Bisbee

Bisbee, Arizona is a former mining town turned tourist destination and artists’ colony. As these things go, Bisbee is worth the trip from Tucson for a stay of three or four days.

The town is notable for several things: sitting in a steep valley at about 5,000 feet, it’s especially picturesque. Depending on where we were standing, the small, colorful houses rising up both sides of the canyon reminded us of either Santa Cruz, Ashland, or the town in the Popeye movie.

As a tourist destination, it seems to offer a higher quality of everything normally found in places like this. The restaurants are excellent, galleries offer art of a much higher quality (and price) than usually found in your typical tourist trap, and among the usual antique and curio shops, there are the occasional specialty stores you would expect to find in a large city. I went into Optimo Milliners, for example, to see if I could get my felt fedora cleaned and blocked. The guy was nice about it, but my hat is a piece of crap and I could buy two for what it would cost to have him do triage on it. And there’s a four-month waiting list. So I thought, well maybe I’ll just buy one of his fancy-ass hats, but that would be an even longer wait, during which I could work part time to come up with a down payment. He seems to have a worldwide reputation, and for all I know he makes the Pope's hats, though he specializes in Panamas.



But come to Bisbee for the mine tour, an absolutely fascinating hour and a half underground in a miners’ train. We went down 1,770 feet in a mine that went down8,000 feet underground and has an amazing 2,000 miles of tunnels. Or so the guide said, a former miner with a terrific dry sense of humor and a bucketful of facts, some of which I took with a grain of salt, even though The Copper Queen was not a salt mine.


The day shift reports for work

By about 1955, they figured out it was cheaper and easier just to eat the mountain and sort out the rocks later, so there’s one spectacular hole in the ground. When the mine reached the edge of the next town over, it just kept going. Don’t follow your GPS to any addresses in Warren.

This was a little bit of a pilgrimage for Mary since her father was born and raised here. He graduated from Bisbee high in about 1935 when it really was a rough and tumble mining town. We went to the museum and looked through some old records. Mary had thought her grandfather was a mining engineer, but turns out he was “Chief Clerk” for Phelps Dodge. We don’t know quite what that means but it sounds important.

Still, Mary doesn’t appear to be the rightful heir to anything here in Bisbee, so we’re moving on tomorrow, despite the many interesting things to see we never got to.

Maybe next year.

Scared north

We’re camping again at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one of our favorite Southwest destinations. At six bucks a night and a three-week limit, it’s also a real bargain and a good way to save money compared to the $35 or $40 fees at state parks and private campgrounds. There are a lot of loyal visitors. The people across from us—possibly the nicest old couple you’ll ever meet—have been coming here for seventeen years.

Still, last year the campground was only half full, about eighty campers and tents on any given day. This year, the number is half that. What’s going on?

Certainly part of the blame has to rest with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the Arizona legislature, which have driven away millions of measurable dollars in convention business and probably even more in winter tourism. Not only have they alienated Hispanics, they’ve outraged lots of just-folks who have a low tolerance for intolerance.

But even more than any moral backlash, there must have been considerable harm done by just the rhetoric, highly exaggerated, about how dangerous the border region is. Organ Pipe borders Mexico, and the campground is a scant four miles north of the crossing at Sonoyta. The Fence is clearly visible during the daytime, and the lights of the small town are clear at night.

Brewer has repeatedly fixed on the murder of one borderline cattleman, even though it hasn’t been proven he was killed by illegals. But let’s give her that one. She also stated, though later amended, that there are thousands of headless corpses out in the desert.

Those headless corpses are in Mexico! What’s to worry!

Still, I can see how visitors who thought this might be a nice place to stay for two or three weeks might feel a little uncomfortable and decide to move on. The NatGeo program called Border Wars doesn’t exaggerate by much.

Here’s a sample:

The Border Patrol station in Ajo, about thirty miles north, has grown by a factor of ten in the last few years. They’re currently constructing an even-larger facility that looks about the size of a small prison, and I’m sure that’s partly what it will be.

Border Patrol SUVs are ubiquitous on the highways, sometimes feeling like about one in every three or four vehicles. Many of them pull trailers carrying quads for patrolling out in the desert.

There’s a Border Patrol checkpoint about ten miles north of the park. We pass through with just a few standard questions, but other vehicles get a careful search. It’s common to see vehicles parked on the shoulder before and after the checkpoint, and certainly some of them are picking up and dropping off immigrants and smugglers as they get around the checkpoint on foot.

It’s also common to see Border Patrol SUVs right in the campground, the agents parked and looking out over the desert to the south, slowly patrolling, or driving through fast. This is especially common at night when they also shine spotlights into the desert. Some of them carry tracker dogs.

Helicopters are routine, and a few nights ago one of them worked the desert no more than a mile from camp for over an hour, flying back and forth with dual spot lights playing over the ground. I could also see lights from SUVs out there.

Most eerie, just north of the park I watched one night last year as planes dropped parachute flares which cast a bright yellow-orange light creating an unnatural daylight. And not just one plane, but at least three. I watched almost hypnotized for the whole evening, one flare after another so that there were usually three or four in the sky at one time. This brought back a strong memory from Viet Nam—not to be confused with a flashback—because it was routine there, too, for planes to drop flares outside of the base where I was stationed, especially during the occasional rocket or mortar attack, the biggest difference being the lack here of .50 caliber machine guns firing tracers at the ground. It made a sound not like gunfire but more like the steady staccato buzz of an arc welder, and we called it pissing fire.

At least the runners don’t have that to worry about.

