I am not sure if the last post came through in total. While I was fiddling around trying to get the photos on I think I deleted the first part and part of the end. I think that is should come with photos this time too.
1-30-04
When I pulled out of camp this morning I ran into a small herd of desert pigs crossing the road. There were about forty of them in all sizes. The little ones are sure cute. This is a good place to hang while hunting season is on, if you are a peccary/javalina . I see a lot of cameo dressed guys out in pickups.
While I was at the college I did some research on cameras. I thought I was going to buy a Nikon cool pix 3100 until I read a review by a guy that has a really nice website that he reviews all/most of the cameras available. In his review there was a link to the Canon A70. he really likes that camera and said that the A60 was just as good for a hundred less. After reading the review and specs on the A60 I decided that was the one I wanted. It is rated as a 2 mega pix but they say it will do an 8x10 with excellent quality. I will probably not need anything better, especially for internet use. It does have the ability to use wide angle, telephoto and close up lenses as well, which most digital cameras don’t. They had it at walmart for less than $200 so I went ahead and got it. It really pisses me off to buy anything at chinamart, but it is so difficult to order and then get anything out here on the road. I will have to say their guarantee is good, thirty days money back, ninety days replace. When I figure out how to operate it I hope to post a photo or two.
The pod on two rocks.
I headed into town and the tire shops, I finally found a shop that had tires for the pod and got a price. I told him OK and brought in the wheels and went back to the truck to study the new camera. He came out and said that they would have to charge me $20 extra each wheel because they were split rims. Geez! After a big discussion about insurance and liability I finally convinced him to loan me his tire hammer and I went out in the street and broke them down and mounted the new tires. It only took me a half hour or so and it was well worth saving $40 for sure. The guy ended up giving me a new tube instead of patching the old one which was nice. He said that they don’t get many people in who even have split rims anymore. I guess so, they are all too broke to buy a tire after paying for mounting the last ones. They probably just parked the truck when it got a flat.
I went back to camp at Kearny and fooled around with the camera. The reviewer said that it came with an excellent book. It is true. By the time I got around to taking a photo is was getting dark and all I was able to do was take a photo of the train going by in the dark and a couple of pix of my sock feet in the pod. That was not a good test for sure, but it gave me time to read the book.
1-31-04
in the morning I put the new rubber on the pod. Ready to roll!!!
I took a couple of photos that didn’t come out for doodle. I then noticed that I had it set for night photos. Duh, no wonder that they didn’t turn out. It was pretty chilly working outside and I went back in and looked at the book for the software photo program that also comes with the camera. I decided to go ahead an load it and try it out. WOW! What really nice program. I have been lamenting the fact that the Adobe photo deluxe program that I got years ago with a scanner will not load into this computer. it has been really hard to get it to install on anything newer than win 98. after much finagling around I was finally able to get it installed on the last desk top we got, but have been unable to get it on this laptop. This computer knows what I am trying to do and will not let me install it. Adobe doesn’t support the old program and they want to sell their photo shop. This photo program is wonderful and does everything that I need to do.
This is a really small little thing, shirt pocket size, but it is just jam packed with features that I probably will not use, but it is sure nice to be able to fine tune if I need to. I am hoping to be able to use the macro feature to take photos of my jewelry.
I drove on down this afternoon to Tucson. Country mouse, in the big city. This place is huge. I am down here looking for the big antique fair that is held the first Sunday of every month. I stopped at a gas station and asked. They girl said, oh, that is at least a half hour away on the other side of town. I was in the middle of town, or so the map said, but I followed her directions and ended up way out in the country on a little two lane road and I knew I was lost. I pulled over where a side road crossed and got out to look at the sign to see just where I was. there was a small white car that pulled up and a kid got out and asked me if I needed help. Your from Montana? You are really lost!! The big fair is held at the school he goes to and he led me over to it with his car. He was a really nice kid and he said I wouldn’t believe how big this was going to be. There is absolutely nothing there tonight, but it opens at nine. I found a place to get off the road in a place that looks like a necking lane and am parked for the night. Lets see, it is Saturday night, I guess I will find out if it is a lovers lane. I am getting really good reception on the radio and I am listing to a NPR station and it is Blues Night. Great music!! I sure wish I could be there at joe’s bookstore for music night. I’ll be there when I get back for sure.
