A Pacific Northwest Best-Kept-Secret

When granddaughter Annie, a budding artist, said she’d like to spend part of her spring break with us, we had the excuse we’d been waiting for to visit Tacoma’s Museum of Glass. It is located in the Tacoma Museum District, one of the Northwest’s most fascinating destinations.

Besides the glass museum, three other attractions stand in a row between an arm of Commencement Bay and the brick buildings of old Tacoma. The Washington State History Museum brackets the glass museum on one side; on the other stands the beautiful old Union Station which is now a courthouse. Beyond the former rail station is the Tacoma Art Museum.

In 1968, when many of Tacoma’s anchor retail stores abandoned the downtown to relocate to a big new mall, the area went into an economic tailspin. The city began revitalization in 1990 by renovating Union Station. Then it offered tax exemptions for new residential units in multifamily dwellings and added the three  museums already mentioned. Now the once-shabby surroundings provide a feast for the senses and an educational smorgasbord to thousands of visitors, including busloads of school children.

Bridge of Glass leading to the glass museum 

Since we’d visited the History Museum a couple of years previously, we started with the Museum of Glass. We entered by way of the Dale Chihuly Bridge of Glass, a pedestrian overpass designed in collaboration with the world-renowned artist.

                                          

On the bridge, a seascape of glass floats overhead

The exterior of the museum is a work of art in itself, with plazas featuring glass installations in reflecting ponds. A conical structure of glass looms over the museum. It houses the hot shop where visitors can watch teams of artists at work shaping blobs of molten glass into beautiful sculptured forms.


Annie admiring one of the outdoor installations;
a newly renovated apartment complex in back.

Within the museum we marveled at the variety of   imaginative works possible in this media. We especially enjoyed the interpretations of Tlingit themes in an exhibit by Native American artist Preston Singletary.
(See http://www.museumofglass.org/ for more information.)

Glass installations inside the former Union Station

Annie and I wandered through the door of Union Station, expecting to see the usual offices and business-suited professionals one might find in a court house. Instead, we saw the high, arched rotunda and massive lobby of the original railway depot. The breathtaking architecture formed the setting for massive, jewel-like glass designs by Dale Chihuly. A lone guard sitting at the entrance asked for ID and told us that  we could come into the lobby and take photos. I was glad we did, because no picture-taking was allowed in the Tacoma Art Museum next door. But we enjoyed the exhibit on the development of Northwest art, as well as the other displays. And this museum had its own Dale Chihuly glass pieces.

Tacoma’s Museum District is a secret no more to us. We’ll be back, and we’re happy to share this cultural resource with anyone who’ll listen.

  
Annie and friend outside Union Station

Skagit Valley Sky Scenes

One of the things I love about the Skagit Valley (besides the river, the communities with personality plus and the variety of farming activities we see while driving through its flat and fertile fields) is the sky. It’s Big Sky, like they say in Montana...a wide, overarching screen upon which every kind of weather drama plays out.

Today storms were building over the Cascades to the east. Clouds also billowed up from the western horizon, echoing the shapes of the rocky knobs that jut out of Puget Sound at the edge of the delta. They almost obscured the snowy Olympics. Walking the dikes in warm sunshine, we felt very much dwarfed by the changing sky-scenes in every direction. Come enjoy the clouds:

Ps. 97:1, 2 The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad; let the distant shores rejoice. Clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

 Clouds over Mt. Three Fingers

Ps. 36:5,6, 7 Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.






 
Tidelands from a Skagit delta dike, looking across Puget Sound toward the Olympic Mountains




Psalm 29:3 The voice of the Lord is over the waters: the God of glory thunders, the Lord thunders over the mighty waters.

Isaiah 44:22,24 I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.
This is what the Lord says—your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the Lord, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself…

 

 A great blue heron lifts off from a dike near the mouth of the Skagit River

Arizona Ghost Town

Swansea, AZ from a miner's window

Ghost towns have fascinated me since childhood. Several such places were located near our home in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. The neighborhood kids often walked to old Robe, the location of a former mill town at the mouth of the Stillaguamish River canyon. Silverton and Monte Cristo, farther up the valley, had been mining towns. All three communities sprang into being in the late 1800s. When residents left, our burgeoning plant life and rainy weather rapidly returned the communities’ remnants to the forest. Reminders of Robe and Monte Cristo are hard to find now, but summer residents and others who live there year-round have kept Silverton from disappearing.

So this spring, when we visited cousins Darlene and Vernon Edinger in Bouse, Arizona and they asked if we’d like to visit the ghost town of Swansea, we said an enthusiastic “yes.”

