Random Rants

It is time to divert from the biographical trajectory of this blog and get right down to the problems with modern American life (aside from our idiot President). Here, in no particular order, are my most recent complaints:

1) Why do they advertise the evening news on the evening news? I mean, are you not already watching it?

2) The costumes worn by bicyclists are among the most stupid of any sport. Even the most fit athletes have a problem with spandex.

3) I do not understand those who complain that people seeking healthcare in Canada must wait weeks for an appointment. When was the last time you tried to get an appointment with a dermatologist in the United States? I am sure they saw you right away...

4) Why does our government retain the penny? It costs more than a penny to make a penny!

"Iuventus stultorum magister"

Ringo. The name has (forgive me) a certain “ring” that has echoed throughout the twentieth century. It hardly echoed through the nineteenth century, the time when Johnny Ringo actually lived, because he was simply not that famous. The legend of the alcoholic, educated gunslinger was invented in 1927 by writer Walter Noble Burns in his colorful fable Tombstone, An Illiad of the Southwest. Burns added Ringo to his blood and thunder epic about Wyatt Earp to give a dash of mysterious menace to the cowboy faction of Cochise County that the Earp brothers battled in Tombstone, a sort of counterbalance to the story of Doc Holiday, another alcoholic, educated gunslinger. As a result, both men became legends long after their own time, and the number of bad guys in western movies named Ringo are almost beyond counting. One of the best cinematic portrayals of this legend was turned in by actor Michael Biehn in the 1994 film Tombstone. (The title of this essay comes from the exchange of threats in Latin between Biehn and Val Kilmer's Doc Holiday in that movie. It translates as "Youth is the teacher of fools.")

But the real John Ringo was not a gunfighter, accoring to his biographer John Burrows, but instead a vicious drunk who may (or may not) have shot a couple of men in the back during his short tenure on earth. Burrows biography sifts through what little is known of Ringo from primary sources, and devotes a chapter to the man’s mysterious death on the banks of Turkey Creek

in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona. Ringo was found seated in the forks of a blackjack Oak tree, bootless and with a bullet hole in his right temple, ostensibly from the discharged revolver in his right hand. In spite of a coroner’s verdict of suicide claims of a few men, including Wyatt Earp, to have actually shot Ringo persist to this day.

Jayne and I went camping in the Chiricahua Mountains last week, a beautiful spot along the splashing brook that is Turkey Creek. Although we were a bit on edge pondering the very real twenty-first century danger of drug mules known to traverse this area, we enjoyed our time immensely, and finished our trip by stopping at the gravesite of the “gunfighter who never was.” Requiescet in pace, Johnny.

The Price of Boredom

The bumper sticker is really an inside joke. I saw it on a car yesterday and had to reflect on the slogan: “Keep Warren Boring.” Locals will recognize Warren as the large Bisbee neighborhood which splays out south of the Lavender Pit, a place where the “nice” people lived in the early years of the twentieth century. It is still home to our community hospital, our lone elementary school,

and a few second hand shops, but almost all of the businesses that used to line Arizona Avenue were shuttered years ago. There remains a quiet residential area with some pretty nice looking homes in various stages of deterioration and a strip-designed city park that hosts our weekly farmer’s market. Overall a sleepy, quiet place and one overlooked by the tourists who frequent Old Bisbee every weekend to carouse in the many saloons. So, yes, Warren is boring and it looks likely to stay that way.

Keeping a place boring requires that residents look elsewhere for commerce and entertainment. For Bisbee citizens, that means a drive to Sierra Vista for almost everything other than groceries. With a population that exceeds Bozeman, Montana, “Sorry Vista” is a vast area of strip malls and franchises such as Outback and McDonald’s. It is a city without a core, lacking a downtown area

in favor of sprawling development that guarantees the necessity of driving some sort of vehicle to shop, worship, or eat. It resembles the worst of Tucson’s development where older ugly temporary buildings are periodically bulldozed to throw up newer ugly ones, and where directions are generally given by using chain restaurants as geographic waypoints.

We can indeed glory that Warren is “boring” (or even the rest of Bisbee) because Sierra Vista offers us the luxury of keeping it that way. We drove over to the big city yesterday for a doctor’s appoinment and had a wonderful lunch, but it is always somewhat stressful to deal with busy intersections and traffic lights. We have neither in Old Bisbee, and I hope it remains that way (even if it is boring.

R.I.P. William Wallace

He came into our lives in 2002. I can remember very clearly going out to the breeder’s place near Big Timber and walking out to the kennels filled with anxious, barking dogs. The breeder had a lot of different varieties, and all were noisy with the exception of the Westies. They were in one caged run just sitting quietly, watching us as the other dogs around them were going berserk. I guess I was sold on the breed that day. The breeder showed us to a mother with about five or six little white pups, and our boys picked out one small fellow that seemed more lively than the rest. However, we were not allowed to take him that day; he needed to be weaned along with his siblings and it was not until about three weeks later that I drove to the parking

lot of the Bozeman Wal-Mart where I met the breeder’s husband and actually purchased Willie. It felt like we were conducting a drug deal. For the next seventeen years Willie was a part of our family. He watched the boys grow up and leave home. He traveled with us to Arkansas and Arizona. He stayed at home with Max, our friend, while we went on our overseas trips. He even went for an airplane ride last November when we flew from Phoenix to Bozeman, sitting quietly under the seat in front of me. And most of all, he brought us a lot of joy. His run ended today following a week of steady decline, and he has left a void in our hearts. Goodbye, Willie. I said it so many times, and I said it again as you were dying, “You are a good, good dog.”

This cartoon is published with the permission of the artist, Mark Glavin, and his website ubertoolcomic.com.