With the help of all the electronic devices which include conventional radar, noise and motion detectors, regular and infrared cameras and probably some secret technologies we don’t even know about, it’s common for agents to arrest groups as large as fifty, though smaller numbers are more common.

And still they estimate four to six get through for every one who is caught. Where they get this number I have no idea. The park superintendent estimates an amazing 1,200 runners cross the park every night. Again, I have no idea how they arrive at such numbers, but eighty percent of the park is closed to the public and even to park employees. Only the campground and a few close-in trails are open.

Still, we love it here and feel completely comfortable and safe. There are some magnificent hikes and drives still open, and just walking the dogs around the campground and looking at the desert and mountains is a pleasure. Actually, I’d rather like to see some runners, which is common, just like I like to see coyotes or javelina.

We didn’t bring passports because we have no plans to cross into Mexico itself, although we’ve talked to plenty of people who have and who say that other than the border towns, Mexico is still safe for tourists. Maybe so, maybe not, but tomorrow begins spring break for Arizona college students, and despite the alarmist pronouncements from their elected officials, tens of thousands will cross the border here and drive down to Puerto Penasco.

Out here in the middle of the Sonora Desert, the Pacific Ocean is only seventy miles away. Maybe next year.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

As expected, the new Tea Party Republicans are going after federal spending with a meat cleaver, demanding $61 billion in budget cuts during the current fiscal year, which ends September 30th, and refusing to pass any budget for more than two weeks that doesn’t meet their demands. Mary and I were hours away from getting thrown out of Organ Pipe National Monument, where we’re currently camped and driving up the national debt with our six-dollar a night Senior Pass camping fee, which doesn’t even cover the cost of a howling coyote. Luckily, the two-week budget extension passed, which will cover our time here. After that, we might be reduced to parking in Wal-Mart parking lots again.

But good for the Tea Partiers. It’s what they promised and it’s what they should try to deliver to the voters who elected them. Voters are rightly concerned about the deficit and the reach and role of the federal government, so this is the debate we should have. But before we start talking about how to reduce the deficit and national debt, we should take a look at what did and did not get us into this mess to begin with:

First of all, virtually all of the programs targeted by the Tea Partiers have nothing to do with the current deficit. Public broadcasting did not cause the deficit. If it did, the fifty dollars a year I send to public television would leave me bankrupt. Proportionally, it’s a lot more than what the Feds spend.

Foreign aid did not cause the deficit. We spend less than one percent of the budget on foreign aid, and we rank 22nd in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. This makes us about the cheapest country in the world when it comes to dropping a dime in a beggar’s cup. Maybe a nickel, but really, get a job.

Aid to the poor for heating assistance did not cause the deficit. I allow my power company to round up my monthly bill to the next dollar in a program to provide assistance to those at risk of freezing in the dark, and those few cents are a much bigger part of my total budget than the federal program is of its total budget. Still, I totally don’t feel it at the end of the month.

The list goes on. Tea Party cuts address only twenty-five percent of the national budget—discretionary spending outside of the military—and focus their wrath on a few programs they’ve always hated, like research on climate change, the EPA, and virtually every program of assistance for the poor.

Curiously, they would also reduce border security, which will not be a big hit here in Arizona. I really don’t get that one except that it shows they truly mean business. But then, so do the Mexican cartels.

Their targeted cuts would do the most harm to the most vulnerable and, equally importantly, they would do little or nothing to reduce national debt in the long run.
It seems obvious that if we’re going to look at reducing the deficit, we need to look first at what caused it. There are three things:

First, a massive tax cut under President Bush that concentrated its largess in the upper and extreme-upper income levels: Not that we in the middle class didn’t get a nice piece of pie out of the deal, but really, nothing that in any way changed our quality of life. More like an unexpected Christmas present, appreciated but soon forgotten. A toaster, maybe, or new pajamas.

Any long-term economic benefit from these cuts failed to materialize. There was, for example, no measurable uptick in employment. Not even billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet wanted the money. “Really, we have enough already,” they said, but Congress and President Bush made them take more anyway. These silly rich people don’t even understand capitalism.

Second, the war in Afghanistan: Almost all Americans including me supported the president in the invasion of Afghanistan to annihilate Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, once we had heard of the Taliban and what a bunch of medieval creeps they are. Ten years later, we’re still in the fight. These fighters are tougher than we thought. We should have asked the Russians.

And third,

The war in Iraq: A majority of Americans, not including me, supported the invasion, but then a majority also believed it was approved by the United Nations. Not to mention the whole WMD thing, but let’s not get bogged down in all that.

The really amazing thing about the Bush budget was that all of the expenditures for our two wars were off the books. They never showed as part of the annual budget. It would be like Mary and me saying all of our spending on horses, motorcycles was not included in our household budget. Things would feel pretty, pretty good until we got a note from the bank that we were overdrawn and now had a fifty dollar fine in addition to our empty savings account which used to have $127 dollars in it. This could cause us to seriously look at our spending on Brussels sprouts.

Maybe Obama’s recovery spending added to the deficit and maybe it didn’t. It saved a ton of jobs and almost certainly kept us out of a genuine depression. Lots of economists think he should have spent more, but I’m no economist, and neither are any of the Tea Partiers. At any rate, that spending is quickly phasing out and we’re even being paid back a lot of it from the banks and GM.

So if the tea party boys and girls want to seriously chop away at the deficit, they should go after the programs that caused it in the first place and that could make a significant difference in reducing it: bring the troops home from the longest wars in American history and end the Bush-era tax cuts, or at least reduce them at the highest income levels (exactly what Obama and congressional Democrats proposed for the current budget, but it was promptly shot down by the Republicans.)

In the meantime, I have to give Mary the bad news about the Brussels sprouts.