Recent Adventures in Bisbee, Arizona...
Friday, January 18, 2002
Remember my good friend Bill from The Lost Soul Companion? He's the guy who likes to reanimate dead animals. He rearticulated an entire cow skeleton, Dazey, and now she moos and walks (well, roller skates, actually) and even pees once again. Also, he has a large freezer in his garage just for road kill because he never knows what great dead thing he'll come across.
Anyway, about a year and a half ago, Bill moved to Bisbee, Arizona—an old mining community and haven for artists of all kinds. It had been much too long since I had seen him, so I took a flight out to what has been called "North America's largest open-air asylum." Ah, Bisbee. Bill's new Bisbee friends fully appreciate his road kill art. The first thing we noticed on Friday morning when we stepped out of the house was a dead coyote half wrapped in a black, plastic garbage bag: a gift for Bill. He was, of course, ecstatic, and, frankly, so was I since I'd never seen a coyote up close before.
Saturday, January 19, 2002
On Saturday we ventured into Naco, Mexico. Another first for me. The roads were all very rough and there were lots of stray dogs running around. Most of them looked well fed, but one dog didn't look right at all. He had two fleshy growths—each the size of a canteloupe!—protruding from his hind quarters. I wanted to do something for him, but I didn't really know what. Bill said he would never handle that dog without rubber gloves, and that's a big deal coming from him.
Mostly we just walked around. There weren't many people around that day, but there are cardboard police officers watching over the crosswalks in Naco. And there are scads of pharmacies around. I liked the shops along the main street because they weren't slick and contrived like so many of ours are. Our corporations have conducted million-dollar studies to determine which store shelf levels are most likely to move which sugary cereals, which colors and smells free up our spending, which music best prevents shoplifting, and the like. Here, though, I saw dusty boxes of Clairol hair coloring casually offered next to jars full of wrenches and I swear I could breathe just a little bit better.
This is a neat-O, unisex shoe store from the same shopping district. What I want to know is what do they do with all of the shoes when the store closes? Do they have to box up each pair and stack them inside? I suppose they do.
After Mexico, Bill took me on a tour of one of Bisbee's old mines. We donned rain slickers, battery-powered lamps, and hard hats and squeezed ourselves onto a series of carts that ran on a track some 300 feet into the mineshaft. The tour guide was himself a retired miner who seemed to delight in making us all turn off our lamps so that we could see just how dark darkness can be.
Bisbee also has a good number of open pit mines. This is the Lavender Open Pit Mine, and, even though most people think it is a blight on the landscape, I think it is amazing to look at. How did we ever do anything on a scale so much larger than ourselves?
Sunday, January 20, 2002
I had a short book signing at Atalanta Music and Books on Main Street where I met some very good souls. I'll probably be back there for a signing for my new book, The Not-So-Lost Soul Companion, coming out in October. A secret message to the nice lady I met who is afraid of her impending retirement: yes!
After my signing, Bill and I drove out to fetch a coatimundi that had been spotted "napping" on the side of the highway. To our surprise, there were two dead coatimundi. Was it a suicide pact between star-crossed lovers or just an unfortunate coincidence? We'll never know, but those two (if Bill has anything to do with it) will surely live again.