At Our Age, In Our Condition

People said we would never be able to do it, at our age, in our condition.

They were almost right.

"For our anniversary," Mari had said, "let's go to Bisbee!"

She might have said, in fact she had said, "Let's go to Glacier National Park",  but our anniversary is in August, and August is not a good month for glaciers.  And the park is a two day drive away, and Bisbee is less than two hours away.  But such a two-hours it is!  Tombstone is on the way.   Tombstone!  The OK corral!  Wyatt Earp, and gunfights in the street and in the saloons!

"We could leave early," I suggested, "and have breakfast at Big Nose Kate's Saloon."

It was in Tombstone that we should have turned around and returned home.  We drove down the main street.  There were no other cars, mostly because of the barricades that said the street was closed to make it easier for the stage coaches and the gunfighters to stage a gunfight, and for the coach drivers to say, Giddap!, and Whoa!, and things.  A somewhat irritated gentleman told us to get off the street, and said some things about my mother, so we skeedadled.  Big Nose Kate's wasn't open yet, so we mosied on into somewesternwhere else for breakfast.

I believe the somewesternwhere else was named the Longhorn Something:  probably Saloon.  

It is a fact that, a year or so ago, someone actually got shot during a Tombstone tourist gunfight.  It was an understandable error:  wrong kind of bullets.

We took no chances.  Left town.  Headed for Bisbee.  

There are about 5000 people in Bisbee today.  Once, when copper was king, Bisbee was an important town, larger than it is today by at least another 5000, but every time we visit we hear a larger number than we heard the last time.  On Saturday, a local merchant confidently announced that once there had been 45,000 people in town, which I assumed included everyone who had ever lived there since about 1880, as well as coyotes and housecats.  

It has the bones of a larger town than it is today.

We stayed at a second-story, eight-room hotel (not pictured here), on the main street of town, up a stairway reminiscent of Amsterdam.  My first attempt to scale the heights, a suitcase in each hand, ended up in a heap at the bottom, with me on the bottom.  I had seen a doctor the day before, and he had assured me that I was right:  something was wrong.  A thigh muscle had quivered and said, "To hell with it!", and down I went.  But almost no damage, except to me and my shirt.

The most astounding factoid about Bisbee, it seemed to me, was not how much copper had been mined in town, or how many people had once lived there, but that there was one gas station in town, up a hill somewhere, with one ancient gasoline pump.  I forgot to ask how many towing companies there were.

We do know that, across the street from where we stayed, there is a marvelous restaurant--Roka--that served us the best meal we have had in years.  Roka has been in Bisbee for almost a quarter of a century, and it is a treasure!

Mari could not resist a dessert that always provokes her system to rebel, so she did not get much sleep after we scaled the hotel stairway, again.  While we nursed our wounds, a late summer monsoon thunderstorm thundered by, producing an astounding amount of water on the steep street below us, but the town is a mile high, after all.

At our age, in our condition, we agreed that we have been right--all these thirty-four years since we married at our log house in Iowa--that like Bisbee, we may or may not have been larger than we are now (that is a debate we choose not to make), but that it has been a fine story.

We bought gasoline at Tombstone, on our way home.