One Year of the Commute

One year ago today we were in Louisville, Kentucky trying to stuff twelve densely-packed boxes into one very densely-packed Rav4. It was 35° outside – at best. We had not yet seen manatees, humpback whales, roadrunners or jackrabbits. We hadn’t yet acquired an appreciation for Spanish moss, golden barrel cacti or paloverdes. We knew nothing about the Apalachees, the Chumash or the Hohokam. We had only visited two of the Alta California missions. We had only lived in three different states between the two of us. What a year it has been!

Things are coming around to the end, too. Most of you will know, but this assignment will be our last. We are heading back home soon. It’s time. We have loved all this adventure, but we are ready to lead a bit more of a settled life again.

Here’s how it happened: About a month ago we had no idea where we would be going next. Maya had extended this Phoenix assignment for one month (the end of January) because we were both enjoying it here so much. The winter weather is great, the apartment is very nice and Maya was really enjoying her work. Well, when it came to the end of January and it was time to look for the next assignment there wasn’t much open. We had hoped to go back to California, but there were no jobs there is Maya’s field. She tried to get herself extended here again and they were looking to loose staff because of low patient census. Maya was looking at Atlanta, Denver, Bullhead City (AZ) and even Johnson City (TN), but nothing was panning out. For some reason the market for travel nursing was really drying up… We eventually decided that we would have to call it quits and head for home. We had actually started packing, had looked at prices of trailer rentals.

While it was a little sad to be done traveling, we also started to get really excited about home. Louisville has our family, our friends, “our” roads and “our” parks. It has Lotsa Pasta (there is no better gourmet food market; we know because we’ve looked!), has Queen of Sheba, has Pita Delights, has Bearno’s Pizza. We were excited about Food Night, Game Night and When You See the Robot Drink. We were ready to celebrate birthdays and holidays with more than a phone call and a card in the mail. In short, we were looking forward to picking up all the threads of our life that we put on hold and packed away last year.

Then at the eleventh hour we found out that we could stay. The census at the hospital had picked up and they needed Maya to say after all. So now we will be here until the end of March. So after getting really excited about going home, we weren’t. It was bittersweet to be going, but it turned out to be bittersweet to stay too! Crazy how life works sometimes…

Sahuaro Ranch Park

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day Maya had to attend a Basic Life Saving update course. Since we were out and about on the west side of town we decided to try our luck again and the pretzel factory. Alas! They were closed for the holiday. We didn’t even think about that. That was the third time we went and failed to get factory-direct pricing on tasty pretzels…

Well, since we were out we decided to stop off at this place Maya had heard about. It’s Sahuaro Ranch Park. It used to be just Sahuaro Ranch where William Henry Bartlett built up a smallish farm and homestead into a thriving agricultural complex. Starting with figs, alfalfa and grapes in 1886 he expanded to citrus (one of Arizona’s Five Cs of Commerce), dates and olives by 1891. The ranch eventually reached over 2,000 acres and also raised milk cattle and hogs. A house was built in 1881 but the Bartletts never really lived there. The house was taken over and expanded by the ranch administrators, their families and the farm workers. Part of the land that was once the ranch and all of the historic buildings were eventually acquired by the city of Glendale to make “the crown jewel of Glendale’s park system.” Eighty acres are now covered in ball fields, playgrounds and picnic areas. The park includes seventeen acres of the historic ranch area including some of the orange groves, a few palms and an expensive rose garden. Neat!

It’s a unique place. Public parks don’t usually have orange groves or historic houses. The house is actually two with a patio-like walkway between them. The rose garden was not in bloom at all, but it was still kind of a nice place to stroll through. Kinda weird though: it was infested with roosters. All roosters. Not hens. And they were noisy! All of them were crowing all the time. You could hear it everywhere in the park. We are city folks so our main experience with rooster noise is the stereotypical they-crow-at-dawn thing. The truth seems to be more that they start crowing at dawn. We were there at mid-day and still; Ahroo-ahroo-ahroooooooo all the time. There are supposed to be rabbits too, but we didn't see any.

