littlebigdog.net 

from McNeal Arizona

(life, not politics; for politics, go to http://littlebigdog.net/ccipra.htm)

because the McLaurys may have died in Tombstone, but they LIVED here.

The Sulphur Springs Valley was the route for rustling cattle both ways across the border,
and McNeal is only about 3 miles from the location of the McLaurys' last ranch.

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In a quest for a treat, neither home cooking nor fast food,
we just discovered the German Cafe in Sierra Vista.
Here's their menu (slightly chopped on the right) as of Aug 17, 2011:

The servings are good-sized, and from the sampling of four of us, the food is beyond good.  What we had -- the house salad, jagerschnitzel, spaetzle, potato pancakes, & all trimmings -- were up to very high standards, which is hard to achieve for dishes that only the best cooks should even try at home.  The service was perfect, pleasant without presumption and attentive without obtrusiveness.  For anyone who wants good Mitteleuropean food, this place ranks up there with Novak's Hungarian Restaurant in Albany OR, and the Bohemian Cafe in Omaha NE.  Sierra Vista's German Cafe apparently got listed as one of Arizona's top restaurants without our even knowing it was in the County; this is our attempt to fix that.  We'll go back whenever we need a real treat to repel the tendrils of madness that come from isolation in the high desert.  One caution:  check your map before you leave the house; you can't quite see these people from the main road.  (Disclaimer:  We have no financial interest in this place, we just hope it lasts at least one day longer than we do.)

A nice surprise:  we were just told about this video about the restaurant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d1dBRgqm9I
It made me hungry all over again.

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Here's the business card of Cochise Imprinting,
a fine new venture at 9108 US 191 right in McNeal,
but serving all up & down the Sulphur Springs Valley:



They do good work, they work hard at it, and they are VERY responsive to special requests.
Best wishes to them for success.

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Skin art:  here's a forearm tattoo, photographed one day after it was made:

That image is still as sharp as the needles that did the job.

Everyone should recognize a GI's field grave:  boots, rifle, helmet.  For those who -- like me -- didn't instantly recognize the 58479 at the bottom:  that's the number of American dead in Vietnam.  Forty years after that war, it's still playing out in the heads of those who fought it.

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Charles Tidd is doing well with his excellent

Sunsites Sun newspaper:

http://sunsitessun.com/

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McNeal is in Cochise County, Arizona, about 20 miles north of Walmart, Radio Shack, Safeway, and Mexico, on US 191.  McNeal has a few dozen visible people.

Here is a panoramic shot of McNeal:

At the far left and far right of the picture is US 191 facing south. The car whose top you can just see is about halfway between Davis Road and McNeal Road. A hundred feet or so ahead of the car, you can barely see Davis Road branch off to the left and right. In the middle of the picture is US 191 facing north. The white blotch just to the left of US 191 facing north is downtown McNeal.  Yep, McNeal's small.

All of us in the Sulphur Springs Valley get to enjoy sunrises like this:

and sometimes morning fog like this:

And we always have goatheads, the unofficial Cochise County flower -- in real life, about 1/4" across, and taller than that until the spike breaks off in your foot:

and our famous"Area 51" dogs, sometimes passing on their wisdom to us monkeys:

Don't worry about missing McNeal as you drive down 191 -- you can see it from space:

North of town, on Turkey Creek, we have this, the real thing, right where they found Johnny Ringo's body:

http://www.bellestarr-az.org/index.html

About mile 353 on AZ 80.  South side of the road.  Look for a lot of corrals.  This is a private home, not a business, but Belle is very sociable.  So are her horses and burros and lord knows what.  Take apples and sugarlumps!

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Cochise County has a Bookmobile which stops at McNeal:

http://cochise.lib.az.us/cbookmobile.html

but McNeal also has a library, located in Elfrida, which is another wide spot in the road 6 miles north of McNeal.

The library is by the Elfrida community center, west of 191 on the north side of town. Its address is 10552 North Hwy 191; phone 520 642 1744; hours Tuesday 1 to 8, Thursday 9-12 & 2-5, Friday 1-5, Saturday 9-12, with the usual holiday closings.

Here's the library lady, the Charlene Kennedy quads:

Except for the Charlenes, the staff is all volunteer, so be nice to them. The library has computers with free internet access, and an online catalog with links to much more stuff.

(On a personal note, "here" is a link to some books I have liked in the last few years. Many of them are available through the Elfrida library.)

The Charlenes won a song contest on KWCD 92.3, for this ballad, to the tune of Jingle Bell Rock (and if you think it's easy fitting a song to that meter, think again: 

The Charlenes also do painting, and all of them carry a card to prove it:

The Charlenes' works are showing through October 2010 in Benson's City Hall Gallery, Saturdays 1-4.  And the San Pedro River Arts Council named them their "featured artist" for September 2010; see http://sprarts.org/current-newsletter/

Elfrida has other artists, and an Art Center at http://www.elfridaartcenter.org/
and see also http://www.youtube.com/user/elfridaart

The best thing about Cochise County is its people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0GgFKisVto

The break dancer is Eric Drabeck, in Ray & Cricket Lawson's front yard.  Ray & Cricket also have a singer/guitarplayer friend known on Youtube as carlsborgbob.   See

For an 8-minute tour of central McNeal, go to Youtube.com and use search terms McNeal Arizona Tour.  Warning, this video makes Andy Warhol's movies look interesting.

