In post-WWII America, a song written in 1934 rose to the top of The Hit Parade. Cole Porter wrote the music and shared lyric credit with Robert Fletcher, a poet, and engineer with the Highway Department in Montana. The war that bound the country was still raging when many people heard the song for the first time on Kate Smith’s radio broadcast on October 8, 1944.
I cannot recall the first time I heard the song, ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ in the 1950s, I do remember my parents, young romantics in their 30s, harmonizing with it whenever it played on the radio. It was “their” song.
We lived far away from any place The Sons Of The Pioneers would call open range. The east was closed up. Fenced off. Walled in. We had a car but it would have been a long “ride off to a ridge where the west commences.”
The song conjures up the things that would have appealed to that generation of heroes, men who had gone off to war and women who had stayed behind to work in the munitions factories. All had sacrificed to defeat authoritarianism and fascist dictatorships.
The song speaks of a physical west of “wide open country” but also of a yearning to be someplace where you could be yourself “in the evenin’ breeze.”
In addition to open-range cattle ranching, the West has a long history of mining. The Arizona State Mining Inspector estimates there are 100,000 abandoned mines in the state, many of them on the 12.1 million acres that the Bureau of Land Management maintains and conserves.
I have made it a retirement hobby to visit and document the mining industry that once flourished here. I get my clues from the smudges of waste rock piles on Google Earth or from following remnant roads into the mountains.
In this day of fiat, and now, even more inexplicably, digital currencies, it is difficult to imagine the impact the worldwide search for gold had on human behavior or on human history. When gold was discovered in the west it brought about a massive migration of people seeking fortune in the cool rivers and washes for the placers that had accumulated, untouched, for hundreds of thousands of years. Gold dust begetting gold flakes begetting gold nuggets.
The placers pinched out and the search went underground to the cool gloom of damp, hard rock mines.
This endless pursuit made perfect sense from an economic view.
Before the Bretton Woods system of monetary management broke down in 1971, countries around the globe depended upon their gold reserves to back their currencies. If you borrowed gold-denominated dollars you paid that loan back in hard currency too. The world’s money supply, and therefore, economic growth could only expand if more gold was brought to the surface.
The value of this activity explains things like boomtowns, brothels, and boxcars of oysters, packed in harvested ice, making their way to rustic Arizona.
The work was all brute force and sinew.
Discovering and documenting the diggings has been a good exercise. Picking at the waste rock, hoping to find a bit of ore that was passed over on the way to richer veins, has been a quiet and contemplative pastime.
It is, in at least one aspect, a race against time, not only because of the time allotted to me, surely finite in nature but also against the powers that want to erect iron grates, or bat bars, on every abandoned opening in the American West.
I have not entered many of the open shafts that I have found. I do not have a death wish. Occasionally I like to take a flashlight and a helmet and explore a little.
I know the caveats that come with the territory. Wild animals. Bad air. Cave-ins. That I might endanger a first responder if I encountered trouble might seem selfish. Having gotten to an old age though, does make me a little confident in my risk assessment abilities.
According to Geology.com, a total of 278 people died in abandoned mines and quarries in the US between 2001 and 2017. 72% were from drowning after swimming in quarries. 8% were ATV related. Another 8% were from falls presumably while trying to scale the walls of a quarry. Just 30 deaths are in the asphyxiation/other category. The data is not broken out any further. I cannot say with confidence how many people died over those 17 years from making the mistake of entering an abandoned mine.
I can say with confidence that the number of people who died from entering mines is far fewer than those who died from alcohol-related auto crashes, from being unvaccinated and contracting influenza, or even from accidental gunshots. Draconian measures to prevent those deaths could be taken too, but they are not.
I can hear the Bat Lobby protesting already, and they have a legitimate grievance: protect the bats. It seems though that ancient, natural caves should be a protected part of their ecosystem. But man-made tunnels on public lands?
Please don’t fence me out.
Keith Krizan can be contacted at therealkbkkbk@gmail.com