Its a Neighborhood Bar :: Essays Papers

It's a Neighborhood Bar For a group project assigned in our Advanced Composition class at the University of Arizona, four of us decided to research the Morenci Mine Strike of 1983. When we left Tucson early one morning, we had no idea what to expect. The story was so muddled and had been so misconstrued with the passage of time and the fermentation of emotion, that we started to feel like Scooby Doo and his gang of amateur detectives. We even jokingly started calling my Nissan Altima the "Mystery Machine." I had read about a bar called The Refrigerated Cave in a book by Barbara Kingsolver called Holding the Line, and was interested in learning more about it, so armed with nothing but Morenci-Clifton-Safford phonebook we drove down the main highway in search of it. Our visit to "The Cave" turned out to be one of our most informative stops that day. We saw the sign on the side of the road through the window of the car, but finding the entrance was another story all together. After we pulled into the dirt parking lot, the other three members of my group and I stepped on to a rickety looking wooden bridge and looked over the side. The rushing water below looked to be maybe four inches deep, but the creek bed was completely invisible under the unnatural looking rust colored torrent. On the other side of the bridge, there was a staircase leading to a door, and a path leading around the corner of the building. After deciding that the staircase door looked more like a residence than a bar, we chose to follow the path around the building. Around the corner there the path begins a steep decent to another door with a large square sign over it reading "The Refrigerated Cave." When we walked through the door, I had to blink several times to adjust to the darkness. The bar was all but empty when we entered. It was only about 2:00 in the afternoon, so it was not surprising that there was only one man sitting at the end of bar talking to a female bartender. They were situated in front of a large T.V., maybe sixty inches or more, with horrible reception. The movie Grease was playing and Olivia Newton John and John Travolta were singing about summer days and nights while we surveyed our surroundings.