Early builders in the desert often used dried adobe mud bricks for their homes. Though only cactus and spiky desert shrubs flourish in that land of little rain, doing little to hide evidence of civilization, infrequent downpours eventually dissolve the adobe buildings. Only stubs of mud walls are left. As in ghost towns everywhere, vandalism also hastens the disappearance of remains.

Desert roads and rainstorm     

Even so, we were eager to explore the site. We packed a lunch, grabbed our wide-brimmed hats and set out in the Edinger’s four-wheel-drive pickup. We were scarcely out of town before the paving turned to dirt. Desert roads in Arizona are easy to build. Scrape away the sparse vegetation to a depth of six or eight inches, following the lay of the land. Presto! That’s about all there is to it.

 Where the road dips into low spots, signs read “Do not enter when flooded.” Often someone ignores a sign and suffers the consequences. The Edingers, who spend two months of every winter in an RV park in Bouse, saw for themselves how quickly trouble can strike this winter. News reports had told of heavy rain far to the north. That night, Darlene woke to a strange rushing sound. No wind or rain beat against their RV. She got up to peer out the window. The deep, usually dry wash behind them was running bank full of roiling water. By morning the wild stream had drained away into the Colorado River. Fortunately no one was in the channel when the flash flood came crashing through.

As we headed northeast out of Bouse, a few cloud puffs sailed across the sky. We crossed a strait-jacketed river flowing direct as an arrow in its concrete channel. A sign credited the canal’s existence to the Central Arizona Project, which brings water from the dammed-up Salt River to the thirsty conglomerate of cities making up the greater Phoenix area.

                                                                Ruins of the smelter from a slag heap

We had the gravel road to ourselves. After 25 to 30 miles, we reached the mountains cupping the once-busy townsite of Swansea (swanzee). As we wound up, then down, the road became narrower and more jarring. Finally, we glimpsed the town’s ruins ahead.

                                                                     Remains of a shaft
 
The Bureau of Land Management is attempting to protect the remnants. It has built an area with parking for a few cars, an interpretive sign, and restrooms. It has established an interpretive trail and installed protective roofs over a double row of crumbling miners’ quarters. Metal fences keep visitors away from vertical shafts, one of them 1,200 feet deep.

When mining began in this area in 1862, copper ore was shipped via San Francisco to smelters at Swansea, Wales. Later, George Mitchell, an  entrepreneur from Swansea, invested in rejuvenating the mines and named the site after his hometown. He built his own furnace to reduce the ore, installed hoists for five mine shafts, and constructed a pipeline to carry river water to the townsite. He built a smelter in 1908. An electric plant, water works, restaurants, movie houses, saloons, a railroad, even a newspaper served the 500 or so people who lived there. Until the 1920s, the town hosted a general store, a hospital, and a post office.

However, Mitchell spent too much money on building the plant and not enough on working the mines. His company went bankrupt.  Swansea as a community lasted only twenty-nine years.

Miners' quarters undergoing renovation

Today, all that remains of the town is the double row of miners’ quarters, the foundations of the reverberatory furnace, the crumbling bricks of the smelter, and a few remnants of adobe walls. And, oh yes, the heaps of waste rock brought up from inside the mountain and the slag piles left from smelting the ore.

We sheltered from the wind against the side of the Edinger’s truck while eating our picnic lunch, then we wandered around the ruins. I tried to imagine living and working there in the broiling summer heat; the noise of the machinery, the squeal of the hoists, the belching furnace. A few other tourists poked around in the distance. Otherwise, the only living creatures were a few well-camouflaged lizards that darted from underfoot, startling us and reminding us to keep an eye out for snakes. The wind brought a growing armada of clouds to cast shadows across the hills below us.

As we turned back to Bouse, curtains of rain swept the faraway mountains. Eventually, the storm might reach our part of the desert and fill some of those sandy washes with rushing water, but for now the sun shone brightly. As we descended to flatter land, we peered hard into the rocky defiles. We almost expected to see ghosts of prospectors with their faithful donkeys, still searching for the next strikes.

        Even in springtime, the desert mountains are rugged.

 

Warning! If snakes give you shivers, look no farther. 

But, if you enjoy God's little surprises in nature, you may get a smile out of what I found in a sunny corner of our garden this afternoon:

These harmless garter snakes discovered a warm spot off the cold, damp ground  atop this lavender plant.

I had just thrust a trowel into the ground next to them, not seeing them, and I must admit I stifled a shriek when one of the three (count them) heads lifted and flicked a little red tongue at me. But I didn't bother them and they didn't bother me, even though I hope they move over to the neighbor's side of the fence before I come back to work in that part of the garden.

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.