Bisbee's bohemian scene came alive the next day on Main Street. Over a glass of pulpy peach lemonade at Café Cornucopia, Bisbee's best lunch hangout, I watched residents stroll by in their easy, desert-sun style: ruffled skirts, turquoise chokers, rectangular copper glasses. Across from the café, I found a small Africanized-killer-bee honey shop called Made in Bisbee. Reed Booth invited me to taste his sweets (the Killer Bee Radical Raspberry Honey Mustard had just taken a silver medal in Napa Valley's national mustard competition). In the mid-nineties, he became Bisbee's official "beehive guy" when millions of killer bees migrated up from Mexico. He now answers emergency calls in his beemobile and makes silky honey butters, mustards, and mead (honey wine) in his clifftop laboratory.
I asked Booth why he became a killer-bee guy. "There aren't many jobs in Bisbee," he explained. "To live here, you've got to find your own cool niche." One of Booth's best friends, known as Electric Dave, found his in a defunct shopping center on the edge of town. There he single-handedly runs his own microbrewery; Dave's Electric Beer lager and OK Ale are so popular that he can't keep up with orders, which come from as far as Phoenix.
Later that day, I got back on the road and drove west through the Huachuca Mountains to the border town of Nogales. I'd made an appointment at Holler & Saunders, a private gallery housed in a palatial 30-room hacienda. It's the only way to see Ed Holler and Sam Saunders's extensive collection of art and antiquities; though the owners prefer to be discreet about prices and celebrity patrons, they did allow that the 40-million-year-old fossils in the lobby of the Phoenician, in Scottsdale, came from their collection.
It was early evening by the time I reached Rancho de la Osa, a 16-room guest ranch in Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, 60 miles west of Nogales. In 1996, art collectors Richard and Veronica Schultz bought the dilapidated 18th-century hacienda and adobe outbuildings and transformed them with vibrant tones of pomegranate and persimmon, adding international furniture: Mexican Mission benches, African mud-cloth cushions. Today, the Rancho is just as fashionable as when John Wayne and Margaret Mitchell vacationed there a half-century ago.
At the dinner bell, guests gathered in the dining room for arugula salad with sweet chipotle vinaigrette and warm garlic custard with salsa fresca. The owner and chef, Veronica, draws from local farmers to create Southwestern fusion menus that change daily. After dinner, many of us retreated to a stone-walled terrace, where we sipped a 1997 Edna Valley Chardonnay from Richard's cellar. I listened to other guests make early-morning horseback-riding plans.
My morning ride, however, was 70 miles in the car back to Tucson. As I drove north on Route 286, cows grazed inches from the road, reminding me of my father's own herds. His West was still here, alive and well.
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