Since it’s a public park the fruit that remains is free for the picking. You are limited to three pieces per person per visit. A lot of it is harvested by volunteers and given away to shelters and other places. We saw some of the large bins of harvested fruit ready to be shipped somewhere. Maya chose three bright orange fruits with nobly texture. Matt chose three larger and more yellow fruits from different tree. We learned an important lesson from these fruits. Just because the fruit came from a formerly commercial orchard doesn’t mean that it tastes as commercially wonderful as it once did. There must be some tricks to watering and fertilization that orange-growers use. Maya’s orange were impossibly sour. More like a lemon. Matt’s were impossibly bitter. More like a grapefruit, but really, really bitter. At least visiting the park was a fun afternoon diversion.

Have You Heard?

About the middle of January we went to the Heard Museum. It’s a large museum that focuses on Native American art and artifacts. That’s about all we knew about it before we arrived. It turned out to be a really cool place except for one thing…

The museum houses a vast collection of stuff acquired by Dwight B. and Maie Bartlett Heard in the course of their travels around the southwest and around the world. Since they established it in 1929 others have continued to donate to the collection making it eight times the size it originally was. Now, by this point we have been to enough places that we have seen quite a lot of corn-grinding stones, bits of pottery and woven blankets. The Heard collection had all of the too, but what made it different was that it also houses an impressive collection of modern art by living Native artists. So alongside the ancient Zuni pots pulled from the dust of some cave somewhere are modern pieces with more dynamic glazes and bolder shapes, but with the same kinds of designs. You can see the motifs in use now and the heritage they come from on the same shelf. That is neat. The permanent collection exhibits artifacts and describes the lifestyle of each tribal group that lives in southwest as part of a massive gallery called “Home.”

One of the temporary exhibits that we saw was called “Life in a Cold Place.” It was a collection of modern-day art from Inuit artists in Canada and Greenland. In the 1950s the Canadian government promoted the production of art as a way for the people recently collected (forced) into settled communities to make some money. The idea took hold and several artistic lineages were established turning out lots and lots of paintings, prints and sculptures for consumption by tourists. As it turns out, the Inuit aesthetic in two dimensions is just not that appealing to us. Most of the pictures of people running about in the snow or hunting or dancing just weren’t that interesting. The three-dimensional art on the other hand was very interesting. The stylized human form looks interesting when rendered as an object. A lot of the small soapstone carvings we saw had a distinctly Asian look to them. Imagine one of those rotund Buddhas in a fur-fringed parka. Maya’s favorite piece from the gallery was a stone carving of a man hunting a seal and a woman fishing. The artist rendered both the people above the ice and the animals below. Very cool.

Next to this gallery was a smallish one containing a few items from around the world: feather headdresses from New Zealand, jewelry from Africa, a blanket from Hawaii… It was in this room that we encountered our third tour group. The Heard Museum really, really, really likes tours. When we had first come in we were looking at the map trying to decide which gallery to visit first and we asked by a docent if we wanted to join a tour that was forming up. No, thank you. Then a different docent asked if we needed the map explained to us. No, thank you, we can read it ourselves. So he sat down next to us and proceeded to explain the map to us anyway! While this was going on we heard one docents at the welcome stand talking about it being about time to round everyone up for the tour. Later after we had escaped from the map-explained we met the lady rounding everyone up. NO, thank you, we’d like to go at our own speed. So in the Around the World gallery when me met yet another tour group with the lady loudly shuffling her charges past the headdresses and the cradle boards at breakneck speed it was something of a camelback-breaking straw. Can’t we look at the museum on our own? We paid our fee! Let us wonder! Don’t tell us where to go first and don’t tell us what your favorite thing is like you’re letting us in on a great secret. We’ll see it all in our own good time! At least no one was giving us the evil eye just for being there like often happens at the Speed Art Museum.

