Day 131: The Pass

Otero/Doña Ana County line to Organ. 20.6 miles/2501.5 total

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

9:30 a.m. I’m setting forth from the side of the road near mile 179 on US 70, just a little east of the Otero/Doña Ana (pronounced Doñana) County line, heading to a spot about three miles west of the village of Organ, a distance of 20.6 miles.

Today’s walk will take me up and over the San Andres Mountains through the San Augustin Pass and into the flat lands below.

No clouds, and it’s about 60 degrees. I have a very clear view of the mountains to my right and directly in front of me. The wind is blowing in stiffly from the west, though, pushing against me as I walk.

Like yesterday, I won’t have any places to stop for refreshment, so I’m carrying everything I'll need. The gas stations don’t start for another three miles or so past the vacant lot where the motor home is parked.

Not long into the walk I come to a historic marker telling about the disappearance of Albert J. Fountain and his son Henry. Albert Jennings Fountain was a Civil War veteran, New Mexico legislator, and prominent lawyer. On February 1, 1896 he and his eight-year-old son Henry were traveling home to Masilla (south of Las Cruces) from Lincoln. They carried grand jury indictments against cattle rustlers. Father and son disappeared at Chalk Hill and their bodies were never found. In 1899 Oliver Lee and James Gilliland were tried for their murder. Both were acquitted. And that’s all the marker says. I suppose Chalk Hill is near here.

There is a bit more to the Fountain story than what was provided on the marker. It seems that old Albert J. had cheated death on more than one occasion before his luck ran out. Born in Staten Island in the 1830s, he moved to Sacramento, California and became a newspaper reporter, from whence he went to report on the exploits of William Walker, an American southerner who had gone down to Central America with a private army and set himself up as president of Nicaragua in 1857. Fountain's newspaper dispatches angered Walker, who had him put in prison and sentenced to be shot, but he escaped and returned to California. Immediately after serving in the Union Army in the Civil War he joined the New Mexico volunteers as an Indian fighter. While fighting Apaches he was wounded and trapped under his dead horse overnight with a bullet in his thigh, an arrow in his arm, and another arrow in his shoulder. Later he served in the post-war Texas legislature as a Radical Republican, where he encountered the enmity of a number of Texas Democrats and fought several duels, killing at least one man. In the 1870s he moved back to Masilla, New Mexico, his wife's home, where he became a district attorney and started a newspaper and eventually went into private law practice. In 1881 he represented Billy the Kid on a murder charge, but lost the case. His client escaped from jail, which seems like the usual response to a death sentence in those days, killing both his guards. Not long afterwards Billy the Kid was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett (father, as you may recall, of Elizabeth, the author of the New Mexico state song and the first teacher at the school for the blind in Alamogordo).

Fountain then ran for the New Mexico territorial legislature against Albert Bacon Fall, another Las Cruces area lawyer and land owner, defeating him once and losing to him once. At the time he and his son disappeared Fountain was obtaining an indictment against Oliver Lee, a noted rancher and gunman (and friend of Albert Fall's), for cattle rustling. Although Fountain's body and that of his son were never found, authorities did find two pools of blood and some other blood-soaked personal effects. Lee and his employee Gilliland and another thug named Billy McNew were acquitted of the murders in 1899, after being brought in by none other than Pat Garrett. Their lawyer was Lee's friend Albert Fall. Albert Fall would go on to become one of the first pair of U.S. Senators from New Mexico, but not before successfully defending Lee's brother-in-law, J.J. Cox, for his alleged involvement in the 1908 shooting of Pat Garrett. Fall was appointed Secretary of the Interior under Warren G. Harding. A few years later, after being convicted of taking a bribe to provide no-bid oil leases to several companies on land owned by the Navy in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, Fall became the first cabinet member ever to be sent to prison.

I leave Otero County and enter Doña Ana County. Las Cruces is its county seat and the second largest city in New Mexico. It lies beyond the mountains that loom before me.

Before I leave the Alamogordo and White Sands region, I should mention that I’ve been listening to a series on local public radio about the Alamogordo Primate Facility. I mentioned that they used chimps in the early years of the space program, and that they housed them at Holloman Air Force Base. I don’t think they use them for that purpose anymore, since humans have been going into space for fifty years. But evidently they keep a bunch of chimps around, and the military is caring for them, but also interested in dealing them off to the NIH and drug companies for biomedical research. I might have the facts a little wrong there, but you get the idea. Some people are up in arms about the treatment of the chimps, some of which have been kept in little cages for years. They’d like to “rehabilitate” them and put them in parks and preserves. It’s a minor cause célèbre in the Alamogordo area.

I might as well weigh in on the subject. I think our practice of using animals other than humans for experimentation is a natural outgrowth of our essentially predatory nature. We raise and kill animals to eat them and wear their skins in the form of leather and furs or to feed them to other animals, so it stands to reason that we might wish to use them for experiments that we’re not so sure would be safe if performed on us--sacrificing animals in yet another way for the good of humans. If one eats animals, how can one object to experimenting on them, provided the experiments aren’t completely frivolous? But people do object, and they do draw arbitrary lines. Kill and eat, okay. Inject with experimental vaccines, not okay. I don’t see a clear distinction there. If one objects to both the eating and the experimentation, that's consistent.

What’s lurking in the background of the chimp controversy is one of my hobby horses, the notion that we shouldn’t mess with certain animals because they’re almost like us because they share almost all of our DNA, or are cute and cuddly, or are relatively intelligent. That strikes me as a very self-centered position for our species to take. Why do we care so much about animals that are almost like us, or ones that wag their tails when we come in the door, or rub up against our legs and purr? Because we are stuck on ourselves as a species, and wish to protect the animals that seem most like us or gratify us in some way. It’s all about us, not the other animals. Modified vegetarians even partake of this attitude when they suggest that the best or healthiest animals to eat are birds or fish, rather than mammals. But when we encounter an animal that is very dissimilar to us, like a spider, we’ll stand on a chair until someone steps on it.

Oddly, some people who object to using animals for experimentation think the use of human volunteers is more "humane" (giving an intriguing meaning to the word). But such volunteers usually are prisoners or other down-and-outers who may have opted for being the subject of an experiment as the lesser of several evils, rather than out of a sense of adventure or altruism. Any way you look at it, some species is being exploited. Better them than us, I say.

I see a live jackrabbit, running like crazy through the sagebrush and mesquite. After all this talk about animals, the sight of this one makes me hungry.

After 4.5 miles I come to a collection of buildings set back from the road about half a mile. This is the White Sands Small Missile Testing Facility. I don’t know whether the facility is small, or the missiles are, or both. In the distance I hear jets, or maybe missiles, breaking the sound barrier.

I’ve seen half a dozen large hairy brown spiders dead on the roadside. I don’t keep statistics on insects or arachnids, but the spiders are out here, along with the fat dying grasshoppers.

After the small missile facility I begin in earnest my five mile long ascent through the mountain pass. The wind has picked up and is pummeling me at 25 or 30 miles an hour. It’s becoming chilly.

At 9 miles I reach the main exit for the headquarters of the White Sands Missile Range and its museum and gift shop. After that as I proceed up a very steep hill I get far enough into the mountains that the wind is blocked a bit. This ascent is much steeper than the one to Cloudcroft was.

All throughout New Mexico so far I’ve been seeing gourds growing wild along the roadside on vines twenty or more feet long. They’re round, about the size of tennis balls or baseballs. They turn yellow when they dry out, but I pick up a green one and cut it open to taste the flesh to see if it is edible. After all, this is the same family of vegetables as pumpkins and squashes. The taste is so bitter that I spit it out immediately, and the bitterness stays in my mouth for a half hour or more. Hope I don’t die, for Christ’s sake.

At 13.8 miles I pass the entrance to the Aguirre Spring camp ground. I’m almost to the summit. Soon after, I come to a large Nike Hercules missile at a truck pulloff area. A sign in front of the missile tells the story of the Nike Hercules. They once stood guard around major cities during the Cold War. They were capable of knocking down attacking missiles or carrying nuclear warheads to attack formations of incoming missiles. Testing for the Nike Hercules began in 1955 at White Sands and concluded in 1967, after which it was replaced by the Nike Zeus. And now this Nike missile stands guard over the rest area and its green porta-potties.

Finally I get to the top, and an arduous climb it has been. I’m now at the San Augustin Pass. This pass is the divide between the Tularosa Basin to the east and the Jornada del Muerto to the west. The Jornado del Muerto is the name for the desert basin in which Las Cruces lies. It's Spanish for something like "single day's journey of a dead man." Hmmm. San Augustin Pass is a cut between the Organ Mountains and the San Andres and San Augustin Mountains. Elevation 5,710 feet.

The other side of the mountains presents a wide vista for twenty or thirty miles ahead to the next mountain range, with the desert floor and a few smaller hills in the foreground. I have about two miles of downhill before US 70 levels off for its course into Las Cruces.

At 16.6 miles I enter Organ, which is designated only by a small sign on the highway. It appears that at some time this was a going concern. There are several empty stores and restaurants and a place purporting to be open called Thai Delight. But there is only one vehicle parked in front, and I find it hard to believe this place operates as a restaurant. Probably a front for other activities. There just isn’t enough business around here to sustain a restaurant, especially a crummy-looking one like this in the middle of nowhere.

