01: Jerome - The Wickedest Town in the West Still Has a Pulse
I didn’t plan to stay. Jerome was supposed to be an afternoon. A scenic detour on the way to somewhere else. The kind of place you pass through, photograph, move on from.
The road into town felt anything but gentle as it wound up the mountain in corkscrews, the town appearing in glimpses and pieces — a painted storefront here, a rusted sign there. Until, all at once, it revealed itself. Tilted sideways on the mountain, stubborn and alive and unbothered by the fact that pieces of it slid downhill a century ago and simply stayed where it landed. There is something intimately familiar about a place that stubborn.
Jerome was a billion-dollar copper mining operation once, the wickedest town in the West by its own proud admission, a place that swallowed fortunes and outlaws and heartbreak in equal measure. Now it's an artists' colony and a ghost town and a tourist destination all at once, wearing every version of itself simultaneously. I liked it before I'd even turned the engine off.
I found myself wandering aimlessly, the streets uneven. Fascinated by the raunchy history wearing its scars openly — brothels that had become bars, hospitals that had become hotels, a mining town that swallowed a billion dollars and dares to still be here, still be strange, still be entirely itself. I found the journal within the first hour, which is to say the journal found me, because that is how the magic of travel works. I was doing that particular kind of wandering where a place hasn't yet told you what it wants from you, so you move through it slowly, picking things up and putting them down, letting your fingers glide along the shelves. There it was, tucked away in a stack of books, coated in a thin layer of dust. Leather. Handcrafted. Hand-stitched. Adorned with a vintage Lovers Tarot card on its cover. Already worn at the edges as though it had been waiting many years on the back of that dusty shelf just for me. As I walked back out into the afternoon heat, I felt the weight of what I was holding was something that I didn't fully understand. One of those moments that feels very important but you don’t yet know why.
As I moved through the town slowly, the journal warm under my arm, not looking for anything in particular, I noticed a set of stairs I thought for sure hadn’t been there before and climbed to the top with that unique curiosity of a woman with an afternoon and no obligations.
At the top: a sign. Ghost Tours.
The building loomed over me and I laughed quietly to myself, the way you do when the universe is being almost embarrassingly silly. A ghost tour? Really? I have never in my life wanted to go on a ghost tour. And yet standing there at the base of that ancient and enormous building, I felt the pull move through me clean and simple, the way the truest instincts do — the feeling of a decision arriving fully formed from somewhere below conscious thought. I have learned, slowly, over the course of many years and many wrong turns, to recognise the difference between what I think I want and what I am being pointed toward. I booked the tour.
By the time the sun started its descent, the hill had pulled me upward toward its crown, and I found myself at the top of Jerome, with nowhere left to go but inside…the Asylum. Dining in the hospital to end my day. The bar where the pharmacy used to be. The surgical rooms, now bathrooms. The original nurse's desk, now the hostess stand. In the classic Jerome way, it didn’t erase it’s history, instead it just repurposed it and poured me a drink.
I ordered a glass of red and found a table by the window, the valley spreading out below in every direction, the sky going gold and then amber and then something softer as the sun dipped lower. There was a waiter with a cute smile who made me laugh. I asked him about the hauntings. The charge nurse who still lingers near the hostess stand. The giggling children heard in empty hallways. The elevator with its long history of accidents. I ordered another glass and stayed far longer than I'd planned, which is to say I stayed exactly as long as Jerome decided I should be there, watching the valley lose its color slowly, the way you watch something beautiful when you know it's almost over.
Jerome disappears fast when you leave it. A few bends in the road, and it was gone entirely. Like it had pulled itself back into the mountain, evaporated into the mist like Brigadoon. I had been but a spec in a simple afternoon in the wicked town’s long life. It had been something considerably more significant in mine.
I understood it better now, winding back down toward the desert floor, the night sky expansive and open ahead of me, the next place still unnamed and waiting somewhere out in all that dark. This was the life I had chosen. Showing up to places that handed me significant memories and synchronicities and mysterious magic. The road flattened and the mountain fell away and the night desert opened up on all sides as I let Jerome go, or it let me go, and I'm still not entirely certain which.
That journal would become my Heart's Almanac of the whole trip. Every feeling I couldn't say out loud, every moment that cracked me open quietly and without warning, would end up pressed between those pages like dried flowers. Jerome had given me the container to hold my whole journey.
