A phantom bullet whizzed by my head and spectral puddles of blood blotched the desert skin like the pox as I trod the streets of Tombstone a century after its hey-day. Yet beneath the crass commercialism and tourist-trap stores, enhanced or at least invigorated somewhat by staged gunfights and corner pitchmen offering wagon rides with or without  spiels on the infamous of the town, I could sense the struggle, the haunting faces of the regular people who only desired to feed themselves or family and who tried to stay out of the way of the power struggles of wealthy, influential and often violent men of the times. This was a town once full of saloons, adventurers, and painted ladies, and their ghostly breaths scratch and drift like tumbleweeds across my aura, tingling.

A laughter-filled skit of gunfighters is in stark contrast to the life and death confrontations plentiful in the high-desert town that thrived for a few years but barely survived the rest. Tombstone was--for a brief mark on a timeline--populated with more people than San Francisco! An entire town that now revolves around the past; who slept here and there, the famous “gunfight at the O.K. Corral” that really took place in a street further away from that catchy name it’s always been called, the same street that is now a highway where cars speed by without knowing or caring on their way to somewhere else. Although that’s probably seldom, since it’s more likely the only reason someone not living here would venture into the desolate over-grazed and depleted landscape would be to walk the same streets of those famous personalities of the pat. As we were doing.

We were three women who like to explore sights and sounds and history. The blatant tourism brings out the kid in each of us, the fun-loving immature innocence that doesn’t connect the glamour of The West with its dark side of drudgery, despair and desperation. And so we simply fall into the wide-eyed innocence of those childhood fantasies, seeing the place through a lens that exudes color and shimmer and absorbs the awe of the courageous in all their guises. The proper young wives in tiny elegant dresses that we cannot imagine keeping lean in a desert town where water is scarce. The Chinese immigrants toiling in a cramped tiny area, packed in like grains of rice. The droves of ladies-of-the-night offering their bodies to anyone with coin. A blustering, bustling boom-town at one time, and a draw for those already wealthy wanting more, plus those hopeful of striking it rich in the silver ore running through the land. Hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath the town, huge man-made caverns, opened-up spaces beneath unaware feet were larger than football fields, carved out by hands strong with meager light from solitary candles living in darkness. The mines and the gunslingers, the contradictions.

Remember the childish fun of walking along a sidewalk or rail with one leg and foot stepping higher than the other? That’s how I felt this day, uneven, balancing. I would have liked to have gone more slowly, to observe the players and the watchers, the ones seeking to entice away money, and those eager to part with it for entertainment and to touch a bit of the past for just a moment. Return someday...to sit and listen and watch. But the others are so eager to stay busy and distracted, drawn hither and yon--courthouse museum, trolley ride lecture, gunfight skits, souvenir stores. I shrug off resistance and step into their space. Enjoyable enough, laughter and wonder mingling around the struggles of the past people who knew nothing different--they were simply living their lives. As we do. I know I become too cynical at times, disillusioned with people and our greed, our obliviousness to here and now so as to focus upon then and future. It’s good for me to be with others who see and live differently. And good to feel the giddy laughter of a child erupting from inside my throat, my belly...the child who is blissfully unaware of of the complexities of life.

The gravity returns of what we who call ourselves civilized have created and destroyed in hundreds of years of industrialization and the disease of ‘never enough’ falls heavy upon my heart, until I once more re-focus upon the natural wonders of Mother Earth of which we are One , and I know we will, we can, move into heart-centered existence as we learn from the past.

~ written in my usual ‘stream of consciousness’ style