The museum wasn’t all neat art and crafty artifacts. In “Remembering Our Indian School Days” the museum has a very informative and well-presented gallery about the experience of the Indian School system. Guided by such enlightened principles as “It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them” the Indian Schools may be the worst thing that the White Man ever did to the Indian. Maybe. The attempts by the teachers, administrators and government functionaries to eliminate all the “native” from their charges and graduate productive “Americanized” citizens were documented in an immersive way. The room was set up like a series of classrooms each focusing on a different aspect of life in the Indian School program. Copious photographs from the heydays of the schools cover the walls and you are surrounded by video and audio clips of grown folks remembering their days at school. Native legends were discarded in favor of white versions of Indians. Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was compulsory reading but children were not allowed to speak in their native tongues. Names were changed, hair was cut, and visits home were out of the question. Of course, in the end, the schools failed in their attempt to entirely eliminate Native cultures (hard as they might have tried). The government knew it too. Control of schools on reservations was relinquished to the tribe that the school “served.” Some were closed immediately and others were turned into centers of solidarity and pride for their students and alumni. Even so, only one of the dozens of former schools is still in operation. Those schools not on reservation land were disposed of in various ways, some quite recently. Although the educational program had dropped its assimilation aspects, Phoenix’s own Phoenix Indian School operated until up until 1990 when the value of the land was judged to be irresistibly high. Some of the grounds remain as a city park and funds are being raised to turn the buildings into some kind of museum and Indian cultural center.

On a lighter note, we walked through the children’s activity center part of the museum. There we tried on a replica canoe for size. Matt also picked up a pattern to make a humming bird mobile. He hasn’t made it yet though. We also looked at an instillation of art by one Tony Abeyta. He’s of both Navajo and Anglo descent and in his work he uses thread from both. That was a theme we saw a lot in the modern art on display throughout the museum. The works are modern and yet they have these resonances with other images that are very traditional for specific cultures. The artist says that his current work uses abstracted images of the Navajo underworld to show the relationship between the modern world and the rest of the cosmos. So there you have it.

Carefree in Cave Creek

After being slightly underwhelmed by the Pioneer Living History Village, we looked into places that might be similar, but better. Checking on the website of the Central Arizona Museum Association (dedicated to the promotion of museums) Matt found a listing for the Cave Creek Museum. It described it as “living history of the desert foothills.” That sounds promising, right?

It was a beautiful day and rather than brave I-17 again, we went north on the Desert Foothills Scenic Drive. This stretch of northern Scottsdale Road is cool enough to have its own website and a support society. The Scenic Drive was established by locals back in the 1960s as a tourist attraction. The drive provided a reason for “snowbirds” to come and patronize the businesses at both ends. Perhaps they were hoping to follow the Pigeon Forge-Gatlinburg model. Maybe they just really liked the look of the desert flora. That was long before the development of the area so both sides of the road today remain utterly “wild” looking. You can almost forget that you are in the middle of a huge metropolis because the cityscape is blocked out by giant mesquite trees and towering saguaros. There are signs along the way that name the different plants. They are names we have come to know well: paloverde trees, teddybear chollas, fishhook barrel cacti… It is an amazingly scenic drive. You can even take a piece of it home with you! Twice we saw guys selling full-grown saguaros out of the back of their trucks. They were all packed up and ready for transport.

Looming up ahead of us the whole time was Black Mountain. It looks like an impossibly large pile of black gravel. Most of the mountains around here look that way, but most of them are red. The mountain was mined from the mid 1800s up until 1942. The Mormon Girl Mine on the southwest side of the mountain is famous. Famous in Cave Creek, anyway. Cave Creek started up to support the mining on Black Mountain and in the other area foothills.

The museum was not really what we expected. It was just a museum. Nothing “living” about it. That isn’t to say it was bad, it just wasn’t what we were looking for. Actually, it has an impressive collection and several nice displays for being a small place. It seems that all the individual towns around here have their own history museums. Since they have all become islands in the middle of sea that is Phoenix it’s more important for each municipality to showcase its own individual story, no matter how small it is.

