FROST this morning! Beautiful clear and sunny.
Well it has been several days and it has been rainy and cool here in the desert. I have had plenty of time to write so here goes…..
1-21-04
I took a cruise around the area today and looked at the lots that are for sale. Almost everywhere you go there are signs pointing to lots with houses and bare lots. There is really a wide variety of areas according to their value. The low end is a place called Roosevelt gardens and I think it was one of the first places subdivided. One of the real-estate guys I was talking with said it was really one of the best places, but the problem is that they sold the lots at fifty bucks down and easy payments. There are abandoned places and places just thrashed with trash all over. There are a few guys that have impressive collections of ‘stuff’ and there are places that are neat as a pin.
The high end places are very upscale and I guess one place on the hill built by a developer in Phoenix is around a two and a half million palace. I talked with a guy that was out raking his yard, it was neat as a pin. He grew up in Globe, Az and went into the service and got out in New York where he married a NY girl and stayed for forty years as a landscaper. I guess that is why his place looked so good. He moved here ten years ago and really likes it. He was telling me all the stuff that the realtors leave out. He said that there was quite a difference between the people on different sides of the creek. I think I said it was salt river before and to correct that, it is, Tonto creek. This ‘creek’ is about a quarter mile across and there is not any water running in it at this time except for some places where it comes to the surface. There are several roads that cross the creek and they just blade a road across the sand/rock/gravel bed of the creek. When it rains hard the creek really comes up as it drains a large area all the way up to payson. The guy was telling me that the first year he brought his wife from NY, they were only able to get across the river three times in the first month. There is really no other way out other than a small cable car that is strung across the river up here near my camp that you have to hike to other than the A+ road that goes across the north side of the lake. He said that that wasn’t a alternative since when it rains, it is impossible to drive on it. I know that is the case as I once lived at the other end of the road back in 1969. the road when it is dry is like concrete and it is unbelievably hard. In fact I once stopped on the road and got out my pocket knife and tried to dig into it. It was really like stone. I was ridding my Harley at that time and I headed to work on morning after a rain and when I got to the road I immediately fell down. I tried to get up and ended up having to crawl over to the bike and use it to help me stand. It took me forever to get my bike back onto firm ground and I never did make it to work that day. Everyone at work just laughed because they knew what had happened. So, if you live on that side of the creek, you had better be ready to make do on your own for a few weeks or more. There was a big flood back in the early 90s that almost flooded his place. He said that several houses went floating down the creek. It is really hard to visualize that much water when there is nothing in it now.
I was camping out in a wash up by Wickieup thirty years ago when a guy came by and advised me to move my camp up out of the flood plain. I was up probably twenty feet out of the bottom of the river bed and I told him that I thought I was probably high enough to be safe. He pointed up into a tree we were standing under and up in the top of the tree was a bunch of flotsam (is that the word for trash floating down the river?) caught in the branches. I moved my camp!!!
I guess the most interesting thing he told me after I told him that I didn’t like humidity is that it is unbearable there in the monsoon season. That is July/ August/ September. He said the temperature is in the hundreds and almost every afternoon, a rain shower will come through. After the rain the humidity is thick. He said that most of the time people use swamp coolers, but when the monsoons hit, they all switch to air conditioning. He said you do your work early and head inside and stay there. There is a nice house across the street from him that is for sale. He said that a cop bought the house and worked on it fixing it up. The first time he brought his wife up, she brought her daughter and her kids up too. he said that the guy had left the swamp cooler running and when they got there it was a monsoon type day and the house was unbearable. They asked him to come over and turn on the AC but he didn’t want to be responsible but called the AC guy to come out and get it going. When the AC guy showed up the power went out. He said the woman and her daughter were soaked with sweat and their hair was all hanging down stringy plastered to her face and they got in their car and never came back. So, the house is for sale along with a lot of other. There are a lot of older people that move there and when one of the couple dies, the other doesn’t want to stay and the place is put up for sale. The other thing that happens is that a guy will get a job up there and put money down on a place and bring in a modular and when he looses his job or the job ends, they have to leave it. There are a lot of people who just leave in the summer and he was going to buy a place in the mountains for the summer monsoon season.