Organ was once a mining town. Near here from before the Civil War mines produced gold, lead, iron, silver, and other minerals. In 1885 the population was over 1500. Eventually the mines were inundated with water and by the 1930s they closed. The Wikipedia article claims there are 100 households in the vicinity today, many of them homes of employees of the White Sands Missile Range. It has a post office, but is unincorporated.

Highway 70 has become an expressway so I get off the main road and start walking along the access roads on either side. I’m entering some of the far eastern suburban areas of Las Cruces, still ten miles or so away. Although most of the houses hereabouts are prefab or trailers, it’s clear that the area is being prepped for middle class development. The infrastructure is already here, with the highway exits and access roads nicely laid out, and large tracts of land have been leveled and cleared. All that remains is the construction of businesses and houses.

Day 130: White Sands

White Sands National Monument to Otero/Dona Ana County line. 21 miles/2480.9 total

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

8:55 a.m. I am walking out of the parking lot of the White Sands National Monument visitor’s center to the somewhat suspicious stares of a couple of park employees. I get on US 70, heading southwest through nothing to a point in the middle of the long space between Alamogordo and Las Cruces. I will finish in 21 miles on the Otero-Doña Ana County line.

I can't promise anything of interest on this walk (not that I ever do). This is one of those stretches that must be walked so I can get to more fascinating places. Other than a small military installation about two-thirds of the way through, there’s nothing in the way of civilization or amenities, unless you count the port-a-potties provided by the State of New Mexico at a few places where trucks can pull off the road.

There are clouds in the sky today, for a change. They started coming in yesterday afternoon. Alamogordo, behind me, is pretty much covered with clouds. I’m back wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and the temperature is about 50 at the moment, getting up into the high 60s, with a strong breeze from the west into my face.

This stretch of road is designated the Bataan Memorial Highway. I hope the walk today doesn’t end up resembling the Bataan Death March. As a matter of fact, every year in March they hold a marathon and a 15-mile run along here, or somewhere in the White Sands Missile Range, through which I’m walking, to commemorate the Bataan Death March. That was in 1942 after the Battle of the Phillipines, when the Japanese marched 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war about 60 miles over a week’s time, killing as many as 11,000 of them along the way. In the New Mexico version of the Bataan Death March, competitors can run “light,” with normal running gear, or “heavy,” carrying 35-pound backpacks and, if they’re military personnel, wearing their army combat uniforms. Survivors of the real Death March are there to greet the winners.

I should say a word or two about the White Sands National Monument, too. I visited it in April on my way out to California and wrote about it in the blog. This area was first set aside as a national monument in the 1930s. The white sands that form the ever-changing dunes here are made of selenite, a crystallized form of gypsum. Unlike regular quartz-based sand, gypsum is water soluble. In prehistoric times this area was a lake, in which the gypsum was dissolved and sank to the bottom. When the lake dried up selenite crystals were left, some as large as three feet long. Gradually these crystals have eroded and sand-sized pieces have blown over here from the southwest, forming these unusually white dunes. Also unlike regular sand, this gypsum sand does not absorb the sun's heat very well, so even in the hottest part of the year the sand can be walked on in bare feet. The National Monument has hiking trails and places where people can ride sleds down the dunes. Because of the whiteness of the sand and the otherworldly look of the place, some movies have been shot here, especially ones where people are supposed to be on another planet or in the middle of the old desolate tough-guy west.

Apparently the White Sands National Monument people and the military have a sort of uneasy relationship. Frequent flyovers by jets and the occasional errant missile have had a tendency to interfere with the touristy aspects of the place. Not to mention the fact that US 70 is closed a couple of times a week, for an hour or two, because of whatever they're doing on the missile range.

For the first mile I walk past a line of dunes on the northwest side of the road, on which grow large deciduous bushes, probably mesquites, that have turned flaming yellow and orange. Those colors, contrasted with the white sand, are a beautiful sight in the morning sun.

I pass a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol station, where all vehicles coming east have to stop. I stopped in the car on the way here this morning, and I’ll have to stop in the motor home on the way back to pick up the car. Sure hope they don’t find that family I have living in the back. After I walk past, a friendly young man from the Border Patrol drives by in a Jeep and asks me if I’m okay. Slow day, I guess.

So little is there to distinguish one mile from the next on this walk that I have to use the mile markers on US 70 as progress points, rather than crossroads or other roadside sights like I usually do.

For anyone interested in the found money situation here in New Mexico, let me report that as of this morning I have picked up $1.76 in change, but no nickels yet. I have two quarters, nine dimes, and thirty-six pennies.

At about 8 miles into the walk, there’s still absolutely nothing to report, except two dead coyotes. The mountains are getting a little closer.

It’s about 1:00 p.m. and I have gone 11 miles. I’ve found a few more pennies and a dime. Though you can't see it from a moving vehicle, the roadside is heavily littered with beer bottles. Not cans, mind you, but bottles, mostly brown.

The wind is blowing hard from the southwest, pushing me back. It’s gusting to between 25 and 30 miles an hour.

At 13.5 miles I come to a small military installation called HELSTF, which stands for High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility. There’s a gate out front, and perhaps a dozen buildings spread back a mile or so from the road.

At about 18 miles things are the same as they were, except that I have only another hour to walk.

With less than two miles to go the San Andres Mountains are no longer off in the distance. I’m walking right beside them. The land sweeps smoothly up, like a carpet, to the foot of the mountains, which rise to heights of several thousand feet. I can’t really capture in words the majesty of these mountains, for the most part unblemished by evidence of human presence, looking like they did ten thousand or more years ago when the first people lived here. As a flatlander from the east, I am continually impressed by such sights. I can see how people could think that gods dwelled in the mountains, or indeed that the mountains were the gods. They’re so undeniably huge and powerful and frightening, yet quiet and passive at the same time. They change throughout the day from blue silhouettes to horizontally striped and striated rock faces to greenish brown lumps of shadow to grave black outlines on the starry horizon, always standing guard over everything.

Day 129: Alamogordo

Alamogordo to White Sands National Monument. 21.1 miles/2459.9

Monday, November 8, 2010

8:50 a.m. I’m starting at the north end of Alamogordo, heading through the city, then down US 70 to the visitor’s center at the White Sands National Monument, a distance of 21.1 miles.

It’s about 60 degrees and clear, expected to get up to about 70 or 75. A beautiful day as usual. In front of me as I head west on US 82 are the San Andres Mountains, and behind me are the Sacramento Mountains.

Very soon into the walk I turn left onto Florida Ave., entering the Alamogordo city limits. A mile or so down Florida I pass the Deutsche Schule Alamogordo, looking fairly new and prosperous. In 2008 the German government built this school for the children of German air force pilots who train at Holloman Air Force Base, southwest of the city. (As if to reinforce this, I see a couple of people speaking German at the gas station after the walk.) I wonder if they still call it the Luftwaffe?

I should mention that Alamogordo was founded and laid out by the El Paso and Northeartern Railroad brothers, Charles and John Eddy, and that John chose the name Alamogordo, which means “fat cottonwood tree,” after a grove of, well, fat cottonwoods he remembered from down by the Pecos River. When the Eddy brothers laid the city out, they numbered the east-west streets and named the longer north-south streets after states. White Sands Boulevard, which is the main drag and where I’ll be soon, was originally called Pennsylvania Avenue.

Alamogordo’s motto is “The Friendliest Place on Earth.” That’s a bit grandiose, don’t you think? I have found most of the people here to be about as friendly as they are elsewhere, to be sure. But the friendliest on earth? Even allowing for normal civic hyperbole, that's a big statement, bound to invite dispute.

The north end of the city seems to be a prosperous middle class neighborhood. The military is big in Alamogordo, and nearby Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range employ over 6,000 people, many of whom live in this city of about 35,000. There are also many military retirees living around here.

Alamogordo is perhaps most famous for being the city closest to the Trinity site, where they detonated the first atomic bomb in the summer of 1945. Even though it was several dozen miles from here it must have lit up the sky a bit. Closer than I'd want to be to an atomic explosion.

Down at the White Sands Missile Range is where they did quite a bit of research in connection with the space program in its early years. Training chimps, decelerating people from 600 mph to a full stop in one and a quarter seconds, that kind of thing. There’s a museum here in town dedicated to the history of the space program. I won’t visit it, however. Frankly, the whole space thing never excited me much, in reality or in fiction. Except of course for I Dream of Jeannie, which was a great show.

At 4.2 miles, after cutting across on Indian Wells Boulevard, I turn south onto US 70, White Sands Boulevard. Right away I pass a large campus of buildings of the New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. According to a sign in front (in large type), it was founded in 1903. The first teacher was the blind daughter of lawman Pat Garrett, Elizabeth Garrett, who also wrote the state song, “O Fair New Mexico.” And for you deep trivia buffs, here's the last verse of that song, copied from my 2007 edition of the New Mexico Blue Book:

Days that are full of heart-dreams,
Nights when the moon hangs low,
Beaming its benediction
O'er Nuevo Mejico.
Land with its bright manana
Coming through weal and woe,
State of our esperanza
Is Nuevo Mejico.

