Winkelman: The last gang in town

[Ptah]

Squint and the filthy copper smelter could be a cathedral. Its tallest spire lifts
more than 1,000 feet into milky blue, over jagged cliffs and a layer-cake mountain
of mine tailings. The sweeping vista below is flora-rich, mesquite green and haunted.
The ghosts tantalize, swirl through frontyard windmills and rusted wrought iron,
the flower-dotted graveyard on the town's edge, these souls of Natives and immigrants,
miners and ranch hands, and whorehouse daughters of the revolution. Float down the
hillside, into the Gila and San Pedro Rivers, through Aravaipa Wilderness Preserve.
They mingle with the dead who came before them, cultures who belonged here and
conversed with their own Gods. The ghosts move beyond Dudleyville and Mammoth
and 33 miles up to Oracle, and further, to the Santa Catalina Mountains.

To live here is putting money on the dead. It feels like dying more than it does living.
It is not easy living around death but this town's present cannot begin to deny its history.
The mine on the hill has died and risen, died and slightly risen again, and now it is Easter
week. The mine, still robbing the earth of minerals, has given life, and taken life away.

Taste the air in warm April winds, the yellowy dust lifting off manmade hummocks of ore
tailings; it's briny, and hints of sulfur dioxide. Everyone here knows cancer, it's either in
them or directly around them.

This is mining country, mister, part of a loop that snakes miles and miles through the storied
Pinal Mountains. One such story involves a family store, Giorsetti's Superior Grocery.
A store erected before Arizona was a state. A store that has resisted certain death.
Because it has resisted death it could be a miracle. It is a store that offers an essence of living.

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/tucson-salvage/Content?oid=24986259