The story for Cave Creek is like that of many other places in Arizona. First came the Native Americans. They ate saguaro fruits, colored their clothes with various desert plants, wove baskets, made lots and lots of pots and then all mysteriously disappeared about 1450 C.E. Of course we already knew that. Maybe it’s just that we have heard about the Hohokam a few times now, but the signs and information panels in the Archaeology Wing seemed very clear and informative.

Next came the prospectors. They dug, dynamited, crushed ore, melted out the silver and the gold and kept their deeds in steel tobacco tins. About the time the gold and silver ran out, people were settling down in the area and ranches sprung up. Some of these were later developed, some turned into parks and some enjoyed a spate of tourism by re-branding themselves as “Dude Ranches.” A taste of the wild west specially packaged for tourist consumption.

In the central gallery was a large, wall-sized, aerial picture of the area in the 1960s. It showed a whole lot of nothing stretching away into the distance. However, close to the bottom of the picture, meaning somewhere nearby, was a huge sundial. Huge! Matt just had to go check it out. We found out that right next to Cave Creek is the rather newer town of Carefree. Carefree was a 1950s planned community designed for up-scale residents. With street names like “Easy Street” and “Nonchalant Avenue” (really!) it appears to be trying very hard to meld the Old West and the New West. It has worked to some extent. Cave Creek (old) and Carefree (new) have a join chamber of commerce.

So, the sundial. It’s on Sundial Circle at the town centre. Carefree advertises its sundial as the “third-largest working sundial in the Western Hemisphere.” The 75 foot long gnomon (that’s what a sundial’s arm is called, apparently) is 35 feet high. It has been bringing people to Carefree since it was erected in 1959. Hey, we went to look at it! The town centre has other interesting features like a nice fountain with a stepping stone bridge across the splash door, a gila monster-shaped slide and a stature of a cowboy. We took a look at all of this, mostly because Matt wanted to see it all. “When will we be back here?” he asked. He did manage to resist, however, going a little way up the road to see the world’s largest katsina. But here’s a picture of it…

Sergeant Solder

We starting having problems with it while Maya’s family was here. A couple of mornings the computer would wake up, but the monitor wouldn’t. If you shut the whole system down and leave it for twenty minutes or so and try again it would came back on fine. Weird. Well a day or so after they left it was nothing. No amount of waiting, jiggling cords, using different power cables made any difference. Luckily for us the discount TV we bought back in Florida has an in port for a computer’s video out. Of course, it is hard to sit that close to a television. Plus, what if one of us wanted Days of Our Lives at the same time the other wanted Tetrapod Zoology? It was just a temporary solution.

We were hemming and hawing about getting a new monitor. There's the cost plus the possibility that a new one would fail in short order as well. While searching for information about HP monitors and whether this is a common problem or not Matt found that, yes! it’s very common for the vs19e. Almost every site that mentioned them also mentioned “no power.” We even seem to have gotten more life out of ours than average. Our monitor is close to three years old. Most other people seem to have had problems in under twenty months!

The good news is that the most common problem is also really easy to fix! We learned all about it from gr8whtd0pe at instructables[dot]com. It has something to do with sub-standard capacitors in the circuitry. Namely, they bulge open, leak brown goo, and stop working. “All” you have to do is snap open the case, unscrew the circuit board, replace the faulty capacitors and you’re back in business. This does involve the use of a soldering iron to get the old parts off and the new ones on. Now, neither of us has ever soldered, but we have both “helped” our fathers do it. And of course by “help” we mean that we stood around blocking the light and asking silly questions of the guy with the 400 degree wand in his hand. How hard can it be right?