I pass the Trinity Full Gospel Church, Pastor Harold T. Marshall. I wonder if this church is named after the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or the a-bomb site? Maybe both. Which reminds me that I read about a church here in Alamogordo that held some book burnings in 2001. Not this church, but one called Christ Community Church. They burned Harry Potter books as well as books by J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, Star Wars books, and the works of William Shakespeare. Also a Ouija board. The pastor called the Harry Potter books “a masterpiece of Satanic deception.” To retaliate, the Alamogordo Public Library held a fundraiser and used the proceeds to purchase books by J. K. Rowling, Tolkien, and Shakespeare.

Strictly as a statement of literary criticism, I can see the burning of those books, except for the Shakespeare, of course. I think burning books, particularly if they're insipid ones, may have its place. After all, books aren’t sacred, especially Bibles and Korans. If the burnings had been held a few years later they could have warmed themselves with some of that damned Twilight series, and thrown some Dan Brown on the fire while they were at it.

I pass the Alamogordo Visitor Center and Chamber of Commerce, whose free RV dumping station I availed myself of yesterday. In this complex there’s also the Tularosa Basin Historical Museum, which I visited last April on my way through here. I decide to go back in for a few minutes and end up having a nice conversation with the docent, a woman named Shirley. We talked about our grandchildren mostly.

I stop to exchange pleasantries with a woman who is holding one of those street corner signs, this one for a furniture company. But she seems quite paranoid and doesn’t want to talk. I'm tempted to mention to her that Alamogordo is supposed to be the friendliest place on earth, but she doesn't appear to be in the mood.

I come to the Commission for the Blind Orientation Center, in a 1949 vintage adobe building, quite handsome. I pass My Mother’s Place Restaurant, the Rocket Restaurant, the White Sands Motel. As I reach the southern edge of town the buildings thin out. I pass the Highway 70 Adult Store, a couple of abandoned car dealerships, some used car lots, a paint and bump shop.

Then I’m back in the desert again. A flat expanse lies before me for the next 60 miles or so, with the San Andres Mountains in the distance but getting closer. Out here in the middle of nowhere there’s a new-looking place called Plateau Espresso. They’re selling the usual fancy expensive coffee and tea drinks. I opt for a blended iced chai, which is basically a milkshake with just an afterthought of spiced chai tea and a big glob of whipped cream on top. But it hits the spot when you're walking through the desert. Chai wallah, come here, boy!

At 14 miles I pass the entrance to the main gate of Holloman Air Force Base. Lots of new-looking base housing along a fence by the road. After about a half mile of this the base becomes fenced-off bare desert, jets flying high and low over me.

Some high clouds are coming in from over the mountains to the west. At 19 miles I pass a sign saying that I’m entering White Sands Missile Range, "Birthplace of America’s Missile and Space Activity. Visit our Museum and Gift Shop and Missile Park."

I begin to see the white sand dunes of the national park, and at 20 miles I see the sign for White Sands National Monument. Not long afterwards the motor home, parked in front of the visitor’s center, comes into view.

Day 128: Downhill

Wimsatt to the outskirts of Alamogordo. 22.2 miles/2438.8 total

Saturday, November 6, 2010

9:05 a.m. I’m departing from Sixteen Springs Canyon Road and US 82 in Wimsatt, going uphill for about eight miles into Cloudcroft, then steeply descending for fourteen miles to Alamogordo, a total distance of 22.2 miles.

It’s another clear sunny day. What else is new? It’s chilly up here, probably in the high 40s, but by the time I get to the sunny west side of the mountains it’ll be hitting 65 or 70.

Almost immediately an old couple stop to ask me if I’m “broke down” and need help. I tell them my story in brief—that I’m walking across the country and staying in a motor home at night. They laugh, I guess from the sheer insanity of the idea. The guy doesn’t have any teeth, and he looks jolly and benign and just a little daft. I’m reminded of one summer during college when I did some work for a guy, helping him build a breakwater on his lakefront property. He was probably only in his 50s, but his wife insisted that he needed someone to do the heavy work because he had a heart condition. So he’d hang out with me at the dock, bumming cigarettes from me on the sly and shooting the shit. This guy had false teeth that he seldom wore, and I got used to seeing just his gums. He was a nice guy to begin with, but the absence of teeth made him seem even more beneficent and genial. Then one day I came over while he was eating his supper, and he had his teeth in. He looked up and grinned at me and I was shocked. Those teeth made him look like a different person, sinister and tough. His smile was now menacing rather than kindly and avuncular. I think at that moment I was experiencing something innate in our species--the evaluation of another based on whether they are predator or prey or something in between, and the key to it is in the teeth.

I pass the Mountain of the Lord Church, set back about a quarter of a mile from the road. It has the now-familiar “Prayer, America’s Only Hope” sign out front. They must get those signs from some fundamentalist clearing house. Deliver us from our wickedness, oh Lord. In this case I'm sure that what they’d classify as America’s runaway wickedness would be things like voting Democratic and not executing enough blacks and Mexicans.

The sign on a building says James Canyon Volunteer Fire Department. Notwithstanding this, and the fact that James Canyon appears on other things near here, including the church and cemetery I visited yesterday, my map says this is Wimsatt. And it looks as if there are plenty of Wimsatts to go around. I read last night that old G. Gordon had a few kids and a bunch of grandkids. Up the road there’s a Wimsatt & Sons Construction and Storage Company. So the Wimsatts still make their presence known here.

Buildings and businesses dot the way as I near Cloudcroft. The Wimsatts have a U Haul rental operation. They, like everyone else, squeeze a living out of tourism, transience, and recreation up here in the mountains. I wonder if G. Gordon Wimsatt passed on his knack for reading bear grease to any of his descendants.

I start seeing quite a few spruce trees in addition to the pines, and some Douglas firs and balsam firs as well. The hills are thickly forested with evergreens here, with few bare spots on the peaks.

At 5 miles I reach the sign that says I’m entering the village limits of Cloudcroft, elevation 8,650 feet. But that’s just a teaser, because the real village isn’t for another two or three miles, and I’m still heading uphill. Wikipedia says the population of Cloudcroft was 729 in 2000, but I’ll bet it swells in the summer, because there are many lodges and campgrounds and vacation homes. A place that's twenty degrees cooler must draw people from down in the baking desert.

Cloudcroft was founded by the Eddy brothers, Charles and John (they must have named Eddy County after one or both of them). They organized the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad. They decided to run a rail line up into the Sacramento Mountains to harvest lumber, and when they got up here they saw that it would be a great place to bring tourists. Cloudcroft Lodge and a pavilion were built in 1899 and the rail line was completed to the top in 1900. In the 1930s the lodge was managed by Conrad Hilton, and it brought in some big names, like Clark Gable and Judy Garland. With the increasing popularity of cars, passenger rail service stopped in 1938.

I pass the Village of Cloudcroft Photovoltaic System Project, run by the EPA, Department of Energy, and the State of New Mexico. I see a few solar panels, but it looks as if they’re still setting them up.

Then comes Ski Cloudcroft, which is waiting for some snow at this point. A little way up the road they’re doing some logging on the hillside, and the sweet smell of sawdust fills the air. I see my first New Mexico raccoon roadkill. I’ve seen a few smears that probably were raccoons, but I couldn’t tell for sure. This one’s intact.

After Big Daddy’s Diner, the Elk Vista Motel, and the Crosseyed Moose Cafe, at 7.9 miles I enter the village center. Cloudcroft has new-looking elementary, middle, and high schools, one right after the other along 82.

Past the high school I head up to the central business district, which consists of a few blocks of boutiques, antique and souvenir stores, and bars and restaurants, all aimed at the tourist trade. The store front facades are flat and square in the typical old west style. I remember that when I was here in April in the car on the way out to California they had snow on the roofs of the buildings and roadsides here from an overnight storm.

After a little turn around the town and a visit to Allsup’s gas station convenience store for a cappuccino, I begin my trip down out of the Sacramento Mountains. Immediately I feel like I’m being pushed from behind, and each step jars my knees and my heels. As I begin tripping this light fantastic the first thing I can see on the far western horizon are the vast white sands looking like snow in front of the San Andres Mountains, perhaps forty miles distant. That’s a nice preview of what I’ll be seeing during the next two or three days of walking.

In the immediate foreground are the remnants of a train trestle. A historic marker tells the story of the railway built by Charles B. Eddy, which continued to operate as a freight railway until 1947. All that remains is this one trestle.

Less than two miles down the hill a guy on a bicycle passes me going the other way. Lord have mercy, that’s a serious bike ride, the kind you’d do if you were in training for the Tour de France. A little more than 4,300 feet over sixteen miles.

Off to my left the valley is filled with deciduous trees, flaming yellow and gold aspens and elms. I pass under the Harkey Pedestrian Bridge of the New Mexico Rails to Trails system. And here comes the same cyclist going down the mountain, coasting and riding the brake all the way. Easier than going up.

I come to a little place called Old Wooten. This was probably a water stop for the railroad. There’s an old water tank painted red. I go by an orchard where the trees are just loaded with ripe apples, and hardly a single one on the ground.

At about 15.5 miles I reach Mountain Park, elevation 6,750 feet. So that means I’ve descended 1,900 feet so far. Not quite halfway. The only factoid I can offer about Mountain Park is that it’s the birthplace of the cartoonist Bill Mauldin.

I stop in at the Wolf Creek Antler Works, a place that sells furniture made from elk and deer antlers. I sit on the front porch and talk to the proprietor, a guy named Joe. He’s originally from Artesia. I ask him if he’s heard of Gordon Wimsatt and he says oh yes, that guy was famous around here. And the Wimsatt family is all over up in the mountains. Joe says his business is slow in this spot and he’s thinking of going back up to Cloudcroft next year. Reluctantly I get back on my feet, which are a little more sore than usual from all this downhill walking.

