Your day-off town is not the place where you wake up most mornings. If you have a day-off town, you work elsewhere: on the road, on the river or at a duty station for the park, the forest or for science. You guide or you fight fires or record artifacts, educate on the rez, or service trains east and west.
After you’ve spent nine days on a cot, or weeks eating off enamelware dishes in government quarters, the vision of time in town starts to glow like an angel on the horizon beckoning, come hither. Soon, soon you can do your laundry with a latte from Macy’s, or hoist a beer of amazing flavor, graze the wonders in a library, and have lunch in a café without needing to heat water with propane to wash dishes after. And, oh oh, the grocery store might have things, aisles and aisles of things gone missing: arugula, cantaloupes, amazing cheese, White Castle burgers.
Years ago I drove 30 miles of dirt road out of the Bradshaw Mountains to get to Prescott, my first day-off town. There I’d cash my paper paycheck by putting it in one of those pneumatic tubes that got sucked in to the bank. Money would shoot back at me—a delight!—and then I’d spend it all day like a coyote marking boundaries. I’d put coins in the machine at the Violet Ray Laundry Mat, leave dollars for paperbacks from the Bookworm, savor hash browns at the Dinner Bell, add gasoline to my Honda wagon and head back up the dirt road to Crown King often passing the other gal on fire crew headed down to her days off. I’d see her three switchbacks above me making a dirt plume with her Toyota. One time I slowed when I saw her hand out the window. Without stopping, I barely managed to snatch the feather she offered. Driving the washboard home to the crew trailer, it bounced gently on the dash of my car. A week later when we passed I handed her a cantaloupe.
At fire lookout a food fantasy can easily goose me to town. This summer the menu at Cuvée 928 calls out as I peer through binoculars at the end of day. One summer I’d bail off the mountain to have a steak at Rod’s in Williams, another I scooted along Woody Mountain Road eager for trout and eggs at La Bellavia. Chili with sunset on the porch of the bar at El Tovar often coaxed me away from Grandview Lookout. Watching the World Series after was bliss. At Mt. Elden it was dangerous to the shocks on my truck to think too often about a Leroux Burger, the Weatherford not being that far away.
I’m fond of the Weatherford because it has kept me company through 20 lookout seasons from summers when I slept in the youth hostel to recently watching the full moon rise from the balcony. What a fine time to come to town and dance to Limbs Akimbo, then retire with Jimmy’s voice following you up the staircase to the hostel dorm. On the top bunk in a room with others, I once stared sleepily at the ceiling while a French gal excited from hiking the Grand Canyon compared beauty with a Navajo young woman from Chinle. “How is Canyon de Chelly different?” the foreigner wanted to know. “Well,” the Navajo woman said, “It’s smaller. And it’s a home.”
Back then I did not come to town to get online and peer at the e-mails backed up on my laptop. Back then I would tear open envelopes from my post office box and then write letters on the mezzanine while foreigners lined up to use the pay phone on the wall. If I came in from Turkey Butte and found the hostel fully booked, there was an overflow room where one could sleep on a mattress on the floor. I think that room became the Zane Grey ballroom. Hard to remember clearly now, sitting with a Smithwicks, chatting with Shelley tending bar upstairs.
For many of us, Flagstaff is a most delicious day-off town. Out there on the plateau through long hours of income-producing behavior, we drive dirt roads and highways in our imaginations; with the eagerness of hummingbirds hovering before bright blossoms, we calculate our paychecks and plan our play, full speed ahead to merrymaking in town again one day soon.