So, we headed on over to the nearest Radio Shack. We took the circuit board along because we had read that one person following gr8whtd0pe’s instructions actually got the parts store to do the soldering as a while-U-wait kind of thing. At the Radio Shack we went to it didn’t quite work that way. We walked in with the circuit board in hand and the clerks all dived behind the desk and hid. Well, maybe it wasn’t really like that. They pointed us in the direction of the parts bins and the rack of soldering supplies then stepped well away. Apparently, the fact that we had removed a circuit board from the inside of an LCD monitor was proof enough for them that we knew way more about it than they did. One of the guys claimed complete ignorance of circuitry, citing instead his MBA as qualification enough to run an electronics store.

If we had already had a soldering iron the repair would have cost us under five dollars. Since we had to buy an iron and solder and the new capacitors the repair was more like twenty-five dollars. Still, that’s not bad when a replacement monitor could easily have run us $150! The repair wasn’t that hard either. The hardest part was snapping the frame of the monitor apart to just get the process started. When we actually got to the soldering Matt held the iron and Maya applied the solder. We got better with each piece. We replaced three capacitors, screwed and snapped it all back together and the little blue power light came on! Great! We were quite pleased with our results. We love just doing it ourselves!

The House That Niels Built

The day after going to the zoo we were looking for something else to do. Maya and Neha were thinking about going to see the Vulture Mine near Wickenburg, but after looking at how far away it is we decided to find something closer to home. After several false starts we eventually decided to go have a look at the Niels Petersen House. The house is decorated for Christmas and it was the last day for the decorations so we went to see them.

Niels Petersen was a Danish immigrant that set up a huge ranch in what would later become Tempe. In addition to becoming one of the wealthiest ranchers in the area he became an influential figure in Tempe serving on bank boards, donating land to the city, and even serving a term in the territorial government. He built a Victorian mansion on the ranch to woo Susanna Decker, an upper-crust east coast lady. They were married in 1892.

Other than the story behind it, there wasn’t too much about the house itself that was remarkable. The high ceilings, the ornate moldings, the archaic kitchen implements: all of it was fairly standard for old house tours. The thing that wasn’t standard was the holiday decoration. Since Petersen was Danish, the house is always decorated in traditional Danish fashion. The decorations follow a theme and this year’s theme was the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. So, there were a lot of references to Andersen’s tales in the decorations. The guest bedroom had half a dozen mattresses piled up on the bed, the Petersen boys’ room was full of nisser (gnomes), swans were worked into the garlands going up the curving staircase, there was a metal heart placed in the fireplace; that kind of stuff. Since Andersen was a big fan of paper cut outs and they are traditional Danish Christmas decorations anyway, the house was full of them. On the trees, handing as mobiles, sitting on desks and mantles – everywhere. Red and white (the colors of the Danish flag) are the main color used in decorating. The flag itself is also a popular decoration. It all made for a very nice display.

The day after that we had to get up at 4:00 to take Maya’s mom and sister to the airport for an early-morning flight out of town. We saw them off then came home and went back to bed!

Phx Zoo Take Two

The day after Christmas Maya’s mom and sister left here headed to California to see the family out there. It was nice to have the apartment all to ourselves. We like guests, but we like our space too. It was a fairly uneventful few days. Maya was originally not scheduled to work on New Year’s Eve or on New Year’s Day. It’s not that we planned to do anything special, it’s just nice to occasionally have a holiday off. Maya has worked more holidays than she hasn’t since we started traveling. It kinda grinds you down to have no special days in your life. Well, it didn’t work out that she had them off. She traded her New Year’s Day shift with another nurse who was going to have family of her own in town that day. Then on New Year’s Eve morning she got a call from the hospital asking if she could come in because some of their regular staff had skipped out. Jerks! She hadn’t been prepared to go in at all. There were no clothes laid out, no lunch already packed, plus we had stayed up reading until 02:00! Yet she said “yes” and so off she went. So, from two holidays off to neither off. That’s the way it goes sometimes…

On the evening of the first, Maya’s family returned from California. They were going to say with us a few more days before heading home. On the second we went to the Phoenix Zoo. We had liked it so much when went before, that we thought they would enjoy it too. They did. We all did. Ah, animals!

