Summer Art

There is a small art museum in Myrtle Beach that features artists with local ties that have made it big.  The exhibit this summer shows the work of Drew Brophy who spent his youth surfing and painting surf boards in Myrtle Beach.  He uses pens and spray paint to paint what he loves -- the oceans of the world and the surfers who ride their waves.  His style is whimsical, colorful, and unique, and we really enjoyed the exhibit.

What he began on surfboards he continued painting on skateboards, tshirts, shoes, caps, and eventually very large canvases, which he sold while surfing around the world. 

Cape Hatteras NC lighthouse, a Mecca for Carolina surfers.  

Many of the paintings are very large and it takes a long time to look because you keep discovering more fun details.  These are some of my favorites.

I love the boogie boards he does for kids.  My grandsons would have loved these!

The last painting (right) sums up how the exhibit made me feel. 

 It's called "Pure Joy"!

Moon River...Moon Over Miami...Moon FLOWER!

I didn't have a lot of hope that our moon flower would ever bloom.  I was inspired by a fellow blogger's photos of her gorgeous blossoms (https://goodnightgram.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/one-of-those-lovely-sundays/  ) last year to buy a plant in the spring.  

It didn't do very well, in spite of fertilizer and plenty of water, and grew  one scraggly vine up the trellis with very few leaves, let alone signs of blooming.  

I kept looking for buds.  Nothing.  Then one day two big buds appeared that had not been there when I watered it the day before.  By late the same afternoon ...

the biggest bud began to unfurl in the 

brightest white ruffles.  

Within a couple hours ...

as the sun was setting, the blossom had opened to nearly the size of my hand.  

By the dawn the next day, the flower had shriveled and died, and there were seven more buds!  One of them opened the very next night.  We've have a little break now, but the rest should be opening on the next few nights.  And ... it's the full moon!  Maybe I'll get a shot like Gram's if I'm lucky!  

If I do, I'll be OVER THE MOON!  (Sorry, I couldn't stop myself.)

The World's Largest Rosebush

  The world's largest rose bush in Tombstone, Arizona, is part of The Writer's family history.  Its story began in 1884 when a young miner and his wife came from Scotland to work in the Tombstone mines.  The young woman, Mary, was very homesick and particularly missed the garden of her childhood home.  In time she received a package of bulbs and cuttings from plants in that Scottish garden, including cuttings from a Lady Banksia rose she herself had planted as a young girl.  

  A single cutting was planted behind a boarding house in Tombstone, which was purchased by the Macia family in 1920.  It grew surprising well in the Arizona desert climate that was so unlike Scotland, and the Macia's named their new business the "Rose Tree Inn."  

  It had inadvertently been planted over an underground stream and the availability of that water accounts for the fact that now, 130-some years later, it covers 9,000 square feet!  

 

 

It has never needed to be fertilized but has to be pruned in January to bloom for six weeks in March and April.  You can smell the scent all over town.  

  When The Writer was growing up, his uncle's family continued to own the inn and live there.  He and his brother spent weeks every summer with their cousins, climbing on top of the adobe walls around the garden, playing cowboys and Indians (it was the 50s, folks!) over-under-and-through the rose tree branches, riding horses, climbing landforms in the desert, and having exciting Western adventures.

Today The Rose Tree Inn is still owned by the family and it's a museum.  It's near the legendary O.K. Corral where a famous 1881 gunfight between a gang of outlaws called The Cowboys and The Law (which included Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers - Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan) erupted.  (Actually the gunfight took place six buildings away from the O.K. Corral, but what are mere facts in the face of Western novels and movies from the 1950s that insist on showing it happening at the O.K. Corral? ).  

  Thirty shots were fired in 30 seconds and three Cowboys lost their lives.  (If you think that was the end of that you'd be wrong.  A couple months later the Cowboys picked off Virgil (maimed) and Morgan (killed) in seperate ambushes on the streets of Tombstone. Wyatt took a hint and got out of Dodge, so to speak.  He continued fighting, gambling, and shyster-ing in California and managed to survive into his 70s.)

