Notes From Bisbee.

the Smashwords edition

1Notes From Bisbee

Twenty years on the Border with killer bees, rattlesnakes, and folks needing supervision.

Copyright © 2017 Debrah Strait

All rights reserved.

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All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Apply to Debrah Strait, P.O. Box 172, Bisbee, AZ 85603.

1Disclaimer: The following are newsletters I sent yearly to friends and family. The opinions are mine, as are any errors. What I wrote came from my own experiences and perceptions, plus items and articles I read in local newspapers. There was no intention to insult or demean anyone. I did not use last names, actual addresses or other identifying details.

Cover Art by Geoff McLeod windmillart@cox.net

Interior format by Debora Lewis arenapublishing.org

With gratitude and admiration for the people of Bisbee, who make this community such a wonderful place to live.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Bisbee Notes - 1996

Bisbee Notes - 1997

Bisbee Notes - 1998

Bisbee Notes - 1999

Bisbee Notes - 2000

Bisbee Notes - 2001

Bisbee Notes - 2002

Bisbee Notes - 2003

Bisbee Notes - 2004

Bisbee Notes - 2005

Bisbee Notes - 2006

Bisbee Notes - 2007

Bisbee Notes - 2008

Bisbee Notes - 2009

Bisbee Notes - 2010

Bisbee Notes - 2011

Bisbee Notes - 2012

Bisbee Notes - 2013

Bisbee Notes - 2014

Bisbee Notes - 2015

Bisbee Notes - 2016

‘Til Next Year

About The Author

Foreword

Twenty years ago I drove across the American Southwest looking for a place to settle. From Jacksonville, Florida, where I’d been run down in a crosswalk, I visited Durango, Colorado, Carson City and Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona. I was looking for a quiet, safe locale, near a college, with a fairly stable economy, lovely scenery with recreational possibilities.

But all those places were expensive to live in, and I preferred not to use the settlement I’d received from the accident to supplement any wages. I needed a while to finish healing and really wanted a couple of years to polish my first novel, and perhaps write another. Part-time work would be good. A full-time, hefty job that exhausted me would not. I figured, what’s the use of being run down in a crosswalk if I couldn’t use the insurance settlement to change my life.

I first heard of Bisbee, Arizona, while in Kansas. I’d driven through Goodland to see a friend, and a friend of hers, upon hearing that I was a writer, suggested I check out Bisbee. I did look it up in the road atlas but didn’t like the location. I’d already rejected Tucson as a place to live because it was big, nearly a million people, and was close enough to the Mexican border to have problems. I wasn’t certain I could withstand the stress of a big city and the border issues. And there was Bisbee: small, to be sure, but practically on the border.

Yet the other places I’d researched were expensive to live in and I didn’t want a hefty job just to survive. Not very restful for recovering, I thought. So after visiting all those other cities, I drove south to check out Bisbee.

I drove south through Arizona, leaving the Interstate to take a two-lane highway further south. I drove through Tombstone, and then headed south. The highway appeared to be leading nowhere. To the west, I could see the town of Sierra Vista, and bits of Ft. Huachuca against a mountain range. But the highway didn’t turn and head that way. It felt as if I were driving into uninhabited desert.

Then I drove through a tunnel and entered the oldest part of Bisbee. There were small houses and some shacks dotting the mountainsides. Driving along a by-pass made me feel as if the town were bigger than advertised. I left the by-pass to enter the downtown, with its turn of the 19th century storefronts, parked, had a snack, talked to a woman in the museum and another in the Chamber of Commerce about the general cost of living. Then I drove on east, spending the night near I-10 in Lordsburg, New Mexico.

At home again in Jacksonville, I found a temporary job in a bank. I thought long and hard about moving so far from family, to a place where I knew nobody, to live in an environment I knew little about. But within a year, I did move to Bisbee, and I’ve never been sorry.

There were so many new things to tell my friends and family about that I wrote a newsletter instead of mailing Christmas cards that year. What follows are the newsletters I’ve written over twenty years of life here, almost on the border, in a little town full of the friendliest people I’ve ever encountered. Friendly, and fascinating, and independent as can be in the late 20th Century, U.S.A.

Sometimes the county, named Cochise after an Apache war chief, is referred to as The Free State of Cochise. Or it’s called Arizona’s largest, open air asylum. We do our best to keep up with doings in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., while at the same time ignoring them if we find them inconvenient. There’s a history of violence in the county, the shoot-out at the OK Corral being just one example, the Bisbee Massacre another. Yet I’ve never felt safer in my home since I was a child. Strangers come, cause trouble, and then leave again.

So here’s a personal tour of Bisbee, a rarely dull place full of history and people from all over. There are killer bees, rattlesnakes, scorpions, javelinas roaming about, mule deer in the streets, a few folks in need of supervision but generally harmless, great weather, another country with a different language just five miles away. The Notes here are all mine. I’ve sent them out yearly, and sometimes got my facts wrong.

