I'm blogging to you today from the windy high desert plateau near Sonoita, Arizona. If you are wondering what this terrain looks like, go watch some old Westerns. Many were shot on location here on the Empire Ranch. I've told you about this place before. It's a working ranch, which means cattle roam freely across the valley, working hard at becoming fat for your dinner table. Not my dinner table, I don't eat anything that would run from me if it could. Or kill me, if it felt inclined. When they stroll through camp, I respectfully retreat to my car. These cows are not to be messed with.
This week I visited four towns: Benson, Tombstone, Bisbee, and Patagonia. Everyone said I should check them out. All four towns are within a couple hours' drive from Tucson. My intention was to escape the Tucson heat, and these places were on the way to higher elevation, so it made sense to give myself a tour of the area. Plus, one of these towns could conceivably be my next home base. As I've mentioned, I'm pretty much over Tucson.
Each town had a unique personality.
Benson was all about trains. Amtrak actually stops there, the woman in the visitor center told me. Trains have interested me for a long time. I grew up not terribly far from a train track, and we used to cross over the track on a viaduct as we walked to high school (pre-school bus days). I remember getting excited when I happened to cross the viaduct just as a train was coming through. That was probably more about the thrill of having a train rush through underneath me than it was about trains in general. I took a train when I moved to Los Angeles in 1977 but only because airfare was so expensive. I've never had a desire to, like, work for BNSF or Amtrak, though. So, all that to say, Benson, too small, too trainy.
Tombstone was a weird fake western ghost town reminiscent of Frontierland. The main street was dirt, cars prohibited. As I walked along the wooden plank boardwalks past real saloons, I saw small posses of gun-toting men in jeans, vests, cowboy boots, spurs, and ten-gallon hats. What's more, they all seemed to be wearing badges, which you know can't be right. There have to be some villains in town. Sure enough, I found one. A long-in-the-tooth badge-wearing cowboy (transplant from Minnesota) invited me to dinner after his shootout comedy show. I guess the few dames in town (identifiable by their straggly show-girl dresses) had turned him down. He must have really been desperate to ask me out. I smoothed the front of my stained smelly t-shirt and politely declined. Tombstone's great tourist attraction is the shootout at the OK Corral. I don't care for guns. If I were willing to put on a costume (preferably spurs), I could probably get a job in Tombstone and live in the nearby trailer park next door to Lonesome Cowboy. No thanks.
I was really curious about Bisbee. Bisbee is purportedly all about art, and I saw quite a few galleries when I dared to look at anything but maneuvering my car up and down the steep narrow streets to find a hidden parking lot to spend the night. I could see the attraction of the place. It's picturesque, unique, and charming, despite the fact that a couple played their stereo in the car next to me for two hours in the wee hours of the morning. However, Bisbee to me was all about the massive crater known as the Lavender Pit Mine, a wound left on the land by the copper mining industry. I felt deeply disturbed coming around the bend just outside the historic town and seeing that yawning hole. It did not make me proud to be a human, to know I have benefited from the copper that was blasted out of innocent mountains. No, I will not be moving to Bisbee, to be constantly reminded of how I have been part of the descrecration of the land.
Patagonia (population 800 for the past 100 years) was about mining and ranching. The visitor center was closed but I stopped in a mining office that had a sign in the window welcoming visitors. The mining enthusiast there greeted me eagerly and told me all about the mining still going on in Patagonia (not strip mines or pits, no these are all underground, with a smaller-than-700 acre footprint, easy on the environment, you betcha). Not gold, copper, or silver. No, nowadays, zinc is the new gold. And manganese. We need zinc and manganese for electric cars, apparently. It's the American way, tear up the earth so we can smelt it down to power our excursions into the country where we destroy more pristine habitat in our quest for peace and quiet.
Up here on the cattle ranch, sitting out of the wind in my tin can fossil-fuel burning minivan, looking out over the vistas at the cattle roaming slowly through the grass, I can almost see the attraction of ranching. My grandfather was a cattle rancher in Eastern Oregon, so I could claim a slight relationship with ranching (although I claim no affinity). I used to want a horse. I don't remember ever wanting cows. Or sheep, goats, pigs . . . I'm a city kid forced into a weird car camping adventure by circumstance. I really like camping up here on the Empire Ranch, but I don't think I will be choosing to live in Sonoita or Patagonia or some other ranching mecca.
Writing and drawing, blogging and mentoring . . . these activities can happen anywhere I have an occasional internet connection. I can't imagine being a cattle rancher who happens to write fiction on the side. Nor do I see myself as a writer who keeps a few head of cattle. I can imagine taking a train to Boston to see my sister, but don't expect me to be the sleeping car attendant. Along those lines, I don't reckon I'll be out panning for zinc or manganese anytime soon.
So, here I am again, learning by process of elimination where I don't belong. It's useful, but it's a lot of work, to choose a home by crossing every other place off the list of possibilities. If I live long enough, I might actually find the place I'm looking for, if such a place exists. One thing for sure, I will not up and move to a place I haven't thoroughly checked out, and that means shopping at their stores, printing my car insurance ID cards in their libraries, and sleeping in their Walmart parking lots. You don't really know a town until you've slept in your car on a backstreet with one eye open, waiting for the knock.
