Trip to hometown elicits mixed emotions

Editor’s Note: The Augusta-area business news, issues and gossip normally found in Scuttlebiz is absent this week because business editor Damon Cline was out of town. Instead, he offers the following account of his visit to his hometown. Mr. Cline apologizes to readers interested exclusively in Augusta-area topics and urges them to read next week’s Scuttlebiz.

SAN MANUEL, Ariz. — It’s eerily quiet in this high desert town.

The dull industrial drone of what was once the world’s largest underground copper mine – the region’s sole industry – fell silent a few years ago after a half-century of production.

Homes and storefronts are vacant. So many families have left that the middle school had to be closed and consolidated into the high school.

The residents have long said that “there’s nothing to do in San Manuel.” Now it’s really true.

This is my hometown.

I HAD NOT BEEN BACK here since 1999, right before the Australian company that acquired the mining operations three years earlier announced it was suspending operations. During that visit, the place pretty much looked the same as when I was born there in 1972. In fact, the town has hardly changed since it was built in the early 1950s to house the 2,000 miners who would eventually produce nearly a quarter of the nation’s copper.

I thought I was prepared for this visit. The mine closure and the town’s subsequent decline were often topics of conversation during bimonthly phone calls to my parents. I had read news reports on the closure and even watched the demolition of the smelter’s massive twin smokestacks on YouTube.

Nothing about the largest mine closure in Arizona history resonated with me, however, until Monday, March 10, at 1:43 p.m. MST. That was when I looked out the passenger window of my rental car, somewhere between mileposts 107 and 106 on Arizona Highway 77, toward the San Pedro Valley.

I saw nothing.

The people of San Manuel have always known they were close to home when they could see smoke billowing out of the 500-foot-tall stacks that loomed over the town like giant twin sentinels. On a clear day (which wasn’t all that often when the smelter was in full production) the stacks could be seen 40 miles away. On this day, there was a picture- perfect view of the Galiuro Mountains.

I pull into The Highlands trailer and RV park and drive up the gravel and dirt road toward the double-wide at Lot 224, the address that for 18 years was my legal residence. The old home is a disaster area because my mother is in the process of moving.

The fence is torn down, the skirting has been ripped off and debris is scattered all over the yard that was once considered the finest in the trailer park.

After more than 30 years of living there, she is being evicted. Earlier this year, the park’s residents were given notice to be out by the end of June. The Scottsdale businessman who bought the property a few years ago plans to turn it into a golf course community.
My father, who lives down the street in a single-wide (they divorced several years ago but still see each other practically every day), was told bulldozers will roll in to level the place during the summer.

I walk up the steps past the handprints I made in the concrete patio 25 years ago and give my mom a hug.

PEOPLE HERE ARE ANGRY. They can’t understand why BHP Billiton would spend $3.2 billion to buy Magma Copper – the San Manuel mine’s owner – in 1996, only to suspend operations in 1999 and permanently close them in 2003 during the next few years while nearly 2 billion pounds of copper remained in the San Manuel and Kalamazoo ore bodies.
Conspiracy theories abound. The most likely explanation, however, is this: It was a bonehead decision.

Copper was selling for 60-70 cents a pound in 1999. At those prices, it was more profitable for BHP to focus on its overseas operations, where government regulations are lax and labor is cheap. By the time workers began reducing the world’s most technologically advanced copper mine and smelter to 21 million tons of scrap metal, copper had risen to $2 a pound. Copper is now trading just below $4 a pound.

Whoever it was at the BHP headquarters in Melbourne who decided to close the mine that had employed four members of my family probably never envisioned such a run-up in copper prices. Or had they?

A couple of decades ago, the U.S. produced nearly all of the copper it consumed. Now, nearly half is imported.

GOING THROUGH MORE THAN 30 years of accumulation produces myriad memories. While helping my mother clean out one of her three tool sheds (the one on the northwest side of the yard, closest to the small hill where I learned to ride a bike) I find some old G.I. Joe toys, an E.T. storybook and somewhere between 80 and 3,000 copies of the high school and college newspapers I worked on.

Later, I help her demolish the plywood back porch and haul the rotted timbers to the empty lot across the street, a spot where the landlord promised there would be a roll-off waste container.

I won’t be here to help my parents move their trailers to Rancho San Manuel Park – the trailer park on the other side of town – so I want to make sure they can travel as lightly as possible. Because they are being forced to move, the state will pay up to $5,000 to move my father’s single-wide and $10,000 to move my mother’s double-wide.

The problem, however, is that the companies they contact want to charge the maximum to do as little work as possible. During my visit, my mother learns the mover she has been working with will not move any of her sheds or reinstall her awning, so she and my father begin calling other companies.

Neither of my parents has a lot of money to spend on the move, particularly my mother, whose sole income is a monthly $600 Social Security check. She tells me she has less than $100 left over after paying her lot rent and utility bills. After hearing that, I sleep the rest of my nights in the trailer with the space heater turned off, wondering how this place was ever big enough to house my six brothers and sisters.

I FORGOT HOW COLD the desert is at night. I packed no warm clothes, so my mother takes me to the recently opened dollar store (one of the few businesses in town that appear to be thriving), where I buy a hooded sweatshirt and some ill-fitting sweatpants for less than $7.

While driving around town, we swing by the barren lots that my parents have reserved at the new trailer park; two concrete slabs on light-brown dirt.

My mother has tried to dig up the oleanders we planted in the old yard, but most have grown too large to transplant. I notice the portable storage unit she dropped at the new site already shows signs of attempted burglary. The area’s methamphetamine addicts are the likely culprits.

The closure of the mine has left three basic types of residents: elderly retirees (such as my parents), people who commute elsewhere to work (such as my older brother) and unemployable drug addicts (such as the neighbor’s 20-year-old son I saw sneak into his mother’s car to pilfer through her purse).

I LEAVE SAN MANUEL with mixed emotions. I’m pleased I could help my parents better prepare for their move. I enjoyed visiting with them and two of my brothers who still live there. But there’s a lump in my throat and a queasy feeling in my stomach as I think about the changes my hometown is going through.

People speculate that the area will someday become a thriving bedroom community of Tucson, which every day inches a little further around the Catalina Mountains toward town. Some are banking that retirees will move in to buy the vacant homes.

Perhaps the signs of evolution will be more evident on my next trip , whenever that is.
The only thing I know for sure is that the twin sentinels will still be missing and that bulldozers will have plowed through a little boy’s concrete handprints, some oleanders and a gentle hill that was perfect for bike riding.

It’s dark when I drive out of the San Pedro Valley. I tell myself I won’t look in the rear-view mirror at the dark spot that used to be a gleaming beacon in the desert, but I do anyway.

The queasy feeling subsides by the time I reach Phoenix. The lump in my throat doesn’t.