The next little community is High Rolls. It lists its elevation as 6,750 feet also. But it’s downhill from Mountain Park, so somebody is mistaken.

West of High Rolls, at 17.1 miles, I come to a tunnel. Lupe at the Hope Quick Stop told me this is the only tunnel in New Mexico. It’s a short one, about a quarter of a mile. At the other end of the tunnel I’m once again treated to a view of the vast area of white sands on the desert floor.

Tucked against the steep cliffs I see a roadside cross and a little shrine to a young woman named Kristen. Her photograph is down at the bottom of the cross. She must have bought it right here, maybe driving a car, maybe as a passenger. Or perhaps she was walking, just like me, and one of these big loose rocks that are strewn along the shoulder fell down off the mountain and hit her in the head. (I’m starting to think like Anguish now.)

There’s about a mile and a half to go, and the vegetation is once more typical of the desert—yuccas, cactuses, mesquites—and the hillsides are bare of the tall evergreen trees.

I pass another dead raccoon, an empty beer bottle lying next to him as if he’d passed out from drinking too much. Maybe all these animal deaths aren’t due to car accidents after all.

Day 127: Wimsatt

Elk to Wimsatt. 20 miles/2416.6 total

Friday, November 5, 2010

9:25 a.m. I’m setting out from a spot just past Elk, at Mule Canyon Road, heading west on US 82 through the village of Mayhill to a place on the map called Wimsatt. Today’s walk will be 20 miles.

It’s a beautiful day, and I say that with the knowledge that a majority of the days in New Mexico are cloudless. But today the sky seems somehow clearer and bluer. Probably the mountain air. It’s in the high 40s, and expected to get into the high 50s.

Of course I’m walking uphill, but fairly gradually still. As I look around today it strikes me that the countryside is becoming alpine rather than the arid and semi-arid surroundings of the past two days of walking. In the broad meadow to the south of 82, between the road and the mountain ridge the road follows, deciduous trees are plentiful—aspens, alders, some elms, and even a few birches and willows. Up on the hillsides it’s strictly evergreens, mostly junipers, pinyon pines, and now increasingly the taller ponderosa pines, also known as western yellow pines. The higher in elevation I go, the taller the pine trees get.

The stream I remarked on last time runs just a few feet downhill from the road. The water rushes in spots, and occasionally I see small waterfalls. In the meadows on the other side of the stream cattle graze—white face, angus, Hereford, and several other beef breeds. Herds range from a dozen to over a hundred. Lots of cows up here.

Shortly after I start I leave Chaves County and enter Otero County, and then the Lincoln National Forest. There’s a tanker truck on the side of the road that says Mescalero Gas, A Mescalero Apache Enterprise. The Mescalero Apache Reservation is just north of the national forest. They’ve got a casino and a racetrack and a few other things, evidently. Robert Kie, my host the other night, used to be a tribal policeman on the reservation.

Otero County's county seat is Alamogordo, but it also contains this national forest and the reservation and part of White Sands National Monument, to the west, which I’ll be walking through in a few days.

I’ve had two ride offers already, one from a guy in a PVT truck. PVT stands for Penasco Valley Telecommunications, a small private telephone company operating around here. The driver saw me and said, “I shouldn’t even have stopped; I graduated from Ohio State.” And I realized that I’m wearing my Michigan hat today. Usually I wear a camouflage-colored hat. But today I left it in the motor home and used this one because it was in the car. I guess I’ll wear it tomorrow, too, to show my support for the Wolverines as they play the Fighting Illini at noon.

And speaking of bad news coming out of Michigan, I see that Rick Snyder, the Tough Nerd, has won the gubernatorial election, and that the Republicans now control both houses of the state legislature. They’ll probably impose austerity measures on the state, as if things aren’t austere enough already. We’re in for a rollicking time now, not that it’s going to make much difference. They could turn Michigan into the Delaware of the Midwest and eliminate all taxes on corporations and it wouldn’t induce manufacturers to bring in businesses. Rick Snyder of all people knows that, having outsourced all the jobs in his company to the far east. The Tough Nerd. To call both him and Satan nerds is an insult to Satan.

The most disconcerting thing is that the GOP will take credit for the upturn in the economy that’s already begun, even before they get into office. And the people, like a tribe in the jungles of Borneo that prays to the god Ooga Booga because they’re afraid the sun won’t come up, then gives Ooga Booga all the credit when the sun does come up, will think these new assholes actually had a hand in the recovery. The recovery from the shit storm that resulted from eight years of Bush and Cheney and Halliburton and Blackwater and Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and the purveyors of the fast buck and the free market and the third-tier derivative security. As if you could undo all that in less than two years.

Every now and then I see a sign, made to look like a political campaign sign, that says “Prayer. America’s Only Hope. 2 Chronicles 7:14.” That’s one of those verses from the Old Testament where God says he’ll forgive his people if they turn away from wickedness and seek him. It reminds me that the citizenry around here, particularly the whites, are some seriously reactionary folks. Not just hard-bitten right wingers, but hard-bitten religiously self-righteous right wingers, the worst kind.

Six miles into the walk it’s getting shadier and the trees are getting taller. Some large apple trees grow along the river. Around every bend is another magnificent vista. To my left are the stream and the meadow, several hundred yards wide, and the slope of the Sacramento Mountains. To my right the sheer rock faces where they’ve blasted the hills to make the road.

I see my first fresh deer kill. I’ve seen a few live ones today. On a sign Smokey says the fire danger is low today. The original Smokey the Bear, you may recall, was from New Mexico, rescued from a forest fire as a cub. In his honor, the New Mexico state mammal is the American black bear.

I just finished a pleasant conversation with a mail carrier named Sarahy, who has been noticing me for several days and decided to find out if I was walking for some cause. As my readers know, I’m a rebel without a cause. She delivers the mail out of Artesia, and drives from there to Mayhill and back every day. That’s 70 miles one way. I told her I’d been a mail carrier briefly, and that she had one very large mail route, but a scenic one. She said it can get a little treacherous in the winter when it snows. Like almost everyone who stops, she was friendly and curious. People notice things around here, probably because they have only this one main road to concentrate on, and not a lot happens.

At 9.6 miles I enter Mayhill, a small village with a few churches, whose business district consists of a dozen or so buildings, among them a hair salon, a gas station, a couple of stores, and a hotel with a restaurant. The sign as I enter says “Congested Area.” Well, that’s a relative thing. In the center of town there's a historic marker that refers to a battle between U.S. forces and the Apaches that took place here.

I stop at the Mayhill Convenience Store and the proprietor is friendly. He shows me his left hand, which has the last two fingers missing. He says he was bitten by a rattlesnake and got a fang in each finger and the bites got gangrene so the fingers had to be amputated. As I look around the store I begin to see some virulently mean-spirited right-wing political signs. One says, “Pelosi the Puke,” and the worst by far says, “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012.” I beat a hasty retreat, thinking that the rattlesnake didn’t do its job well enough.

The elevation of Mayhill is 6,578 feet, so I have another two thousand feet to ascend between here and Cloudcroft. Just west of town is the junction with New Mexico Route 130, which goes off to Pinon.

A few miles down the road in front of an abandoned restaurant I have a conversation with a young guy named T.J., who builds houses around here and restores old cars in his spare time. He looks uncannily like the actor Liev Schreiber, but with no front teeth. He lives in an old motor home with flat tires that’s set up right next to his shop. When I tell him about how I do the walk he says he noticed my motor home earlier today. It’s a good thing for me that people are respectful of the property of others.

I get waved over by an Otero County Deputy Sheriff, a guy of about forty. He wonders if I’m okay because some people saw me fifteen or so miles back and contacted him. Then he does his little cop routine where he tries to get as much personal information from me as possible, knowing he doesn’t have any legal basis to make me tell him anything. But I don’t mind giving him my driver’s license, and it’s better to cooperate with these guys as long as they're not trying to hassle you too much; after all he drives up and down the road all day, and I’ll probably see him again tomorrow. When he sees I have a Michigan license, he mentions that he used to visit his grandmother in Pontiac when he was a kid, that she worked at a big department store. “Hudson’s?” I ask. “Yeah, that’s it.” Turns out she worked at the Hudson's at the Pontiac Mall specializing in prosthetic bras for women who’d had mastectomies. So we have our small world moment, and he loosens up and figurs I'm probably harmless.

I see a sign for a Christadelphian camp. The Christadelphians, whose name means “brethren in Christ,” are a small sect that was started in the nineteenth century by an Englishman named John Thomas. They are “biblical unitarians,” which means they believe in God the Father, but not in the trinity. Jesus wasn't God the Son, just the son of God. They've also were conscientious objectors during the major wars in this country and in Britain and Europe. They’re scarce as hen’s teeth now, but they do have this camp up in the New Mexico mountains.

At about 18 miles I come to a place called Cloud Country. There’s a big gate out front and some mailboxes. I guess this is a housing development, although I can’t see any of the dwellings from here. I imagine it would be compelling to come up here in the summer, especially, when it’s 110 degrees down in Alamogordo.