Attention MIKE !!!! he told me that he bought the lot next door that belonged to a doctor that lost his mind. Before the doc lost it, he would sit out on his porch and shoot a couple of quail with a pellet gun for breakfast out of a large pine tree in his yard. He said that there were 300 or more quail that would roost in the tree. It was a beautiful tree and so handy. The brush along the creek is dense and I think e dog is seeing or smelling the quail but I can’t hear them. I have seen some running across the road, so I know that they are here. (note; mike loves to hunt quail and Lucky, his dog, is up to it, for sure).
I noticed that he had a small garden and shade cloth house and that there was something green growing in a raised bed. He said that next week would be the first lettuce and spinach picking. He said you can grow stuff all year there and he was on some beautiful sandy loam soil. Most places don’t have much but clay and rocks. You pay the price for good soil with the possibility of a flood. The only thing he was having problems growing was tomatoes. He said that it just got too hot for them. He had even tried 50% shade cloth. Peppers did wonderful and got way too hot (hear that Lisa?)
Oh, that reminds me of a license plate I saw the other day that should belong to either Lisa or Tova. The plate was = IH8COLD
There are quite a few small subdivisions scattered around and some of them have community water systems and others have wells. The wells on the high ground can go dry in the last few years of drought but the ones down near the creek seem to be holding up ok.
1-22-04
it rained on and off most of the night and the radio said that there was a good chance of rain most of the day, especially around where I was.
I hooked up and pulled the pod out of that camp and got out on the pavement. I stopped at the library to check for email that needed attention and headed south to Globe, AZ.
Back in 1969 I was in Alaska for the summer with my Harley mudder cycle and sidecar. It started to get really cold and the days were getting shorter by it seemed ½ hour a day. I headed south and followed fall all the way down to Globe where they were filming a movie called the Great White Hope. I got on as an extra and my girlfriend made friends with one of the cooks. I made fairly good money and my girlfriend got a lot of extra food left over from the lunch they served. We ate well and built up enough of a stash to hold us over until I got a job at one of the local big mining companies. I hired on as a geophysical tech as that was what I had been doing in San Francisco. I worked on an exploration crew and we covered some of the most remote parts of the state. I worked with a guy on the movie set that turned me on to a place to rent way out in the country north of Roosevelt lake. I rented a small house that had no electricity or running water inside, but it had a wood stove and water right outside the door. It had a nice two holer outhouse and was built to government specs. It was owned by the forest service but was leased by they guy who ran cows on the allotment. It was a long way to commute to work on a bike, but you can ride a bike all year round in AZ. Some days it was a little cold I will admit, especially when it was raining. I finally bought a sixty three Rambler station wagon. One of the best cars I have ever owned. Three speed with overdrive and a flat head six. Great mileage!!
I cruised into town and boy, has Globe changed for the bigger! Actually the old downtown is not too different, but it has expanded out with shopping centers and such. The same thing all over, you know the drill. Same o, same o.
I stopped at the chamber of commerce and asked the girl if there was anyplace I could get internet. She said if I had a laptop I could plug it in to their fax line. I ran out and got the ‘SilverQueen’ (when I opened up the new laptop it wanted me to ‘name’ it) along with a phone cord and brought it in. I had the local phone numbers for earthlink which is my provider. I had to figure out how to get my computer to hook up to the modem again after I hade changed it to hook up to the wifi system. Their line must be some sort of screaming fast line, because it just took a few minutes to download all the mail. I took advantage to download a couple of website discussion pages and folded it up and thanked the girl. I asked if I could come back in a day or two and she said, sure, anytime. So, if you get this, it is thanks to her.
I had to go to the library to check out how they work it there as well. The library in Punkin Center just let you walk in and go ahead and sit down and start in. they had several puters to use but I didn’t want to abuse the system so I tried not to stay too long. At the Globe library I had to wait about fifteen minutes and then the librarian handed me two numbers to get the computer on line. When I did, a little box came up on the screen with a counter on how many minutes I had left. I was given thirty minutes. At five minutes it beeped and warned me that I had to save my material and beat it. Every library has a different system and rules. I suppose that some day it will be more standardized. But for now it is new and every community makes its own rules. One library let you make ten copies for free. Most charge ten cents a copy, but others charge twenty. I think all of them had a way to make copies. All computers were hooked up to one printer so I guess you had to wait your turn if there were several people printing at the same time.
I headed out of town and made it over the hill back to Roosevelt Lake and on to the A+ road. The road is a little greasy and I am now parked just off the main road and onto the little side road where I once lived. It was getting really dark and I am happy to be set for the night and will check out the options in the morning. If it keeps raining, I my just stay here, ie, have to stay here until it dries out.