2-1-04
well the big antique show turned out to be pretty much a dud as far as I was concerned. There was some pretty neat stuff, but it was mostly just stuff picked up at yard sales. About the only thing that I really liked was a strong box, or at least I think it was a strong box. It was the size of a trunk, but it was made out of sheet iron reinforced with oak straps and it had two iron handles on each long side and a two-handed iron handle on each end. It looked like it was made to carried by four to six men. The top also had places for bolts to secure the top as well as a heavy-duty hasp. It was made to hold something heavy and valuable and weighed about 100 lbs.
I got to talking with one of the vendors there about the big show in Tucson. Well, it isn’t just a show, it is about 8 shows going on at all the same time. He told me that probably the best thing for me to do was go to this movie place and park in their parking lot. He said that it is ok to park there over night too. I went across town again and found the parking lot for a mega-plex movie place. I parked the pod in a place where it would be in the shade in the afternoon and took a shuttle bus to the Rodeway Hotel where there is a large wholesale only vendor display. I tried to get in but I needed a tax resale number to get a pass. I wandered around outside where there were some spaces open to the public and finally went into the main office and talked with one of the chiefs about getting in. I told him I was down from Montana and he said ‘oh, you don’t have tax numbers up there do you?’ he told me to just fill out the form and in the place where it asks for the number just put in NA. It worked like a charm and I now have an official Buyer Pass. This is a wholesale only show. There are several huge buildings filled with vendors of all types. This is all jewelry related stuff from findings to cut finished stones. There were a lot of bead vendors and I thought I had seen a lot of beads but after I took the shuttle bus to another place on the south side of town I see I had seen only a few. This other place had vendors that had tons and tons of beads. These beads were mostly cut and polished rock but there were glass and clay ones as well. There were also a lot of different types of silver beads too. I must say that there were almost every language being spoken today. There were quite a few vendors from New york, but they were out numbered by those from China, Indonesia, India, etc. they sell most everything by the gram.
The shuttle bus system is very highly developed. There are several shuttle bus systems that all interconnect and it is possible to get to all the venues by these shuttles. They are all free and they run on 5 to 20 minute schedules. They are actually vans and not big busses. I only have been to two of the sites and am truly beaded out. There is a big catalogue that is put out by the stack that lists all the different sites and what vendors are there. It also has the bus routes and connection points. These different bus lines have colors like blue, red, yellow, purple, black, blue, etc. I have been trying to sit up front and talk with the guys and gals that are driving. They enjoy the company and I get to learn about the system and how thing work. I found out from one guy that has been doing this for ten years that the attendance it way down from a couple of years past. He said that two years ago he had people asking him if he knew of any place with rooms for rent and now he says that there are vacancies everywhere. From what I was reading on the jewelry discussion site I lurk at, the rooms are over $100/day and these people stay here two weeks. That takes a lot of volume to make expenses.
2-3-04
I took the ‘pink line’ out to a specialty bead grouping that is actually not too far from where I am camped at the movie theater complex. This was a rather small grouping of maybe ten or so vendors behind a year round bead shop. There was a gal that was selling Venetian beads and antique Venetian buttons from the 20’s. this was morning and it was a little chilly in the shade where she was. I noticed she had on a nice fuzzy scarf and I made some mention about it being Angora. It turns out that she is from Alaska and she is a knitter and I think will be ordering some specialty yarns from Susan soon.
There were glass bead making demonstrations as well as specialty beads on display. The day before I saw some beads in a small case that were displayed one bead in a special box. It turns out these are very rare antiques and a lot of them were over $1000 each and were only the size of a dried pea!!!
There was a guy down by himself that had a rather haphazard display that I found interesting. He loved rocks and cutting them as do a lot of others. I am not sure how it happened but somehow we got on the discussion of getting connected to the internet. He invited me into his stall and we sat and talked for at least a half hour. He uses his cell phone to connect up. He says it is slow, but with the unlimited minutes that they give on nights and weekends it has not been a problem for him. I ask what people do in real life and you I get the most interesting answers. It turns out this guy was trained as a physicist. He told me that he developed the first smart bomb that used controls of a stinger missile. He said that it was really two video cameras that you watched a screen, that had the screen that the missile was seeing and controlled it by sight. (I think I got that right). Anyway this was done at the China Lake test site down by Ridgecrest, California in the desert. They had a huge high tower and he said you could track a crow for fifteen miles up there. The first test firing was at an outhouse and they told them that if they got within two hundred yards of it, they would consider it a success. They hit it dead on!!! I could tell he was really pleased with that.