With less than a mile to go I come my first New Mexico cemetery, next to the James Canyon Church, now called the Cowboy Church. Before going into the cemetery I peek in the window of the little one-room church. There’s a lectern in front and behind that a galvanized baptismal tank. Dunkers, not sprinklers. But I notice something on the floor. Little black dots of something. At first it looks like bird droppings, but then I see that it’s thousands of dead flies. All over everything in the church. Evidently the place hasn’t been used lately. T.J. told me that the flies were very bad this year because of a wet spring and summer. Looks like the Lord of the Flies has taken over the House of God.

I go into the cemetery for a few minutes to commune with the dead of James Canyon. It’s overgrown in places with tall grass and weeds, but a few areas have been tended. A mixture of Anglo names and Mexican names. Robert Garcia has a tractor trailer etched on his tombstone. I take a seat next to Pfc. Joe L. Mancillas, who was killed in 1943 in World War Two. There’s nothing like a little respite in a cemetery. So quiet. Across the street the sun is low over the tall trees, but it warms me.

On down the road, around a bend, the motor home comes into view. The map says this little area is the community of Wimsatt. It looks as if Wimsatt was named for G. Gordon Wimsatt, born in 1915, who came here with his parents in 1927. He learned to predict the weather from a guy who was half Apache by studying the changes in bear grease placed inside a scraped-out deer bladder. (You can’t make this stuff up, I swear.) Well, old G. Gordon got so good at it that he did better than meteorologists and other sages and often confounded people who scoffed at his predictions. Many times he'd predict major weather conditions that no one else did, so people finally came to rely on him. He had hundreds of containers of bear grease, and he experimented with other types of grease as well, including human grease taken from around a kidney that he got from a hospital. In 1985 he predicted a major earthquake around Mexico City. He got on Ripley's Believe It Or Not. He died in 1995 at the age of 80.

It’s going to be cold tonight. Already, since the sun went below the trees, the temperature has dropped five or ten degrees. It’s supposed to get down to the low 20s. But I’m going down to Alamogordo, in the desert.

Day 126: Uphill

Chaves County to Elk. 20.8 miles/2396.6 total

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

10:22 a.m. I’m getting a late start this morning because I spent a little too long over coffee with Diana Kie and her kids and then at the computer before finally setting out from mile 65 on US 82 in Chaves County heading west to Elk, a distance of 20.8 miles.

It’s another clear day with a strong breeze blowing at my back from the east. It’s in the high 50s and will probably get into the high 60s.

I spent a quiet night outside the home of my hosts Robert and Diana. Diana told me this morning that she puts up a hiker or cyclist about every two weeks. She's sort of an angel of good cheer on the road, offering meals and shelter to people whenever she sees them, mostly when she’s driving back and forth to her kids’ school, which is at least 15 miles from their house. It’s interesting that for as many hikers and bikers as there evidently are along here I haven’t seen any. I see cyclists maybe once a week, but the only time I’ve encountered another walker was in western Louisiana when I saw two within a couple of days of each other.

I’m trying to maintain a brisk pace, because I won’t get back to the motor home until nearly sunset. Today I will make it to those gentle brown hills that lie in front of me about ten miles distant.

The flora continue pretty much as before, with plenty of mesquite, chollas, prickly pears, a few yuccas, and here and there an agave, a light green succulent with wide thick thorny leaves. They make tequila from one type, but I don’t think it’s the one I’m seeing. Also, as the walk progresses, I begin to see a few short juniper and pinyon pine trees for the first time. There appears to be as great a variety of plants here as there is in any wooded area in the northeast; they’re just shorter, due to the lack of water.

The wind has stiffened and is blowing now from the northeast at about twenty miles an hour. At the intersection of US 82 and New Mexico Route 24 I reach a point of demarcation between the rolling fields of the past two days and the mountain foothills, and the road becomes steeper. Route 24 goes down to a place called Dunken, about which I could find no information.

Within a few miles of this intersection I’m straddling two sub-environments. On my left, south of the road and down about a hundred feet, flows a rapidly-moving shallow stream about twenty feet wide. This is the first body of water I’ve seen so far in New Mexico, I think. Along the stream grows a variety of tall deciduous trees—elms and aspens mostly, and the grass is closer to green than to the usual yellow-grey. On my right, across the road, rise sheer cliffs at the top and bottom of which grow prickly pears and other desert plants. A fascinating contrast.

Ahead of me the hills are rounded like pointed domes, dotted by rotund evergreen trees. I come upon several places where the grass and plants by the roadside have been burning very recently. The first area, blackened and still smoldering, is about an acre in size, but the next two are larger. The fourth, thirty or more acres, still has little fires burning here and there where bunches of dry sticks are gathered together. A half dozen firefighters are busy pumping and spreading water. Several miles back a state policeman stopped beside me to ask if I was okay and if I’d seen anything suspicious, telling me that these fires had been started deliberately. This all must have happened between the time I drove down the mountain in my car to the beginning of my walk, just a few hours ago. I did see several fire trucks, but that was about it. Anyway, the worst of it is over now. Conditions are extremely dry right now, and I can see how easily a fire can spread in these hills, especially with the wind as strong as it is.

At 9.6 miles I stop at a large roadside stand, the only commercial establishment on today’s walk. The sign says it’s run by Tom and Pam Runyan. In addition to selling fruit and jellies and honey and other such things, they have a petting zoo and a fishing pond behind the place, which I don’t visit. Petting zoos are just sneaky ways to get other people to pay to feed your livestock. Also, the Runyans advertise a “clean restroom.” But I don’t need that either. The world is my clean restroom.

On Diana’s advice I ask Tom Runyan, the old boy who runs the place, if there’s a safe spot near here where I can park the motor home overnight. He tells me I can park on Route 24, just off US 82, in a wide area in front of some land he owns. I thank him and buy a Diet Coke and promise to come back tomorrow and buy something else from him.

The elevation at Runyan’s, by the way, is about 5,400 feet, which means that I’ve climbed about 1,300 feet since I left Hope and 2,100 feet since Artesia. I'll get up to about 5,800 feet by the end of today. Still almost 3,000 feet more up to Cloudcroft. It must get a lot steeper. Tom also told me that these are the Sacramento Mountains I’m entering.

The road winds around, opening up new vistas with each sharp turn, until I get to about 15 miles, then it levels off somewhat. I’ve hit a bit of a plateau, although the elevation continues to rise gradually. This plateau continues until I’m almost through with the walk.

With about a mile and a half to go, the sun hangs low over the hilltops to my right. Twilight comes earlier in the mountains. According to the maps, I’ve just gone through the community of Elk, although I saw no sign for it. There have been farm and ranch houses along the way, but nothing I’d call a village. Nor have I seen any elk, for that matter. Just one good-sized doe running along the river. Right after the sign for the turnoff to Mule Canyon the motor home comes into view.

Day 125: Los Muertos

Hope to somewhere in Chaves County. 21.1 miles/2375.8 total

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

9:40 a.m. I walk out from the Hope Quick Stop, heading west on US 82 again for 21.1lonely miles, to a spot in front of a ranch somewhere in Chaves County.

Another cloudless day, with the temperature around 55, going up to the high 60s. At the moment the wind is blowing toward me from the west.

Today’s walk will be along the most sparsely inhabited stretch of road I’ve been on so far, with the possible exception of Borden County, Texas. There will be no towns or villages, and precious few intersections. Just hilly grasslands. And fairly light traffic. People do live and work around here—the cattle that graze along the fences must live somewhere—and I occasionally see houses set far back from the road, but there are times when I feel completely alone.

Lupe, at the Quick Stop, gave me a friendly send-off this morning when I went in to tell her I was leaving my car there for the day, telling me to be careful. And careful I will be.

Today is election day, and before I start getting pessimistic and critical I’ll share a little joke with you. A guy from the U.S. was talking to a Chinese guy, and he was challenging him a little on the state of democracy in the People’s Republic. He asked him, “So, how often do you have elections in China?” At first the Chinese guy looked puzzled, then suddenly he smiled. “Oh, elections! I wake up with an election evely morning!”

Appropriate story, because we’re all about to get screwed. Going into today they’re predicting that the GOP will take over the House of Representatives, but the Democrats should hold on to the Senate. The voters are “angry,” we’re told. Well, the Republicans have been angry ever since they lost in 2008, and they’ve got their well-oiled propaganda machine working overtime to convince the American public, stupid as ever, that the unemployment problem is somehow the fault of the current administration. I know people have short memories, but does everybody in this country have Alzheimer’s disease, for God’s sake? Isn’t this the same unemployment problem that got the Republicans thrown out of office two years ago? Old George Orwell would be scared shitless if he could see how completely his sinister vision has come to pass. The GOP and its corporate masters would have no trouble getting elected using the slogans “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” Especially the last one.

So next January we’ll probably have a House that will endeavor to dismantle the very few decent things the Obama administration has succeeded in doing in its tepid first two years. Well, as I always say, we get the government we deserve in this country. Reminds me of the lines in that song by Nine Inch Nails:

Bow down before the one you serve,
You’re going to get what you deserve.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the Day of the Dead—el dia de los muertos. Unlike election day, it’s not a movable feast. Every November 1 and November 2, coinciding with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day in the Christian calendar, Mexicans and some Mexican-Americans remember their dead friends and relatives by building altars to them and leaving food and drink and other gifts for their souls at their graves. I heard several references to el dia de los muertos on the Spanish-speaking radio stations, but I couldn’t really tell what they were saying beyond that. This practice originated with the Aztecs, and maybe before that. Since all religions seek in some way to facilitate communication with the dead, either literally or by imagining that they know something about the afterlife, it’s no surprise that this ancient American tradition got seamlessly incorporated into Christianity.

