That's not my Tombstone.

The New Yorker magazine posted a story online on June 3rd, 2019, about modern-day vigilantes and re-enactors of the old days of the Wild West. The author visited Tombstone as a tourist, and paid her way into such tourist attractions as Boot Hill Cemetery, the Bird Cage Theatre, and the reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

That's not my Tombstone.

Visitors come to the southwest and they find what they are looking for.

It's an old story. These days, we call it confirmation bias.

In the case of Tombstone it's a place easily associated with a colorful past. For many visitors Tombstone is a place of stories of the old, wild west. Of rustlers and gunmen.

And that is what they expect to find when they visit. That, and some modern-day vigilantes.

Put the two together and call it a continuum.

There is some explanation for that equation, but that is not my Tombstone.

Let me tell you about my Tombstone.

For six months a couple of years ago I was the vicar of Tombstone. That is, I was the priest who served Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Tombstone. Like many a predecessor of mine I arrived from the direction of Benson. Approaching from the northwest the first sight I had of town was of the steeple of its church. For 137 years that has been a prominent feature of the town.

And I'll tell you about it through its people. Four sets of them.

First, the pastor and people of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. When the town was new, things were a little dusty, and leaders of the community called a young seminarian to lead the effort to organize and build a building for the church. Over six months of effort, using plans by Richard Upjohn and with the aid of resident mining experts, the congregation laid a solid stone foundation. The members of the congregation, including their young minister,  made adobe bricks on site, and put them in place. They've been there ever since. And the church, the living church that is composed of its people and its leaders, thrives. Their pastor now is the Reverend Heather Rose.

As vicar I used to pull on my boots and put on my hat and walk down the wooden sidewalks of the old town. "Here comes another one," I heard once. Apparently some visitors thought I was a re-enactor. An understandable mistake - but I was just walking the bounds of my parish. On Sunday morning sure enough you could find me at the liars' table in the O.K. Cafe on Allen Street. There is a picture over the table - I'm the one in the black clericals, my hat is on the table. In that group is someone whose family has been there since before the church was built. My closest relative in town has been there a much shorter time than that.

Second, the founder of the Tombstone Hearse and Trike company, Jack Feather. A few years ago he called my cousins in Eureka, California, and invited them into an extraordinary project. Two crews made almost entirely of veterans, in northern California and southeastern Arizona, built a replica of Abraham Lincoln's hearse. They delivered it for the 150th anniversary reenactment (there's that word) of the funeral procession to the 16th President's final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. It's in the museum there now.

Third, the single parents I met who work in the businesses on Toughnut Street and Allen Street. You wouldn't know it, as they serve you a beer or a sarsaparilla, but they have children to raise that are growing up in the local schools. They drop them off on the way to work and pick them up at the end of the day.

And fourth, there are those guys at the liars' table at the O.K. Cafe on Sunday mornings. Dressed up, some of them, as the period characters they portray on weekends, they get together and, well, tell stories. They are part of the town. Don't be surprised to see the mayor, or the tourism director, thereabouts, discussing what next to do for the community.

These people are all part of the living community. They are my Tombstone, the town I came to know in six months as vicar of Tombstone, one in a long line of ministers that continues. This fall that town, and the church, will celebrate Endicott Peabody Day, celebrating that young seminarian who came to town on a dusty stage 137 years ago, and the people who built the church, and the building they built, and the town so blessed it thrives.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/the-wild-west-meets-the-southern-border

Photograph by Jon Donahue. Used with permission.