I just had to tell him about the ‘really first’ smart bomb that they were developing in the desert at the Tonopah test range just east of Goldfield, and Tonopah, Nevada. When I was in Tonopah I stopped at the historical society museum. Gee, did I already tell about this? I guess I was going to if I didn’t. they had a dummy smart bomb that was dropped and recovered. It was a huge metal bomb with a set of short wooden wings and tail. It was controlled by a series of cables and pulleys but I don’t know how it was guided. This was done during the second world war. He lives in Sand point, Idaho and goes though Tonopah on the way home and will stop in an see it. This is really a small world and so interconnected. It just amazes me that I saw that first smart bomb and then meet the guy that built the second generation smart bomb in just a couple of months.
He built up a company that made instruments to study the ocean (he is some sort of expert on whales)(he thinks the damage to the ocean is irreversible now) and then got into making tracking devices that the CIA and other military groups used for tracking. There have been some high profile cases that even I vaguely remember hearing about that used his devices. Some high level ambassador that was kidnapped and they tracked him and saved him. This was back before the gps technology that they use now. He said that he had over a hundred employees and was dealing with the Government and military guys all the time. He got really tired of all the hassle of running a business and sold it and said that he wasn’t going to do anything that he didn’t like to do. So he is cutting rocks and making a few rock beads. One of his jadeite beads is $30 and it didn’t look like he was doing much business. He was having a good time tho. I might just go back and visit with him. He had been to Iceland and he really likes the women up there.
Probably the most interesting discussion we had was on writing. I told him that I had a friend (Randy the news dog) that says “a line a day” (sorry randy I don’t remember the Latin, can you resend that? Thanks). I told him that I try to write a little each day of where I have been and what I have done, the people I met, etc. He told me that he was supposed to be doing that too, but he seems to never get around to it. He said that there is a BIG difference between what he writes long hand and what he types. After thinking about it, I too write differently. I thing it goes was back to when I moved from Arcata on the Califonrnia coast to Redding. The school I attended was WAY behind the school in Redding and I never did get the hang of spelling. When I write long hand I tend to write very short simple sentences using simple words. When I write on this computer, I just let go and say what ever I want and don’t worry about spelling or even sentence structure. When I make a spelling mistake the red line alerts me and the green line makes me look, but I really don’t give a shit how it all goes down. It is SO easy to erase. I once stopped in to see my girlfriend Mary, who was teaching school in Goldfield, she was working late at the school. She was a very dedicated teacher and would often work until ten at night getting papers corrected and things organized for the next day. I was looking over a pile of papers that she had corrected and found one just like I would get when I was in school. It had a –27 written in the top right corner in RED pencil. with some sort of note that he needed to watch his spelling and punctuation. It was a story composition and the kid had a good story but was just filled with red marks. I told her how it was to get a paper back like that. It just totally ruins any interest in doing another. When I was in school my neighbor girl Sharon was just devastated when she got a red mark, she was a smarty-pants and did really well in school. She also happened do be a champion speller.
I hopped shuttle busses to different areas the rest of the day and I have seen more beads than can be imagined as well as a real interesting place held at a large hotel. The grounds as well as the rooms were filled with mineral displays. There are people from all over the world there with mineral specimens as well as fossil displays. There is a place that I haven’t been to yet that specializes in fossils. I may get there today. This is morning and I have been waiting for the places to open up which is about 10. yesterday I wore my bag that Anna gave to me that was made in Bolivia and I packed my lunch an water(tea) bottle. The day before I got caught out a long way from the pod and had to buy a dollar hamburger for six dollars. This bag is wonderful. I wear it over the opposite shoulder so it hugs the body. Some of these venues are really crowded and it is nice that it doesn’t get in the way or make it dangerous when threading the way through valuable items.
