S.A.S.S. and the city

Dad and I are both members of the Single Action Shooting Society, also known as S.A.S.S. It's a large national club wherein members choose a cool Old-West alias, get all dolled up in some Western duds, grab some reproduction 19th-century firearms and go target shooting every weekend. It's great fun. Some of the aliases people come up with are funny too. You can pick something normal like "Tex" or "Slim" or "Red," but a lot of people make puns and plays on words. I've seen names like "Deathrow Bodine," "Jed I. Knight," "Dirty Sally" (you know, a feminine portmanteau of Dirty Harry and When Harry Met Sally), and a bunch of others. Dad's S.A.S.S. name is "Nevada Jones," a combination of "Indiana Jones" and "Nevada Smith" (Pop really likes Steve McQueen movies). My S.A.S.S. name is "Painless Potter." This one's a bit esoteric. There's this really excellent Bob Hope movie (with Jane Russell as Calamity Jane, va-va-va-VOOM) called The Paleface. Bob plays a hopelessly inept dentist who somehow gets suckered into going west with a wagon train. Along the way, the protagonist bumbles through through a hilarious heap of hijinks. Hope's character, called "Painless Potter," after his dental practice, saves the wagon train from Indians, bandits, and a host of other dangers. And he gets the girl at the end, too. No wonder I admire the guy. (I love Bob Hope, just so you know; one of the funniest men alive, and a true patriot.) Anyway, Dad found out about a S.A.S.S. shoot in Tombstone, just 30 miles from Benson, where we'd be staying in Arizona. So we decided to go check it out. That was why we needed an SUV; those "bulky items" I mentioned before were Dad's gun cart, ammunition boxes, and guns. Pop's got a couple of 1873 Colt Single Action Army .45-caliber revolvers; a nine-shot 1892 Winchester lever-action rifle; and a Winchester model 1897 pump-action shotgun. Hell yes. So we rose at 6:30 or something (again) to get ready and go to this shoot. Dad and I got all duded up, and then we all piled into the Hummer and got on the road for Tombstone. We found the range with little difficulty; Tombstone's not a big town and you can see a long way in Arizona, anyhow. The shoot went well. We gathered 'round, listened to the mandatory safety meeting (which takes place before every match), then split up into posses. See, cowboy action shooting (as this type of shooting event is known) is done in stages. There are 6-8 different shooting ranges set up, each with its own set of props. These include things like rail fences, barrels, boxes, wagons, horse troughs, even the façades of shops and barns and stables. It is, really, like being in the Old West. Anyway, there's usually too large a group for everybody to be using one stage at once, so people get split up into groups of about 15 people, nicknamed "posses" in keeping with the flavor of the affair. Posse 1 went to Stage 1 and started shooting. Posse 2 (my group) went to Stage 4. Picture three high berms, forming the walls of the stage. Put a rail fence between the two side berms. On the far side of this fence are the targets: black and gray cast-iron panels on supports. (The shotgun targets have ropes attached to them so they can be pulled back upright after a shooter finishes blasting them.) On the near side of the fence (left to right) are a livery stable, a wagon, and a water trough. (The livery stable is just the building front, completely open in back to allow access to the targets; and the wagon is nothing more than a frame resting on the ground without wheels. But the illusion is achieved.) Here's Pop shooting... This is the other cool thing about CAS (Cowboy Action Shooting). You don't just pick up your guns and blaze away. Things are a good deal more intricate than that. For this first stage, our instructions were as follows. When the buzzer sounded, the shooter would, from inside the livery stable, draw his or her first pistol and fire off four shots at the first two pistol targets, alternating, landing the fifth shot on the third target. (For safety purposes, only five shots are loaded into the six-shot revolvers.) Then he would draw the second pistol and fire four shots at the last two pistol targets, landing the last shot on the third target, as before. Holstering the pistol, the shooter would dash to the wagon, grab a rifle, and fire off all ten rounds at the five rifle targets, double-tapping each one. He'd then put the rifle down, move to the front of the wagon, grab the shotgun, and blast the six shotgun targets one by one. Imagine the targets are all desperadoes, and you've got the makings of a damn fine shootout right there. Lots of shooters train hard to get fast. There were some competitors there that day who fired off rifle rounds as quickly as though they were firing a semiautomatic rifle. Keep in mind that they were using lever-action rifles, meaning