Bisbee, Arizona

Mouse Cat DogBig B over Bisbee

Donna sings with the band "Group Therapy"

Gallery in Downtown Bisbee

Queen Mine Tour

This little town in southern Arizona just might be my spiritual home (it could be one of many, so I don't want to be absolutist about this) although it's looking like we may not come back to settle here. Despite its isolation (2 hours from Tucson) and dry desert heat, for me, it was like coming home to a loving friend. It was where we lived, from when Sophia was a couple of months, to 18 months old.

During that time, I was surrounded by a wonderful group of women who supported me so that I rarely felt bereft of friendship, assistance or inspiration. I walked from one end of Tombstone Canyon with Sophia in the backpack to the other, almost on a daily basis. We got to know artists and healers and writers and poets along the winding canyon streets.

I learnt about natural medicine like homeopathics and herbs and also received many massages and healing sessions. It got me started down a road of health care that has sustained our family ever since.

One very special healer, Deborrah, helped me after I experienced a seizure. I had seen a neurologist prior to her visit, but felt dissatisfied with his advice. Instead of taking the anti-convulsants he suggested, and stopping breastfeeding when Sophia was only 6 months old, I followed Deborrah's suggestion and took some herbs to regulate my hormones. I've never had another seizure and after taking the herbs, I had more energy and vitality than I'd had since before Sophia was born.

Not only did Deborrah help me enormously, but she also passed on a lot of her healing knowledge as well. I really enjoyed working with other people in the town in this way and have learnt a lot about myself and others in the process.

Coming back to Bisbee, it's great to catch up with these women again. Talking with them about Australia, I realize why it was essential for me to leave that nurturing environment and go back home. It was really hard arriving back in Oz. I'd lost contact with most of my good friends and my family not being understanding of the style of parenting which we'd adopted, were not the source of support I was looking for. Sharing a bed with baby, on-demand-breastfeeding, prolonged breastfeeding (beyond 9 months) carrying the baby in a sling or backpack, just seemed like an awful lot of unnecessary pain for us the parents, to their mind.

My Bisbee friends asked me then, what had I learnt in Oz? Well, for one thing, how to have faith in my own decision making processes, to feel good about myself and my abilities, to trust my intuition. That's more than one thing. Here's another. That one cannot take for granted that their own experiences of the past are the same as that of their siblings. Also, to get to the truth regarding the past, one has to do a lot of digging in shit. I'm an avid gardener, I love digging. But it's not just snooping-digging. It felt like when one truth was revealed, I just had to question almost all the assumptions I'd ever made about my life. The past is a slippery thing at best, people's memories are most unreliable, who knows what really happened in their childhood, even if they get several different accounts.

What I learnt was that my childhood was less than the perfect experience that my family rhetoric had lead me to believe. Whose is, anyway? This made me feel angry for a long time. I then realized that expecting perfection from oneself and others just leads to more and more pain.

So what does Bisbee look like? It's tucked into Tombstone Canyon in the Mule Mountains with turn of the century miner's houses perched precariously on the steep slopes. The surrounding rocks are red and craggy, with sparce desert shrubs scattered around. The colour of the rocks and the big blue sky overhead remind me of the Australian outback. A heyday of decades ago has left behind reminders in the form of impressive buildings like the Copper Queen Hotel.

Phelps Dodge buildings no longer have the signage of yesteryear, the mine being closed in 1975, but many are still standing throughout the town and have been converted into shops and restaurants, as well as tourist attractions like the fascinating Queen Mine Tour site.

The tour prompts visitors to wonder about the working conditions of men long ago, when they worked deep underground by candlelight for 10 hours straight, and of their strength and endurance to survive such conditions. It also stirs up sympathy for the mules which worked alongside the men, but were never allowed to leave the mine, sleeping there at night and working there for up to 10 years, blind and exhausted by the end.

Thirty years ago, Bisbee mines produced some of the highest grade copper that could be found in the U.S.A., but dropping prices resulted in the operation becoming less than profitable. There is still copper in the mine. It will never be reopened though, because now that the prevailing technique is to level whole mountains, noone will bother with the miles and miles of underground tunnels.

The Lavender Pit just outside of Old Bisbee is the remains of the one open pit mining operation conducted in the area. It was left as it was, ecological vandalism to my mind, but it seems there was no govt body to hold the company accountable for its clean-up actions or lack of.

