T'ain't Roswell but...

We were just finishing a late dinner at the kitchen counter when Agapi spotted a pinpoint of light on the flank of the Florida Mountains. It seemed to be situated at the place where the bajada (slope) meets the steeper pipes of the range. In the foreground was a copse of trees. At first, the light was situated over the small cone-shaped tree; but it moved slowly over to the right until it was above the taller deciduous tree bare of leaves. 

 

In the car moving toward the light (how could we resist?) we speculated further.

"There's no road up there, is there?"

"Maybe it's a four-wheel drive. Maybe it's a rescue mission for stranded hikers."

We drove parallel to it for awhile along Lucca until we hit Sunshine and crossed toward the mountains on Sunshine. The light split in two and seemed lower down now and the lights seemed to drift apart.

"It could be just the angle as we get closer."

Another light appeared or seemed to appear on the mountain further to the North end of the range. It seemed to have a little orange to it. As we drew nearer the lights seemed to manifest lower and lower, until it seemed clear that the original pinpoint we'd seen must be floodlights at the bottom of the bajada.

How could that be? We stopped where the pavement ended and the dust began. The light to the North end was still there, still apparently higher than the plain but not as high as it had seemed a few seconds before. As we drove home, Agapi reasoned that:

"Aliens do that, I hear. Make it seem like a normal light so that they blend in."

--

So, of course, the next morning we sought to retrace our steps and set out to get closer to the mountains again. We took Sunshine past the pavement and into the dust and continued through a fence onto a road of colorful stones. No way there could be the light from a house at that height on the mountains! No house there. Neither at the North end nor in the middle of the range. We walked and gathered stones: green, blue, dark blue with clear crystals, purplish, pinkish, white, white with green and blue spots.

On the way home, after our 2-mile walk around the perimeter of "Pit Park," a former quarry or washed-out anomalous arroyo at the East end of town, we saw a plume of smoke or dust rise up from the base of the Florida Mountains. It continued to extend higher and higher in a thin column very unlike the conical form of a dust-devil, rising nearly half-way up the height of the mountain before it dissipated.

"Looks kind of like a rocket taking off," I said. And...

--

A day later:

Didn't a coyote just limp across the road in front of us about a 1/4 mile away? Into that recently plowed field. No brush. No boulders. No structures. Nothing to hide behind.

Yes, but...

No coyote.

Histories Both Vile and Mild

We stopped in Mimbres on the way to the Gila Cliff Dwellings and bought coffee at a breakfast place called 3 Questions run by a Mennonite family. The Questions, emblazoned on the tile floor, were: Who am I? What is my purpose? And... I forget the third question, but I could ask: 

Who are these people?

We picked up a free newsletter there titled "Mimbres Messenger," the last issue to be published, as the editor and her husband, the delivery person for the publication, had at last burned out after 5 years with the project. One column the publication had featured regularly was a reproduction of news items from newspapers of the past. This, the December 2013, issue includes letters and news items from the Silver City Enterprise of 1882-1883.

A sad irony is revealed in two of the tidbits provided. One is that the Apache named Penaltisch had at last been captured by Major General George Crook of Wilcox, Arizona. Penaltisch had been part of the raid that killed the parents of 5-year-old Charlie McComas, from Silver City The second item offered a hopeful message for Charlie's return, which reads:

One thousand dollars reward has been offered for the return of little Charlie McComas, recently captured by Indians in this county, at the time of the killing of Judge and Mrs. McComas. Letters, descriptive of the boy, together with his photograph have been to sent to different parties in Chihuahua and Sonora. It is generally believed that the boy will be recovered.

He wasn't.

Jason Bentzinez, cousin of Geronimo, reveals in his book titled _I rode with Geronimo_ that, contrary to what authorities were told by the Apaches, the boy did not wander away from camp and disappear into the brush, never to be seen again. Rather, a warrior named Speedy, after learning that hired Indian scouts with General Crook had killed his mother, beat the boy to death with rocks in revenge.

Writes Bentzinez (once Batsinas) 91 years old in 1959: "Everyone connected with this tragedy is now dead. So the truth can at last be told."

--

Well, such is history, isn't it? Does it have to be? 

There's no question the days of the Old West were just one big murderfest -- native groups like Apaches attacking miners, miners luring Apaches into traps, bandits robbing stage coaches, drunkards shooting it out with other drunkards, in short, bad men killing other bad men, lawmen giving bad men their just desserts, and innocents like Charlie McComas meeting untimely deaths. Thousands died violently in the years of Manifest Destiny -- as an unfortunate side-effect of gold and silver fever, land grabs, cattle and sheep drives, smallpox and flu epidemics, military campaigns, rebellions, and forced resettlement of indigenous peoples.

