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.