2-3-04
I sat next to a gal from Whitefish, MT on the way to another location. She has bead shop and buys some stuff here and imports other beads from Thailand. She had just bought $4200 worth of pearls. Well, I said, that really isn’t many pearls is it? I had looked at some really nice pearls and when I asked how much, they girl said that those strands were $1000 each. They were large and extremely white and just glowed, while the others that I liked, which were colored, were only $800. There were several hundred strands in this small hotel room. The lady form Whitefish said that she bought hers for $1 /strand. That is quite a difference!! She can sell them for $5 and make a good profit. It is just so amazing how cheap some of this jewelry is. How can someone collect, drill holes in fifty small pearls, string them and export them, and set up and sell them for $1.? Another lady that I was sitting next to had on a nice bracelet of polished shells. She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to buy anything when she walked in a room and saw those. she put it on and liked how they looked and asked how much? $2 so she had to buy them. There were probably thirty shells that had been polished and two holes drilled in each. There is a lot of silver work that is unbelievably cheap as well. Most of the silver stuff is sold as so much a gram. They just give you a tray or bucket and you can go around and pick out what you want and at the end they empty it on a scale and they figure out the total. Depending on the quality of the work, detail and quantity they sell the stuff between 40 and 60 cents a gram. The pieces can also have stones set and some are quite intricate. The intricate carved stones coming out of China, India, Indonesia, etc. are sold very cheaply. In a couple of days the helidome will open as well as the convention center which will have the really expensive stuff. Quite a few of these venues will be on invitation only. A lot of them I will not be able to get into to even look. One guy I talked with said that they will just have big piles of diamonds and other gems on tables and may have several million sitting out. They don’t want to have to deal with rubber neckers and those with sticky fingers.
There has been a real cross section of humanity here. They come from all over the world and quite a few of them don’t speak much English. They can sure carry on in their native language between them tho. I got in the middle of an intense discussion by accident while I was looking at some fossils from morocco. This guy comes I and starts yelling at the guy in the shop and as I say it was getting intense so I left. It did attract a small crowd but on the whole everyone seems to get along well. There are some young people here but most are older middle age folk. When I was in Quartzite there were quite a few young people with dreads that were hanging around that were absolutely filthy dirty. They young ones here are clean ones. They seem to be having a good time and I see a lot of them buying so they must have head shops or bead stores at home.
2-4-04
I rode with a couple of way out gals on the way back to the parking area that had just bought a real load of beads. They were from Berkley and they were supplying their bead shop. One of the dealers gives their customers cool shopping bags with little wheels like the luggage you see being drug around. One of the gals said to go ahead and pick it up. Wow! She must have had at least 50 lbs in it. She said that they were all kinds of rock and silver beads.
By now you should have gotten an email that I sent at the U of A. There are a couple of junior colleges that I stopped in to see if I could use their computers and you have to have a student card to be able to use them. I took the truck and pod,(I probably should unhook) and made it down town to the university. I had to park at least a mile away to find a double parking space. I found the library and in the basement there is a room with maybe fifty or more computers. Most all were in use but I finally found one and ran a quick check on any email. There are a FEW of you out there that are dropping a line now and then. I really appreciate you doing that as it keeps me in touch with what is going on where you are.
I have been waiting for one of the places to open up and today was the day. It was supposed to be fine amber folks with a display of a Russian castle that has rooms done in amber. For those of you that don’t know, amber is pitch that is zillions of years old that has hardened and often with small bugs that were trapped in the pitch when it oozed out of the tree. It is hard but not like rock and it is so wonderful to hold. It is warm. They use special tools to work it and polishing it is a real art. There were a couple of artists there that made fine elegant jewelry with the amber as well as the importers of lesser quality stuff.
The other part of that place was supposed to be Native American arts and crafts. What a bunch of junk. I don’t know why these Indians don’t get with the program. Almost everything there was either order out of a catalogue and assembled or made in Mexico. What a shame and waste of time.
This was the day before it opened and they were setting up. Photo taken through glass. Notice the people to give it scale.