I’ve been reading a little of the history of New Mexico from a 2007 copy of the New Mexico Blue Book I picked up in a store in Artesia last Saturday. I’m only up to about 1700, but a lot has happened already. I get the impression that the Spanish treated the native peoples—the Indians—a bit better than the English did in their part of the continent. At least at the official level they seemed committed to behaving decently. In 1504 Queen Isabella issued a decree that the Indians were not to be mistreated, and that they should be converted to Christianity. This echoed an edict from 1593 of Pope Alexander VI (who was a Spaniard of the Borgia family), in which he said the aboriginal peoples were to be Christianized and not harmed. Of course the Christianization part was a pretty stiff prerequisite, and I’m sure the Spanish didn’t hesitate to put the shits to any Indians who might have had the temerity to question the need to convert. More than anything (and I could be mistaken here) it seems as if the Spanish were not driven, in their dealings with the Indians, by a sense of racial superiority, as the English most certainly were. In fact, the great conquistador Hernando Cortez married the daughter of the Aztec king Montezuma, thus setting the standard for the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood that to this day characterizes the average Mexican mestizo. To be sure there is an insidious parallel tradition in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America to keep the ruling classes as white as possible. Still, the policy of marrying the Indians, as the Spanish did in Mexico, rather than simply annihilating them or putting them in concentration camps, as we did in the U.S., seems the more humane course. More on New Mexico history in future installments.

A couple of miles into the walk I come upon a small herd of cattle, and try a little Warren Zevon on them, but they’re having none of it. The problem is that I started with Hank Williams, and they turned tail and trotted away from the fence. I should have led with Warren.

The chief difference between the terrain of yesterday’s walk up from Artesia and this one is that it is more hilly than not today. On the road there’s plenty of up and down, with the uphill climbs being longer. Out in the fields there are lots of chollas and prickly pear cactuses, and not quite as many yuccas as yesterday. Many of the chollas are full of yellow fruits, and the ones that aren’t probably have green fruits that match the color of the branches. And of course the prickly pears have their red and purple bulb-like fruits.

I come across a dead porcupine. I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as such, it was so far gone, but for a few tufts of quills. I think this is the first porcupine I've seen on the trip.

Not long after, I see two black garbage bags full of rotting meat, maggots still busy on it, and next to them the skinned skull of a deer, its antlers cut off. Then a few miles down the road I come across a deer pelt recently removed from the animal, the inside still wet and pliable, and next to it one of the rather large front legs of a deer. From its size I think it might be a mule deer. It takes me a few minutes to put it all together, but I can see that someone killed the deer, skinned it rather skillfully, then took what meat they wanted and threw the rest out, including the head. But first they skinned the head and kept the ears and antlers, no doubt for purposes of creating a trophy mount. The only thing I can’t figure out is why they felt the need to put the meat they didn’t want into bags. Why not just leave it by the roadside to be eaten? At any rate I think I’ll count this as road kill. What the hell, it was killed, and it’s on the roadside.

At 6.6 miles I leave Eddy County and enter Chaves County, whose county seat is Roswell. Chaves Country was named for Jose Francisco Chaves. He was a prominent New Mexican who was born into privilege in 1833 in what was then the Mexican province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico. He went to school in St. Louis and studied medicine in New York, then raised livestock in what had become the New Mexico Territory, and served eight terms as president of the Territorial Council. In the Civil War he enlisted as a major in the Union Army, and after the war served in the U.S. House of Representatives. After that he went back to New Mexico and occupied several posts in territorial government until being assassinated under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1904, at the age of 71.

All day I’ve been swatting at little red-eyed flies with striped bodies. They land on me and stay with me. The only good thing about it is that they’re fairly easy to kill with my bare hands, not having developed especially quick reflexes. They’re probably not used to being on humans and land mostly on cows. My success in killing flies makes me think of a kid I went to elementary school with named Roger Martin, who filled the ink bottle in his desk with flies he caught with his bare hands. While the rest of us were trying to learn Spanish from Senora Lopez or sitting with our heads down on our desks listening to Mrs. Baumgartner read from Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Roger was doing something productive. I wonder that happened to him. Maybe Ted or Jim knows.

I think this is the most serene area I’ve been in. So quiet and devoid of signs of human habitation, except of course for the barbed wire topped fences and the road itself. Maybe before the Spanish came this was a foot path used by the Apaches in their nomadic travels between here and what is now Texas.

At 9.4 miles, I rest at the entrance to Cuahape Ranch Road, to get off my feet for the first time today. I usually don’t sit for more than three or four minutes at a time. At about 14 miles the terrain becomes much more hilly and rolling. The road rises and falls. The wind has picked up speed and is now out of the north again.

While I’m sitting on a rock a woman pulls over to offer me a ride, and we get to talking and she invites me to come for dinner and park the motor home by her house tonight. I accept, and a little while later she drives by again with two kids in the back seat and asks me when I think I’ll be over. She lives near mile marker 77, which is about eight miles west of Hope. That sounds like a perfect place to spend the night.

Finally, at 21.1 miles, right in front of the entrance to the Muerto Springs Ranch, I reach the motor home.

After picking up the car I go to the house, which happens to be on Cuahape Ranch Road, right where I sat and rested earlier. I'm welcomed by Diana Kie and her husband Robert, who, I learn, are both Apaches. They have two charming children, Robert, 10, and Kathrine, who is 12. While the kids did their math homework I ate a great meal and had an interesting chat. Robert used to be a tribal policeman on the Mescalero Apache Reservation a few miles west of here, and Diana moved to the reservation from California. Robert now teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia. They lived in Artesia for awhile, but didn't like the pollution from the refinery, so they moved out here to the country.

I wish to thank them for their very kind hospitality and for their company this evening.

Day 124: Village of the Zombies

Artesia to Hope. 20.1 miles/2354.7 total

Monday, November 1, 2010

9:45 a.m. I depart from the Walmart parking lot in Artesia, heading 20.1 miles west on US 82 to the village of Hope.

This morning I parked the motor home at the Hope Quick Stop on the far side of town, after asking the proprietor for permission. I sometimes take this precaution with the motor home since it’s so intrusive a presence, and it gives me a chance to chat with someone. On the few occasions when I’ve gotten into trouble for parking it’s been because of the car. Several times I’ve returned to the car and found notes on the windshield saying not to park in that spot, and once in Missouri someone wrote on one of the side windows in soap, “This is not a parking lot.” Then there was the infamous incident in Jackson, Mississippi, when the owner of a business called the cops to have my car towed, but the cop called my nephew because the car was registered to someone with the same name as his, and he intervened on my behalf. But never once has anyone said anything about the motor home. I think I know why. Ordinarily, wherever the motor home is parked is where the car will be the next day. People have already tolerated the presence of an out-of-state vehicle for one day, but by the second day they’re ready to take action (although in Jackson I had not parked the motor home where I parked the car). Well, today the car is safe at Walmart, and later I’ll get permission to park the car tomorrow at the Quick mart.

It’s probably ten degrees cooler today than yesterday. It’s in the 50s now and I doubt if it will get over 70. The sky is covered with high cirrus clouds again, but it looks like they’ll blow over soon.

Today I begin the ascent that will take me from 3,380 feet here in Artesia to 8,668 feet in Cloudcroft. The trip up the mountainside will take four days. The climb will be quite gradual today and tomorrow and steeper on the other two days. Then the descent from Cloudcroft to Alamogordo will be rapid, going back down to 4,526 feet in about fifteen miles. Roadside signs warn trucks of 6% grades on the other side of the mountain. I’m not sure how the cell phone or internet reception will be after tonight, and some of my dispatches may be delayed until I get into the city.

I pass the large white Artesia water tower, boasting of the many high school sports championships the Artesia Bulldogs have won. Most of them were in football, but there are a few for basketball and track and one for golf, even. It doesn’t say whether these are regional or state championships. I can’t help wondering if they use any alien ringers on their teams.

Within five miles I’m out in the country. Across the yellow grasslands everywhere the plant that is beginning to predominate is yucca. It consists of an array of spiky sharp thin green and white leaves, about 18 inches long and a half inch wide, terminating in needle-like points. The overall impression is reminiscent of Ron Wood’s hair. These bunches of leaves sometimes sit atop a thick trunk covered with old brown dried-up leaves. Up out of the leaves grow straight branch-like shoots, three or four feet long and a half inch to an inch in diameter, which produce bunches of white flowers in the spring and summer, and which are now dried up and contain only a few seed pods. An interesting and complicated-looking plant. In addition to the yuccas the fields are dotted with mesquite bushes and the occasional cholla cactus.

A mile or more to the north someone is shooting automatic weapons. I hear rapid burping bursts of machine gun fire. Maybe there’s a shooting range or a military installation on the other side of the low hill. Or maybe it’s just some Second Amendment lover shooting for the sheer joy of it. After another mile the sound of the gun fades away and is replaced by that of a chain saw and then silence.

I pass a beautiful large new house about a quarter of a mile back. On either side of the gate at the road are concrete heads modeled after the Easter Island statues, and along the driveway on both sides they’ve put huge rough-cut stone steles four or five feet high. It makes for an interesting view down the drive.