Her website is http://judithgrantham.avonrepresentative.com/

Cochise Sports & Recreation

seems to me to do a good job of teaching people how to get a CCW license. I took their class and was very impressed. If you want to be able to carry concealed legally, you might call them at 824 2299.

Harvey Allen's business, doing well work well:

 

A-Ray's does a fine job taking care of manufactured homes, new or old. They made our floors much more level. 

They do such good work it's almost worth while to break things just to see real craftsmen.

Here are (little) Gary & (big) Gary Mattingly, of Bar-Heart Enterprises. They do heavy-duty plumbing for farms & homes, including backhoe work. They know what they are doing, they care about doing it well, & they are scrupulously fair in their billing.

Every one of the people above is somebody we are glad to know, & would be proud to have as a friend. Things down here are not like in the big city. These people all pull their weight.

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Standing water once dotted the Sulphur Springs Valley. In 1872, a survey found water just ten feet down almost everywhere. Alfalfa and other such plants covered the valley.

Our surface water went for cattle. By 1890 we had a hundred thousand cattle. Cochise County was actually called America's Cattle Capitol. Came a drought. By 1895, only 25,000 cattle survived. The rest starved to death, after eating every plant down to the dirt, creating the desert that we live in now.

Our underground water survived until about 60 years ago. Old-timers remember diving into running rivers. Then came rural electrification, and cheap energy made it feasible to pump water out of the ground. In 1944, the County had only 12 square miles irrigated. By 1950, with electrification, that was 40 square miles. By 1975, 312 square miles. Came the oil crisis, and expensive electricity. About 2/3 of the irrigated land in the County went bust. Irrigation hasn't come back much, nor has the water table. It's typically 300 feet down. In places, the surface of the ground has sunk 6 feet or more. And abandoned farms keep blowing away in dust storms.

Today's money crop is housing. To real estate developers, housing means profit. They always want just one more project. They say we'll never run out of resources. That's what miners, cattlemen, and farmers said in their turn. But we live in their ruins -- mine tailings, ghost towns, a desert, sinkholes, dust storms, and scarce water. All over the county, new cracks in the earth show us that the aquifer is drying up today.

Government wants to appear in control, and developers and their allies want us to think that with new zoning and careful use of water, we can keep adding housing. But our eyes show us that we are out of water, and Cochise County history shows us that whenever we push the limits in this county on the edge, disaster happens.

On March 8, 2006, Planning & Zoning approved over a thousand new housing units. If developers eventually fill just a third of the County, with big 4-acre lots holding standard-size families, that's 750,000 people -- 6 times our population now. But the water's not here. It is either insane or crooked for politicians to keep pushing for developers to get rich by adding new homes to a valley that cannot support them.

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Things have gone downhill.  The scene below looks nice until you know what it is.

You are looking south towards Mexico, from about 20 miles north of Douglas AZ and the Mexican city of Agua Prieta. Agua Prieta has a few hundred thousand people, many of whom come from parts of Mexico where people have no hope or opportunity at all, to get jobs in factories that are far below American standards of wages, safety and pollution. In the picture above, the golden area low in the sky is the pollution over Agua Prieta. That's how "free trade" looks.

Many impoverished Mexicans don't want to stop in Agua Prieta, they want across the border into America, where the streets, not the skies, are paved with gold. From the American side of the border, the illegal immigration looks like a crisis -- which leads to the following item:

Cochise County is in a State Of Emergency

On August 23, 2005, the Cochise County Board Of Supervisors voted, 3-0, to place Cochise County in a state of emergency.

Arizona law allows a county to declare an emergency to meet a man-made calamity, disaster, or civil disobedience which endangers life or property.

Cochise County's "calamity, disaster, or civil disobedience" is the border situation. The Board was following Governor Napolitano's lead. On August 15, the Governor issued a Declaration Of Emergency for the counties bordering Mexico, stating "that the massive increase in unauthorized border crossings and the related increase in deaths, crime and property damage justifies a declaration of a State Of Emergency."

A State Of Emergency is not the same as martial law. Under Arizona Revised Statute 26-301(16), a State Of War Emergency "exists immediately whenever this nation is attacked or upon receipt by this state of a warning from the federal government indicating that such an attack is imminent." The Governor did not find that language appropriate for the border situation.

The States Of Emergency do, however, give state and county government great power. The Governor can directly control every state agency in Cochise County, and exercise the state's police power, subject only to Arizona's constitution and laws. And the Cochise County Board Of Supervisors can, among other things, impose curfews, close any business, and close any public street or place.

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Despite having such great powers, the Board Of Supervisors is reluctant to use them, because the Supervisors have to be elected, and perceive Anglos and Latinos as distinct voting blocs who must be separately placated.

In this situation, because our politicians are no better than average politicians, two bad things happen. First, when the politicians do anything, they build on the differences between the Anglo and Latino voting blocs, and make the differences greater. Second, whatever the politicians do, they do in twisting, turning, evasive ways, so that nothing bad can be pinned on them.

Thus, people are taught to look at others as enemies instead of fellow citizens, and governmental structures are distorted to rule subjects instead of representing citizens.

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