I figured out that I lived here 35 years ago at this same time of year.
1-23-04
I was just getting cranking this morning when a couple of rigs pulled up and wanted me to get out of their road. I had to move my truck forward enough so they could get by and through the gate. They really weren’t very friendly and were all wearing cameo outfits. I guess it must be pig hunters out with their bows. I find this out later in the afternoon when a guy comes in and camps right next to me. I had moved out of the road and was camped in the yard where I used to live. I spent the day in the sun making a few hair clips. I got to making several clips on the hot chili theme. When I stopped in the store in Globe, there was a dried pepper section in the grocery store. There were maybe ten different types of chilies at all different prices, in a big display. There is a big Mexican population around here. Just over the hill from Globe is Miami which was/is all Mexican. In most stores there are one or two kinds of tortillas, here there are six or more.
One hair clip I was making wasn’t turning out the way I wanted it to but I kept at it and ended up with something that the girls call one of my ethnic style clips. It actually came out kind of OK, in that it resembles three breasts. I really ought to go back to Quartzite and give it to the leather guy who made the bra for the gal with three breasts, and have him give it to her. It is a long way to go so I will just hang on to it and I might run across her. She should be easy to spot…..
It definitely is hunting season, as there have been probably a dozen trucks and one motor home that has gone by with quads in the back. I have heard rifle shots in the distance. The guy who came and camped next to me came over this evening and told me that he wanted to camp next to me because had I heard that there was a couple that was murdered recently near here. A young couple camping out were shot in the head but not robbed or sexually assaulted. No, I hadn’t heard that, but I guess I might be able to protect myself. I had a pistol on my belt when he drove up. His name is Dennis, like the menace, he said. He ended up being a really nice guy and he has been out hunting geese. There are a lot of honkers down here and they even have protected areas for them on the lake. He said that bow hunting for pigs was open as well as quail and geese. I am not sure what the rifle shooting I hear is, but maybe they shoot the pig and then stab it with an arrow. It could be muzzle loaders that I am hearing.
Dennis is a injection mold designer and he is telling me that all that type of work is now being done overseas. He is one of the outsourced job people I keep hearing about. He is out of work because he says that there just isn’t any work for him any more in this country. He uses the Auto Cad program (computer) for his design work and has been doing this kind of work for twenty something years. He said he was making over a hundred thousand a year, but the last few years he is lucky to make thirty and last year he made seven thousand and only has one company left that he does work for. He told me that there are tens of thousands of tool and die makers that are out of work and it really does not look like they will ever get a job back. The government is retraining them but into what? I heard on the radio that bush spoke at a junior college about jobs. The student body of JC’s are now people over forty years of age going to school to retrain for a new job. His wife works in a kind of shaky job situation as well. He is 48 and although he didn’t say it, I could tell he is scared of the future. He bought a eighty acre piece of land out in the middle of nowhere for twenty thousand and I guess this will be his retreat. It is thirty miles from power and he say all the people that are out there use solar/ generators/ wind/ or propane. I think this guy is pretty much clueless as to how to make it out there, but I guess if he has time to learn he will be ok. If he lost around ninety pounds he will do a lot better. I don’t think you work off much weight riding a quad. His place borders the Navajo res on the north and BLM on the south. Someone told him that the tribe moved in a bunch of really bad guys near there as they were getting into too much trouble where they were. They also told him that they steal everything that they can. Sounds like a great place to have stuff, while you live someplace six hours away. It is probably one of those things where the realtor didn’t fill him in on the real details. Buyer beware! One hundred dollars down and fifty a month can get you into real trouble.
The little house I lived in is really falling down now. I was poking around and found the propane refrigerator that was in the house (I didn’t need it in the winter when I was there). The wood stove that heated the place was gone but I did find the old front tire from my Harley out in the desert. It was an Avon 19” front tire worn in a weird pattern as pullling sidecar is want to do. Some day when archeologists dig up the remains around here, they may find it and wonder how a tire from a motorcycle that pulled a hack came to be out here. I found a couple of mule shoes in the yard today. That will make them really scratch their heads if they find mule shoes as well as my tire. Hee, hee, I love to mess with their heads. In all my camps, I leave something for the next camper. I usually leave my carved camp stick, but the last few camps I haven’t built a fire so I have been leaving small soapstone carvings. Most people leave beer cans/ burnt aluminum foil or filter tip cigarette butts. When my friend Cactus Jack would come to visit he would always leave some sort of gift/ surprise when he left. I always thought that was a nice touch. When I went to my friends Willie and Fritzes’ wedding, I camped down the hill from their house and left my intricately carved camp stick when I left. Willie found it and brought it home and kept it. When Fritzie gave birth, Willie took the umbilical cord and wound it around the stick. It was really pretty cool looking and Willie said he would give it to him when he grew up, he called it his power stick.
