A Pretty Corpse

Once again, I'm going to blog on the proposed Resolution Copper Mine that wants to get started in Superior. Every time I write about it, I get read by folks in Virginia and Washington DC and sometimes in faraway countries around the world. I'm not doing this to gain readership. I'm doing it because something doesn't smell right. And it seems there's very few people that really know what is going on.

This week, some friends back in California sent me an issue of the 'High Country News'. The February 18 issue. It had a six page article on the perplexing problem of whether or not Superior, Arizona should accept the proposed mine Resolution Copper has for it. The editor and writer spoke to economists and townsfolk and miners and Indians and the copper company itself. And their conclusions? The copper mine probably isn't the best thing that could happen to Superior. Because of the short intensity of the high tech mining that is done these days, the area won't be able to sustain the Boom it needs and within a very short time, will be back to hard scrabble times. The Big Money the copper mine is promising Arizona and the US in return for the Land Swap (still before the Senate) won't be enough to sustain the local economy and the few jobs that will be available for the locals during the short term, aren't going to be there for long. So any big growth for Superior won't be sustainable.

Then the news gets worse: IF the Land Swap bill goes forward, Senator McCain made some environmental provisions for the British owned Resolution Copper (partly owned by Rio Tinto, a global mining company). The part I had heard about that gave me chills was that NOTHING would befall the copper company if worse came to worse and the Apache Leap mountain imploded under the block caving methods they mean to do at more than seven thousand feet deep under the mountain. That part just leaves me numb! But now, there's more. Under the Land Swap bill, McCain would exempt Resolution Copper from following the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). There would be no public oversight on copper smeltering or how much groundwater and Central Arizona Project water would be used. The company has said they would pump the billions of gallons from the old Magma Mine mineshaft down to the valley in Pinal County where it will be purified from other water, but again, with no NEPA public oversight, nobody will know how much good fresh water is being diverted.

I don't understand why the citizens of the US are expected to conduct their business in an orderly manner and follow all the environmental rules and regulations set down by the Feds and the State, but that some big global company can get away with not following the same rules. NO FAIR!

I think, and again, this is my opinion, but I think this Land Swap bill needs to be folded up and put away in somebody's desk. Resolution Copper will just fade away and go down to Indonesia or Mongolia to reap (rape?) what it can from those countries coffers of copper. Superior doesn't need it. It has had its mining. It still has its looks. It's going to be getting better from the good folks who are willing to work to change it for the better. But it's not going to be from another "Copper Boom".

I guess we need to tell Senator McCain and the other senators that might be inclined to vote for the Land Swap Bill that you can dress a corpse up in pretty clothes and make her look good, but... she's still a corpse. Superior doesn't need this mine. There's better days ahead of her than that road.

Coincidence?

On our sunroom wall hangs a New Guinea war mask from the Sepik River region. We bought it from a villager on a trip we made there in 2000. It worships the crocodile king, one of the Founders of the tribes there and it has a tortoise on its headdress. When we returned home to California, we hung it our living room wall but the mask didn't seem happy there. There was no 'spark' to it. After a year or two, I took it down and relegated it to a corner of the bedroom, dark and unhappy, until we bought the house here in Superior and put it in with the things to be moved here. It was one of the first things we put up when we moved in three years ago. As soon as Bill hung it on the wall, we got tingles down our back. The warrior mask was happy. It gazed upon Apache Leap mountain and it wasn't going to budge off its wall. It seemed a curious thing to me at the time. How could a mask from a far off land like Papua New Guinea find happiness in a copper mining town of the Southwest? Evidently, it's not so far-fetched.

Today, I went uptown to get my hair cut. The beautician is lively lady, about my age, and married for more than forty years to her high school sweetheart. We have a good time discussing things while she cuts my hair. Today, she started talking about the Native Americans and their inability to drink alcohol. I commented that it was the same way with the Australian Aborigines. She agreed and told a story about her husband getting accosted by a drunken Aborigine one time. I asked her where that occurred and she said Cairns. I laughed and said, yes, Cairns was where we had run into Aborigines too. Then she said her husband worked for a mine that sent him to Indonesia and she had visited him there.

I was awestruck. "You didn't go to Irian Jaya, did you?" I asked. "It's on the same island as Papua New Guinea."

"I certainly did!" she agreed. "And it was the strangest place I've ever been. Why, when I got up that first morning and looked out the window, what did I see but this man walking down the road wearing a penis gourd!"

I whooped with laughter. "Did you visit the Spirit House too? And see their thirty foot phalluses?"

"Oh my, yes!" She covered her face with her hands while she laughed harder. A woman sitting across from us and getting her hair colored and who obviously had never visited the likes of Papua New Guinea had a puzzled smile on her face. What were these women discussing?

"I cannot believe you've been there too," I told her. "I had no idea this was such a small world."

"My dear, the copper mine industry goes all around the world. There aren't that many places where it is mined. It is one of the biggest mines in the world in Irian Jaya. So that is why the miners go there. That's the way it is." She shook her head but kept smiling.

And so it is. There aren't that many copper or gold mines in the world. This happens to be the same good region for those valuable ores. Maybe that's why our New Guinea mask was so happy to reacquaint himself with the same sort of mountains he'd come from. He recognized a kindred spirit in the mountains. I might just be being fanciful but as my grandson Sage says, this sort of weirds me out! Small world, indeed!

What's Missing?

I have to confess: I still haven't made up my mind yet whether the Resolution Copper Mine will be a good thing for Superior or not. On paper, I think, what's not to like? It would provide for 3000 jobs once it's up and running. It would be the biggest mine in Arizona. The president of the mine says it will provide the US government five billion dollars in revenue and the state of Arizona 2 and a half billion dollars and that doesn't include revenue from the worker's paychecks, etc. It should be a win/win situation.

But on the other hand? On the other hand, the 'sleepy' little town of Superior won't stay the same. The mine will be running twenty-four seven. It will be all underground and lots of automation. It promises not to be anything like what the community of miners has come to expect around here. It will burrow seven thousand feet into the mountain and do its mining underground. Seven thousand feet! That's like a mile and a half. All down under our feet. And what's not to guarantee that it won't all crumble inward? The mine president has reassured the townspeople that contingency would not happen. That they would know well before such a thing would happen and take precautions for it. But.... are they sure? Would they really?

So that's why I'm on the fence about the whole mine thing. I would love to see Superior get some new businesses going and be able to keep its young people employed so they wouldn't have to leave the community once they graduated from high school. I would love to see Main Street actually bustling like it did in the old days, now nearly fifty years ago. But I'd rather see all of that with some assurances that the majestic Apache Leap wasn't going to pitch inward into the mountains it has sprung from or wipe out the town if its underpinnings all go missing.

Hey, I'm not a geologist. I'm just a person who loves the mountain and loves the view and some of this high faluting talk about such a big mine so far underground kind of drives me nuts.

Last Thursday night at the town council meeting, the mine president gave a talk. The federal bill granting the land swap to the mine and guaranteeing the mine's success is stalled in the Senate. The bill, in one guise or another, has been dicking around Congress for about three years now. The House finally passed it last year, and now it only has until next December to get through the Senate. Resolution Copper is starting to weary that the bill will be passed. They say they have allocated a hundred and five million on getting this mine started up and are reluctant to part with more money until they are assured they will be getting the land they want. They have spent something like fifty two million in the reclamation of the old Magma Mine just west of the town. They have rebuilt the old red brick hospital into a suite of offices. They've done a lot for the town in the past three years. But they are businesspeople and they want action. So this year, they say, they will be winding down their activities after March and adopt a Wait and See attitude. Their technical crews will depart for venues in other parts of the world where bureaucracy isn't so prevalent. What I thought was fairly puny of them was that they would not be offering their scholarship to the high school this year. Surely, you guys who can spend a hundred and five million in this little town, could still afford to dig up enough money to fund the scholarship, couldn't you? That's mean!

And what I found compelling when I opened up this week's paper was that there wasn't one hint of what the mine president said at last week's town council meeting about closing up shop and leaving town come March. Not one little note about it! If you hadn't been one of the thirty or forty people at the meeting last week, then you hadn't heard it. I dunno! I'm a Newbie at Small Towns but this one is a mystery to me. Something big and life changing as this mine is and it's all done with very few knowing anything about it. Am I missing something?

Superior, Arizona

There's a little town in central Arizona I want to introduce you to. It's an old copper mining town that came into existence a hundred and twenty five years ago. It started out as a silver mining town and in the 19-Teens changed over to copper for the next eighty years. Since the early 1990's the mine has been closed and the town has lagged behind.

It's not a big town. It's got a population of nearly four thousand and the majority of the people worked the mine before it closed. It's located sixty miles east of Phoenix and sits under the jutting, majestic peak of Apache Leap. The mountain is a red monolith with bulging pinnacles crowning its summit. It earned its name by General Hooker's men rounding up a hold out band of Apache warriors the Army had destined for an internment camp back east sometime in the 1880's. The Army figured they had them cornered once they'd crowded them onto the steep rocky pitches of the mountain's top. Rather than face the ignominy of incarceration, one by one the warriors leaped to their death from the massive rock.

Superior and the mine and Apache Leap have weathered the past and the present over these many years. You can't have one without the other. They make up the whole. And one wouldn't be the same without the other two.

So now the problem arises: There is a Land Swap before the House and the Senate for a British mining company to come into Superior and re-open the copper mine. It would bring the ailing little town new prosperity and assure the townspeople that their children wouldn't have to move away to make their way in the world. It would insure there was a vibrant livelihood in the town once again. It promises to get the boarded up storefronts on Main Street unboarded and thriving again. In short, it promises to bring Superior back to life after its long hiatus of mine closure and few jobs. But what the Land Swap would do is take away some of the Apache land that was promised by Eisenhower in 1955 to stay in natural lands and award it to the mine for land to be mined on. The method of mining the British company prefers is one called cave blocking, where they would dig down into the bowels of the earth by seven thousand feet to cut out big blocks of ore to bring to the top. The weight of the mountain above it would subsequently fall in on itself when enough of the ore had been removed. Impacting, is how the mine describes it. Imploding the mountain is how the Apaches and some retired miners look at it. There is no guarantee that the Apache Leap mountain would not suffer an impaction. Indeed, if that should happen, the little town of Superior that nestles at the mountain's feet could well be threatened too.

So now the friendly, hard working people are at an impasse. Some are convinced the mine would be the best thing for this ailing community with abject poverty and low paying jobs. Others are just as convinced that the mine could ultimately cause the demise of this sacred Apache land and change the landscape forever. Friends and neighbors are at odds with each other and old resentments are simmering. It's hard to go into any store or public gathering without the question of the copper mine getting trotted out and argued over.So what's the coincidence here? It's that for all of the arguments over whether the mine is a good thing or a bad thing for the town, there is one area that everybody is in agreement upon. And that is their heartfelt hope that they all want what is Best for the town. They all want Superior to survive and want the town to prosper. How that will happen is yet to be decided. But what I'm praying is that folks will recognize that they are all in agreement in wanting their little town to thrive, without changing the fact as to what Superior is.