Thelma Heatwole

Heatwole was an Arizona Republic reporter in the 60's and 70's, and quite an adventurous lady. This book was published in 1981, when she was in her late 60's and is pictured in polyester jacket and styled hair. It seems that exploring Arizona's abandoned towns was a hobby for Heatwole, her husband and friends, because this book must have taken years to compile.
They spend hours searching for long-forgotten graves or a town that turns out to be just a single crumbling building. Her directions and warnings are pretty precise, and she includes many people who had lived in ghost towns during their heyday, which means she was talking to people who had been around soon after the turn of the last century, several of them having been born in bustling mining towns that were now empty. One "town" consisted of just one elderly woman who had spent here whole life there.
I expected the writing to be rather straightforward in a "here's where it is, here's what's left" way, and she does tell the reader what is left of these towns, as of the year she visited. But there's also a real quaintness to her storytelling. Not the passages that attempt to paint a picture of the sunsets or the isolation, but the instances of her going between the reporter, writing in the third person of "the party" or "the explorers" when she speaks of her own husband or friends. A paragraph later and she's describing hiking around a deserted town while sharing a can of tomato juice with her husband or sitting in the car eating a lunch of Vienna sausages and coffee, or even better, stepping behind the car to remove her "slacks" and pantyhose so she can wade across a stream. I know I'm going on too long about this little book, but reading little asides like really made this more interesting than expected.… (altro)