Safford

Not much to see in Safford unless your esthetics lean toward gas stations and WalMart lined up with Best Western and Jerry’s Restaurant on a street too busy to walk across.  So I show you the old city hall.  

Dropping back to when life moved slower, the land and its fossils still remembers the Imperial Mammoth, standing twelve feet tall and weighing ten thousand pounds.  Those were the days my friends, they thought they’d never end. 

Cotton just emerging
along ther Gila River

Cotton just emerging
along ther Gila River

And then there were the days when Cotton was king along the Gila River. I am happy to still witness that great era.  But it too is ending.   

This morning in Jerry’s Restaurant, I sat at the counter because that’s where I hoped to overhear the locals.  I was not in my spandex and bright colors for biking, so they thought I was a nobody.  The counter was nearly full and they asked no questions.  Then two farmers sat one on each side of me and cross-fired to my two listening ears.  Something about a tractor-towed scraper that he’d bought at auction and the price of a bale at nine-hundred dollars.

Finally one of them said, ”Where ya from?”  I hedged, because to be from California, the land of fruit and nuts, is to be shunned in God’s country.  “Riding a bicycle across America,” I said.  And we spoke briefly about that.  But to get on with why I came to this counter, I showed a some innocent ignorance and asked if he meant a bale of hay or a bale of cotton.  Cotton, one of them said and seemed happy that I cared.  He went on to proclaim that enough cotton is grown around here to make a pair of jeans for every one of us in this great country each year.

Now I had a pair I could deal with.  All I had to do was show interest and ask questions.  And for just a bit of intent nodding, I learned that in 1880 the price of cotton was about eighty cents a pound.  Today it averages about a dollar, but this year it is $1.80, higher than it’s been in a long time.  One of them could remember it as low as $0.53.  I said something about mules and manure versus tractors and chemical fertilizer, asking if taht explains how farmers grow cotton at the same price as it was in 1880.  They perked up; I had them hooked now; they knew I was listening.

  Tailings from the Santa Rita Mine,
(also called the Chino Mine)
seen from several miles away

But all that’s changing they said.  The copper mines are driving out farming.  It’s because of water.  We have plenty of water for farming just eighty feet below the surface.  We can pump all the water we need as long as we don’t exceed our riparian right to a certain quantity.  The trouble is copper mines.  There are three huge ones up in the hills ( somewhere behind the field you see in the above picture), and they need lots of water.  Since they have n

o riparian rights, they buy up the farmland just to gain the water rights.  Already one-fourth our good farmland has been abandoned and let go to native desert because the mine owners pay us more for the land than we can make farming.

  Tailings from the Santa Rita Mine,
(also called the Chino Mine)
from about a mile away

In the old days the copper was smelted out of the rock.  All that has changed with water.  They add acid to the water and leach it through the ore to extract the copper in chemical solution.  Then they get the copper out with electrolysis.  With copper prices high, they can buy farmland just for the water rights.

  Santa Rita Mine, (also called the Chino Mine)
seen through the chain-link fence

I peered through the chain-link fence with barbed wire leaning outward from its top and looked into  the pit.  First worked by the Mimbreno Apaches prior to the 1800s, and a source of copper for the Mexican mint until 1845.  Today, it is one of the world's largest open pit mines.

Other than that, I am lazing away the day, letting the body recover, getting ready to move deep into Arizona tomorrow.

Of Mountains and Wind

Into the silence of pre-dawn, I climbed like a  mole to the dark mountain surface above Silver City.  Stars too bright and numerous to think of as distant—brighter than the town lights below.  It was cool and blue as a morning painted on canvas.  I climbed for four miles to the continental divide, where droplets split company—some to the Rio Grande, some to the Colorado. 

Contrary to meteorologists’ word, no wind came up from the west to hinder my progress.  I sailed happily into daylight thinking the hills will be easy without that dreadful west wind.  And so I came to rest in a little berg called Cliff.  “D” runs a fine little restaurant here serving biscuits and gravy full of carbs and fat, which I fully expected to burn off on the many steep hills before me until I rest for the night.  He assured me that wind will begin in earnest by ten, no matter the forecast. 

So it was, just as “D” said, a flag stood out straight, pointing at me on edge, as if to say you cannot avoid the wind. 

What really got them in the end—

those women who didn’t make it,

who withered and blew away

in the open—was the wind.