I really did sneak into the BIG show that you have to have iron clad documentation that you are a qualified buyer or dealer or jeweler. I have been able to get into the main one for lower quality stuff by filling out the form and saying that Montana doesn’t have sales tax and therefore doesn’t give out tax resale numbers. That works well and everyone is envious of no sales tax. I got turned down when I tried to talk my way in at the front door but I noticed that there was a way around back that they had the doors open so the smokers could go out and puff. Well in my defense, I didn’t see any sign that said that I couldn’t go in that door. Yikes! This was the high grade stuff for sure. I have a photo of the floor from overhead where I tried to get in and it is enormous. Must be football field size. Most of the booths were colored stones, from tiny little specks to huge walnut size stuff and the all were just brilliant. They have high intensity lights on everything and it is just dazzling. I made a quick trip up and down a few rows and it just wasn’t my kind of place for sure. I will have to say that some of the women there were just stunning. I didn’t check out the guys but I did notice that there were quite a few of those little tiny hats held on with bobby pins on the jewish guys. One guy had almost no hair and he must have glued his on as I didn’t see any way it could stay on. There were quite a few of those big guys in turbans with beards that look like you wouldn’t want to irritate them.
I said that I saw a string of pears for $7,900, and that is wholesale!!! I talked with a Chinese guy that is a jeweler in San Francisco and he said that on diamonds the markup is only ten to fifteen percent. He said it is getting increasingly difficult to make it in SF. He said his electric gas bill tripled in the last two years. Insurance, rent, etc etc. is just killing him. He said that the internet has been the downfall because people come in and they have checked out the prices on line and they come in and ask him to meet that price. He said that he couldn’t make it much longer there. This was a young kid who was really nice and a great attitude but a dead end job it looks. I hear over and over how we are going to be drug down and the third world pulled up to a common level. It could be….
2-5-04
Nothing happened today. Oh, the sun came up and went down and I saw a lot of beads, rocks and people.
2-6-04
I pulled out of the parking lot that I was camped at and headed for the ‘Rio catalog on the move’ show out in the eastern part of town at the Hilton hotel. Rio Grande is a catalog company that supplies the jewelry business. They carry everything from the metals to tools and the display / packaging materials. They put out an beautiful catalog and it has a lot of good tips on they tools in it. At this show they have working jewelers giving demonstrations as well as they give classes. I got to see part of a pmc (precious metals clay) where thy guy showed how to make a pair of earrings ot of this stuff. It is like just like working clay and when you are done, you pop it in a furnace and it burns out the fiber filler and leaves the pure silver. This is a really quick and fun way for people to make silver jewelry without doing technical metal work. The other class I sat in on was on carving wax models. This gal was great and talked all the way through explaining what she was doing. She did a better job of this than the pmc guy but what makes these classes really special is that they have a person with a camera right over the persons shoulder and it was shown on a large screen so everyone could see what they were doing.
There is also a large room with many of their machines on display with someone there who not only uses them but will give you a chance to play with it. I had the chance to use a power engraver and a couple of new style buffing wheels. I took one of my hair clips out and had it ultra sonic cleaned and then took it over to the gal who was showing the pen plating techniques who plated a small diamond shape that I had made in the center. That was way cool and it just took a few minutes to do. The gold center really puffs it up. I was talking with a jeweler later and he told me to stay away from that as the gold will polish off and my customer will be pissed off. The gal that did it said that since it was on a hair clip it should not get a lot of wear and should do just fine.
Oh, I talked with one jeweler and mentioned that I had seen a string of pearls for almost eight thousand dollars and he said he saw a string sell for $50,000. wow!
I have had a chance to meet and talk with a few of the jewelers that post or are mentioned on the jewelry forum I am a member of. Everyone seems to be really nice. The place is full of guys in suits but I am trying to overlook that and see within. There are some real pro’s here and I am learning a lot just looking and listing (which is hard in a big room full of people and machines running.
Some have asked what kind of jewelry I do and now have a really nice box with a hair clip in it to show. I talked with a gal with Rio about display / package box for the clips and she came up with a really nice little box about 3 ½” square with a glass top. The box is black with a black top foam insert. A large hairclip just fits on a diagonal and in the black box, the silver is really enhanced. I have been showing one of my fish clips from my ‘ice fishing series’ I did last winter. I have been asking about marketing and how and where should I go. A couple of jewelers bounced the idea back and forth between themselves (a man and woman) and came up with taking them to the upscale extra fancy hair salons where they ‘do’ hair for their clients and charge over $100. That’s a great idea but can you imagine ME going to the big city and going into a hair salon? Im going to have to pass on that idea I think. Another thought was the up scale ski areas where people fly in and ski for a couple of days and buy sweaters for $300 and wouldn’t blink an eye at a $100 hair clip. That sounds do-able.
