Moving Mountains in Arizona

The Abandoned Lavender Pit

  When we visited the old Arizona copper mining city of Bisbee recently, we marveled at a vast hole in the ground called Lavender Pit. It was named not for the color of the rocks but for Harrison Lavender, the man responsible for the mine’s development in the mid-‘50s. Terraces spiraled downward to rust-colored waste water nine hundred feet below. Where had all the missing rock gone? A whimsical thought struck. Did the miners know about Jesus’ comment that if his followers had faith, they could remove mountains?

We’d toured Bisbee’s underground Copper Queen Mine on a previous trip, but hadn’t seen this example of Arizona’s open pit copper mines. When we stared into the pit, which covers an area of some 300 acres, we noticed that its sides were much steeper than others we’d seen in the Southwest. That’s because the rock was less crumbly than in other mines. Then we drove past remnants of structures where the ore was recovered and past oddly smooth hills of broken, barren rock. In the distance we saw the town of Douglas, where trains had taken the ore for final smelting.

We returned to explore the part of old Bisbee that clings to the walls of Tombstone Canyon. A deep concrete ditch runs along the canyon to contain the frequent flash floods that used to wash away buildings every year. Some of the channel is hidden beneath the paving. Where the channel is open, narrow bridges connect picturesque small dwellings to the street.
                                                                                     The Writing Room
A sign pointed up a steep driveway: Schoolhouse B & B. We investigated and found a red-brick schoolhouse perched on a ledge just big enough for the building and a few cars. What a serendipity! It was built in 1913 as a four-classroom elementary school. Its rooms had been divided and turned into charming, high-ceilinged bedrooms with schoolhouse themes. When we saw the one labeled “The Writing Room,” we couldn’t resist and decided that’s where we’d spend the night. Besides the usual amenities, our room had antique books and typewriter, toys, and framed samples of a long-ago student’s penmanship. High-ceilinged windows     and old-fashioned transom over the door were curtained in lace. We also had comfortable armchairs where we sat to read from some of the old books and where I wrote this blog.

While waiting for breakfast the next morning, we found a compilation of stories from an old Bisbee newspaper, the Brewery Gulch Gazette, accompanied by early-day photos.

One picture, taken in the early 1900s, showed Sacramento Hill--a huge pile of low-grade copper ore--looming above the town and mine buildings. In 1917, Phelps Dodge began to develop the first pit, Sacramento, atop the peak. William C. Epler, the newspaper’s editor, wrote: “Many tons of explosives were placed in hundreds of drill holes in the top of the mountain and set off with a bang that shook old Bisbee from one end to the other. The entire top of the mountain rose into the air with a mighty heave, then settled back into place--broken into millions of tons of mineable ore. In later years the Lavender Pit and then the extension to that pit took away much more of the hill. Today there’s only a nubbin left.”

So, a mountain had once stood where the pit now gaped.

The arrival of our gourmet french toast interrupted my reading. Two other couples invited us to join them at their table, another serendipity. One man told us he’d grown up in Bisbee. Like boys everywhere in those years, he and his friends made the whole community their playground. They hung around the mines and knew all about the mine operations.

He told us that at 3:05 every school day, all students had to be in their classroom seats because that was when the blast of dynamite went off in the mine, shaking the whole town and loosening ore for the next day’s digging.

Until mining ended in the Lavender pit in 1974, shovels loaded ore onto massive trucks. The trucks carried the ore to a crusher building on the lip of the crater. After the initial crushing, the ore passed by conveyor belt up and over the highway to the concentrator.

There, according to our new friend, the ore was dumped into tanks and mixed with a solution of acid, which caused the copper to float to the top. We’d seen the remains of the tanks still perched beside the highway. Huge wipers skimmed the liquid copper. The concentrate, containing about 13 percent copper, was loaded into railroad cars and hauled to the smelter in Douglas where gold, silver, and other metals were separated from the concentrate. The gold paid for the operation of the mine. Workers also found some of the world’s finest turquoise in the broken rock.

                              Hill on the right is composed of waste rock from the mine.     

The waste rock was conveyed to the  mountain-like dumps we’d seen looming against the sky. Now we knew where the insides of Sacramento Hill had gone.