For some reason a lot of animals were off display. The anteaters weren’t in their cage. The Pronghorns were nowhere to be seen. The bald eagle was off display this time. The Mexican wolf was there, but was hiding. The whole Forest of Uco feature was closed because one of the bears was sick. Since it’s got that innovative you-can-walk-completely-around-it design they had to close off the whole forest to give the bear its restorative peace and quiet. Too bad, that was one of our favorite things!

We did get a good look at the prairie dogs. They were all out cooing in the sun, but there was one very close to the edge of their enclosure that was digging. He was really going at it. Dirt was flying! Then, every once in a while he would stop and peep his dirty head out and look around before he went back to it. We also had a couple close encounters with humming birds. These aren’t zoo-a-mals, they are just native humming birds. One came close to attacking us over by the coyote cage. You know how loud it is when a bumblebee dive bombs right by you? This was like that but even louder. It flew right past Maya’s mom. Zzrrrruuummm! Later by the cheetahs we saw another humming bird feeding. It’s pretty amazing to see now they move from flower to flower hovering like they do. Wow.

Neha saw that there were camel rides and she wanted to take one. It’s a pretty silly little figure eight that the zoo folks take the camel on, but it was popular enough that there was a line. A short line, but still a line. She had a fun. Something to tell the neighbors back home. That’s the zoo. Seeing it again we can be a little more objective about it and we slightly down-grade it from “The Best Ever” to “Really Great.” It may still be the best zoo we’ve seen, but we can see now that there could be zoos better. Where? We’ll let you know when we visit them.

There's No Place Like Home For the Holidays

Well, Christmas was a while ago. It’s kinda old news at this point, but if you have any residual holiday spirit left you might enjoy these pictures…

Here’s our cute little tree. We didn’t bring any kind of holiday decorations with us but we couldn’t go without. Especially not with guests staying over. We picked up this mini-tree and trimming then made the star ourselves from felt and silver glitter hot glue. The little birds covering it are our favorite. As you can see, though we are far from home, our families sent us some holiday cheer.

We’ve just opened gifts from Matt’s brother, Michael. See how happy alpaca wool hats and The Tick on DVD make us? Thanks everyone for the calendars, the shirts, the gift cards, the tea and the television shows on little plastic discs!

Since we have a fireplace here we decided we needed a fire on Christmas morning. We got one of those fake logs and it burned cheerily away for most of the morning. Asher wisely kept a safe distance.

Neha helped make bread. This was the honey-oat bread that we make often. This time it was perfect. It’s quite possibly the best loaf of bread we’ve ever made. We also had spicy chili and coconut corn, sage butter on green beans and red potatoes, a mozzarella and tomato salad and, for the entrée, eggplant lasagna. It’s our own recipe using grilled eggplant slices instead of noodles. Neha made our dessert all by herself. It was a cheesecake made from a cake mix. She picked it out of The Cake Mix Doctor, which is a fabulous book. It’s not my any means a typical Christmas dinner, but when have we ever been typical?

It rained most of the morning. That’s as white of a Christmas as Phoenix can manage. In the evening, though, the rain petered out, the setting sun shown through the clouds and we were treated to a vibrant Christmas rainbow.

