The Pope and the Screaming Banshee

Friday, March 11, 2011

BENSON, AZ – Today’s field trip was to the mining town of Bisbee, about 50 miles south of Benson and eight miles from the Mexican border. We made a leisurely start, which brought us to the town of St. David at about the right time to catch the bake sale at the local Benedictine monastery.

We knew we’d arrived at the right spot when the enormous cross came into view through the trees. The road in went past a grove of pecan trees, and there were several adobe buildings, and a small gift shop where we stopped first. We picked up a bag of pecans, harvested by the monastery residents.

The lady who served us told us the story of the cross. It’s about 70 feet high, and was donated to the monastery by a man who had set it up in his yard in the nearby town of Sierra Vista. The neighbours complained about the sizable religious symbol, so the man took the case to court. But before he had a ruling, he decided to make the donation.

As chance would have it, on the same day he contacted the monastery, another man also offered a gift. He said he was the last person in his family line, and wanted to pass on a precious heirloom. One of his ancestors had been in the Swiss Guard, and had saved the life of Pope Leopold (we don’t know the circumstances). Apparently the Pope expressed his thanks by giving the ancestor his pectoral cross, which contained a shard of wood from the cross on which Christ was crucified. The current owner of the cross had had it carbon-dated and it was deemed possible that this claim was true.

With both of these offerings coming on the same day, the abbot felt he could hardly refuse either, and now the cross stands as a beautiful landmark, with the precious relic housed in its base. The follow-up to this story was that the ruling about the large cross came in the first man’s favour, and he immediately erected another cross on his lawn, only this one was 80 feet tall!

With our pecans and homemade bread in hand, and some delicious sticky buns in our bellies, we headed on toward Bisbee. The town is nestled into the folds of a valley and up its hillsides, with lots of buildings dating from the late 1800s when the town was founded.

Bisbee has a vibrant artistic community, and as we strolled down Main Street, we could see in the shop windows all manner of pottery, paintings, sculptures, and embroidered clothing, as well as antiques and curiosities. We decided to take the Lavender Jeep Tour of the town, since it promised to show us parts of the town we’d never get to ourselves.

The hype was right. Our intrepid tour guide was Dorothy, a lady of a certain age with a black beret, large glasses and bleached hair. She knew every nook and cranny in the town, and manouvered our purple Jeep up and down the steepest, narrowest streets you could imagine. She had a story about nearly every building! So many were reclaimed from earlier times and repainted in wild combinations of colours, decorated with fences and sculptures and landscaped with cactus and aloe plants. Lots of hippies and artists migrated here when mining activity waned and houses were cheap.

In its heyday, Bisbee produced 8 billion pounds of copper, plus silver, lead, gold, turquoise and zinc. Open-pit mining had carved the hills into terraces and created a huge crater from which the copper had been extracted. It all started when the US Cavalry was looking for Geronimo and camped on a rock outcropping (still in the middle of the town). One of the men spotted a large chunk of what looked like copper, and when it was assayed and found to be of extremely high quality, the rush was on.

Houses popped up on every hillside – some of them were actually acquired by mail order from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, complete with furniture and carpets. One building on Main Street was a multi-level parking spot for horses, which were raised to the second and third floors in an elevator. Another four-storey building, set into the hillside, has ground-level entrances on each of the four floors. Actor John Wayne bought one building and often stayed in Bisbee, where folks would kindly leave him alone.

There are so many staircases in Bisbee that each year they hold “the race of a thousand steps”, where people run up one set after another. Some of the hillside houses are only accessible by steps; no roads go there. The quirkiest name we spotted was The Screaming Banshee Pizza place; we didn’t ask if it had anything to do with the number of hot peppers they use.