As I photographed one massive pile of waste rock, and again stared into the crater of Lavender Pit Mine, I could hardly imagine the creativity and hard work needed to conceive such a project. I’m not sure this was exactly what Jesus had in mind, but it seemed to me it took a lot of faith to move that mountain from one place to another.                                                                          
         

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Arizona, a Dream Deferred

Desert Dunes near Bouse, Arizona

   It seems a lifetime ago when I dreamed of moving to Arizona. Somewhere I’d come across the magazine, Arizona Highways. Full-page photographs showed glorious blue skies, vast untrammeled vistas of mountains and wildflowers and Indian ruins, cacti and wild animals and beautiful Southwest art. 

     After teaching for three years in rainy Washington State, I thought the time had come to follow my heart to Arizona. So I handed in my resignation and applied to teach in several Arizona towns. When school let out for the summer, my sister and I set out on a road trip. I planned to interview for teaching positions while we explored California and Arizona.

     But at my first interview, I was told, “We cannot hire you. You are still employed at your old school.” It turned out that my resignation had never reached the right officials. Without even seeing Arizona, we turned around and headed back to Washington.

    That September, I met Bob, a young engineer from Alaska. We married in March and went to Alaska, about as far away from Arizona as we could have gone and still be in the USA. We raised our family in Alaska and I came to love the state. I continued to drool over the photos in Arizona Highways, but God had given me many of the desires of my heart and I was happy.
 
   Our children grew up. When my husband got sick, we returned to Washington. Before he died, we spent a winter traveling in Arizona. I even wrote a mystery-adventure book for young people and set the story in the state. By then there were elderly parents to care for and lots of friends and loved ones I didn’t want to leave behind.
 
    Hank and I found each other and married. Then my daughter married a young man from Arizona. He loved Arizona as much as she loved Washington. They moved to Tucson. Some of Hank’s relatives lived in Arizona and we both had friends there. We began to spend several weeks each early spring visiting loved ones and exploring the state. We've been doing it for ten years now.

    It’s true that Arizona’s skies are a glorious blue...usually. You can still find untrammeled vistas, in some places. There are cacti, everywhere. There are artists and Indian ruins and lots and lots of mountains, completely unlike their counterparts in Washington. We come to Arizona at the choicest time of year, between winter’s chill and summer’s unbearable heat. In between, we read stories by J.A. Jance, Tony Hillerman, and other Arizona-based authors and experience vicariously what we are missing in person.

   It’s the best of many worlds, and a dream fulfilled. I’m not complaining at how long it took to see it realized!

Vacationing by Rail

    When we wanted to visit friends and relatives in Arizona and California this spring, we decided to try Amtrak’s Coast Starliner. I bought our tickets on-line. Daughter-in-law Lydia drove us to King Street Station in Seattle. We checked our largest bags at the gate, waited a few minutes, then walked down the platform to board our sleeping car. Our compartment was up the stairs and to the left. The aroma of fresh coffee greeted us at the top of the stairs. We stashed our carry-ons next to our facing seats, helped ourselves to free coffee at the juice-and-coffee   kiosk, and settled in to our home away from home  for the next two days.

    Our tiny compartment, about the size of our dining table at home, had privacy curtains on the door and windows. Facing cushioned seats made into a bunk for sleeping. A narrower bunk folded down from the ceiling. We had a folding table, reading lights, temperature controls, and pillows. We could move about the train and ride in the lounge cars if we wished. Meals came with our sleeping car fare. Conductors took reservations for when we wanted to eat. Each meal had a choice of two delicious entrees and a selection of deserts. There was also a snack car. If we’d wanted to save money, we could have chosen to ride in the coach cars and sleep in reclining seats.

    I’d planned to catch up on letter writing but unless the train went very slowly or stopped on a siding to wait for another train to pass, the ride wasn’t smooth enough for that. However, we could read. And the lady in the compartment across the aisle had no trouble making her knitting needles fly.

    The scenery kept us glued to the windows anyway. Much of it was new to us, since the train mostly follows a different route than the highways. Sitting high above the passing countryside gives one an expanded viewpoint. We saw some of the best of America from the train (as well as some of its seamier side in the larger cities.)