The Lost Mines of Arizona

The so-called Lost Dutchman Mine is famous enough that we had heard of it before we ever moved out here to The West. There are almost as many versions of the story of the Lost Dutchman as there are tellers of tales. The basic semi-mythical story goes something like this: Jacob Waltz was not a Dutchman but a Deutschman, that is, he was German. He wondered around in the hills and ravines now known as the Superstition Mountains and came back with pockets stuffed full of huge gold nuggets. He never told anyone where the gold came from but it was suspected that he had a secret mine in the mountains somewhere. In 1891, On his deathbed Waltz supposedly revealed the location of the mine to his friend and nurse, Julia Thomas. She put together a team of people to look for, but seems to have never found it. She took to selling maps to the lost mine instead. Since then, the story has been mixed (intentionally and accidentally) with other stories of other “Dutchmen,” rumors of other mines, stories of Indian gold, tales of lost military payroll shipments, and all manor of other things. Stories say that the mine is cursed and people who find it are doomed. Indeed, more than one person over the years has turned up dead after setting off to look for the mine. Whether these deaths are due to a curse, some sort of enigmatic mine guardians, or simply exposure to the harsh climate of the desert is immaterial to the tellers of tales. The deaths, the uncertainties surrounding Waltz, the countless versions of the story, the remoteness of the place and the fact that the mine itself remains lost (if it ever even really existed) all add up to a legend.

The truth of the matter has likely been lost in the Night of Ages. The Superstition Mountains themselves are real enough, in any case. They are quite picturesque. The western edge of the mountains is dominated by a feature known as The Flatiron. It’s the remnant of a volcano and was formed by essentially the same process that made Devil’s Tower. This Arizona volcano didn’t make the same tight shape, but the thrust-up rock with vertical grooves is overall a similar shape. You can see the Superstitions off in distance from just about anywhere in Phoenix. They are always out there looking mysterious. A couple of days before Christmas (known in Matt’s family as Christmas Adam) we all went for a picnic lunch in Lost Dutchman State Park at the foot of the mountains. It’s about 45 minutes to the east. The mountains look even more picturesque and mysterious up close! The park itself has an exhibit on native plants, an amphitheater, frequent programs and all the camping facilities you could want. There are also a lot of trail heads that lead out of the park, into the Tonto National Forest and up into the mountains themselves. We were not prepared to hike up to the mountains themselves, but we did venture off along one of the trails for a little bit.

That day was probably the coldest day we’ve had. It was in the 50s at the best. But there was a lot of wind too! It was kind of empty area – certainly no buildings of any size out there. And we were slightly above the surrounding terrain. These both likely had something to do with the wind. In any case, it was windy. It was a constant wind too, with even stronger gusts. Being out there at the very, very edge of what could be called Greater Phoenix you feel like you are nowhere near civilization. Looking at this huge chunk of rock in front of you and at all the empty, dry land around you makes you wonder why anybody ever came out here. All those miles and miles of dry, scrubby-plant covered land dotted with giant volcanic promontories and scoured by the endless, whipping wind. All of the Phoenix area used to look like this. How could anybody think this was a good place to live? Yet people did cross this land. People did settle here. Amazing.
Of course there is an easy answer to why people came to this particular spot of wilderness. One word is enough. Gold. It’s as easy as that. The volcanism that made the Superstition Mountains also laid the veins of gold, silver and copper that brought prospectors like Waltz and big time mining companies alike to almost literally the middle of nowhere. About the time that the Lost Dutchman rumors were just getting going, rich strikes really were made to the west in the Goldfield Mountains. The rumors and the promise of real gold kicked off a mining boom. All the mining in are area necessitated a town and Goldfield was founded in 1892. There were multiple saloons, a brothel, a boarding house, a few shops and even a school. The town existed for only five years. After that, the gold had all been dug out and the town went vacant as the miners moved on. There was a short period in the 1920s when new technology allowed a little more gold to be extracted, but when that was gone the town disappeared again.

The foundations of the original buildings were still there, but not much else, in the 1970s when one Robert F. Schoose came to the Arizona looking to make a business of tourism to ghost towns. Not to be deterred by the lack of a town Schoose purchased the site in 1984 and set about reconstructing the town. Rightly or wrongly, the site bills itself today as the Valley’s only authentic ghost town. Come to Goldfield Ghost Town! What have you got to Schoose?

