D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November 2009
 |
We conclude our presentation of winners from our annual writing contest — for the first batch and full list, see the September issue — with this intriguing and thoughtful piece by Silver City author Lyle York. As you'll see, it's definitely a case of "last but not least . . .." |
Underground Silver City
The town's history flows beneath us and sometimes pops up around us in unexpected places.
By Lyle York
Silver City is haunted. People say they've seen ghosts, restless spirits who died violently, like the woman who was pushed out a window above the Buffalo Bar. Our neighbor in an 1887 house says there are rooms he doesn't frequent, inhabited by a child who died a terrible death there.
 |
Draining down into the "Big
Ditch." (Photo by Lisa D.Fryxell) |
But I am not talking about those ghosts, only about a feeling that the city's history is still hanging around, that the relict buildings and empty lots want to tell stories of what went on here. People say they are attracted to Silver City by the friendly people and gentle weather. But also there are the wilderness just to the north, the rough and sometimes lonely streets, the possibility of something unexpected happeningnot always something good.
The town is full of restless spirits, very much alive and arriving in town every day. Others have been here all their lives and are holding on, cranky about the eager-beaver newcomers. Every decade brings emigrants with different ideas who rob those who came before, force them out, or trample their sensibilities, intentionally or not. The driver behind you at an intersection may wait patiently while you make up your mind which way to turn, or he may yell at you to move your ass. People drive high-rise pickups with rumbling sound systems, 1970s lowriders, Priuses, mountain bikes and Harleys. They are all spinning the wheel of fortune that will make life better than it was where they came from.
In the 1880s, men made mining fortunes one year and lost them the next. Later they came to be cured of tuberculosis. In recent decades they've been coming to get away from a crowded city, live on the land, center themselves, make art, or start a business they miss from back in the city, and they'll show the locals how it's done.
All these newcomers may not consciously know that the streets they are driving on barely cover ruins and bones. Remains, and old enmities, lie layered under Silver City, and sometimes they wash to the surface.
Death feels closer to everyday life here, if only the deaths of insects, like the clouds of grasshoppers in September that fly into our hair and die under our feet and wheels. On the ground you see big beetles struggling on their backs; if you set them on their feet, they go right over again. When you sit indoors at night, the outside watches you through the windows. The spring winds scratch at your house with falling branches. On Saturday nights when the winds are blowing, you hear distant whoops, short irritated bursts of police sirens, deep barks. Kids get rowdy and yell over the wind. Sometimes they sound like children crying.
Centuries of dead people haunt the ground beneath us. A friend who grew up near Cochise Stronghold, between Silver City and Tucson, told me that she had feared she was breathing in the bodies of generations of Apaches. She was, actually, if matter is neither created nor destroyed, but more probably she was breathing the dead bodies of grasshoppers.
Silver City sits among pillaged mountains, built on plundered native graves and succeeding layers of Spanish and Anglo enterprise. The original Native American civilizations rose and fell with the supplies of water and food. The last natives to arrive here, the Apaches, fought hard to protect their land from Spanish, then Mexican, then American invaders. They did not yield until 1886, when Geronimo, the last fighter, surrendered for the last time. The town's American history was a brutal series of booms and failures, recorded in brick and adobe buildings, legal records and newspapers. The stories of Indians and Spanish-speakers are mostly unrecorded, but they wail in our imaginations.
When I was still a visitor to Silver City, a friend and I were exploring Bullard Street downtown. Lynn bought several tiny but expensive Ethiopian leather amulets. Each one contained a tiny paper prayer rolled up in a scroll, a prayer for protection. Some of the prayers were Muslim, some Coptic Christian. The amulets were sealed, so you never knew what prayer you were carrying around. We thought those amulets were the best protection anyone could buy.