People here in New Mexico have been quite generous with their offers of rides. Each day I get at least three. Just now a guy offers to drive me into Hope, and after I decline and thank him I happen to look down at the pavement and see a bunch of discarded pennies, sixteen of them in all. That brings my take in change up to almost a dollar so far.

At 12.5 miles I’m still surrounded by vast flat or rolling grasslands in all directions. It’s only when I look behind me that I’m aware of how far uphill I’ve gone. When I look back into the haze I can vaguely see the valley where Artesia lies. It’s amazing to think of how many millions of acres—indeed, millions of square miles—of this country look just about like this: yellow-brown grass dotted with shrubs and other small plants. Practically half the country rolls out just about the way it does here, from the middle of the Dakotas down to Texas, and across to the Pacific, excepting only the coastal northwest. That’s a lot of wide open spaces.

In the absence of dead mammals I turn my attention to a more plentiful form of animal life, the grasshoppers. The black ones with the orange and black wings are just about gone now, with many lying dead or dying. Occasionally I see larger grasshoppers, fat and tan and scaly with blunt tails and no wings, eating the black ones. But even most of these big guys seem to by dying off, their fat butter-colored bellies exposed to the sun. I’m aware that some of the different sized grasshoppers may be stages of the same species, but I know the black ones and the big fat yellow ones are different.

At about 14 miles I cross a dry river bed called Eagle Draw. I was at the Eagle Draw City Park in Artesia yesterday, at the free municipal RV dump site, so I think Eagle Draw must run down from here into the city. I believe this is what they call an arroyo here in the west.

I come upon a deer skeleton, or more accurately a scattered, bleached, chewed-up collection of bones that I identify as a deer skeleton based on a piece of mandible that happens to remain. The skull is gone, probably carried off. Since I’ve had so little road kill so far I’m going to count this. Deer number one.

At 17.6 miles I enter the Village of Hope, elevation 4,085 feet. That means I’ve gone up about 700 feet on today’s walk. The wind is now blowing stiffly out of the north as I head toward the center of town, still a mile and a half away. Hope has arrogated to itself quite a bit of municipal land, most of it vacant. As of 2000, the population was 107. Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about Hope other than the fact that it became somewhat known because a novel called World War Z, written by Max Brooks, was set there. It was where a group of humans successfully fought the zombie horde. So I guess it’s safe for me to approach now.

There’s a story about how Hope got its name. Two settlers tossed a dime into the air and one said, “I hope you lose.”

At 19 miles the speed limit goes down to 40 and I see the first real trees I’ve seen on today’s walk, some pines and a collection of elms, and also several I think are mountain ash trees, with compound leaves growing alternately about 15 to a stem.

I pass a little convenience store called Hope Store and next to it a defunct antique store with several rusty farm implements out front. Across the street from that there’s a little park with about a dozen benches and four picnic tables. Down one side street is the Methodist Church and down another is the Church of Christ. Take your pick.

After a short rest on one of the picnic tables I resume walking, on a brand new wide sidewalk. In fact, this is a hell of a nice sidewalk for such a dinky place. It even has wide handicapped ramps at all the intersections. As much of a fan of urban infrastructure as I am, I’m having trouble seeing how this is going to get enough use to justify its cost. The same thing goes for that little park. You could fit the whole village into it with room to spare. I don’t see anyone else outside. Maybe the zombies got them all.

I pass the fire station and the post office and in a few blocks I reach the Hope Quick Stop and the motor home. But first I spend a few minutes talking to the proprietor, a pleasant woman named Lupe who’s from Artesia originally, but has been up here since she got married 27 years ago. I told her Hope had some pretty fancy sidewalks for such a small town, and she responded enthusiastically, saying "lots of people" walk on them and the kids ride their bikes on them, too. Wonder where they all are now? Lupe also said that last year when they were putting them in they let her write her name on the sidewalk next to the store. She’s quite proud of that.

I got her permission to park the car here tomorrow, then told her my story. Like many people she wanted to know if I was walking for some cause. I always get a tiny bit apologetic when I tell them "No, I'm just doing it," even though I don't care at all for the idea of embarking on random quests in support of disease cures. If it's a good cause, just give the money--who cares if someone hops around the world on a pogo stick, for Christ's sake? On the other hand, imagine how much money I might have raised so far if I just had a cause. But no, I rebelled against the idea of using the walk for that purpose. I guess that makes me just a . . . .

Day 123: The Roswell Rodeo

Somewhere in Eddy County to Artesia. 19.7 miles/2334.6 total

Sunday, October 31, 2010

9:15 a.m. I’m in the middle of Eddy County on US 82 heading west to Walmart on the far side of Artesia, a distance of 19.7 miles.

It’s party cloudy for a change, but the clouds are high cirrus clouds; nothing threatening rain. There’s a gentle breeze blowing in from the southwest and the temperature is about 65. I’m back in just a t-shirt. Yesterday it got up to 90, but I don’t think it’ll go that high today. And the temperature in the motor home never went below 65 overnight. Sometimes I wake up and it’s in the low 40s.

I took the day off yesterday and have already spent two nights at the Artesia Walmart, which is located on 26th street at the west end of town. Artesia is a reasonably prosperous community, built mostly with oil money. Oil, cattle, and farming are its principal sources if income.

I went to a laundromat in Artesia, a fairly painless experience as those things go. It was pretty clean, and very busy on a Saturday. The washers and dryers were all coinless, and you had to purchase a plastic card, which you credited with money through an ATM-like device, then inserted in the washers and dryers. You had to pay four dollars just for the plastic card, then put the money on it for the machines. I suppose if you’re a local and only have to perform this task once it’s not so bad. But for a tight-fisted itinerant like me it was painful.

So at the end of my time there, with fifty cents credit left on my four-dollar plastic card, I decided to bestow it on a deserving person, since I’ll probably never be back here to do laundry again. Once I made that decision the beneficiary was pretty easy to find. As I was folding my clothes I looked around for the most attractive young woman in the place who looked as if she could use a little help. I found a pretty Mexican woman in her early 20s with a handful of kids in tow. Beauty should receive its little rewards here and there, especially since that beauty will soon be lost to a life of domestic drudgery.

As I walk along I spy a patch of baseball-sized gourds growing wild, maybe from something someone threw out the window. It’s somehow appropriate that I should see these on Halloween, a day we celebrate with another member of the gourd family. And speaking of members of the gourd family, I noticed while driving from Seminole to Hobbs that they grow watermelons in the twenty-foot swath of cultivated earth between the cotton fields and the road. The guy in Loco Hills told me they grow them all through the cotton fields, between the rows. They have to water it all anyway, he added. And I suppose the watermelons are all finished before they go through to pick the cotton. The ones I saw were leftovers, small and round. Texas ranks third in the country in watermelon production, behind California and Arizona.

A couple of miles into the walk I pass the entrance to Turkey Track Ranch, which sports ten black iron signs boasting of rodeo championships they’ve won. In the 1990s and 2000s they won events in the Roswell Ranch Rodeo, and also the Eastern New Mexico State Fair and the Eddy County Sheriff’s Posse Fair.

I don’t know if the Roswell Ranch Rodeo has just the traditional rodeo events, like calf roping and bull riding, or if there are extra events such as alien probing and flying saucer shooting. I can just hear the announcers:

“Now the object of this event, Billie Bob, is to lasso the alien as he’s flying up to the mother ship. You gotta get him around the neck, pull him down and hogtie him, then stick the probe in him, all in under ten seconds. And you gotta watch for the green stuff he shoots out of his eyes, which can blind you. Jimmy Clyde Baxter, out of Turkey Track Ranch in Artesia, holds the state record at 4.8 seconds.”

“Yes sirree, Donnie, these aliens can be tricky as well as feisty. Sometimes they fly horizontally, just to confuse you. You gotta have split-second timing at the moment you throw that rope, and know which way they’re gonna go. These little guys might only weigh about eighty pounds, but they can be slippery and ornery. So let’s watch Jimmy Clyde now as he attempts to rope the alien.”

I had occasion last night to meet some local folks and one of them, Ray, works for a gasoline distributor. I asked him if he knew about the cheap gas down in Carlsbad, and he did. He said Murphy, which is affiliated with Walmart, opened a new station down there and started selling cheap gas to drive out the competition. According to Ray retailers currently pay $2.49 a gallon for gas. That means the station where it was $2.29 is losing twenty cents a gallon. I don’t imagine that can last for long. But maybe they more than make it up in sales of beer and cigarettes.

I haven’t said anything about my beloved New York Yankees, mostly because I’m trying to forget. But I must acknowledge that the Texas Rangers handed them their asses. They jumped on the Yankee starters pretty consistently, and New York’s middle relief wasn’t too strong. You can’t win with Mariano Rivera if he’s not in a save situation. So, better luck next year to the boys. Knowing them they'll throw some money at the problem and fix it. Now Texas is trying to make a series of it, down 2-1, playing in Arlington later this afternoon.

As for Michigan football, that’s just too depressing to talk about.

I fear I’m disappointing you lovers of road kill. I just haven’t seen much of it. Three coyotes, a rabbit, a vulture, and a skunk in five days. There just isn’t that much out here. Or they’re all to fast. Maybe when I start walking up the mountain I’ll see some deer. I heard they’re hunting them up there right now.