What is Bisbee like these days? It's gone through some changes since we left in '99, and some things remain the same. Like all small towns, it experiences intense conflict of interest amongst its citizens. Many people in Bisbee are highly individualistic and sometimes find it hard to work towards a common goal. That was true when we lived there and seems to be true today too. Economic gain, to the detriment of community goals seems to have occurred with the food cooperative. It no longer relies upon members to conduct the running of the coop, and offers them discounts in return. Instead it has a few employees and offers negligible discounts. It's closed the bakery/cafe that used to be a central meeting place for locals, because "it wasn't making any money". Now locals have fewer places to meet in relaxed, spacious environs, but the coop is making so much money, it's interior looks great and it's opening up a new branch in another town.

Bisbee is still a haven for transient creative types. We met a busker wandering around whose 'act' involved walking a dog around on a leash, on whose back balanced a small cat, on whose back balanced a white mouse. His spiel was why couldn't humans get on with each other when his three pets all natural predators/prey of each other were quite happy together. I'm not sure about the significance of riding on top of each other, it may have been an homage to Dr Seuss' Yurtle the Turtle.

Bisbee is a near-border town with Mexico, that suffers from the insidious presence of U.S.A. border patrol enforcement. Where else, other than in Iraq, or countries experiencing oppressive dictatorship, could you experience the routine road-block checks that occur in the towns of the southwest states? Oh, did I imply that this region feels like it's run by an oppressive dictatorship? Whoops!

So with the goal in mind, of following the bliss, I have to balance up the negatives and positives here, and conclude that Bisbee would probably suit us on a short term basis, but may not be the place where we put down roots. So onto the next place we go.

Manhattan Pier, Los Angeles

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Originally uploaded by blhouston.

We've landed in the U.S.A. at last. Weeks of packing and days of cleaning and vacating the rental house seemed to drag on and on. Our departure date felt like an unreachable conclusion to some frustrating dream sequence, where instead we find ourselves scrubbing walls forever.

We approached the Immigration queue at L.A. airport with trepidation, expecting to be interrogated for inadvertently filling out our visa waiver forms incorrectly, or for Brian being in posession of an Australian passport or for being the unfortunate victim of some aggressively paranoid officer's decision that we were suspect terrorists.

We needen't have been so worried. That type of experience awaited us at another time. For now, however, the officer was cool, he patiently waited as we filled in the four back sides to our entry forms which we'd accidently left blank, politely asked us our travel plans and didn't admonish Brian for using his Australian passport, even though he was also a U.S. citizen.

Ah L.A., what an amazing pit of human civilization. In many ways, it seemed not to have changed. Same monotonous view of red roofs and blue pools from our plane window. Same lines of traffic snaking down the 405. Same massive portions of food. Too many choices of consumables. I get so lost listening to the choices of dressing to go with my order of salad, I end up staring at the waiter, lost in a state of choice-overload.

We had one positive impression about L.A. For a city with half the population of Australia, transportation is so much better. We travelled up and down the coast in our Dodge hire car between LAX and our old haunts of Torrance and Redondo Beach and not once experienced a traffic jam. Of course we stayed off the 405, but even though all main roads were always full of traffic, it flowed well and drivers were polite and patient. Gold Coast roads in comparison are congested and slow to a crawl and the drivers are subsequently frustrated and aggressive, desperately trying to reach their destinations.

We took the kids to our favourite eating places, Rubios with its fabulous fish tacos, inspiration for our food van business, and because my favourite Japanes restaurant, Takefuku, nearby my old workplace of GEOS was closed, we settled for the food court at a Japanese supermarket complex on Western Blvd.

We spent the day at Manhattan Beach so the kids could swim in the waters of the other side of the Pacific. The water was very cold as was the breeze. I'd forgotten how cool L.A. can be in summer.

In the aquarium at the end of Manhattan Pier are fish tanks with a variety of sharks and other sea creatures, including some Port Jackson shark eggs. I didn't realize that these are Australian sharks until I mentioned to the attendant that we have sharks in Australia that lay the same kind of eggs. He nodded, saying that they were in fact Australian. The eggs look like seaweed and curl around in a spiral.