One of the guys asked if I did them in gold. No, I’m not sure that anyone would pay that much for what I would have to charge for gold was my reply. He said “there are women that wear silver, those that wear gold and a few that wear both, but those that wear gold, wont wear anything else.” He said I should probably do a few in gold at least and tell them that if they like anything in the silver I will do it in gold for them as a special order.
I met the most amazing man. I think I was destined to meet this guy. I have had a photo of a small gold piece that he made as my desktop image since I got this computer up and running. When I first met him I had no idea that he is the guy that made the piece. I was talking marketing with him and showed him a couple of pieces I had made. One of the pieces was a scarf slide I had made. He asked to buy it and I just didn’t want to sell. Over night I talked myself into just giving it to him because I really liked him and I appreciated his input on marketing. So I gave it to him the next morning. He was surprised and gave me one of his orchid pieces that he had made. He is a member of the orchid jewelry group and he has made several small orchid silver pins that he sells and has donated several pieces for an auction for the benefit of orchid group. This guy is a psychologist in Mass but is doing more jewelry as he enjoys it more than his real work and I suppose has enough money now to do what ever he wants to do. I was really surprised to see him pull out this piece when he was starting to teach a class on repousse in gold.
gold piece that has been my desktop. My photo, I must have had it set on a weird setting.
He is really quite a character and uses only small hand tools that he carries in a small tool bag and he is constantly working on something. When I found out that he was teaching/giving a demonstration on repousse I just had to stay overnight to watch it. Rio really put on a nice demonstrations of all the tools that they sell and also put on these demos of artists.
2-7-04
I heard a little clip on NPR by Baxter Black on the cowboy poetry in Elko and it had Wally McRae on it. It was really nice to hear the voice of home country.
the demo was great as was the demo earlier that had a guy teaching how to make a couple of different crown settings out of gold. After the demos I loaded up and got the hell out of town and headed for Tombstone. As I was going through a small town which I cant remember the name of right now, I saw a bike shop with open sign in the window. I stopped and when I got out I saw the guy just locking it up. He saw me and waited until I trotted up to him. I told him that I really needed a new chain on my bike and he opened up and installed a new chain for me. He charged me two bucks for labor, which I though was extremely reasonable, as he had to cut, and fit it as well as he adjusted some on the shifter. I asked him where he would camp if he was on the road and needed a place for the night. He recommended the place where I am right now. It is just past the border guard check station on the highway. I am on the road to Cochise (the Indian) Stronghold where the army finally caught him. The check station is sort of a joke as the Mexicans know where it is and he said that the Mexicans have well worn trials around it.
2-8-04
I was a little concerned about the place I camped last night as I didn’t go far down that road before I pulled off and made camp. The radio reception was terrible other than the Mexican stations which were blasting it out as usual. It seems like all they do is hit it full speed ahead. I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the skip. The full moon has something to do with not sleeping well as it was like first morning light, all night and was hard to tell if it was morning. That is a weird sentence, but I think you get my drift. Art Bell was coming in just great out of Albuquerque NM. He had on a retired cornel from South Africa who said that he was responsible for shooting down a ufo which was eventually taken to Area 51 where others have reported seeing it. He said it had two small grey aliens in it. I am not far from the border here and I heard several planes last night. It is hard to tell if they are looking for wetbacks or smugglers. When we were down here before the border patrol had several large blimps tethered way up high with cameras and who knows what else, keeping an eye in the sky on what was happening on the ground.
I rolled into Tombstone and it was just like I remembered it. It is a total tourist town. They have the street blocked off and there are repo stagecoaches and wagons that take tourists around town. I didn’t remember the stagecoach drivers with head set microphones that amplified their spiel to those inside the coach. I think the wagon driver had the same setup. The stores are filled with tourist crap and there are paid shills in old-time outfits that put on shoot outs and other hokey stuff. I will have to say that the building are being well taken care of and down town looks nice. It is a national historical site as is Bisbee where I drove on up to. Bisbee is a little over five thousand feet and I could tell that this was going to be much cooler than where I had been camping lately. It is an old time mining town and the old part of town is in a couple of main gulches. It is in a really steep mountain country and the houses are almost perched on the hills. They have been able to maintain the old time character of the downtown business district and most of the building have been restored or at least had a lot of work done on them. When the mines shut down in the mid 70’s the town went down hill and almost became deserted. The hippies and artists moved in and started fixing up the place and now is sort of an upscale cool place to live.