Hazards of the Desert

Living on La Frontera is not for the faint hearted. In this isolated mountain town there are a number of hazards that one faces on a daily basis. Now that the monsoon rains have started we cast a fearful eye on the rock wall behind our house that threatens to spill debris on our home with every torrential rainfall. Most of the transients and homeless who wander the streets are harmless eccentrics, but they occasionally break into vacant homes in search of booty and shelter. And of course the animal kingdom opens another front that the Bisbee resident must take into consideration.

But for all that, life is good in this salubrious climate. The Fourth of July was a city-wide celebration that we were able to share with our oldest son, Benjamin, who came all the way from New York City just to watch burly contestants pound holes in a rock.

One of the holiday exhibitions was rock drilling by hand into a solid block of granite positioned in Brewery Gulch. Men would step up to the block with a hammer and an assortment of drills to pound furiously for eight minutes to see how deep the resulting hole would reach. (The winner scored an impressive depth of over 11 inches.) There was also a coaster race down the canyon in front of our home, a rather boring spectacle since it was a timed race and the carts came along in widely spaced intervals. This is to prevent wrecks, of course, but it pulled the excitement right out of the competition. The fireworks were ignited in Warren, the neighborhood on the far side of the Lavender Pit, and we declined to drive down there to seem. Instead we contented ourselves by observing the flashes that outlined the intervening mountains, making the display look very much like an approaching thunderstorm.

But back to the hazards. A few nights ago Jayne had occasion to visit the bathroom and discovered a scorpion scuttling across the floor. I continue to encounter javelinas during my morning walks, and the other day spotted a rather emaciated mule deer in one of the draws cutting across the road. This means that mountain lions are likely also inhabiting my route during these early morning hikes and I remain vigilant.

But the biggest hazard is picture here. A coral snake, one of the most venomous reptiles of Arizona was lazily making his way across our yard to the stone retaining wall right near the steps I was about to descend. After admiring the beauty of the creature I nevertheless used a garden rake to send him flying into the ditch below, hoping he will find a better place to ply his trade.

Pedestrians and Peccaries

My morning walks up to the summit of Mule Pass have taken on an almost ritual aspect; an early morning trudge up to a whitewashed stone wall that I must physically touch in order for the exercise to be complete. The wall overlooks the western half of the pass, and about 400 feet below one can see cars entering and exiting the tunnel that connects Bisbee with the rest of the world. Some mornings I pause to take in the scene, but more often I simply touch it and perform a smart about-face to begin the descent home. A troop of regulars joins me in this ritual. About a dozen people perform the same walk every morning and every morning, depending on the time, I greet them going up or coming down the roadway. About two weeks ago I had a message to convey along with my salutations.

Javelinas (or peccaries) are pig-like animals that apparently find the Mule Mountains ideal habitat. Not really related to pigs, these tusked animals move in small herds which include large boars, smaller sows, and the cute little piglets that are generally born during the months between November and March. The boars can get pretty big, and with the ridge of stiff hair that grows from

their backs, they can appear to be a formidable adversary for any human that might come upon them. Apparently they do well in urban habitats, and they have been known to hang out in the suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson. The herd I stumbled across two weeks ago consisted of about ten individuals, who crossed the road not more than fifty feet in front of me as I stopped to observe them. Hardly a grizzly bear encounter, but I still felt obligated to inform my regular walkers who I met going uphill that the animals were ahead for them going down. The same thing happened to me last week, only this time I counted eight and had a walking stick in my hand, a precaution that I adopted after the first incident.

What is totally weird is what occurred last night as Jayne and I sat on our front porch. Jayne heard a rustling in the bottom of the concrete drainage culvert that runs between the house and the street, about twenty feet below the level of our porch. When we looked down to see the origin of the sound we saw yet another herd of these creatures stealthily emerging from the connecting draining tunnel into the main channel where, I am sure, they were lured by the vegetation and few stagnant pools of water that have remained into these warmer months. It was a fascinating reminder of the wildness that exists beyond (and sometimes within) the limits of this town.

.45 calibre Anniversary

Jayne and I observed 45 years of married life yesterday with a drive with our friend Steve to Sierra Vista, a nice steak dinner, and a visit to the Coronado National Memorial, a lovely park situated on

the Mexican border immediately southwest of Bisbee. This is supposedly near the site where the 1,500 men expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado crossed the line into what today is known as the United States. It is a good thing they made the trip back then; today they would have had to contend with a russet-colored steel-slatted barricade that extends as far as the eye can see. Back in his day, Coronado made it all the way to Kansas before he realized there was no gold among the native inhabitants of the plains, but at least one of his lieutenants managed to stumble upon the Grand Canyon. The Coronado National Memorial is also the site of a hidden geocache which we found easily (once we asked the ranger where it was) and a visitor's center with dress up clothes for kids. They had helmets, swords and even a heavy chain mail shirt. Of course the two biggest kids on this trip had to participate but Steve is a bit camera shy.

I began the day with presenting a card to Jayne to observe the date properly, and designed by myself in TrueArchives style. The inside joke on this one concerns my periodic threat to open

a tourist stagecoach ride concession in Tombstone with my brother, an idea crazy enough on its own but even more so when you consider the town already has TWO coaches competing for the tourist dollar. I had so much fun thinking about Tombstone while designing this card that I almost forgot that this Memorial Day weekend was also the "Wyatt Earp Days" festival in Tombstone. I drove over on Sunday to observe the intersection of myth, memory, and mayhem that constitutes the gunfight reenactments in the middle of Allen Street. A very surreal touch was the addition of a belly dancing club from Sierra Vista performing an interpretive dance to the music of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" which seemed curiously appropriate.