Well, that is my last post on our trip to Arizona.  That afternoon we headed back north to Phoenix, through the first rains of the monsoon season, with flooded roads and traffic brought to a halt for over an hour.  Close to Phoenix we drove through my first duststorm in the desert, which made the tv news that evening.  Then we gave up our luxurious rental car with the cooled seats, spent a few too-short hours sleeping in a hotel, and flew home to South Carolina.  

Bisbee and the Lavender Pit Mine

I've been missing for awhile and behind on reading blogs let alone writing a post.  I will be catching up this week though.  I have another post on our wonderful trip to Arizona to share today.

¥.  ¥.  ¥.  

  We left behind the ghost mining towns to explore one that hasn't gone bust and faded into the desert: Bisbee, Arizona.  

 In the 1880s, Bisbee grew up in the Mule Mountains adjacent to the Copper Queen Mine.  By 1910 its population had swelled to 9000 miners and their families.  Open-pit mining came into practice as the need for copper soared during World War I.

    

Coming out of the desert and up the mountains into the town, you are welcomed to Bisbee with the promise of a Scenic View.

  The Lavender Mine is what you see.  The open pit is 4000 feet wide, 5000 feet (that's nearly a mile!) long, and 850 deep.  It's stunning.  

  My first reaction was dismay.  I've never seen such desecration of nature. This is not the awesome beauty of land opened by Nature over eons of time, like the Grand Canyon or even Chiricahua National Monument.  It's more like ripping open a private part of the earth never meant to be seen and leaving the insides of its carcass lying exposed.  I felt like a bug standing next to such a vast hole.  

Looking at the photos now, I can be awed by the human feat of engineering it is, the beauty in the colors, and the opportunity to see what is hidden deep beneath our feet.   

  The colors of the layers visible are from the different minerals in the pit.  The surface red rock of the mountains is oxidized sulfide.  The gray is a granite layer containing small amounts of copper.  The yellow is a layer of rocks embedded in clay that surrounds the granite, and the lavender is limestone and conglomerate rocks cemented together which is considered waste as it has no copper in it.  

  Copper is an excellent conductor of electricity.  I'm not sure what it was needed for in war, but it became vital in every home, car, electronic device, appliance, etc. etc.  By the 1970s Bisbee's mines had run out and they closed.  A sign says that with new technology for extracting the small amounts of copper left in Bisbee and an increasing demand for copper, Bisbee's mines could open again in the future. 

  I didn't get very good photos of Bisbee itself. The streets of the town are built into the mountainsides, winding steeply one above the other.  It's now the home of artists and eccentric old-timers, a cute little town with shops in the old buildings and old miner's cottages colorfully painted, surrounded by clever little flower gardens and rented to tourists.  

 Many of the cottages are reachable only by steep old stairways.  

  We ate lunch in a restored building with a nice view of the hilly streets.  

  A mining museum is the centerpiece of the town, located in the old post office and surrounded by sculptures and places to sit it the shade.  

This one was my favorite because it shows off the minerals and gems of the area, including the turquoise which I love and is a byproduct of copper mining.  

Chiricahua National Monument

  Few words are needed because this post is all about the pictures.  The only thing you might want to know about the Chiricahua National Monument, near Tombstone, AZ, is how all this amazingness came about.

  A long, long time ago, an ancient volcano, Turkey Creek Volcano, erupted, spewing red-hot volcanic ash and lava all over the place.  That stuff hardened, and then many powdery layers of ash floated down on top of it. The process was repeated as the volcano erupted nine times and when all was said and done, the hard layers and softer ash layers lay 2,000 feet deep over the land!  Then came a few millennia of erosion that created the rock forms in these photos.  

There was a campground here.  

I wanted to set up a tent and never leave!

Ghosted

  From Flagstaff we drove south to stay with The Writer's brother and sister-in-law in Tombstone, Arizona.

  

  We probably shouldn't have been surprised by all the Border Patrol activity we encountered still 30 miles away from the Mexican border, but we were.  Helicopters, patrol vehicles, and this sight on the quiet highway into town: a border patrol roadblock with dogs and plenty of well-armed agents.  

  One day Marty and Kari took us deep into the desert on the Ghost Town Trail Road. 

