Hanging Off the Hill
Above the Verde Valley, on the shoulder of Cleopatra Hill, the town of Jerome hangs on. The word clings gets used a lot in the brochures, and it is the right word. The streets are pitched like roofs. The houses step down the slope the way spectators step down a bleacher, and the whole arrangement looks as though somebody threw it at the hill and it stuck.
The road up from the valley finds Jerome in stages. One switchback delivers the basin, wide and blue with juniper; the next delivers the undersides of things — joists and boiler rooms, wooden stairways bolted to outside walls, the plumbing of a town that was never meant to be seen from below. Jerome was built where the ore was, not where the view was, and it shows its workings first. Then the road straightens onto the main street and the town stops being a postcard and starts being a place.
From the lower end of that street, the valley floor lies far below — a great basin of juniper and mesquite, with the black thread of a highway running through the middle of it. Late in the day the light goes long and copper, and the mountains across the valley turn the color the hills must have been before the mining companies striped them. People who came up for the afternoon stop at a curb and stand a while. There is nothing else to do with a view like that.
The second thing gets noticed after the view. Looking back up the main street from the lower end, the building fronts hold an approximate line, but the rooflines do not. Corners sag. Windows sit a few degrees off true. It is not weather, and it is not simple age. It is the ground.
Jerome is built on a slope that moves.
Copper and the Inclined Plane
Copper was the reason anyone came. The mountain was full of it, and a town grew up to take it out — not along any surveyed plan but along the seams of the ore. There was never level ground enough in Jerome, so the builders made do with what the slope offered, hammering facades into the hillside and cutting rooms out of the rock where the ground ran out. For a time the town was flush. There were mills and boarding houses, saloons, a hospital, and a business street that did its brave best to stand upright.
For a few decades Jerome was as lively as any camp in the West, or so the old photographs suggest — crowded boardwalks, ore wagons, smoke standing over the mills. The money came up out of the mountain and went back into the hill as brick and cast iron.
Below the pavement was the other town. The miners followed the ore seam under the streets, carving out drifts and stopes until parts of Jerome stood over emptied rock. It was done well enough to hold, mostly, but it changed the arrangement. A town built on a hill with its knees hollowed out has to come to terms with gravity sooner or later.
The copper did not last. When the mines shut, the people left the way people leave a mostly dead camp — quickly at first, then in a slow trickle. A fire took a good share of the wooden buildings once, and the ones left went to rot and lean. The town sat on its hill for years like a dropped coat.
All the while the slope was doing what slopes do. The ground under Jerome moved. It had always moved — sections of the town shifting downhill a few inches in a year, hairline cracks opening in plaster, porches pulling away from their houses. The mining made it worse. Buildings slid from where they had been nailed down. The main street sank and was re-graded. The jail, so the story goes, walked itself downhill one winter and was never put back. Whether that is literally true hardly matters. Everybody in the valley agrees the ground took it.
A Town Tilted on Purpose
Then came the second life, the one that plays out in a hundred Western towns but with a crooked set here. Artists found Jerome when it was cheap and quiet. They bought the leaning buildings and did not always straighten them. Some owners leveled their floors and squared their doorframes; the happy ones learned to live with thresholds that rise on one side and windows that want to be parallelograms. The old hospital on the heights above town went to another use long ago, and its long windows still look down over everything.
The public part of Jerome is short and steep — a few blocks of galleries, storefronts, and worn steps, with lanes that dogleg back up the hill toward the old mine workings. Visitors come for the light and the unease, and the unease does not disappoint. There is an honesty to a building that admits it is settling: the crack running up the brick like a scar, the stair that meets its landing half an inch late, the door that has been planed at the bottom to clear the floor, and cleared again as the floor went on tilting. The stairways between the town's levels do double duty as seating when the street fills up, and they are the best seats in the place.
A person can buy the postcard version of all this, but the real thing is quieter. Seen from a railing above the valley, Jerome is less a place than a posture — a long negotiation between what people built and where they built it. The town lost that argument long ago. It has made a kind of peace with losing it, and the peace is visible in every off-level window and every patched sidewalk.
The Settlement With the Slope
At dusk Jerome turns into a lantern hung on the mountain. From far below, the lights come on scattered and uneven, stepping down the dark, and it is hard to tell where the last house ends and the first stars begin. Up on the slope, evening comes through the valley like a tide. The red hills go mauve, then blue, then black.
In daylight the town tells a different, older story. In the warm months the heat slants off the hillside and the valley shimmers below, and the grayed wood and rusted tin show their age plainly. The rock above town is stained red and green by years of ore and weather. Nobody is digging anymore. What the miners left behind is the hole they made in the mountain and a town built on the slow insurance of the slope.
Nothing here is finished, and that is the secret of the place. The mine is gone. The company is gone. The reasons the town existed at all are gone, and Jerome has stopped apologizing for leaning. The people who stay patch what moves and plane what does not and get on with the business of living on a hillside with opinions of its own. The one thing nobody is quite ready for is that the hill is still at it. Cracks widen in slow motion. Doorjambs grow out of square. The land under the town is not done deciding where it wants to be.
On a clear night, standing on an old retaining wall above the rooftops, a person can feel how small the town is against the dark run of mountains. Below the streets the rock is honeycombed with the efforts of dead miners, and somewhere down in that emptied rock the mountain is still settling its account. The soundlessness of it is the strangest part. A town in motion ought to make some noise. Jerome moves in silence, a few millimeters a season, while the valley keeps its blue distance.
Jerome leans a little further every year. And it stays.
