I Married a Ranger | Page 6

rushed for a day and forgotten as soon as another
arrived. He played his big guitar, and sang and danced, and made love,
all with equal skill and lightness. The only love he was really constant
to was Tony, his big bay horse.
Ranger West, Assistant Chief Ranger, was the most like a storybook
ranger of them all. He was essentially an outdoor man, without any
parlor tricks. I have heard old-timers say he was the best man with
horses they had ever known. He was much more interested in horses
and tobacco than he was in women and small talk. But if there was a
particularly dangerous task or one requiring sound judgment and a clear
head, Ranger West was selected.
He and Ranger Fisk and Ranger Winess were known as the "Three
Musketeers." They were the backbone of the force.
Sometimes I think my very nicest neighbor was the gardener at El
Tovar Hotel. He saw me hungrily eying his flowers, and gave me a
generous portion of plants and showed me how to care for them. I
planted them alongside my little gray house, and after each basin of
water had seen duty for cleansing purposes it went to water the flowers.
We never wasted a drop of water. It was hauled a hundred miles in tank
cars, and cost accordingly. I sometimes wondered if we paid extra for
the red bugs that swam around in it so gaily. Anyway, my flowers
didn't mind the bugs. They grew into masses of beautiful foliage and
brilliant blossoms. I knew every leaf and bud on them. I almost sat up
nights with them, I was so proud of their beauty. My flowers and my
little gray kitten were all the company I had now. The fire guard girl
had gone home.
One of my neighbors asked me to go with a group of Fred Harvey girls

to visit the Petrified Forest, lying more than a hundred miles southeast
of the Canyon. As I had been working exceptionally hard in the Park
Office, I declared myself a holiday, and Sunday morning early found us
well on the way.
We drove through ordinary desert country to Williams and from there
on past Flagstaff and eastward to Holbrook. Eighteen miles from there
we began to see fallen logs turned into stone.
My ideas of the Petrified Forest were very vague, but I had expected to
see standing trees turned to stone. These big logs were all lying down,
and I couldn't find a single stump! We drove through several miles of
fallen logs and came to the Government Museum where unique and
choice specimens had been gathered together for visitors to see. It is
hard to describe this wood, that isn't wood. It looks like wood, at least
the grain and the shape, and knotholes and even wormholes are there;
but it has turned to beautifully brilliant rock. Some pieces look like
priceless Italian marble; others are all colors of the rainbow, blended
together into a perfect poem of shades.
Of course I asked for an explanation, and with all the technical terms
left out, this is about what I learned: "These trees are probably forty
million years old! None of them grew here. This is proved in several
ways: there are few roots or branches and little bark."
The ranger saw me touch the outside of a log that was covered with
what looked to me like perfectly good bark! He smiled.
"Yes, I know that looks like bark, but it is merely an outside crust of
melted sand, et cetera, that formed on the logs as they rolled around in
the water."
"Water?" I certainly hadn't seen any water around the Petrified Forest.
"Yes, water. This country, at one time, was an arm of the Pacific Ocean,
and was drained by some disturbance which brought the Sierra
Mountains to the surface. These logs grew probably a thousand miles
north of here and were brought here in a great flood. They floated

around for centuries perhaps, and were thoroughly impregnated with
the mineral water, doubtless hot water. When the drainage took place,
they were covered by silt and sand to a depth of perhaps two thousand
feet. Here the petrifaction took place. Silica was present in great
quantities. Manganese and iron provided the coloring matter, and
through pressure these chemicals were forced into the grain of the
wood, which gradually was absorbed and its cell structure replaced by
ninety-nine per cent silica and the other per cent iron and manganese.
Erosion brought what we see to the top. We have reason to believe that
the earth around here covers many thousand more."
After that all soaked in I asked him what the beautiful crystals in purple
and amber were. These are really amethysts