Made of Sterner Stuff
On the verge of manhood, two city boys find themselves in the US Air Force, marooned in a desert outpost
WE HAD COME TO ARIZONA IN THE YEAR OF THE BICENTENNIAL to be soldiers and to become men: the former was less demanding than I had thought, and the latter was proving to be elusive and frustrating. We were not at war, so it was good enough to play at being soldiers; manhood would cut us no such slack. We were in a kind of purgatory, doing our time with the desert as a backdrop, driving our big motorcycles out of Phoenix, north into canyon country at Cape Verde and beyond that the red rock country of Sedona and the high peaks of Flagstaff; or we could head south and cross the border to swim in the Gulf at Puerto Peñasco, a four-hour drive; or east into the dry and forbidding wilderness of the Superstition Mountains and the no-man's-land beyond.
The spring of 1978 found me and Bobby Rakov well past the Superstitions in a motel room in the battered eastern Arizona town of St. Johns, 220 miles NE of Phoenix, a surreal and threatening interlude — storms, wind, air sodden with metallic fury and poisonous moisture, dense clouds churning in vistas we could neither reach nor outrace in the endless expanse of the high plains once we descended from the Mogollon Rim, where mountain beauty gave way to a kind of…