Yet Bisbee is a forgiving place and there’s room for me here. I do hope you enjoy these accounts of my adventures.

Bisbee Notes – 1996

You may already have heard what I’m about to write, but I can’t remember who I told what. So everybody’s getting everything.

Bisbee, Arizona, is a town of about 6500 people, located in the Mule Mountains about five miles north of Mexico. Built between the Great Sonora and Chihuahua deserts, the town has trees and lush, green canyons. It’s rained every 10 days or so since I moved here, and in August when Phoenix had temperatures well over 100 degrees (and Yuma was even higher), Bisbee had monsoons, sometimes with flash flooding.

The day after Thanksgiving we had a rain-to-sleet-to-snow storm, and in early January a minor blizzard dropped six inches of snow in about 16 hours. In early February we had a short hail storm. It’s drier than Florida here, to be sure, but I definitely don’t feel as if I’m living in a desert.

There are three major sections of town—Warren, San Jose, and Old Bisbee—separated from each other by several miles of hills. Lowell has a small shopping district, but its residential neighborhoods were chewed up by a strip mine.

Shopping and services are scattered. Each section has a post office, but the only large grocery store is in San Jose. The Cochise County courthouse is in Old Bisbee; City Hall is in Warren. So is the Arizona Motor Vehicle Department, and the only barber shop and dry cleaner.

Many businesses do double duty. United Parcel Service has a pick-up station at the Bisbee Motor Co. The bookstore on Main Street sells new and used books, tapes, magazines, newspapers. Coffeehouses are attached to art galleries, art galleries double as studios, or meditation centers, or nightclubs. I had to pay the deposit for my long distance telephone service at the Ace Hardware store in Warren, then drive to a San Jose office supply store to FAX the receipt to the phone company

We have a museum, convention center, repertory theater, over 20 art galleries, some gourmet restaurants, excellent classical music concerts, a good library, hospital, food co-op, a daily newspaper and two weeklies, cactus research center, lumber yard, golf course, and small airport.

On the other hand, we have no movie theaters, general clothing stores, car dealerships, appliance or furniture stores. All of the above are available second-hand, however. There is no television reception without cable, which I declined to contract for. I rarely buy a newspaper, either, so the weather is always somewhat of a surprise. Except when my hair gets fluffy. Then I expect rain. The downtown branch of Bank of America is open only until noon. There are no stop lights in town, and Old Bisbee has no mail delivery.

Fortunately, Sierra Vista, a military town of 30,000 to 40,000 people, is less than half an hour’s drive through some gorgeous scenery. In addition to adequate shopping, the town has movie theaters, a symphony orchestra, art festivals, a branch of the University of Arizona, Ft. Huachuca and its Buffalo Soldier museum. Tucson, with major airport, several malls, many cultural events and restaurants is but an hour and half away.

Within the county, Cochise College is 20 minutes east. There are parks, an open train that runs through a national riparian district, a cowboy museum, ostrich farms, national monuments, including that commemorating Geronimo’s surrender, mountains to hike in, an Amerind heritage center, and a huge cavern that will soon be open to the public.

We get lots of tourists on week-ends, but most of the time the town is fairly empty. It takes less than an hour to run half a dozen errands all over town.

I live in Old Bisbee. While Warren and San Jose look like Western desert towns, Old Bisbee is very much a mountain mining town. The streets are steep and narrow, the houses are a mix of brick or stone, or wood and tin miners’ shacks, built into the hillsides. Many are accessible only by long flights of stairs.

The downtown was built by European immigrants, so Main Street looks like a European village with substantial stone and brick shops. Brewery Gulch, my neighborhood, was originally the locale for breweries (surprise), houses of prostitution, and saloons. Now there are shops, restaurants, art galleries and only two saloons. All that remains of the prostitutes are short flights of stairs that once led to their cribs, and a madame’s house standing empty right across the street from my apartment.

Brewery Gulch is distinct within Old Bisbee. The street is wide, climbs gradually and dead-ends in a hiking trail into the mountains. Hippies and Indian families live up there, and their presence makes some in Warren and San Jose afraid to live in Old Bisbee. However, while I’ve seen homes in Warren and San Jose with bars on the windows, I can wander about the Gulch alone at night. The only hippies I’ve seen (I think they were hippies—hard to tell when everybody dresses alike in jeans.) merely grinned and flashed me a peace sign. The only graffiti I’ve seen around is a peace sign inside of a heart. Still, some people here are becoming so concerned about the rise in local crime that they are beginning to lock their homes and sometimes even their cars. After living in Los Angeles and Jacksonville, however, I can’t say I’m all that worried. In fact, I’ve felt secure in my home from the very first