By Jay Treiber
On Jan. 19, 1922, my maternal grandmother was born in a cinder-rock building near the Arizona-New Mexico border, 25 miles northeast of Douglas. The place was then a general store: it has since been a post office, a barn, a general store again, and finally, someone’s house.
That building and the few outlying structures in the area (ranch houses and their out-buildings mostly) is called Apache. The place is named this because some 36 years before my grandmother’s birth, a Chokonen chieftain they called Geronimo was captured in Skeleton Canyon, a few miles east of there. Directly across the highway from that building stands a discreet monument, rough-masoned of the same kind of stone to commemorate this episode in history.
A third-generation Cochise County native, my heritage hear is relatively short. The history of this place and the people with whose blood and toil that history is imbued has a far greater claim than I. Nonetheless, I feel in me a special kinship with the mesquite and creosote, the rock and arroyo, the mountain mahogany and dwarf oak of the high desert. In the sky islands, which define the valley edges here, there exists a kind of eternity… those mountains are bigger, their spirit more abiding than the trifling cities that grid themselves into the landscapes below.
Though I make my home in Bisbee today, I spent the first 18 years of my 39 in the Douglas area. Born in a Phelps Dodge hospital, now defunct, I lived a good part of my youth a few miles north of town on what most metropolitan Americans would call a “ranch,” though the only livestock I can recall are a few beef steers for our own use, two hammer-headed geldings and some dozen Bantam chickens, most of which were filched by coyotes within a year.
Happily abandoning my birthplace when college age came, I spent two years attending a small university in Washington State. While I developed an affection for the great Northwest, the imprinted images of ocotillo and cholla cactus, the remembered, albeit rare, smell of rain-laden Arizona dirt, had a strong draw on me. I had not before realized how deep-fixed my bond for this place. I came back.
At NAU, I finished out my undergraduate work. In 1964, I moved from Flagstaff to Tucson (I don’t recall the reason), where I spent a floundering three years in nightly Fourth Avenue dissipation, losing no-account jobs and confirming my aversion to city life, such as it was in Tucson, anyway.
In 1967, I was accepted into the graduate creative writing program at the University of Montana…back to the Northwest. There treads a good spirit off the currents of the fat green rivers in Montana. Bill Kittredge was right. It is the “last best place.” I figured out who I was there, and so returned to Arizona and the southeastern corner of my youth.
Bisbee has its charms, and over the past two decades, people have begun to recognize them. In 1975, when the mine closed and Phelps Dodge pulled out, many speculated the place would become a ghost town the likes of Jerome. But the population didn’t decline, it just shifted. In lieu of the hard-minded miners in those ship-lap bungalows, there interceded a contingent of the counter culture, “hippies,” many of whom have stayed on to become today’s town establishment, however retro-bedecked they may be… the Birkenstock bourgeois, if you will.
Currently, just fewer than 7,000 people live here. The town survives its desperate times much like the century plants in the valleys either side of it. Bisbee draws all manner of people, from the suited entrepreneurs who buy up cheap real estate, to the idealistic types who, fleeing the decadence of urban centers, find here the end of their spiritual quest and seek out the nearest Bisbee Cancer tree under which to chant their mantra.
My father-in-law, a retired surgeon in Tucson, a naturalist and fine outdoorsman, loves this corner of the state. He and my mother-in-law visit us frequently. When last they were down (or up, depending on whether you measure longitudinally or elevation-wise), my father-in-law lamented the fact that the oak trees south of the highway in the lower part of the Mule Mountains appeared to be dead.
This lower southeastern portion of the Mules is my favorite section of those mountains. As you pull out of Sulfur Springs Valley and ascend Mule Gulch, a series of fingered ridges on the south side of the canyon taper down into a mesquite-choked wash. Those ridges are sprinkled with little oaks, which often lose their leaves in the spring drought and green up again in last August. After the summer monsoons, the scene is so pretty that to make it the subject of watercolor painting would only beg the question.
I assured my father-in-law that those oaks weren’t dead…they just needed a good rain.
I appreciate the growing interest in this area and its notable history. Though my appreciation is attended by reservation…I don’t want to see this county packed with people –McDonald’s, Denny’s, Red Lobsters sprouting up, as incongruous to this landscape as the Russian thistle (tumbleweeds) brought here a hundred years ago.
I respect those who find a certain artistic energy here in Bisbee, but I often suspect some of these relative newcomers fail to realize that this part of the state isn’t just about Bisbee, or any of the frail infrastructures we camp ourselves in. The plumb and level of humankind, I think, is often taken far too seriously.
All of New York City and a small Chicago suburb would fit neatly into the Sulfur Springs Valley. To remind myself of this, for some reason, diminishes the whole notion of the metropolis for me. Encumbered with town life, such as we are here in Cochise County anyway, we often fail to realize, in our day-to-day, the magnitude of the countryside.
A few months back, at a notorious Brewery Gulch watering hole called St Elmo’s, I spoke with a fellow who was mighty proud to have been in Bisbee since 1968. We talked city politics, the history of the tavern in which we stood. “A lot’s changed in 30 years,” he said, with that proud intonation of the old-timer. I’m always bemused by the attitude. To my thinking, it’s not how a person establishes himself as a part of a place, but how that place establishes itself as a part of him. I’ve never considered myself so much “in” Cochise County, as the other way around.
“You know what this place needs?” he asked me rhetorically, meaning the city of Bisbee.
And I gave him my standard reply. “Yeah,” I said, “one good rain.”
For my part, I’ll let the preoccupations of town life take care of themselves. New mayors will be elected, building re-stuccoed and painted, city councils will put in new sewers, corporations will re-open mines, the new order will fight the old guard and public officials will be popped for their prurient misdeeds. Unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. The bones of the heavy hitters in their Armanis and those of the bereted anti-establishment will be interred in the dirt just like those of Geronimo and Wyatt Earp.
But while infrastructures and the politics thereof forever drift in flux, the land abides. The side oats grass will cover the valley floors and green up in late summer. The Agave cactus will grow the same pole old Cochise painted was colors and carried into battle. The prickly pear will put forth its purple fruit. The dime-sized leaves of the ocotillo in spring will be topped with that stunning orange blossom. The crescent bean pods of the mesquite will weigh down its branched by early September. A southerly wind will steal out of Mexico to brush the grass on the Sulfur Springs Valley floor when every last building in it is dust.
An on a day in late August, heading home from work, I’ll round Grace’s Corner and climb into Mule Gulch Canyon. Out the driver’s window, I’ll spy those fingered ridges and see those oaks. They’ll be green again – pulled back to life by tht one good rain.
(Jay Treiber is an English Instructor at Cochise College in Douglas. He also writes Southwestern poetry and is currently working on a novel. His E-mail address is treiberjay@cochise.cc.as.us)