Underground Silver City D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November 2009
Underground Silver City
Page: 2The town of Santa Rita was eaten by the Chino Pit several times between 1901 and 1957. Today, the Chino Pit is a hole 1,500 feet deep and 1 1/2 miles across. It is so huge that you are not sure what you are looking at until you see an ore-hauling truck moving along one of the roads deep in the pit. You think, "Oh, a truck," but you don't realize that the truck weighs 360 tons and is three stories tall. If you see an ordinary pickup drive by one of those trucks, you comprehend the size of the Chino Pit. In 1935, the NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt was born in Santa Rita, which is now nothing but air within the Chino Pit. After he became famous he liked to say he had been "born in space."
Some of the mine workers moved their houses to new locations in Bayard and Silver City. A discerning eye can identify these little restless ghost houses. Use and re-use — it could be a motto for Silver City, sitting on mountains of its grandparents' houses and household trash.
The Big Ditch, a cut to bedrock 55 feet down from the street's original level, has been a pleasant city-maintained park since 1978, with San Vicente Creek flowing over the bedrock. It is also a graveyard for Main Street's remains. Since the first floods, people have been reclaiming foundation stones, trunks, oil lamps, bottles, crockery and silver services from the Big Ditch.
In the year and a half since my friend dropped her amulet down the sewer, my husband and I bought a house in Silver City, and I have been thinking about the river of people's lives flowing downhill into the Big Ditch. One June morning I joined a cleanup crew at the south end of town. Volunteers have organized cleanup parties for the last several years, since some civic-minded residents built a trail along San Vicente Creek. Initially they hauled out big stuff — bedsprings, engines, tangles of rebar. They reclaimed dumped cars to line the creek for erosion control. That day, walking along with my black plastic bag, picking up broken glass, I found the cars — a garden of rusted cars dating from 1938 through 1950 or so. By now they are deeply planted in their graveyard. One section of car is embedded in the trunk of a gigantic cottonwood, like those that were washed away in the flood of 1895.
The creek itself flows clean here, but we found troves of flood debris on its banks. I started digging out a mysterious piece of leather that became a work boot. As the boot emerged from the ground I found myself terrified that there would be bones inside it. But we found no bones. Even though this creekbed has been prospected for decades, we felt that ancient lives lay just beneath and that if we looked carefully, we would find something wonderful. Someone found an ink bottle. I picked up a piece of substantial white marble. Was it from the floor of a mighty 1883 bank? Or from the floor of a barbershop, one like the Silver Clipper on Bullard, where my husband gets his hair cut?
Along the creek are large harvester anthills, whose inhabitants have also been mining for centuries. We kept our feet moving. One fertile trash pile lay by the foundations of a house. Near these ghost houses, a few homeless men live under the trees, making their own piles of less-durable stuff — cigarette butts and plastic Coke cups.
Blocks to the north, our own house was built atop an old dump in the days when most creeks were dumps of some sort. Yankie Creek runs through the yard, usually dry but filling up quickly with the summer monsoons and bringing things down the creekbed from the Continental Divide and points below. Sometimes it simply churns them up from the dump underground.
Ravens mutter to one another in the trees. Raven-like, I am collecting creek artifacts — a silver-plated fork, pieces of Blue Willow china, parts of a handblown glass bong — to make scavenger art for our yard. We live over a slowly moving river of debris. Our neighbor, Hazel, says that because the trash beneath us is unstable, her huge elm tree fell down on a windless day.
The ground is churning, the winds toss the cottonwoods and remind us to be afraid. Yet the very restlessness of this place satisfies us, even when we are frightened. If we didn't like uncertainty, we wouldn't live in Silver City. Weather comes out of nowhere to charm us. Thunder rumbles in a blue sky. And there is a happy wind that blows over this river of souls — the wind that whips in before a monsoon rain, the wind everyone waits for on a hot summer day. Which reminds me of a ghost story. This one happened to me, and I don't believe in ghosts.
Back in early June, I went looking for river stones in a parched and forlorn wash near the Grant County Airport. I found a few good smooth rocks, but, more arresting, a raven's head — the head alone. Someone or something had parted the bird's head cleanly from the rest of him. His eyes were gone, but he had all his feathers and a lifelike black bill. I took him home, thinking of a friend who would love to have the skull, once the beetle patrol had picked it clean. I entombed the head in a pile of bricks between two cypress trees and planned to check on it after a few months.
The August day was sultry, good for sitting in the shady backyard drinking beer and reading Patrick O'Brian. Around five in the afternoon a fierce wind rose out of nowhere, and the puffy white clouds turned dark gray. Now I was cool enough to think of sweeping the back steps down to the creek, and I wanted an excuse to see if any water was coming down from higher altitudes, where it might be raining. Joy came over me, the electric expectant joy that precedes a storm.
When I pushed the gate outward, it stopped on something soft. I saw feathers. Peering cautiously around to see what unfortunate bird lay there, I saw the head, and the head alone, of a raven. It was my eyeless friend. He still had all his feathers, and a bill that looked as if it were about to say something.
Some creature had tunneled under the bricks and dragged out the head, then carried it 50 feet from the cypresses to the top of our steps, where the gate is five feet high and locked.
Or did the raven decide he was tired of his sepulcher, and roll away the stone himself? Was he looking for me, but thwarted by the gate? Ravens are always looking for writers, pondering weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
Politely I returned my friend to his tomb. But few things stay buried in Silver City; he may well come seeking me again.
Lyle York is a writer and retired editor of books, magazines and newspapers, most recently the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the co-author of The Dog Lover's Companion, published by Avalon Books, and Ask Miss Fret-Knot: A Guide to Consort Manners (on playing music), published by Vicious Poodle Press. She and her husband and poodle live in Silver City and Berkeley, Calif.