Restoration is slow, painstaking work, a series of careful steps that Tim Lewis has learned well over the past 14 years, applying them to the task of preserving Mission San Xavier del Bac and to rebuilding his own life. In early morning, before the Franciscan priests begin the day's first Mass, before visitors arrive to marvel at this Baroque masterpiece of Spanish mission churches, Lewis and his wife, Matilde Rubio, scan the plastered, painted walls for marks and gouges.
Later, as the daily parade of tourists in T-shirts, shorts and sunglasses, with flashing cameras and ringing cell phones begins, Rubio and Lewis retreat to the baptistry beneath the west tower. Here, a baptismal font older than the church itself is cemented into the floor below a crumbling dome that is partly painted with fading images of flowers and an angel poised with pen to add the names of the newly baptized.
The insides of the mission's two towers are the last pieces of San Xavier's interior transformation from the "scary and dark" place Lewis knew as a child to a bright collection of sacred art that was crafted when ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ was a frontier outpost of colonial Spain.
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Their most challenging task is dealing with the quick fixes made over the years. Modern restoration isn't patchwork. It seeks to clean and enhance the work of the original artists, to stabilize the surfaces on which they painted, to shore up the walls behind them and to touch up only when absolutely necessary.
It is a philosophy and a set of skills that Lewis learned from the internationally known experts lured to the ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ desert to aid in the project to preserve the art and architecture of San Xavier.
Lewis' education began with an apprenticeship he accepted reluctantly in 1992. His father, John Lewis, former chairman of the San Xavier District of the Tohono O'Odham Nation, prodded him to take the position.
"He just said it was closer to home," Lewis said. He suspects that his father, who began building his family's home within view of the mission more than 50 years ago, just wanted to keep an eye on his son.
"He was always worried that I was going to be just a bum."
The description would have been appropriate, said Lewis, an affable man with an easy smile who described himself in those times as "a happy-go-lucky drunk" with a fondness for crack cocaine.
He can't compare life then to life now.
"Before this, my life was like a blur. I was just kind of lost and always sick half the time."
He had studied welding, his father's trade, then had gone to work at Hughes Aircraft (now Raytheon Missile Systems) as a custodian. There, his bosses gave him an ultimatum to take the cure for his alcoholism or lose his job. He spent 30 days at Cottonwood de ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ and quit drinking for two years.
Then his mother died, giving him an excuse to start drinking again.
Lewis would get sober and take a series of welding and construction jobs but eventually walk away, spending his money on cocaine, beer and whiskey.
His apprenticeship with the mission conservators was a bit fuzzy as well when he started in January 1992, but he managed to keep the job with an occasional "sick" day.
When that three-month job wound down, he began asking the contractors working on the outside of the building to hire him. Offered a job that summer, Lewis took a look at the scaffolding he would have to climb each day and realized he couldn't show up drunk or hung-over.
"I was 30 years old. I woke up one morning and said, 'What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Are you going to keep messing up or straighten up?' "
He made the decision to stop drinking.
"I asked my sister to borrow her car, said, 'I'm going to go to the store and get some eggs.' She said 'no.' She thought I wanted to go buy beer.
"Then a friend came by, he had a car, and I said I want to go get some eggs, and we drove there. I went in and got some eggs and some bread, and I came out and he said, 'Where's the beer?' "
Lewis bought beer for his friend, but none for himself. He went home and cooked breakfast, surprising his sister. Surprising his father.
He had quit before. He would go for weeks or months without a drink, but once he started he wouldn't stop downing Budweiser and Jack Daniel's. He'd drink "maybe a case or two" of beer in a day.
The next day was Sunday. "I came to Mass on Sunday. I started coming every Sunday."
And he went to work at the mission each day.
"I didn't drink for one week and then two weeks and then one month. It was hard because you have all these friends. I had to distance myself. I would always tell them not today, maybe tomorrow."
For reasons he still can't explain, he kept at it.
When the art restorers returned the following year for a second season of the six-year project, Lewis was enjoying his work on the exterior, and told Bernard L. "Bunny" Fontana he wanted to keep doing that.
Fontana, an ethnohistorian who lives near the mission and has made a lifelong study of its art, helped form the Patronato San Xavier to raise money for the mission's restoration. He persuaded Lewis to continue.
"It was pointless to do that work unless we had somebody here locally to take care of it," Fontana said. "Every year there were four apprentices. Tim's the only one who lasted."
Lewis' second season with the art restorers was more rewarding. He was clear-headed and trusted with more intricate work. He was offered a chance to go to Europe the following year to further hone his techniques.
In July 1994, he took a plane to Salzburg, Austria, where he went to work for a Turkish conservator in a German-speaking country where the crew, who all lived in a big house outside the city, spoke primarily Italian. He met Matilde Rubio, who spoke Spanish. Lewis spoke English and O'odham.
Somehow, though, Lewis and Rubio managed to communicate almost immediately. On his first night in Salzburg, at the big house in the alpine forest outside the city, he and Rubio took a walk together in those hills that are famously alive with the sound of music.
At the job site, Lewis kept asking Rubio for help. She kept helping.
An artist and professional restorationist who had studied sculpture and art restoration at the Royal Academy of St. Isabel of Hungary in Seville, Spain, Rubio was happy to guide Lewis' work. She found him exotic — "I thought all your Indians were extinct" — and she found him handsome.
Lewis returned home that December after spending more time with Rubio in Spain and Rome, where he completed his studies. Before he left, he and Rubio made plans for her to come to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.
Lewis' father died the following February.
This time, Lewis didn't take the loss as an excuse to drink. His father had always told him that nothing was impossible, and now Lewis' life was filled with possibility.
On the day he and his brothers and sisters settled his father's estate, Lewis told them the startling news.
"Oh, by the way, I think I'm going to get married."
Lewis, now 44, and Rubio, now 45, married on May 23, 1995, at the family home near San Xavier.
The Patronato didn't lose its apprentice; it gained an art restorer.
"It worked out beautifully," said Fontana.
Now the Patronato flies Lewis and Rubio home for a couple of months each year to maintain the mission and finish the bell towers.
The rest of the year, the couple travels through Europe on jobs, using Rubio's family home in El Escorial, an ancient Spanish town north of Madrid, as home base.
At San Xavier, Rubio and Lewis work in close quarters atop scaffolding that brings them within arm's length of the baptistry dome beneath the west bell tower.
When the old concrete patches are removed, a rain of fine dust covers all. They tap the original surfaces to find voids beneath them, make a small hole and use syringes to inject the walls with denatured alcohol, followed by a waxy substance that fixes the old plaster in place.
They use a mixture of sophisticated chemistry and age-old formulas. The cement plaster is replaced with a lime-and-sand wash to which the juice of the nopal (prickly pear) is added, the same recipe the Morales family uses for the exterior.
The rewards are sometimes years in the future — when the surface is stabilized and the art work on it can be cleaned and touched up to reveal the original intention of those 18th-century artisans.
They seek to restore, not to change.
Likewise, Lewis says he hasn't changed. "My outlook on things is different, but I'm still the same person."
â— The ongoing restoration and preservation of Mission San Xavier del Bac is always in need of funds for repairs and for the endowment it is building for perpetual upkeep. Donations can be sent to Patronato San Xavier, P.O. Box 522, ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, AZ 85702.
● For more information, see their Web site at online.
● The mission's official Web site is at: