Gunsight Pass straddles the northern reaches
of the Santa Ritas, midway
between Helvetia on the west side,
and Rosemont Junction on the east,
mining ghost towns dead a century.
But ghosts, by definition,
are not still; they haunt the pass
and its approaches, high above the saguaro,
whispering through the chaparral
and along the high trails, hungry,
surveying endlessly for a piercing point,
ready to slip, along the fault,
into presence.
In Hombre, 1967, it was fitting, then,
that the sacrificial shootout should
happen at the abandoned mine
on the northwest approach to Gunsight.
Richard Boone’s bandit Cicero Grimes
and Fredric March’s embezzling Indian Agent Dr. Favor
are only aspects of the same ghostly hunger,
shaping the world into loot
and derelict shacks and tailing piles.
Ghosts, careless in their ravening,
neglect the spirit, elemental,
that sustains and surrounds—
that is ground and backdrop and horizon—
of the very world they plunder.
And so it is that Paul Newman’s John Russell,
the Apache-raised white man
enroute to divest of his white inheritance
irrupts as judgement
along their fault-line, revealing
them for what they are
in Elmore Leonard’s laconic prose
and James Wong Howe’s
“deep-focus” cinematography which,
like landscapes of the Northern Song,
re-members how back, middle,
and foreground are one,
and the human world always just a part.
But hungry ghosts do not re-member,
just obsessively repeat, and so in 2016
Rosemont Copper, persistent
through a century of morphing ownership,
has closed the access roads
as it prepares to gnaw a mile-wide pit
2640 feet into the eastern flank
below Gunsight Pass.
—
Laurence Steven is a retired English professor and small press publisher. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, and enjoys hiking in the mountains of Arizona.