As we walked toward our car, Lynn took one amulet out of her package, fumbled and dropped it into a sewer grate — a big, deep sewer grate. It was dry at the bottom, but we could barely see where the bottom was or what else was lying down there. The Continental Divide crosses both west and north of the town, and this grate was a few hundred feet from the Big Ditch, the bottom of the Divide's considerable drainage.
So goes it with the treasures of this world, Lynn said. But then we decided to be brave. Together we lifted the heavy grate, and Lynn, even braver, lowered herself in. She is a good 5-foot-9, but her head was now several inches below street level. First rescue the amulet, Lynn told herself, then worry about climbing out. She found it and pulled herself out using prodigious upper-body strength. We still talk about that amulet and its adventure in the bowels of Silver City. Sometimes a sealed prayer, or a lost history, means more than one you can read.
The waters that flow through Silver City's sewers run from hills to the east, the Pinos Altos range to the north, and the Burro Mountains to the southwest. Until the 19th century, springs fed the marshes that gave the town its original name, La Ciénga de San Vicente.
The American emigrants who changed the name to Silver City were proud to have built an Eastern-style town, planned on a grid as towns were back home in Ohio or Pennsylvania. Beneath a large hill aligned north-south, the newcomers built Main Street running north-south. Men newly rich from mining silver, gold and copper in the surrounding mountains cut trees from the hillsides and built monuments to themselves as their forebears had done in the East, two- and three-story buildings of masonry and brick.
Around Silver City in the 1840s were lush grasses belly-high to a horse, luring Mexican cattlemen and sheepmen to the vast drainage around the little valley. In the 1880s, Anglo ranchers poured more animals onto the land. No one foresaw what fast-moving water and all those sheep and cattle would soon do to the grasses and, eventually, to Main Street.
The grasses looked like Midwestern grasses, resilient to the hooves of grazing animals, but they were not. These grasses were fragile and dependent on periodic natural fires to renew them. The ranchers suppressed fires and put more sheep and cattle on the grassland than it could sustain. As the grasses failed, the hard monsoon rains cut into the hillsides and washed away soil. Periodic droughts and blizzards killed millions of animals. People said you could throw a stone from carcass to carcass for hundreds of miles.
When the rains returned, they fell on a drastically changed landscape. The newly formed arroyos funneled the rainwater downhill fast, aimed straight at Main Street.
In 1895, a wave of water 12 feet high and 300 feet wide roared down a canyon from the Pinos Altos range at an estimated 15 miles per hour. The wave carried trees, boulders and parts of houses, battering Main Street's buildings and its great cottonwoods. Most of the commercial buildings on Main were damaged, many homes swept away entirely. But Main Street, now lower than the surrounding streets and spanned by bridges, stubbornly hung on as the city's commercial downtown.
It lost more buildings in succeeding annual floods. In the flood of 1902, people stood on one bank of Main Street and watched while the facade sheared off a building housing the Silver City Enterprise and the apartment of a judge and his wife, exposing the rooms and their contents. A piano belonging to the judge's wife fell into the water and was carried majestically downstream. In 1907 the citizens finally cried "uncle." They started calling the street "The Big Ditch," and moved the commercial district one street over, to Bullard.
Parts of the destroyed buildings turned up in new ones, and the recycling tradition continues in our century. Old styles lurk beneath a facade, covered by another facade. Many houses here are built in styles no architect had anything to do with. Silver City is a town of scavengers, rich and poor. You see iron fencing from a Georgetown graveyard surrounding the ruins of a house built on the Mimbres, glass and tile fragments embedded in walls, art installations made of farm equipment. Many people I know have a pile of shards and odd objects at home. They are artistic, or just resourceful or imaginative, and they intend to make something; or they keep the objects just to honor their former use, or for the mystery of the things.
Parts of Tyrone and the entire town of Santa Rita disappeared — literally undermined — in the mining heyday. When an open pit mine was successful, the pit would be enlarged, and if your town was in the way of the growing pit, you either moved your house elsewhere or stood back while it was swallowed by the mine. The whole town would relocate a little farther away.
The 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.