Last November when my dear friends Sally and Bill Sommer, West Village residents, invited my mother, Donnette, and me to visit a ghost town, we jumped at the chance. Sally owns a share of the ghost town Ruby, in Arizona, and it so happened we were all free to travel there in early April. I was curious to see what the vibe was like in a town so close to the Mexican border. This was at the height of the media coverage of border caravans, families being separated, and vigilantes off-roading along the border. In January, there was one of the biggest drug busts ever of fentanyl in Nogales (254 pounds of the stuff, valued at $4.6 million), just a few miles south of Ruby as the crow flies. It seemed risky to go, but we decided to proceed anyway.
My mother and I drove down to Ruby from Tucson in a shiny blue rental car. Just south of Arivaca, we encountered dozens of white Border Patrol trucks going the other way on the two-lane highway. It was pretty creepy, frankly, and we pulled over to make sure we had our passports handy, in fear of being chucked over the border if a guard took a disliking to us. However, we passed through a Customs and Immigration checkpoint uneventfully, and then passed more BP trucks.
Our friends (Sally and Bill from New York, and sculptor Pat Frederick and zoo animal nutritionist Howard Frederick from Tucson) weren’t meeting us at Ruby until the next day, so with a little trepidation, we continued onto the final stretch of rough, puddled dirt road in the low-slung rental car. After a few hair-raising plunges through puddles of unknown depths, we arrived at the gate to Ruby. Armed with the code for the lock on the gate, we opened it and crossed the cattle guard into the historic gold and silver mining town that grew up around the Montana Mine. Now, if you’ve ever seen a Western movie, you probably have a clear idea of what a ghost town looks like. This wasn’t it.
At first all we saw were trees, bushes, and a ring of hills surrounding the former town, with the proud landmark, Montana Peak, rising in the south. Here and there were a few crumbling walls of adobe, and a few ominous, decaying mine buildings on a hillside. Suddenly we heard engines buzzing overhead, and saw two military planes circling the ghost town twice before heading off into the distance. This was anachronistic, not to mention ominous. What was going on?
We checked in with the caretaker, Michael, who told us that the US military likes flying over this area for flight training because it resembles Afghanistan! Not quite as sleepy a ghost town as we had imagined, even though it seemed there was no town left.
The sun was about a fist from the horizon by this time, so we hastened to make camp where Michael had directed us, on a flat plain of mine tailings (fine white sand), located between two lakes. We erected our tents by the trees bordering one of the lakes, near a ramada (covered area with picnic tables) and fire pit. I’ve done a lot of camping, and this is the sweetest spot I’ve ever pitched a tent. The daytrippers at Ruby had to leave by sunset, and soon my mom and I and the caretaker were the only ones left in Ruby, or so we thought.
I had promised Donnette a champagne breakfast the next morning, but since we didn’t have the required corkscrew to open the wine we’d brought for dinner, we popped the champagne cork and poured golden libations into our travel coffee mugs. Ambrosia! We cobbled together dinner on a Coleman stove our hosts in Tucson had lent us, and made a fire with twigs and branches we collected under the trees. Guess which West Village newspaper I used to light the kindling? My mom had the fire crackling in no time. That night we listened to three-part coyote harmonies as we snuggled into our sleeping bags. The second act was a great-horned owl backed by the calls of an unidentified pair of night birds.
The next morning we had the promised champagne breakfast, with mimosas, scrambled eggs, and chocolate. It began to rain, but we’re tough Canadians, so we started to explore the remains of the town. The mine closed in 1940, and though at one time there had been up to 1,200 residents, and miners working in 3 shifts, that time was many decades in the past. However, the group of families that now collectively owns Ruby has done work to preserve and restore parts of the town, including the old schoolhouse, part of which is now a museum. After poking around in various decrepit buildings filled with incredibly large mounds of mouse and rat turds, as well as a few fascinating old furnishings, we finally came to the schoolhouse. The door was open and across a narrow hallway was a tiny room housing the creepiest piano I’ve ever seen, with more than its share of black teeth and exposed decaying innards.
Donnette is no stranger to ghost towns, hailing as she does from the Cariboo, home to Canada’s most famous gold rush. She headed straight to the piano. Being a leftie, she reached with her left hand and started playing. Dah-dah-dah-DUH. Beethoven’s Fifth roared forth! The only thing is, my mom has never learned to play the piano. Some haunting being was playing through her! She recalls “The way my back went was so creepy. A creepy, cold feeling. That was a ‘passed one’.” I felt the chill down my spine as well, and an enveloping cloud of cold air. I shrieked and we both raced out of the building. My mother had previously cleared spirits from a residence that had been built on an Indian (First Nations) burial ground. She said, “I just knew from past experience that that wasn’t good for you and you wouldn’t want it again. A little devil in me wanted to go back in, but I didn’t let it win. I could tell the cold was coming, and I was getting cold from it.” We raced back to our campsite, trying to shake off the chill feeling.
A little while later, the sun came out, our friends arrived from Tucson, and it seemed life returned to normal. However, although we were looking forward to margaritas and a good meal with our friends, the dramas of this sleepy town continued. We learned that the night before, while my mom and I were listening to nature’s serenade, Michael, the caretaker, found an illegal immigrant wandering up the rutted remnants of a road through the ghost town. The starving, extremely dehydrated man had exhausted himself on his journey on foot to the US, and now he wanted to surrender. This is what we’re reading about in the papers every day, and it actually happened while we were there in Ruby. We were sobered by this real, live example of a human’s suffering. It wasn’t just a story in the paper anymore.
We had a lot to talk about that evening over a wilderness-enhanced dinner of spicy chili and steamed corn tamales, washed down with Howard’s world-class margaritas. As the sun went down and the stars came out, we heard Ruby ghost stories of murder and mayhem around the fire, building new memories on the ashes of the old.
