Notes on Bisbee

I happened to spend a few hours in Bisbee, AZ in early October 2010. These are my notes (and a few of the paltry photographs I took) from the town.

I apologize for the rambling content, as this is my first self-directed writing of substance in some time.

Notes On Bisbee

Yesterday, I traveled with some comrades from Fort Huachuca to the City of Bisbee in Arizona. There were rains the first few days of the week and the desert was green and alive. We even passed over a stream that was shrouded by trees that completely covered the road in shade.

Bisbee is a former boom town that seems to have successfully recovered from the mining out of older copper mines and the collapse of copper prices in the 1970s, and the closing of much of the American copper mines. Its social structure reminded me of Boone, North Carolina minus the college kids–it seemed to be an eclectic collection of expatriates who somehow never managed to leave once they found the town as well as of old miners who just didn’t have anywhere else to go once the mines all shuttered. There were a number of hippies who somehow managed to settle into the area as well as a younger generation of hipsters and beatniks who are transforming the town into a well-lived place that feels like it should be a celebration of what America is and can be, but also feels almost unamerican in its embracing of pedestrianism (the most direct route to anywhere is likely an alley of stairs too narrow for even a Morris Mini) and lack of American-style suburban sprawl.

I walked up the main street for a bit on my own, and then with others. We visited a couple of shops to browse–one was a standard tourist-oriented jewelry and knick-knack shop that displayed a number of items that were thematic with the copper mining and general southwestern locale of Bisbee, but were clearly produced by neither local artisan or specifically speaking to Bisbee or Arizona for that matter, and the other shop of mostly antique items crammed into a space with little rhyme and some reason, but oriented more towards the type of person that enjoys traveling with the intent of finding interesting things than of finding things to mark that they have travelled.

The town is hilly and is built directly over the hills much like Los Angeles just east of Bellevue Park–it is replete with narrow lanes and staircases leading directly up a hillside to another street. Boone, on the other hand, occupies a single valley and spreads up the hills from it, but, for the most part, avoids going over the ridges that extend into the valley, and feels wholly different for that. There is an annual run that celebrates the stairs, and had I walked that route, would probably have provided a richer experience than I enjoyed.

We visited the Copper Queen Mine, which offers tours of a mine that ceased operations in 1943. The mine tour was nice, but since I failed to visit the mining museum in town or to peruse the exhibits at the mine entrance until after touring the mine, I was essentially unprepared to think about what I saw in the mine. I would recommend reading a little about underground mining and copper mining or giving yourself the time to research the mine a little before entering it. If you want to take photographs, use a camera with a flash. I attempted to take a couple with my older iPhone, but I discarded them afterwards, since I had no flash.

Our trip ended with a visit to the Screaming Banshee Pizza, the food from which I can not comment on, as I only had a drink there (I had eaten earlier at not very inspiring hotel cafe on a patio overlooking a heavily trafficked lane without realizing that everyone else who had visited a brewery to drink nearby were only drinking). The Screaming Banshee had an impressive interior, having recently opened in a standard 1952 service station. The only reason we took note of it was that Caroline was painting a new sign on the restaurant, and so we returned to it after the mine tours. While we were there, the bar had few patrons, and I managed to talk with the proprietor outside while she was reviewing the new signage.