I took my bike out for a ride and I was in the lowest gear I had and was just barely able to make it up some of the hills. I think they are the steepest hills I have ever seen in a town. I made it huffing and puffing up the steepest and highest street I could find, hoping to get a good overview of the town. While I was trying to catch my breath I met a couple of guys and a gal that were walking down the street to where they can park their car. One of the guys asked me where I was from and I told him Miles City. He said that he once had a friend that lived there, his name was Terry Hanson. Evidently he was in school in Fargo with Terry and Terry had brought him to Miles and introduced him to the red light district. I cant imagine Terry doing any thing like that, can you? They said that they were wood carvers and they were headed out of town for a couple of days, but if I was around for a few days to stop by and get acquainted. I asked if the road really was a dead end like the sign said and they said yes, but with a bike I could use the steps to get down. This town is just full of steep steps that go up and down the hills often between houses and is the way that a lot of people get around since cars are almost a nuisance. The local girls have nice legs, just like San Francisco I would imagine. I took the road to the end and was packing my bike down the steps to the next level where I could get back on a road where I met a really nice guy that was planting and fertilizing a small terraced garden along the steps the I was coming down on. I stopped and visited with him for probably an hour. He had come there in the late 70’s and was a carpenter. He had built a nice home over the years and was just about to get his youngest daughter off to school. He was seriously considering selling out and moving to South Dakota. He said that the drought and the influx of people were getting to be too much. He wanted to get into cooler country where there were not so many people. I imagine you get really tired of people in a tourist town. We talked over most of the world problems and I think we have it figured out that we could run it better than ‘the powers that be’ but we will just let them screw it up rather than take control. J His main reason for leaving was that the whole area is becoming a extension of Mexico. Bisbee itself is still a large percentage Anglo but the cities around like Douglas which historically was about half and half is now 99% Mexican. His point was that it was being slowly taken over and probably would soon be just another state of mexico. He said that the whites stole it from the Spanish who stole it from the Indians, so he guessed it was fair. They get the monsoons here too. he said that they are coming sooner now than they did in the past and lasting longer. The last few years have been droughty here though and the trees up on the rim are dying and getting bark beetles just like all the west. He said that people come here from back east to retire and when there is an earthquake or fires in California, they come from there. Sitting up on the steps talking with that guy was really nice. It is south facing and just warm as toast, in fact I moved into the shade of a wall as it was a little too warm. I made my way back down to the truck and pod and pulled out of town looking for a place to camp for the night. I’m on the oher side of the hill from town and over looking a large valley that goes down to old mexico. I have nice southern exposure but I am somewhat exposed on a ridge to a stiff little wind. I may move down into the adjacent wash if it too chilly up here tomorrow. I feel like I need to just get out and have a little peace and quiet after all that town jazz. I am sure Ely will like it much better being out of lock up in the back of the pickup all day. There are a lot of stray dogs that came by to see her in town and I didn’t dare let her out of my sight, I don’t want puppies out here on the road…..
I did look around town at some of the shops and galleries to see what they had to offer. There are some really nice things being made here, but most of the stuff is tourist crap as can be expected. There are a few up scale galleries and a few artists that have store fronts that do good work. I can imagine that Tucker would have a good time here with his gift of artistic gab. Your yard art is so far superior to what is available anywhere down here Tucker. They “need” some of your naked ladies. There is one metal man that has a shop down town that has a large display of metal cutout art. He paints all his pieces in what looks like automotive paint and all his work is very slick and repetitive. Each piece is exactly the same with the only variation being the paint.