Yes, but weren't there any Quakers on the frontier? Weren't there any pacifists or peacemakers?

In the modest resources of the Marshall Memorial Library (bless them) in Deming, I found the story of one enlightened soul named William H. Ryus, a stage coach driver and wagon train conductor who moved passengers and freight from Missouri to New Mexico in the 1860s. Billy Ryus recalled only friendly encounters with Native Americans in his autobiography, The Second William Penn:Treating with Indians on the Santa Fe Trail, 1860-1866. 

He reasoned that many of the Indians he met could just use a good meal. Before he set out on his route, he made sure he had several hundred pounds of bacon, bread, and coffee to share with any Indians he came across. He insisted his passengers show no fear or hostility when approached by Indians and, inevitably, any time spent with the red people passed pleasantly and without incident. Even on the warpath, the tribes would let Billy pass with his cargoes intact

Though not a Quaker -- he would need to resort to gunplay on occasion -- Billy took the position that the Indians would not have resorted to depredations and murder, if whites had not consistently abused their trust. His attempts to establish peaceful relations with Native Americans and to avoid hostilities saved many lives. Wouldn't it be great to find an historical marker which, instead of commemorating a violent event, recalled a peaceful encounter between red and white people of the West? Such as this event which Billy Ryus witnessed?

In 1863, here outside of Fort Larned, several hundred soldiers from Fort Riley and about 15,000 Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes spent an entire day of games, camaraderie, and feasting. Horse races were followed by a buffalo barbecue, for which the soldiers provide cutlery, and the Indians supplemented with candy and cigars. Speeches were made and generosity of spirit prevailed.

It happened. That was history too.

Deming Underground - Old Haunts at the Edge of Town

 We visited the site of the former Holy Cross Sanitarium on the north side of Interstate 10. Not much remains of the complex where patients with tuberculosis were treated in the 1920s-1930s. We found what we believe to be the brick boiler or chimney mentioned in several online forums dealing with "strange" America. There were also a few concrete remnants of buildings scattered about and a fenced-in area that may have been the cemetery.

Holy Cross Sanitarium.

Ghost-hunters and the like write about the tunnels that reportedly once extended from there to the southeast end of Deming, a distance of ten miles. It's rumored these were used to transport patients who had died to the municipal airport to avoid contamination in the town. These tunnels have apparently caved in all along the line and, in town at least, been filled in.

Several current and former residents talk about visiting the tunnels as children and having encounters with dreadful and mysterious spirits. Three teens who vandalized the cemetery, it's said, all died in the same year. Legend has it that if you wrote your name on the walls of the boiler room you would also die. The boiler room is gone, but it was covered with names and graffiti. Many young people disregarded the warnings, daring to scribble their names as a write (!) of passage.

The boiler room. Photo: Ernest Aquirre, Luna Explorer

Before the sanitarium was built, this scrubby and bleak stretch of desert was the site of Camp Cody (named after Wild Bill), set up by General John J. Pershing to deal with the Villistas should they dare reenter the US after their raid into Columbus on March 9, 1916. The camp also was intended to train troops for pending action in the World War.

In 1923, after military uses were deemed obsolete, it was transferred to the Catholic Sisters of the Holy Cross who continued to treat civilians with TB in the base's 800-bed hospital. The 32-building complex included a kitchen, bake shop, amusement hall, and chapel, and was self-supported through an attached 300-acre farm with vegetable garden, dairy, and poultry yard. In 1938, the sanitarium closed for lack of patients and, through a grounds keeper's carelessness with a cigarette, burned down in 1939

Visitors to the place have reported hearing noises and voices and seeing apparitions. People have been said to have been murdered there in ritual sacrifice. The ghost of a nun has been seen at the entrance of the site. Lights have been seen at night near the former location of the fountain. Paranormal activities have also been reported in residences and businesses underneath which the suspected tunnels passed through town. 

Interestingly enough Deming was home for awhile to group called the International Ghost Hunters Society, boasting a membership of over 14,000 in 87 countries. The couple that founded this group moved to Deming in 2004. Identified on their web site as only Dave and Sharon, they researched and investigated the Holy Cross site in person and were open-minded enough to dispel a few urban legends about the place:

First of all, that the cables hanging in the boiler room were not used to shackle and torture patients. Next, that the now-caved-in tunnels only extended as far the other buildings of the sanitarium, for these were merely steam tunnels supplying heat from the boilers. Third, that the graffiti-covered chimney was not once part of a crematorium but was used to burn garbage. Lastly, that the cemetery was used only to inter nuns and the lone priest-administrator of the sanitarium; their bodies, however, were removed in later years and buried elsewhere. So, reason Bob and Sharon, there can be no ghosts at the cemetery.

