Day 37: King Cribbage

Day Thirty-Seven: King Cribbage

7/17/11:

The game known as “cribbage” (hole-y board, pegs, Muggins) haunted many of my days at the KNF. Living a mile outside of a 3,500-person town meant a lot of free time for those of us on the Williams Ranger District. Which, of course, translated into many a summer night of games (but very, very thankfully, and despite Travis' insistence that it was “fun,” no Stump).

We kicked off with a secondhand set of War, progressed to euchre and 31, and somewhere along the way, Noah uncovered North House’s handmade cribbage board, and he and Quentin got stuck. At any hour, in any state of mind, cribbage was played. As the tally of games won and lost began to rise, so to did the trash talk. The punctuation of dark mutterings with a triumphant yell (usually accompanied by arms thrown up in victory) signaled to Joe and me that success had come to one or the other on the cribbage battlefield.

Quentin—a self-proclaimed cribbage fanatic—had earlier related tales of a specially designated “travel” cribbage board owned by his family, as well as enlightening us about the internet-fueled cross-country cribbage matches he held with his father. Noah had also been raised in the cribbage tradition, and the two took to the cribbage board like fishes to water.

So no, crawling out of my tent in the Coconino National Forest, I was not terribly surprised to see Quentin and Noah plopped on the back of Joe’s truck, cribbage board between them, pegs a-whirl. I may not have understood the unearthly sway cribbage held over my compatriots, but as long as they kept their pegging and verbal jabs to a dull roar, I was not overly annoyed.

We milled about a bit, Quentin and Noah battled out a few more games (by the end of the summer, the tally had risen to something like 25 - 15, with Q leading), and then we were striking out for Fossil Creek. Designated in 2009 as a “Wild and Scenic River” (to protect it from development), Fossil Creek runs thick with travertine minerals, which, besides turning the water a turquoise color, create fossil-esque rock formations. Fossil Springs, the source of Fossil Creek, produces more than one million gallons of 72 degrees Fahrenheit water per minute. The creek winds between Tonto National Forest and the Coconino National Forest in central Arizona. (Side note: Coconino is a historic misspelling of “Cohonina,” the Hopi term for the ancestors of the Yuman, Havasupai, and Walapai peoples.)

Braving yet another nasty stretch of road, Joe’s truck faithfully bore us down into the heat of Fossil Creek Canyon. Our first stop along the creek offered a good set of rocks from which to jump, but throngs of fellow day-trippers pushed us on after a while. A little farther along Fossil Creek, we discovered a semi-secluded area with a rope swing, which pretty much decided everything. I collapsed with a book in the shade of the cottonwoods to the ambient sounds of splashing and thrashing as Joe, Quentin and Noah attempted to out-leap each other on the rope swing, Noah giggling almost exactly like a twelve year old girl.

I should have expected a drawn-out lull in activity to mean trouble, but didn’t make much of it until I was hauled up by my arms and legs and thrown unceremoniously into the creek. Thus began a game of karate-attack, mostly perpetrated by Noah and Joe (Quentin instead communing with Fossil Creek’s bird population). We later wandered with the current down the creek, sipping libations and waxing poetic about the beauty of nature as it held us in its loving arms, and the incident of earlier, when an annoyed mother had inquired whether the kid dashing haphazardly about on the rocks was mine, began to fade pleasantly from memory.

Desire for food, more than anything else, drove us from Fossil Creek. The wee town of Strawberry rested just outside Fossil Creek Canyon, and fighting through the cascade of descending cars, we pushed on out, made for Strawberry, and filled up our empty bellies with scandalously oversized proportions of home-style cooking.

Taking mercy on Joe, I volunteered to take the helm on the way back to Williams, and soon enough all three lads were conked out around me. I didn’t mind. The drive back was beautiful, particularly Lake Mormon, which we passed just as the sun began to sink.

Back on the ranger district, shaking off their sleep, I do believe Quentin and Noah rounded out the day with predictable style: wrastling through one last cribbage match.

Photos: 1. Quentin and Noah, Cribbage Lords 2. Drive to Fossil Creek 3. & 4. Fossil Creek 5. Fossil Creek Canyon