2-9-04
It was quiet last night and it was a little chilly before sunrise but no ice on the dog dish. After the sun came up I got my bench set up on the south side of the pod and was getting ready to get to work when e dog just wouldn’t leave me alone. She has been spending quite a bit of time in the back of the truck (locked down so to speak) and she was telling me that she needed a little ‘nose on the ground’ time. That sounded all right to me, as I really needed to get some exercise too. We hiked down off the ridge and started up a little canyon to the north. The road kept getting rougher as we went and I could see where someone had evidently poked a hole in their oil pan on one of the boulders in the road. The road was right in the bottom of the wash and the trees and thorn bushes were thick on the sides. I passed a few game trails or what I had thought were game trails, when I came to a major trail and decided to follow it. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was not your regular old game trail. This was a major people trail! I am sure that it is used by the wetbacks on the way north. The trail was a litterbug mess with gallon plastic water bottles and juice jugs all along both sides of the trail. There were ocotillo’s that had small puffs of filling that is put in coats. I went by one large Agaves plant that had several of it’s tips broken off. I imagine that they are using these trails at night and if they stray from the trail they get shredded or speared. I followed it for a while and then found my own way back to camp. I had the glasses out this morning and I can see one of those blimps tethered south west of here and there has been quite a bit of traffic on the road today. This afternoon I noticed a jeep zooming around some of the back road/trails below camp and got the glasses on it and see that it must be a border control outfit as it had colored lights on top. The way that guy was driving that jeep, they don’t have much to trade in when they need a new one. I see some quads out roaming around and they may be border patrol guys too. I actually don’t feel real comfortable camping here but I don’t think I will be in danger unless I happen upon something, so I am going to stay in camp and not go wandering around. I wear my pistol during the day and have one handy at night. I need to go to town tomorrow and will probably find a new camp spot.
I spent the day pounding on metal. The first piece I did this morning was a copper piece I started last night on the table in the pod. I struggled with it for quite a while and still don’t really like it. The next piece was the same struggle and I don’t like it either. By this time I had wasted (is learning how not to do something, waste?) most of the morning but decided to set up my polishing wheels and try the new buff I bought in quartzite as well as the buffing compound that I bought in Tucson. I bought an 800 watt inverter before I left MT and I have used it hooked up to the battery in the pod. Since I have been camping in the pod in town, I have not had the solar panel out and the battery was getting al little weak. I popped the hood on the Dodge and hooked it up to one of the batteries. I plugged in my buffer and placed it on the hood. This system worked really well and having the buffer on the hood was just perfect height for buffing, I was very pleased with the buffing wheel and the new compound was terrific. The compound it called Zam and the guy that directed me to it said that it is the recommended compound for silver and it would be good for turquoise too, if I set stones.
2-10-04
I got the pod all swept out and rearranged in preparation to head back into Bisbee this morning. I was looking over some carved soapstone pieces for something to leave for the camp Gods when I happened upon some of the mule shoes that I found at the camp near Roosevelt Lake. I was looking at the map last night and was reading that Bisbee is located in the Mule Shoe Mountains. What a perfect gift, no? The camp Gods have been really good to me and I want to keep them pleased, I don’t want any trouble.
I just have to go back and get acquainted with those people I met the other day. The one that asked me where I was from and if I knew Terry Hanson. The coincidence is just overwhelming. How can it be, other than I am supposed to meet these people? I put this on the same plane as when I rolled into Austin Nevada and got out of the truck and walked across the street and went into a jewelry store. Hay loader Tom was just driving into town and saw me as I was crossing the street. He only comes to town once a week or less. The timing had to be just perfect. These things are a little spooky because they happen to me all the time. So, I gotta go and see what is up. I’ll let ye’all know.
I hope to find a library to get this sent off, gee, maybe I should be leaving something for the computer gods. They were sure good to me in Globe…….. I left those girls with silver, hummm…
I spied on the way into town a trailer park. I met the guy that runs it and he showed me around. He bought it 8 years ago as a run down park from 1927 and it is the oldest trailer park in AZ. He has brought in an old diner from California (a 1957 model) and all the trailers are 50’s and nothing newer. These are all fixed up and he rents them out by the night just like a motel. He also has a few spots that he rents trailer space as well. He said that he thinks that the place has just sold, it was for sale for $496,000. the diner is just as cute as a bug and it is open for business. I looked in and it is all 50’s inside too. newer prices tho….
dot’s diner
Boat motel room
More photos of trailer park.
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Airstream
