Spring Break at Cochran

Springtime is the most beautiful season on the Arizona desert. Muted, dusty avocado green, sage, straw, and mauve colors turn bright emerald, amethyst, sapphire and gold. Stately saguaro cacti which were tall, thin and spiky suddenly swell twice as fat and appear softer, almost fuzzy with pale, yellow-white spines. Earthy smells of creosote, wet dirt and moldering palo verde bark mix with the fragrance of millions of tiny wildflowers, brittle bush, California poppies, blue lupine, and new grass to create an intoxicating perfume that smells of new life and open spaces. During spring, everything comes alive on the desert, frolicking for a few weeks before the blazing sun scorches and fries it to a crisp.

Spring-break was always one of our favorite times of the years. Falling in the middle of March, I always looked forward to it with anticipation. Not only did it mean no school and a break from our routine, it was also a time for our family to get together and have some fun.

March, 1994, found us looking forward to mom and dad coming home from their mission in Germany in just a few weeks. In the meantime, Moe and I decided to take the kids camping out on the desert, at a place Moe had discovered down along the Gila river. It was the ruins of an old ghost town called Cochran, and was the coolest place.

My sister-in-law, Tammy, was expecting a baby any day, but her other children needed something to keep them busy so we offered to take them with us. My sister Linda was teaching school while her husband went to medical school. Her spring break wasn't for a couple of weeks, but her husband and kids were off, so they decided to come, too.

Cochran was right on the Gila river. It was started in 1905 as a railway station and copper mine, but only lasted for 10 years or so. By1994 the only things left were the remains of some coke ovens that had been used for making fuel, standing on a hill on the far side of the Gila River, and three foundations under some old trees on the near side, by what looked like an abandoned railroad track.

It was so cool! There were three huge trees growing close together not too far from the railroad tracks. The ground under them was flat and smooth, soft with fallen needles from the trees and dust. Perhaps at one time there had been a building here, with trees planted around it, but there wasn't even a foundation left now. We set up our tents, built a huge fire pit, and then set up our lawn chairs so we could relax in the shade and watch the kids play.

They climbed all over and through the trees. Moe hung a rope from a high branch, and the older boys took turns climbing up and swinging down across the clearing, like Tarzan. Not to be outdone, the girls joined in, but they soon discovered swinging on a tough old piece of rope was hard on the hands, and they went back to playing and lounging in the trees.

After awhile the kids begged Moe to take them exploring, so while I started dinner they all climbed into and on top of the jeep and took off. They came back an hour later full of exciting stories about the river, the coke ovens on the other side that they looked at through Moe's binoculars, and the railroad tracks.

“Do you suppose trains ever come by here anymore?” Alyssa and Michelle wanted to know as soon as they found me. “Will we get to see a train? Do people ride on them? Will it stop here if they see us camping?”

“I doubt that trains go by here anymore,” I told them as I carefully pushed a shovel under the foil dinners I had been cooking in the coals from our fire. “This used to be a train station, but that was a hundred years ago. Did you have fun riding on the jeep?”

They assured me that they had, and pretty soon I had all the foil dinners out and ready for us to eat, so we began dinner.

Later that night, after getting the kids into bed, Moe and I finally settled down in our own tent.

“Where do you suppose those railroad tracks go?” I asked as I listened to the silence.

“To the mines down in Morenci and Clifton, I guess,” he told me. “They used to stop here to get the coke from the coke ovens on the other side of the river, but I'm sure they don't stop here anymore.”

“Could you see much of the ovens through the binoculars,” I asked.

“Yeah, it was really pretty cool,” he answered. “If the river wasn't so high it would be fun to cross over and explore them.”

“No one has used them for a long time, though, right?” I asked.

“No, they've been abandoned for years. I heard that hippies lived in them for awhile, back in the sixties, but you can see that some of them are falling apart now.”

I fell asleep thinking about the beehive shaped cones on the opposite side of the river, but was woken up several hours later, disoriented and alarmed. The first thing I realized was that there was a bright light shining through the black night, and then I realized the ground was shaking and a low rumble was growing louder and louder by the second.

“What the........?” Moe exclaimed as he sat up in our sleeping bag.

“Is it a train?” I whispered, hoping that was all it was, because if it wasn't there must be a whole caravan of trucks or motorcycles converging on our camp, and I sure didn't want to find our little group in the middle of a hells angels camp-out or something.

“It is a train,” Moe confirmed in a second. “Lay back down and go to sleep, they'll be gone in a minute.”

I worried that the kids would be scared, but I didn't hear anyone crying, or even talking, so finally I laid back down and closed my eyes. The train had already rumbled off down the tracks, and it was totally dark again.

The next morning I asked if anyone else had heard the train. “I did,” Linnea told me quickly, and Holly said she had too, but no one else had even woken up.

Alan got there with his kids that day, and we showed them all the cool things we'd found, then we took a long walk down the railroad tracks. At first everyone was excited by the pieces of copper ore we found lying along the side of the tracks, until our pockets were full and we had no more room to carry them. Eventually we walked around a bend and came to a large trestle bridge spanning the rushing river.

“Can we cross it?” the kids wanted to know.

“I don't think you ought to,” I told them uneasily. “What if a train comes while you're out there on it?”

“Oh mom, we'd hear a train before it got close,” they assured me, but I was still uneasy.

“Let them go,” Moe told me laughingly. “The train must only run at night, and even if one did come there would be plenty of time for them to run back.”

I still didn't like the idea, but Moe and Alan both said they'd go, so they took the older kids out over the bridge, stopping in the middle to unload their pockets by throwing their pieces of ore off into the rushing water below.

That afternoon, after resting for awhile, we video taped a movie. Making home movies had become one of our favorite spring-break traditions, and I'd even brought our box of costumes so the kids could dress up.

The boys divided up into two groups, the good guys and the train robbers. Linnea became the heroin, Holly was the grandma, and the little kids were extras. The boys had a ball tying Linnea up and placing her on the train tracks, then pretending to have a shoot out with toy pistols. We were just finishing up our little drama when we heard a loud horn blowing in the distance.

“It's the train,” the kids shouted in excitement, and we all turned to look down the track. Sure enough, a big black engine was slowly approaching, pulling five or six black freight cars behind it.

I wondered what the engineer and brakeman thought, as they rumbled past our camp, seeing girls in turn of the century dresses and boys in cowboy clothes with ropes and six shooters standing off to the side of the tracks, waving and shouting and calling hello. Surely we didn't look like ghosts from the past, but then again, we didn't look like regular campers, either. Whatever they thought, we had some awesome footage to end our spring-break home movie that year.