Space, yes, and distance,

too, from neighbors,

a piano back in Boston.

        Peter Ludwin    

Why take a picture of an obnoxious thorny weed, hated by farmers and sportsmen?  Because I am like the thistle in many ways—prickly, even cruel if approached unprepared, but with a gooey heart that draws the gentle bees, the ones who avoid the thorns.   

a thorny weed

relieves the thorns

I felt so long

its flower declares

pleasant thorns   

Arizona comes at the top of a ridge after a long, headwind climb.  Two states traversed and two to go.  It’s the undone part that can unravel a person, win her over, send her astray from the goal.  It “highlights the natural process of life as not being finished.  And we arrive at the adventure itself, not the ending... that excites, satisfies, and is our element.” (Kathabela on Facebook, Tanka Poets on Site)   

I plunged into Arizona, dove into it, dropping three thousand feet in just a few miles, falling lower, lower to where the night promises to be warm enough for camping with my lightweight gear.  

So it was after eighty-two hard miles I came to Three Way—a store and a place to camp at the ranger station.

This morning I crawled out of the tent to see headlights coming down the mountain from Safford.  It’s the mountain I would climb, and was happy to see a morning absent of wind. 

I made it to Safford and the Budget Inn which probably appears as much like camping as Three Way.  But it’s luxurious, made that way by those many miles of hills and wind.  It is like there’s a space in my heart that will never be filled.  So I wait and wait and ask and keep pedaling.  And out here, I perceive the positive in nearly every moment, something I fail to do in life at home.  

Silver City

.

A creek runs through it, like the creek that runs through Santa Fe, and maybe it reminds the artists who migrated south from that famed city of their homeland.  Here they can buy a modest house for a fifth of the hiked-up prices in yuppie Santa Fe.  It’s too bad they have to move, but true artists find more pleasure in their art than in the little money most of them get from it. 

N. Bullard Street, Silver City

It’s a pleasant town to walk through, to pop into galleries, funky coffee houses, and thrift stores that carry eclectic, quality goods.  Lots of organic food and herbs here.  But many of the old shops are closed, the two theatres are closed, and the newspaper will stop printing next week.  A huge Walmart is just outside of town, and it might explain the closed shops.  Most of the remaining shops in old Silver City carry things Walmart doesn’t.

I highly recommend Jalisco’s Café on Bullard Street, south of Broadway for its authentic spicy New Mexico enchiladas.

Silver City lives in a far less generous time than the early days of mining upon which the town’s wealth was founded.  A little silver and a lot of copper still come out of the pit mine, but the town ran out of most of those jobs, so it sought tourism—that great redeemer of failed indigenous economies—for posthumous ennoblement.  The artists followed and eke out a slim existence.  

Tomorrow morning, the strong wind that blows much stronger than usual today and in the wrong direction, should die down some, hopefully making the eighty-five-mile ride to the ranger station at Three Way possible.  I called the ranger, and she said the station will be closed, but there will be water from an outside faucet.  After camping there, I will ride to Safford, Arizona, where another motel awaits.

Into the Black Range

.

Sunrise a few miles west of Hatch

Rio Grande

Leaving Hatch, I headed up the Rio Grande to turn west again and into the Black range of mountains.  Crossing them would be the high point of the entire cross-country venture—high in sensation of accomplishment and high in elevation.

Arrey Cafe

Arrey Cafe

On the way, I rested for breakfast at the café in Arrey and ordered my all-time favorite—huevos rancheros green.  I tasted chile as it should be—hot and tasty.  The Hispanic waitress knows much about doing a lot of work in a short time, and her ten-year-old daughter, stepping in efficient footprints will soon fit right into a way of life I miss in the city.  She moves at an easy pace without hurry and serves all the twenty-some customers gracefully, without hurry.  

Arrey Cafe

Arrey Cafe

She wastes no time socializing, maybe only feigning not to speak much English with her English-speaking customers.  It’s the way they build adobe houses and stone walls, tasks too tedious for normal Americans.  She defies the American adage: work fast, get more done.  I’ve wondered in recent years if it’s all that good an adage.  She confirmed my suspicion as her actions say: steady and easy gets more done.  After stacking adobes to build our house in Santa Fe those many years ago, and now watching the way this waitress gets the work done, I think I might make a good Hispanic.  But I don’t see many of them riding bicycles, except to work.  They probably find no purpose in it.  

