Industrial Wasteland...

Well, it's certainly been a while since I posted something about my Arizona doings. School is going well and I took one step closer to fulfilling my dream of becoming a Cowboy--I was recently a hired gun for a band of outlaws. That's really all a humanities degree is good for these days. Just kidding; I had my first horse riding lesson (that obviously doesn't sound nearly as cool). But I've still been taking pictures like an Asian tourist, which means constantly and of the seemingly mundane:

These days, "Quaint" is bandied about like the word "freedom". But you don't know quaint until you've walked the raised sidewalk of this small shopping strip in Humboldt. Complete with a hitching post, this serves as the town's center (though, I think it is slightly south of the geographic center), with a Sheriff's substation, hairdresser, grocer, Town Hall and a seemingly anachronistic Consignment shoppe. Despite its location on a major route to Phoenix, it is in the middle of nowhere, and gets little business. I like the grocer, Cowboy Bob, and his locally grown produce, handpicked by farmers he knows. It's quality you can count on, that or they're all getting one over on unsuspecting shoppers (it's relatively cheap, so it really doesn't matter one way or the other). One of the few things in town that gets any attention, the store-fronts have been there and maintained since the 1960's.

A bit of history: In 1906 the Arizona Smelting Company completed a 1000-ton/day smelter to process copper mined from the nearby Bradshaw Mountains. The town grew around the mines and smelter, the owners envisioning a San Fransisco type of boom town. By 1916, Humboldt had 1000 people, ten saloons, five restaurants, three hotels, various stores and three mining companies. As the Depression took hold, and the mines and smelter closed, the wealthy had their beautiful victorian houses moved to Prescott. By 1930, the population was 500. In 1932, the school house was burned to the ground at 2 AM, following the graduation ceremony.
(This is all that remains:)

With a hefty mortgage and the town hemorrhaging tax-payers, arson was suspected. No culprit was ever found--and I'm sure he was searched for diligently in the upstairs of the saloons. Over the next 30 years, mining stopped and started intermittently, until 1967 when the Iron King Mine closed and the smelter was nothing more than a ghost of longed-for prosperity.

That's probably more history of this small town than you'd ever need and more than most of the residents know. I cut a lot out, but it is rather interesting to learn about the rise and fall and subsequent bottoming out of a small rural town. Stories like this exist all over the country, especially in the West, which is one of the reasons I find this area is so fascinating. Today, the smelter sits on a 6-acre plot condemned by the EPA for high arsenic levels among other toxins. That didn't stop me from exploring what is now the victim of teen angst and small town frustration and boredom (I wasn't worried about inhaling anything, it had rained earlier, gluing dust together like wet sand) (Note: Before the area was condemned, the town had planned to build a park. This plan was scrapped after a community board member was insulted at a meeting and called the EPA on the town):
Who knows how this building got all of its scars. But each brick was hand laid by Italian immigrants.SOAR's name was scattered around the area. If you look at the previous picture, you can see how high off the ground this landing is and the limits our lawbreaking friend was willing to push in the pursuit of local infamy.

No, this isn't a picture of Lego bricks scattered across a classroom floor. I didn't get a good picture of the smokestack's top, but I have sneaking suspicion that while our lawbreaking friend was pushing his limits, he decided to push some of the stack's brim as well. It reminded me of quip at the end of this Simpson's clip (Everything reminds me of The Simpson's [the beginning of which is an allusion to American Graffiti 2]):



"Celebrate your town's history by going out of your way to destroy an unnoticed part of it!" Good for you SOAR! The people in charge of your town marginalize your future with small town politicking and backstabbing, so why should you should regard the town's past as sacred?! Of course, SOAR could easily be some unemployed, middle-aged drunk with nothing better to do than relive his squandered adolescence, but we'll romanticize this scene as a victory for youth.

I'm surprised a gust of wind hasn't blown this behemoth over yet. The crack beginning at the brim of the stack extends at least 10-12 feet down. That is an eagle's nest atop the ladder. I'd estimate the height of the smokestack at 150 feet.

This open foundation is now filled with tumbleweeds. That white thing towards the top-right of the picture is a car frame. It is hollow beneath the concrete slabs and as foolish as I may be for trespassing on a contaminated, federally condemned area (and posting it on the internet), I was not about to go exploring in what could potentially harbor mountain lions or dead junkies. After the smelter was shut down, a sawmill moved in and set up shop. You haven't been sufficiently creeped out until you have been in an abandoned sawmill with corrugated steel flapping in the ominous wind. I was expecting a meeting of gremlins or Gossamer from Loony Tunes to pop out or some sort of horrible Industrial Waste super-villain monster--the Toxician?--to coalesce out of the filth. Fortunately--or unfortunately, I had my camera and could've made a killing with footage like that--nothing happened.

This is supposed to be one of those Beauty Amidst the Rubble pictures. The sky is pretty crappy but I think it does the job well enough. I wish the flowers were pointing more towards the camera but maybe they're just shy because of their shoddy living quarters.

This is obviously some sort of poured metal which cooled as it ran down the side of the hill that you can't tell I'm standing on.

I can't tell you what made these:

but I wonder if I could fetch any money for them framed at the low, low price of $9.99.

This is a loader or dumpster or some combination thereof. Perhaps a loader which dumped loads into a dumpster.

This is when I learned that tumbleweeds are extremely itchy.

Remember some 175 words and 6 pictures ago, when I said you don't know creepy until you've been in an abandoned sawmill, etc. Well, pulling tumbleweeds out of a grave-looking hole will also fill your heart with trepidation. "Grave-looking" isn't meant as a figure of speech, it really looks like a grave. The pile of dirt next to it, the well maintained shape; it was begging me to superficially search it and I obliged. But without a shovel or the desire to actually uncover some horrific secret, I stopped after pulling out the bush as it took with it a large chunk of DNA from my hand.

Despite traipsing through what is essentially a garbage dump, I had a very nice time. It was like walking through an interactive human psychology museum, showcasing humans ability to create pragmatic and industrial works of art, mindlessly destroy, and idly watch hope decay. I felt like I was walking through the collective unconscious of every rural resident that has had to watch their land pillaged. From the mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia to Lake Peigneur in Louisiana to good-old Humboldt, AZ and every place in between.