July 6, 2005
Went home for lunch and finished two paintings of Tombstone burning. Swam ten passes. Kicked Peaches in the head on a kick return, and came back in the office.

Finished the Comanche Jack Stilwell copy, cribbing royally from Roy B. Young's excellent piece in the WOLA Newsletter from Summer 2004. Gus and I attacked more pages on the CGII book. By my count we have 98 pages in the can with 30 to go. Finished the South Pass fight, and half the Spicer Hearing. Working hard on the Morgan Earp murder and George Hearst and lesbians in Tombstone. Also need to finish an opium overdose death in front of the OK Corral.

With the Cave Creek Complex fire winding down, the fire legends are sprouting up and circulating. This morning I heard about a guy who allegedly defied the firelines up near Seven Springs and went in the back way to Rackensack Canyon via Bartlett Lake (quite a hike!) and hosed down his house and everything around it, then stood on the roof and fought the fire face to face as it came up the canyon. Back down at the firefighter's blockade his wife was frantically calling 911 and the fire department, demanding that they go up and arrest him (she was afraid he'd burn up) and the firemen were declining with plenty of headaches of their own. He saved his house, as the fire went around him.

A contractor friend of ours, Jeff Carneal (he built my studio extension) has a home up in the canyon and according to one of the stories I've heard, an aircraft dropped a water slurry on his wife's macrame shed which caved in the roof, but the water then ran out the door and down to the main house, surrounding it like a moat and the fire went around their house, saving it also.

Lew and Tara Jones of Mineshaft fame (it was at the Mineshaft Restaurant that David K. and I broadcast our radio show from 1998-99) weren’t as lucky. Their cozy little cabin, tucked into the creek bottom was lost. They have another cabin in New Mexico and I’ve been trying to reach them all day without success.

This morning I discovered a postcard of David K. and I posing in a radio publicity shot on the headframe of the Mistress Mine, which was also lost.

"Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid. The valiant in spirit glory in fighting alone."
—Mahatma Gandhi