Soon, I turned due west into the relentless wind on Highway 152, heading for the distant Black Range.  Something about riding uphill and into the wind is like having a tooth extracted without anesthetic—it feel good when it’s done.  

Hillsboro

Hillsboro

I made it to what might be called the base camp for Emory Pass.  Hillsboro at elevation 5,300 is a good place to rest for the steep climb in the morning.  In the 1880’s, Hillsboro was a boisterous mining boomtown, but today, old-timers in the only remaining café talk of the two filling stations that aren’t here anymore, and the bars gone out of business.  There’s no store here, just a café and a motel where I spent the night.  

I like the feeling of being the first one awake in the morning; it makes you daring somehow.  And it usually means a few hours of riding without much wind.  So it was that I started up to Emory Pass at first light.  I climbed up through desert rocks and into mountain forest, always and steadily climbing for seventeen miles. 

Emory Pass

Looking back from Emory Pass

At ten in the morning, I was there, the top at 8, 228 feet, or so I thought.  Green forest of ponderosa pine, cool air, and almost no traffic, I felt that my day’s work was done. 

But there were more mountains to climb in my lowest gear, though not as high as Emory Pass, more hills to descend at rollercoaster spends, in the forty miles before finding rest.  I made a stop at the Santa Rita open pit copper mine, which I won’t bore you with here, but will come up in some picture talk that do on return.  The little computer on my bicycle says that I climbed 5,240 feet today.  

Bullard Street, Silver City

Silver City and Motel6 was the most welcome rest stop of the trip so far.  I walked about town this morning, and will post again later about what I find here.  Suffice it for now to say that it’s a good place to take a day or two off, an artsy and crafty place, and that’s what I’m doing.  

Valley of the Rio Grande

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I headed northwest from Las Cruces today, not in the direction of home, for that would be along I-10 through desolate Deming, not nearly as interesting as the mountains just a few miles out of the way.  Along the dry Rio Grande, where water can be pumped from shallow wells, land is flat and farmed, but on both sides, bone-dry hills rise like defiant children trying to show that not everyone desires the desired thing—water.  Wind howled from the southwest, hitting me in the face this minute, pushing my back the next.

Rio Grande 

Cottonwood

A staunch old cottonwood beside the dry river digs deep and holds on where most cottonwoods give up and find homes closer to life, closer to water.  Some of us cross the unpopulated desert searching for what most find where life and living things are abundant. 

The town of Hatch, where I rest tonight, bills itself as the Chile Capital of the World and holds a festival each Labor Day in honor of New Mexico’s most celebrated crop.  I rode into town salivating for green chile as it should be—hot and tasty.  There’s no comparison between the upscale Zia Café in Santa Barbara, which advertises New Mexican food, and the delicious enchiladas-green that I had at Chilitos last night in Las Cruces http://chilitos.net/   But it was not as good in Hatch, and I returned to the motel disappointed. 

Tomorrow evening in Hillsboro, I do not expect to have internet.  It’s a tiny town on the slope leading to Emory Pass (8,228 feet.)  The following day should be a long, steep pedal to Silver City with all the modern conveniences.  See you there.

desiring home
I head not west
but a longer way
for a nicer journey
delayed gratification

Land of Enchantment

Leaving the metropolis of El Paso, and heading generally northward, I entered the Land of Enchantment. Even after five years living in New Mexico some twenty years ago, I still thought it mystical, with a kind of otherworldly oldness.  

Country roads led me along the Rio Grande valley, no longer a border with Mexico, and lush with irrigated farms and pecan orchards.  Imagine this sign in Southern California and you get a sense of how different life is among tractors, smells of cut hay, turned dirt, and cow manure. 

In the little Spanish town of San Miguel, the Catholic Church with its parish hall surpasses the store and the café in popularity.  The little villages along here all have a Mexican feel to them.

Heading north on Highway 28 to Las Cruces, I rode through a long tunnel of pecan trees as they meet and touch branches at the road’s center.  Stahmanns Pecans, http://www.stahmannpecan.com/ is a huge orchard with a shelling plant and a store that appears to be closed.  Employee houses set among the trees, but most of the operation seems to have seen better days.  

I came to Las Cruces on Easter evening, and will rest here today before riding deeper into the Land of Enchantment.