  For miles along the desolate unpaved road, clusters of ruins lie here and there in the sand and desert scrub like this one at Elfrida.  The ruins are the result of a mining boom at the turn of the 20th century and the bust that followed beginning after World War I.  

  While Native Americans prized turquoise they mined in the area, the white prospectors came for copper and gold.  

  In what was once called Elfrida, 6991 gold mines were registered over the years, with names like Little Luke, Mystery, Mountain Queen, Chance, and Great American.  There is nothing more left of them than some rusted old iron and crumbling adobe brick foundations like this one.

  Farther along is Pearce, another ghost town where gold was discovered in 1896.  Four years later, the first copper mine opened in 1900. Pearce, with a peak population of 1500 people, earned itself quite a reputation as the wildest town in the West.  It's hard to believe this as the current population is 15!

Gold was discovered by a rancher, Jimmie Pearce, out riding the range.  He picked up a rock, smashed it against a boulder, and EUREKA, there was gold inside!  The news traveled quickly.  People in Tombstone actually dismantled their homes and businesses, carried the pieces on wagons 30 miles over the Dragoon Mountains, and reassembled them in the area of Pearce's mine.  Stores, a post office, school, jail, boarding house, and a dance hall were eventually built.  Even a railroad!

  The post office is one of the three buildings that still exists, although it was closed in 1967 and is now a private residence.

Across the road from the post office is the Soto Bros. & Renaud Store, built in 1896, one of two large mercantiles in Pearce.  Although the exterior is kept up, it looks empty now.  

The metal facade covers one of the largest adobe buildings in the county.  To the side of the store is an old machinery repair shop with rusted mine machinery about.  

The only other building in Pearce that still stands is one that probably saw a lot of use considering the history of the town: the jail.  It was decked out for Independence Day when we were there.

The jail has two cells, adobe walls 10 inches thick and reinforced with rebar, iron doors, and six tiny high windows for ventilation.  I don't see how the prisoners weren't cooked in there on a hot summer day like the one I stood outside in the relentless sun taking photos!  

Apparently the jail wasn't all that successful in deterring crime in 

Pearce.  For awhile, to protect the wealth that was being brought out of Jimmie Pearce's Common-Wealth Mine, the gold had to be made into ingots too heavy to be transported by horseback.  Otherwise, the local outlaw gang would snatch them and ride off with the gold before it made it safely to Cochise and onto the then-closest train.  

After World War I copper prices fell and the copper mines closed.  By the 1920s the country was in the throes of the Great Depression and the gold mines were petering out.  By 1930 the last of the mines closed, the railroad rolled up its tracks (literally) and departed, and Pearce became another desert ghost town.

(Does the completion of this post make me a ghostwriter?)

Thumbs Up For ...

  We'll be taking a little blogging break from desert photos today and traveling to Greece for the sequel film, Mama Mia! - Here We Go Again.  Here's the scoop.  

We have to drive an hour to the nearest movie theater so we don't go often, but this seemed like one to see on the big screen (and at near-deafening volume), and we weren't disappointed.  I give it One and a Half Thumbs Up, mostly for the music and nostalgia carried along from the first film that came out 10 years ago. 

The slightly stingy Thumb review is because it didn't have me dancing out of the theater like Mama Mia!1 did.  I suppose that could be because I'm 10 years older and have been dancing myself silly to the same Abba songs while cleaning the house and doing dishes for about 40 years now.  But I don't think so.

While the plot seems a little thin, the movie does clear up Donna's (Meryl Streep) mysterious past romances, her pregnancy, and how she ended up on a Greek island with a baby,  Sophie.  Will there be a Here We Go Again Again sequel in another 10 years to clear up the mystery of Donna's life as an innkeeper and how she died?  

I will also give it an extra fingernail for Cher's (plays Donna's mother/Sophie's grandma) glitzy outfits and her general fabulousness.  And then there was the large popcorn (you add the butter yourself!  as much as you want! !!), the recliner seats, my favorite hand to hold .... 

Oh, heck, make it two thumbs up. 

Just go.  You'll have fun!