Stepping into the inlaid brick labyrinth in the courtyard of Patagonia’s Community United Methodist Church, Harry Hower recalled his days of building it in 2012.
“The church wanted a brick courtyard, then decided they wanted to include a maze pattern,” he said. The six-ring labyrinth designed by church Trustees Geoff Webb and Regina Medley was a masonry challenge. With patience and careful bricklaying, Hower and his assistant, Michael Brown, achieved the striking geometry of the turning pathway in the courtyard space.
Masonry was a craft Hower picked up in midlife, after moving to Arizona in the late 1990s. He began life in New York City, though his time in the Big City was brief. After his father died when he was eight, young Harry was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the French Alps. There began his deep affinity for mountain life—skiing, climbing, and simply being in the alpine environment.
Hower did well in school in Europe, and returned to New York for high school. Following a logical academic path, he started pursuing a degree in French at Georgetown University, which he thought would be easy. A little too easy, it turned out—he found it “incredibly boring.” So he left college and headed west to the mountains. He ended up in Invermere, a small town in southeast British Columbia along the headwaters of the Columbia River, between the Purcell and Rocky Mountain ranges. “Well, this is paradise,” Hower thought. He stayed there for 30 years.
A rugged life outdoors
Climbing mountains was Hower’s first love, and the peaks in the area provided plenty of challenge with rock, ice, snow, and glaciers. He joined the area mountain rescue team and honed his climbing skills with their able leader. Eventually he achieved the first winter ascent of Mount Monica, a rugged 10,079-foot peak in the Purcells.
Hower’s paying work was outdoors, too, starting with his tree service business working for various public and private forestry operations. His crews of up to a dozen specialized in “juvenile spacing” of trees being grown for lumber. “You choose the best tree, and cut the other trees out in a certain radius to give it a chance with no competition. You get increased production, and the trees are ready a lot sooner.”
Being a skier as well, Hower found a perfect match clearing ski runs for Canadian Mountain Holidays, a helicopter skiing company. “Generally, they’d ski on glaciers, but in a whiteout, you can’t ski on a glacier because you can’t see the ground in front of you — all you see is white,” he said. “That can go on for a week, and they’d have to give [clients] their money back. So they decided to add tree skiing [between the glacier and the lodge], because if you have trees around you, you can judge the slope better.” Even in good weather, the expanded runs proved popular with clients, and were more efficient with helicopter time.
Hower picked up certification as an industrial first aid attendant, (comparable to an EMT), which was required for companies in high-risk businesses such as tree work. That led to jobs as an industrial medic all over Western Canada and up to the Beaufort Sea in the arctic.
One project was dredging and building an island for an oil rig. The crew lived and ate aboard their ship, and were even helicoptered back for lunch. “The food was great,” Hower recalled. “Up in the Arctic, they make sure of that. If the food’s no good, they’re in trouble. People won’t stay. The further north you go, the better the food.”
At another camp, “the first aid attendant used to deliver the bucket of food, a bunch of plates covered in tin foil, for the lunches,” Hower said. “I walked from the kitchen to the rig, which is a quarter of a mile maybe. There had been three bears hanging out, three black bears eating the lush new growth.
“I walked past them, and one of them could smell the food,” Hower continued. “I just kept walking, and he kept walking. I walked past them, and suddenly he was walking, but he was catching up. I’d stop, he’d stop. I knew eventually what would happen there.
“So I put the food down between us, and picked up rocks from along the new road. I just started hurling these rocks, and they’d go whizzing past his head. Then I got a lucky shot. I got him right on the nose, and he just turned around and took off.”
After that, Hower said, “every time I came out of the crew quarters to go to the rig, there’d be the three bears there. One of them would look up and see me and run away.”
Tucson winters led to Patagonia
Hower’s first winter in Tucson was in the mid-1990s when he came to visit an old friend and to run in the Tucson marathon.
The next year, with good sources for trees in Canada, Hower brought down a load of naturally-grown Douglas firs to sell on Tucson’s Christmas Tree Lane at the end of First Avenue. He returned annually for 15 years until he was “the last guy standing” of the independent sellers.
Hower found work with landscaping crews in those first winters in Tucson as well, which is when he learned his masonry skills.
One year, some Tucson friends moved to Patagonia, and Hower came down to visit. “How can you not fall in love with Patagonia?” Hower asked rhetorically. After a few more years going back and forth to B.C., Hower moved to Patagonia for good.
He joined Patagonia Volunteer Fire and Rescue as an EMT and rope work specialist. He still carries a radio in case a technical rope rescue is needed, but says such incidents haven’t really happened since the highway guardrails were improved.
In addition to a lot of tree work around town over the years, Hower’s lasting mark has been the walls, pathways and patios he built for private homes and public spaces, including the wall in front of the Opera House. He also built the flagpole support in front of the fire station, which is a monument to former Fire Chief John Ashcraft. “Everybody in the fire department brought a rock,” Hower said, “and I used those rocks to build the monument.”
The courtyard, labyrinth, stone wall, and bench at the Methodist Church was Hower’s biggest public project. The intricate brickwork was also shaped into a slight bowl to drain rainwater away from Thurber Hall, solving a flooding problem. “I think the ash trees [on the street side] like it here,” Hower said.
Hower remembers his early years in Patagonia fondly, when it was “a sleepy little town” before sidewalks and paved streets, when the Big Steer Saloon was open, and tourists had little reason to stop. He misses those days.
“But it’s still a pretty tight-knit community,” Hower said, and he’s glad about that.
You could say that about Hower’s fine church courtyard, too—different connected shapes that fit together into a tight-knit whole.