another car-load along.
In the early days, Highway 66, from Los Angeles to St. Louis was dirt east of San Bernardino. Therefore, when we arrived in Barstow and turned east, we were on a dirt road.
In that country, the desert and the high plateau of Arizona and New Mexico, the roads were two lane, adobe mud, raised about one and a half to two feet above the prairie. This was done so that if the land was flooded, you would not have to drive through water. The road was also crowned, so that when it rained, the water would run off. They neglected to provide for the fact that the cars also would run off.
Sometimes in New Mexico it rains. On those roads, this posed a problem: how do you keep the car both on the road and going? Many times the problem solved itself. The car slid gently off the road, coming to rest with two wheels on the road and two wheels on the desert. It was kind of a hazard to get the car back up. So everybody carried shovels.
The second car had fallen behind, and so, at least for a while, Pop's bunch were on their own. The shovels were broken out and each of the three men got one. The idea was to dig a gentle path up the side of the road so the two wheels on the desert could be driven up this path to join the two wheels which had remained on the road.
The second car drove up. The people in it were treated
to a beautiful, not too unusual tableau. The Studebaker was at a forty-five
degree angle, with two wheels on the road and two wheels on the desert,
the two men were digging away, trying to construct a workable path for
the car, the women were watching with great interest, and my father was
standing, overseeing the whole thing and leaning on his shovel.
Pop was not really mechanically inclined. He was a lawyer, and he sat in his office all day long and was not very interested in this kind of stuff. One day he was going down to Palo Alto with Mom in the Chandler, when the Chandler decided it had gone far enough. Pop pulled over to the side of the road, got out, unhooked the two catches which held the hood down, lifted the hood and then looked for a few minutes at the engine. Then he put the hood down, hooked the hooks, got back in the car, closed the door, and then said to Mom, "There's something wrong." This same man took the moving picture we will see shortly. How he could do both of these things, I do not know.
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