As touristy type attractions go, Goldfield isn’t that bad. None of the shoppes are pushy about their wares and while there is a lot of the tacky and mass-produced junk that you can find at just about every road side attraction, there are also some genuine articles available. One shop had an impressive collection of fossils and stone carvings. Maya got a couple of cute little rabbits there. Another was all devoted to plants. Matt got a bag of desert pebbles to use in our theoretical future cactus garden. The brothel museum also sold period-ish dresses. Neha got one of those. There were re-enactors running around the place too, and they were all quite friendly.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we did was go on the mine tour. It wasn’t a real mine but a recreation of one of the levels of the Mammoth Mine. That’s a famous mine to the southeast that hauled a truly impressive $3,000,000 worth of gold out of the ground between 1881 and 1901 before they broke into an aquifer and the place filled up with water. Of course to keep up appearances, the guide talked about the tour as if it was through a real mine. There was talk about the capacity of the elevator as we all squeezed into it and we were assured that the cable would hold. Matt suspected that there was some deception going on because there was no sense of movement at all as we “dropped” down to the 100 foot level. It all looked right. There was old equipment stacked around and a lot of dirt, dust, and darkness. The substance of the tour was really interesting. The guide talked about the techniques of mining in the 1890s and the short-short lives these guys could expect to live. There were also anecdotes about people trying to cheat the system and mine a little extra for themselves and survivors of cave-ins. We weren’t absolutely sure, however, about the authenticity of the “mine” until we got into the last room. That last one was clearly made of painted fiberglass. We all walked up a flight of stairs and into the sunlight and that’s when the tour guide ‘fessed up that the mine was a replica. Too bad, we’d really wanted to see a real mine. Maybe someday…

We did get to take a picture of ourselves in a “nine man cage.” At the Mammoth Mine they worked round the clock in nine-man teams. The cage only when down once. The rest of the time it was for bringing up ore only. All nine men on the shit had to go down in the same trip. If you were early for work you got to squeeze into the cage. If you were a little late, you had to ride on top! At least that’s the story we got. It was a fun day and everything we saw was pretty interesting. Apparently, the economy of Arizona has always been all about extraction industries.

A Holiday Visit

Toward the end of December (we know this is going back a long way at this point) Maya’s mom and sister came to visit us. They are the first quests we’ve had since Debbie and Dallas came to see us on California’s Central Coast. In cleaning up for their arrival Matt moved Asher’s cage from its normal spot in front of the fireplace. Asher, not to be deterred, sat down there anyway. We think he likes the drafts coming down the flue. He always seems to go for the drafty areas, especially if they are near tile or stone.

Well, the plane came in on time and Matt fetched the family from the Sky Harbor. We started out with a smallish tourist stop. We all went to Pueblo Grande. Of course, we’ve seen it before, but it was neat to go again and walk around knowing what you were going to see. It makes for a little bit different experience. Also, the weather was a lot more pleasant than the last time we were there. So much cooler this time. It even rained a little while we were there.
Neha is in a journalism program so she had her camera along too. It’s a big fancy digital SLR. She and Matt had something of a one-upmanship thing going on. “Hey look at this flower.” *snap* “Oh that cactus is cool!” *snap* She didn’t have a tripod, though. Maya had just gotten Matt one as part of his Christmas. We are almost always together while shopping so we can’t really hide anything from one another. So we don’t bother. He already had it. He loves using a tripod since including himself in the picture is a favorite thing to do. He used to borrow his Dad’s all the time. Now he has his own and he put it to good use. Look! It’s all of us in front of a (reconstruction of a) pit house.
And here’s another family portrait, because Maya likes it. It’s Phoenix founder Jack Swilling with his adopted Apache son, Chicken Hawk. The most-often reproduced version (used in our pervious post about Pueblo Grande) has the boy airbrushed out. This “real” version is on display in the museum at Pueblo Grande. Apparently, Swilling wanted to poke fun at the image he had acquired as a “wild west” ruffian. He posed with the gun and his son appeared as an armed Apache “bodyguard.” The plan somewhat back-fired as this is the only surviving photo of him, and it appears to only confirm his reputation.