Adios Ajo

A tour of Ajo takes about ½ hour, most of that spent en route to the Ajo Country Club, several miles north of the main town hub. Inasmuch as I was suffering from golf withdrawals, I wanted to check out this track as a potential fix. After motoring several miles on cracked pavement that hadn’t been re-done since the 60s, we arrived at this Ajo social center. Several motorhomes were parked, probably gratis, in the parking lot. Absent were any vehicles that might have contained golfers. It was a cold, overcast day with a 10-25 knot breeze, but weather was not the apparent deterrent from a game of gutta percha. It was the course.

Several sprinklers spun about frantically on the 9th green, trying to resuscitate dying blades of semi-green grass that were clinging to life support. The nearby first tee was grass, but it was Arizona brown. No sense turning the sprinklers on this frittered fuzz.
Looking down the fairway, it was a near-desert vista, with 300 yards of hard pan interspersed by occasional clumps of low-cut prairie grass. Gotta have your hard-pan game together to play this course.

The clubhouse, a paint-needy combination of cinderblocks and weathered clapboard, sported windows covered with a reflective layer of desert dust. If there was anybody inside, they must have been hiding. This was the end-of-the-road for golf pros: The Ajo Country Club.

As much as my golf-habit needed a fix, this was not the cure. Time to see the rest of Ajo.

Speeding back to town, we drove to the town square, a classic Mexican-style plaza. Shops surrounding this once bustling but now decaying centerpiece were empty, except for the post office, a pharmacy and the welfare office. Echoes of a once flourishing past were muffled by cracking sidewalks, a shuttered train station and rows of empty parking spaces. The glory years, birthed by a gaping open pit copper mine, were now history. Tourists en route to Mexico, or coveys of winter snowbirds were now the meager lifeblood.

The local museum was a microcosm of past glories. High school yearbooks ceased somewhere mid-60s. The museum lights were out, shadowing glories of the past in semi-darkness. Though founded in 1854, Ajo really only flickered to life for about 50 years during the mine’s operation, which finally closed for good in 1984.

We had our cross-the-border meeting and group spaghetti dinner in preparation for an early start in the morning. The weather is improving—noticeably warmer today with 70 predicted in Puerto Penasco tomorrow. Bring it on! Dos cervezas, por favor.