they had to work a lever after every shot to chamber the next round. That's fast. This was one of the shooters who exemplified speed. His Winchester sounded more like a Gatling gun. This was only my second S.A.S.S. shoot, so I didn't hurry. I took my time, made sure of every shot, and did pretty well. I practice the "duelist" style of CAS, where you hold the pistol with one hand instead of two. Just to add a bit of flair to the whole thing I usually put my other arm behind my back, like I would if I was actually fighting a duel. Here's me on the first stage... I only got to do about four stages or so before noon rolled around and it was time to head back into Tombstone with Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb and see the sights. Poor Dad got disqualified in the first stage; he let a round go over the berm. That's a safety issue, and an automatic match disqualification. He wasn't pleased with himself, but he took a lesson from it. That darned 1892 of his keeps locking up; as he was working the lever to try to clear it, finger still on the trigger, the round went off. The rifle was pointing up, so the round went over the berm. Oh well. We both had fun while it lasted. The plus side to this was, though, that Dad and I got to walk down the mean streets of Tombstone, Arizona, in full cowboy array. Tombstone was small, and kind of a letdown. It was just all shops and restaurants. Sure, they had reenactments going on, and you could take stagecoach rides and sit in the saloons with dancing girls and self-proclaimed "half-ass piano players," but that's about all there was to it. We walked up and down, looking for the jewelry store that Mom and Pop had been to when they were here last. We didn't find it. I did get myself a rather groovy Tombstone sweatshirt (okay, okay, I'll call it a "hoodie"; are you satisfied?). Then we left. Next stop? Bisbee. Bisbee used to be a mining town. Founded a year after Tombstone (in the 1880s), it's splattered all over the sides and floor of a narrow, twisting valley. It's practically within shouting distance of Mexico, in fact. It's also become sort of a hippie venue. No sooner did we pull into town than we passed the town square, where were parked three jauntily-painted, faded buses with peace symbols scrawled all over them. A gaggle of scrawny, scruffy-looking youngsters, bearded (in the case of the men) and dread-locked (the women), sat in lawn chairs in a circle outside these buses, wearing grubby clothes, smoking and talking. Wherever they were planning to go, I'll bet it was neat. Whatever they were smoking, I'll bet it was fun. Whatever was going through their heads, I'll bet it was probably hopeless liberal horseshit. Bisbee itself was pretty. We meandered through the meandering streets, searching for a gem shop, but found none. The populace looked like a pretty laid-back bunch; lots of guys had ponytails and lots of women were pseudo-Goth, but there were a few normal-looking people here and there. The town itself looked like it had lots to offer in the way of museums and eats, too. The place was worth a look, and not much else. So we went back to Tombstone. We had a date on Boot Hill. Yep, the infamous graveyard where all of Tombstone's desperadoes, thugs, outlaws and even a few poor townsfolk were buried. This is what it looked like: We wandered up and down the rows, investigating graves, some of them famous... Some of them obscure... All of them with a rather pretty view of the desert. It was amazing. To see these people's names, the names of actual people who lived in this town over a hundred years ago, living and dying and making their way...it stimulated an almost physical sensation of awe. Some people had committed suicide, waiting for their lovers; some had been killed in accidents; many in gun battles or shootouts. There were maybe one or two "natural deaths." The year 1882, in fact ,was the worst. There were more headstones with that year on Boot Hill than any other: two "Chinamen," killed in a gunfight; a little boy who died "with a spasm" after falling off his stilts; a man killed by Indians as he returned to town with a wagon-load of firewood; a woman who killed herself waiting for her husband to return from the mines; an Englishman killed by a ruptured water line in Bisbee; the list went on and on. (They gave you a brochure at the gate with the names, dates, causes of death, and a little personal history about each stiff.) We bought some root beer fudge at the gift store (absolutely fab-u-lous) and departed back to the trailer. Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb came over in the evening with the makings for sloppy joes, and we had a delightful dinner party on the trailer porch, with the red Arizona sunset limning the distant Dragoon Mountains. Every minute spent outside and awake in the American Southwest, it seems, is a good minute.