    After leaving Seattle, we followed the shores of beautiful Puget Sound. Near Tacoma, we passed beneath the twin Tacoma Narrows bridges and marveled at that feat of engineering. Later we went by huge heaps of silt, once part of volcanic Mt. St. Helens, that had been dredged from the Toutle and Columbia Rivers. We saw freighters loading in the Columbia and people fishing from small boats on Oregon’s Willamette River. We spied on houseboats anchored along sloughs and looked into the backyards of families in residential areas. Sometimes we saw homeless people huddling outside makeshift shelters.

    Now and then the train stopped to take on passengers. Then we could get off to stretch our legs and shake some kinks out. Walking the aisles is always an option for exercise...but keeping one’s balance while the train hurtles along at top speed is a little hazardous for senior citizens.
 
    Darkness fell while we enjoyed a leisurely gourmet dinner in the parlor car, with white linen and fresh flowers on the tables. Afterward we visited with fellow passengers in  comfortable armchairs in the adjacent lounge. When we returned to our Pullman car, a conductor had made up our beds for us. Some cars have their own little sinks, but we used one of the nearby bathrooms for washing and brushing teeth. Getting ready for bed in a 14” x 36” strip of floor space was an interesting experience, as was getting into my narrow upper bunk. I told Hank it felt like going to bed on an ironing board, but a safety net clipped to the ceiling assured me I wouldn’t fall out. The motion of the train rocked us to sleep.

    One time when the motion stopped, I leaned over to look out the window and saw snow on the ground. We were somewhere in the Cascade Mountains between Oregon and California.

    Daylight found us passing through a wide, wet area of farmland and marshes. (Later on Wikipedia I discovered that this was Suisun Marsh north of Suisun Bay, at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers...the largest marsh in California.) Incredulous, I said to Hank, “There’s a warship sitting in that field out there.” Another ship appeared, then a whole group of them lined up along the horizon. We saw water glimmering behind them and realized they were anchored along the shore of a bay...the U.S. Navy’s ghost fleet of mothballed ships in San Pablo Bay, CA. A while later we saw the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

    This year’s El Nino, which brought us Washingtonians an unusually warm and dry winter, delivered rain in deluges to the Southwest. California’s valleys were still drenched, but burgeoning with new crops. Sleek cattle grazed on hills as emerald as any in Ireland. We glimpsed the ocean between distant mountain ridges. The train chugged through tunnels beneath the cattle on the hilltops  and eventually descended to the Pacific coast. For many miles we watched the wind blowing white manes from curling breakers. Picture-perfect beaches were mostly deserted.

    As the sun went down, we made out the silhouettes of drilling platforms far out in the Santa Barbara channel. As we ate our last meal on the train, darkness fell, turning the platforms into a line of lighted Christmas trees. We pulled into the Los Angeles Union Station around 10 pm and disembarked, along with the staff who’d been on duty for four straight days. The lady in charge of the dining car told us she works 70 hours in those four days. She looked very ready for her three-day rest. And we were ready to find our rental car and motel room, both of which we’d arranged for on-line, and then to continue our vacation.

    But that’s another story.

    Are you tired of airline hassles and freeway traffic? Maybe America’s rail lines are the way to go for your next trip.

God and the Carpet Business

The hour Hank and I spend in fitness class three mornings a week speeds by in a rush of laughter and stories. Our leader often remarks that being in that class is as good as a college education.

Our leader, Irene, showing Eileen and Glenn an exercise

Hank getting the ball rolling

    Our friend Tony Bundy’s stories are cheerful, often funny, and always testify to the goodness of God. When he and Bonnie came to Washington from North Dakota as young marrieds, he went to work for Penneys Department Store. He especially loved managing the children’s department, and dreamed about running a children’s store himself.

He began looking for an appropriate building but God shut the doors. Then he took a job with a floor covering firm. After seven years with that firm he got restless and depressed, feeling that the job wasn’t challenging enough. Here’s what he says happened next:

Ray and Carolyn enjoying a joke
“One night I was awakened by a voice. It told me to quit my job. ‘I have other plans for you,’ it said.
                  
"I wasn’t sure whether God was speaking or if it was my own wishful thinking. So I got up, knelt in the living room, and said, ‘God, if this is your voice, I’ll quit my job, but how do I know?’”


Tony went back to bed, fell asleep, and was awakened again by the voice. “Quit your job and I’ll take care of the rest.”