Having dispensed with the urban legends, Bob and Sharon then did go out to the site and in the barren dust of the former of hospital wards proceeded to record 15 tracks on their digital recorder of about a dozen spirit voices -- right where they expected they would find them.

(!)

And now for an unsolicited ad for a worthy project. A local writers group has put together a collection of stories based on the Deming tunnels. I can't say I recommend it, not having dished out the $12 yet for the book. (It costs slightly less on Amazon I think.) 

Local writers groups should be supported. So say I.

Down Under Deming

Deming Writing Group

Desert Wind Books

December 3, 2012

What Is that Dust?

Every Tuesday and Thursday we drive up NM 180 to Silver City so that Agapi might fulfill her role as adjunct instructor in Sustainable Design -- and I as lay-about and starry-eyed poet in the Western New Mexico University library and in the Bullard Street and Yankie Street cafes. A little more than half way to our destination we pass the tailings ponds that harbor slurry deposited there from the Chino/Santa Rita de Cobre open pit copper mine about 15 miles away. 

 

According to the local activist organization, Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP), both inactive and active tailings ponds at the site cover about 3,703 acres. The open pit mine itself is about 2 miles across, and deeper than the eye can see from the observation point the company has provided tourists on NM 152.

Pick and shovel mining at this site began in earnest around 1800 with accelerated incursions into New Mexico from New Spain. Open pit operations started in 1910 and have been steadily expanding ever since. 

In 1955 or so, the mines gobbled up a town. The people of Santa Rita, living since the 1930s on an "island" connected by a road between the two pits, were relocated to barracks at Fort Bayard until such time they could secure new homes. It had been your regular American town with kids enjoying baseball, chewing gum, and movies, amid the daily and nightly rumble of trucks and dust of dynamite blasts.

So there we are traveling at least twice-weekly past these giant berms on NM 180. Though most of the tailings ponds have the look of being reclaimed or at least inactive, the one closest as we approach from Deming has working cranes perched all along the rim. This rim is covered with a four to five-foot wall of a fine white dust. One day, on our return from Silver City, high winds were blowing that dust off the top of the berm nearly all the way to City of Rocks, about 10 miles away. Another day it was blowing across the road. We took our dust masks out of the glove compartment and fastened them on as best as we could. 

What is that dust?

Well, poke an extractive industry and one is sure to come up with at least one lawsuit and subsequent slap-on-the-wrist settlements. The current owner of the Chino/Santa Rita mine is Freeport-McMoran Corporation, the largest mining company in the world. In 2008, it bought out previous owner, industry giant Phelps Dodge, for $26 billion. Since then, Freeport-McMoran has been sued at least twice by the Department of the Interior and the State of New Mexico for releasing hazardous substances that caused injury to surface and ground water as well as wildlife habitats.

In 2011, it settled with New Mexico for $13 million, while taking in $20 billion in revenues worldwide that year and posting a $5 billion profit. In 2012, it settled with the DOI for $5.5 million, ceding as well 715 acres of land below City of Rocks to the State of New Mexico. (Ouch, that hurt!) Last year, it and the entire copper industry in the state, through its influence on Governor Susana Martinez and her staff in Santa Fe, secured an exemption from the New Mexico Water Quality Act. 

The ruling essentially allows Freeport-McMoran to pollute at will in areas of "hydrologic containment" and "open pit surface water drainage," i.e., in areas related to the supply of its tailings ponds, i.e., they may continue to use the creek that passes near the mine to transport the finely ground rock materials left over after raw ore is processed, known as tailings, to their ponds 15 miles away.

The hazardous materials that gave them such trouble before? Lead, arsenic, mercury, sulfuric acid, among others.

P.S. Philips Dodge is the name of the hall on the campus of Western New Mexico University in which Agapi teaches Sustainable Design. FreeportMcMoran is co-sponsor of an upcoming symposium on disaster preparedness put on at WMNU's Besse-Forward Global Resources Center, where Agapi has her office. One has to ask:

Can life on this planet survive having to be cost-effective?

--

Addendum

As this blog entry goes to press, per se, I find I am compelled to write an addendum. I have tried to elicit a response from the GRIP folks regarding the dust on the rim that gets blown down the valley. Two emails later (about a week apart), and no one has replied. Today, however, sitting in the Yankie Creek Cafe in Silver City, I met Woody, a petrogeologist who freelances in the oil fields and shale fields of America. He seems to be an expert. He said the rim and maybe the entire berm (?) is actually lined with a form of calcium carbonate that is trucked in. It serves, after it hardens in the rain or by hosing with the cranes, to protect against dust getting into the air. We talked of many other things so I am not certain I am remembering clearly. So anyway it's protective -- and floating through the air down the valley.