Then again, I am only forty miles from Roswell. Maybe the aliens are eating all the animals around here, like those wonderfully carnivorous prawns in District 9. And speaking of meat, I saw a billboard in Artesia for that restaurant in Amarillo, Texas, where you can get a 72 ounce steak for free if you eat it and the rest of the meal in under an hour. I keep promising myself I’ll go there, and I’m pretty sure I can tuck away the steak dinner in the prescribed time. I’ve watched them on the Food Channel, and the strategy is simple: eat the steak first, and do it within the first twenty minutes, before your brain tells your stomach no mas. Then you can pick at the potato and the rabbit food for the next forty minutes.

I’m reminded of the opening lines of one of the early chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Now there was a carnivore after my own heart.

Finally after 9 miles I’m looking down into a valley at the City of Artesia spread out before me, and beyond it in the far blue distance the mountains where I’ll be later this week.

At 10.4 miles I come to a small junkyard spread out over several acres, containing mostly old trucks and cars, tanks, oil equipment, hills of broken concrete, old dumpsters. There’s a used tank sitting on the ground bearing the name “Enchantment Propane.” I really love stuff like this. In another life I’d like to be either a scrap dealer or a garbologist, examining landfills like an archeologist.

Just out of curiosity I thought I’d check where I was on Halloween last year. I was walking through Marion, Illinois, named for the Swamp Fox, and home to the federal prison that once housed John Gotti, Nicodemo Scarfo, Manuel Noriega, and, of all people, Pete Rose.

On the flatlands in the outskirts of Artesia there are several cotton farms, some picked and the others just about to be. At 16.5 miles I enter the City of Artesia, elevation 3,380 feet, population around 10,000. The city got its name in 1903 from an artesian aquifer located here. And just inside the city is the Navajo Refinery, its dozens of towers twinkling with little lights like a forest of odd-shaped trees all lit up for the holidays. So there’s oil on one side of the street and cotton on the other. Throw in a few cattle and you’ve got the whole picture.

Just past the refinery with its deep hollow rumblings and the hissing of hot gasses escaping from pipes, Artesia proper begins at the intersection of US 82 and US 285, which is called 1st Street. At this intersection is a handsome bronze sculpture about fifteen feet high called “Trail Boss” by Vic Payne, from Wyoming. It's a cowboy on horseback waving a rifle over his head and driving a couple of longhorn cattle. Up at the next intersection there’s a similar sculpture called “El Vacquero,” again with a rider posed in action on his horse pushing a cow along.

At 6th and Main (as 82 is called here) there’s another group of bronze sculptures in a little park on the south side of the street. The large central one is of an oil derrick being worked by several men. Another sculpture depicts a meeting between two men, Matt Chase and Johnny Grey, called “The Partnership.” These two men went into business together in 1972 as Marbob Energy Corp., which they named after their wives, Marilyn and Bobbie. They sold their interests in the partnership some time in the 80s to pursue other interests, but Marbob is still a major presence in Artesia.

I come across a huge prickly pear cactus plant in someone’s yard, with no needles on it. I don’t know if they’ve been removed or if it just grew this way. It has large clusters of fruit on it, not yet ripe. The fruit does have needles.

From 1st Street to 6th Street is the central business district, with most of the buildings occupied. There’s the Ocotillo Performing Arts Center, a few cafes and restaurants, ATES Petroleum in a huge glass and brick building, and the Land of the Sun movie theater. After 6th the solid blocks end and it goes to separate buildings, which get larger and more scattered as I go west. A hardware store, a K Mart, a grocery. A florist with the somewhat suggestive name The Love Bud Floral and Gifts. I look for the county courthouse, then it hits me that this isn’t the county seat. That honor belongs to Carlsbad.

Finally I reach 20th Street and the well-maintained lawns and stately corporate offices of Marbob Energy. Across the street is the Pecos Inn Best Western Motel where I stayed last April on my way out to California. I ate at the Kwan Den Chinese buffet, which as I recall was not a great dining experience. But it was handy and I was hungry. The Kwan Den proved my rule that the farther you get from each coast the worse the Chinese food gets. And it’s still over a thousand miles to L.A.

Day 122: The Boys of Loco Hills

Maljamar to somewhere in Eddy County. 20.5 miles/2314.9 total

Friday, October 29, 2010

9:35 a.m. I am setting out from the rest area a mile and a half west of Maljamar, headed west on US 82 through the community of Loco Hills, and about nine miles beyond to a spot on the road near the intersection of 82 and Eddy County Routes 210 and 211, a distance of 20.5 miles.

It’s another cloudless day, with a breeze from the south. It’s in the high 50s now, heading up to around 70.

Since I came down off the high plains yesterday, and through Maljamar, the terrain has changed markedly. The plains were flat. Down here it’s not exactly hilly, but sort of bumpy. The land undulates with little hills fifty or so feet in diameter and only a few feet high. There appears to be very little farming or ranching going on here. And the vegetation is different. It’s greener than the plains were, with their yellow grass. There's grass here too, but there are very few cactuses and there’s much more growing than just grass. Sage brush, for one thing, light green and aromatic. And of course mesquite bushes and trees, and also some kind of low-growing shrub-like ground cover with tiny oak leaves. I hope it’s not poison oak, because I just picked some leaves. (Damn, why didn’t I pay more attention in Boy Scouts?) After I check my tree book I see this is probably gambel oak, also known as Utah white oak, which grows as a shrub or a small tree. There's also something that has thin spiky leaves with needles at the ends. Some of the mesquite trees are beginning to turn a golden yellow.

The main feature of the landscape is the profusion of oil wells, those small shallow-well pumps that look to me like busy insects. They’re everywhere amid the little pale red hills, thousands of them, perhaps one on every two or three acres, in a variety of colors—olive drab, khaki, orange, black—and in several sizes. Most of the newer large ones by the road appear to be driven by electric motors, quietly dipping down and slowly pulling up. The overall effect, looking out toward the distant mountains, is of gentle green hills with adobe-colored circles and slashes here and there where the wells have been sunk.

Soon after I start I leave Lea County and enter Eddy County, and the shoulder on the road becomes wider, about enough to accommodate a vehicle. So the walking will be much more comfortable today. My ankles are sore this morning, and I think that’s because of all the walking in the ditch on uneven ground yesterday.

At 11.6 miles I enter the limits of the village of Loco Hills. This place looks a little larger than Maljamar. And I guess this means that the hills I’ve been walking through are the Loco Hills. Loco Hills has the usual scattering of buildings, including a post office and a fire station and some oil and gas-related businesses, most of which are in prefabricated buildings. At the center of the town is Kelly’s Cafe, and I decide to go in.

Before I even get in the door a man who has been standing outside says, “Let this man in and get him something to drink; he’s been walking a long time.” I say he must have seen me on the road and he nods his head vigorously, and says he saw me yesterday, too. These guys drive back and forth between Hobbs and Lovington and Artesia on oil business and see everything.

I go inside and order an iced tea and a piece of pecan pie. The pie is okay, nothing great. Diner food (or dive food, in this case), despite what the guy with the spiky bleached hair would have you believe, is usually mediocre. There are two men at another table, just as friendly as they can be, one an Anglo about my age and the other an Indian of some kind, I think, about 40. They start talking to me about the walk, then invite me to join them at their table. I tell them the whole story, of course. They introduce themselves, but I immediately forget the white guy’s name. The Indian is Joe. Joe runs for exercise, sometimes 30 miles at a time, so we talk about shoes for a bit. He tells me he saw me parked at the rest area outside Lovington Wednesday night and on the roadside last night. I tell him he’s pretty observant and he agrees, grinning.

They’re in the drilling business. I ask them how much oil each of those wells produces, and they say it varies. Some of the older small ones might only produce a barrel a day, but the newer ones might pull up two or three hundred barrels a day. Right now they’re doing something called horizontal drilling, where they go down a few thousand feet then drill out sideways. Business is booming around here right now, and everyone in the restaurant is doing something with oil or gas or the equipment necessary to get them out of the ground. There are a dozen white pickups in the parking lot.

At some point I mention Seminole, Texas, and the older guy says there are a lot of Mennonites there. In fact, he tells me, that huge house that looks like a chateau, some five miles west of Seminole, is owned by the head of the Seminole Mennonites. They’re rich, according to these guys. I mention that I saw quite a few of them at the Walmart in Seminole last spring, and that I thought the women were particularly ugly. “It’s all that inbreeding,” the older guy says. Confirming what George in Snyder said last spring, he tells me they come up from Mexico and they speak mostly German and Spanish. Up here they farm quite a bit. I get a feeling the Mennonites are not viewed at all charitably by the locals. Joe even opined that they might be dealing drugs out of Mexico, which seems like a stretch to me. (Joe also thought the price of cotton was four dollars a pound until I told him it was just over a dollar, so I take what he says about Mennonite dope dealers with a grain of salt.) But there seems to be a mixture of fear and envy of the Mennonites that’s probably a milder version of the chronic European attitude toward Jews.

I make a point of telling them how helpful and friendly everyone has been on my trip. After about twenty minutes they have to get going, so our little party breaks up. As I go to pay the cashier she tells me that Joe, who'd been ahead of me in line, has already paid for my pie. By the time I get outside he’s in his truck and gone. As I walk back out onto the road through the oil fields, with the pungent smell of gas in the air, I feel as if I’m among friends.