He woke Bonnie and told her. She said, “If you’re sure it’s God, you’d better do it.”

The next morning he told his boss he had to resign. That afternoon, Bonnie telephoned the store with news that the realtor he’d talked to seven years earlier had called, asking if Tony still wanted to go into business. “I’ve got just the building for him.”

The building was perfect. It fronted on the busiest street in town. And it was affordable. Two hours later the Bundys signed a rental agreement, not yet knowing what their business would be.

A few days later they received another call. A sales representative from a reputable carpet company wanted Tony to represent his line of carpet. They arranged to meet in Seattle to discuss the idea.

But when Tony arrived for their appointment, the rep had gone to lunch with someone else. Tony asked God, “What does this mean?” He felt impressed to call another sales representative, a good friend who lived in Renton.

This man immediately answered his phone. “Tony! I was just thinking of calling you. I heard you want to open a store. Come on over and let me show you my lines.”

Tony was excited, knowing that this rep had much more to offer than the one who’d stood him up.

The two spent the afternoon together, choosing displays and samples enough to start a carpet business. Then the friend went through the list, crossing out numbers and writing others. When he handed the total to Tony, it had been reduced to eight percent of the original. The company’s owner came by and asked what was happening. He looked at the list, crossed out the price again, and halved that number.

Just like that, the Bundys were in the carpet business for themselves.

They built a reputation for quality service, which led to opportunities to tell others about God and his awesome power to heal and help. Over the years, they planted several churches and served in others. Their children grew up to carry on their example of selfless service to others.  After 35 years, the Bundys sold their carpet business to their children, but when the kids need him, 75-year-old Tony is still there to help.

Bonnie says,”We saw first hand that God is interested in our lives and will do miracles for us. It changed our lives and strengthened our faith.”

 

The Bundys, telling their story

Tony and Bonnie are still telling others that God is faithful and good at all times. I don’t know better examples than these two of the connection between obedience and blessing.
   
   
 

Calling on God in Haiti

Market Day in Haiti (photo by Hank Husby)

Now that a little time has passed since the earthquake in Haiti, it’s harder to find news in mainstream vehicles about what’s happening there. But the Internet is full of communications that help us to know what’s going on. Here are excerpts from e-mails that came across my desk in the past few days, plus this link to a video you won’t want to miss.

Our friend Dr. Jerry Rusher is in Dessalines, Haiti, supervising medical teams assisting earthquake victims and other patients in the Free Methodist hospital there. On February 19, he wrote:

The churches were overflowing Sunday. The 2000 seat Parc Chretien Church in Port au Prince had a 6 hour service and was packed with people standing outside. The Dessalines church also was about as full as I've seen it. This past Tuesday was Mardi Gras here which normally is a time of marching bands, singing, and dancing. This year all the celebrating was cancelled at order from the president as it is a time of grieving. I am hoping that the praying and repentance that is going on here is lasting and sincere. I am really impressed by the strong faith of Christians here in these hard times. One worker at the hospital, Alphonse, who knows his Bible inside and out shared with me a verse this week which God had been encouraging him with. It is Ephesians 3:20 which talks about how God's answers to our prayers are much better than what we ask for. They are" greater than we can think or imagine." I trust that will be true of the many prayers that have been going up for Haiti this past week.

Jerry Miel is a radio engineer who served as a missionary in Haiti with World Team mission.  He returned to Haiti to help in the aftermath of the earthquake and makes these observations:

Only about 6 years ago a former Haitian president called the nation to come together to rededicate the nation to Satan.
 
As (we) left the guest house about 7:30 am, we were met by throngs of well dressed people headed to various churches. The sounds of Christian music and worship filled the air everywhere. The next observation was that there was NO traffic. Port-au-Prince streets are always clogged and overflowing with bumper to bumper traffic. This morning there were only a few vehicles on the roads, a few small buses (tap taps),  some UN and military vehicles, and a few private cars. We had clear sailing through town. The same was true of foot traffic. Usually the streets are clogged also with people walking. Today there were only a few and many of them dressed for church. The only place that there were traffic blocks was in front of several churches where the congregations had overflowed the buildings and the yards and had moved out into the streets as well.
 
The next observation was that EVERYTHING was closed! We could not find even one business or gas station open. There were no intercity buses running . . . The huge outdoor market near the wharf where thousands (of street vendors) work each day and spread out to cover most of the street, was EMPTY.
 
Where were all the people? They were in churches and makeshift meeting sites. Every church . . .  had services going on, almost always overflowing into the streets. Beside broken down churches, services were taking place outside. In homeless camps, there were services. Everywhere the nation was gathered to worship and pray. . .This scene was repeated in every town and hamlet that we passed during the day.
 
Tonight, Pastor Ignace, who is sharing the room with me, asked this question:  "Can people still say that Haiti is a voodoo country?" What has been happening and is continuing to happen in Haiti did not happen because of the earthquake.  It has been happening because the Haitian people know how to pray.  This is a tremendous outpouring of God's power as the result of prayer.

 

Rural family and home

Market Day in Haiti (Photos Hank Husby 1999)                  

Wisdom from a Great President

As a child and later as a teacher, February was exciting to me because of the celebrations clustered in the middle of the month: Lincoln’s Birthday on the 12th, Valentine’s Day on the 14th, and Washington’s Birthday on February 22.

But in 1968, the days devoted to our two greatest presidents were swallowed by an all-purpose holiday called Presidents' Day.

Washington’s birthday had been celebrated as a legal federal holiday starting while the first president was still alive. Later, our 16th president’s birthday (Lincoln’s) was set aside as a holiday by many states.

When Congress passed the Monday Holidays Act, they moved the official observance of Washington’s birthday from Feb. 22 to the third Monday in February. A popular misconception rose that the day had been officially renamed Presidents’ Day. The name change was never authorized by Congress, but still, it is used on calendars, in advertising, and even by government agencies.

Most states have adopted Washington's Birthday. A dozen of them officially celebrate Presidents' Day. A number of the states that celebrate Washington's Birthday also recognize Lincoln's Birthday as a separate legal holiday. But not our state. We get Presidents’ Day. I think Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom and leadership is too important not to remember. So, in honor of his birthday, here are a few of his words of wisdom:

"The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me."
-- December 26, 1839 - Speech on the Sub-Treasury in the Illinois House of Representatives

"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a 'drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.'"
-- February 22, 1842 - Temperance Address of Springfield, Illinois

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!"
-- September 30, 1859 - Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
-- December 1, 1862 - Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress

I don't have sources for these, but I like them:

"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."

Here’s one especially for our politicians to think about:

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

               Happy  201st Birthday, Mr. Lincoln !

Picture: courtesy of Free-Clip-Art

Working Together to Fight Recession

    I just experienced a nudge into a new (for me) area of technology. The phone rang. On the other end I heard the state director of AARP inviting me (and 1800 other people, I found out later) to join a telephone town meeting with the governor of Washington state. The conversation, he said, was to be about the challenge of maintaining public services and quality of life in our state in the face of the worst recession in 50 years.

    Intrigued, I stayed on the line to hear Governor Gregoire, sounding like she was in the next room, talk about the work facing our state legislators, now in week four of a short session, as they try to close a 2.6 billion dollar gap between the money on hand and the needs of the state.

    She said we’re trying to climb out of the worst recession in 80 years. (I don’t know whether it’s 50 years or 80 years, but I am sure the governor is right in saying that we came out of the Great Depression of the ’30s because we as a country united to lift ourselves out of it. The way we got out of that depression was by putting people back to work. That is the way we’ll get out of it today.

    Our legislators know they can’t make enough cuts to services or raise enough revenue to plug all the holes in the budget. So as they struggle to balance a very boney budget and not leave more people hanging out over a financial abyss, I was thrilled to hear some thoughtful suggestions coming in from my fellow citizens. I’m glad to know that the governor was listening and I hope our legislators were.

    Way back in February of 1842, Abraham Lincoln gave a temperance address in Springfield, Illinois. He said, “When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’”   

    Lincoln’s words are still true. So are the governor’s words, “Today we understand the fundamental value of helping our fellow citizens.”

    As people of good will work together, I’m hoping we can overcome the disasters caused by those who put their own wealth and power ahead of the welfare of their fellow citizens. We won’t overcome by force, or by imposing our own will, but by kind persuasion and a desire to help others.