It has been nice and sunny all day and the road is drying out nicely as is the mud on my truck and the mud that it threw up on the front of the pod. When it dries, it is hard a cement. Great adobe material or sure.
1-24-04
when I got up this morning the clouds were down this low and it was like fog. Yesterday there was fog on the lake way down below and sunny up here. I think I must be around 3500 ft or so. There was snow on the high mountain top across the valley but that must be near 7000 ft or so. It was cloudy and it drizzeled on and off all day. I went with e dog this morning up the hill behind the house. I would climb that hill on the weekends when I was here before and I made it up there again. 35 years ago it was much easier, of course at the time I was working on the geophysical crew and I was in fantastic shape. I hired on and later found out what I had hired on as, was nothing more than a two legged pack mule. We traveled all over the back country of Arizona doing exploration work in some very isolated places. They came up with places for us to explore with some new technology that was just coming into play. I think some of it was satellite generated stuff while other places were determined from magnetic surveys done from airplanes. What the geophysicists was looking for were anomalies. When they determined a spot they would send our crew out and we would run a grid on it. We would string up to quarter mile lengths of copper insulated wire in parellel lines about on hundred feet apart. Every hundred feet along the line would be a two foot 3/4 inch steel rod that was driven into the ground 18” (this could be in some serious rocks). After I got the rod pounded in I would attach the wire to the pin. These lines went in straight lines and up and down what ever was in the line. We would take a sighting on the heading using a Brunton compass and mark our line to a spot, when we got to that spot, we would sight to the next. This is a lot harder than you might think when there were cactus and catclaw bushes in your path. Catclaw were the worst by far. We had to wear Levi jackets and pants as any other would get ripped right off of you. When you hit a catclaw bush, it would just stop you cold and you have to extract yourself. We called it the ‘wait a minute bush’. It didn’t take the desert long to shred those Levi’s either. The first lines of a hundred to four hundred feet or so weren’t bad to pull but when you pull two or three wires that are a quarter mile long over and down hills it is some serious work. I wore out good heavy vibram sole Redwing work boots in two to three months. The bottoms would be fair but the tops would be completely gone from the rough rocks. After the pin was pounded in and the wire attached I would pour a quart of water on it. I packed a five gallon jerry can of water with a pound of salt added. The salt water would make a good ‘earth’ connection for the wire. These wires were connected to a generator and the crew chief would record the resistance on each line.
I don’t think we ever worked on flat ground and most of it was in pretty rough country. I don’t remember what the five gallons of water and a dozen steel pins and a hammer weighed, but it about killed me the first two weeks I was on the job. The crew I hired on to was four or five guys that had been working for years together and I was the ‘new’ guy and really different from them. They all played the cowboy lifestyle and I was the biker/hippie and they really didn’t know how to handle that. I remember they would give me the really shit jobs and make it as though as possible on me. I guess I needed the job and I put up with a lot of their shit. Once in a while we would have a day or two around the office to get our gear in order and patch up our wire lines and sometimes just keep us busy while they got a new job ready for us to go to. We were working in an auto shop where we were cleaning out and doing maintenance on our work trucks. There was always a little grab ass going on with them and I was pretty much out of it. Well this one day one of the guys charged up a condenser on a battery charger. When you do that and short it out on an unsuspecting victim, they would get a really bad jolt. I have done it myself before, so I know how it is. This guy Richard, who I really never liked and it was mutual, charged up this condenser and came after me with it. I ran over into a corner and he came right after me. I picked up a tire changing tool about two feet long with a wicked hook on the end and told him go ahead but I was going to kill him if he did. This all happened in front of the whole crew. It was an intense stand off for a minute or so and he finally decided he better back off because I was serious. After that, they didn’t screw around with me anymore. By the time the weather started getting really nice and I told them I was quitting and heading for Montana, the were sorry to see me go and tried to get me to stay. As it was, I should have stayed another month or so, because it was really too cold yet in Montana. I didn’t understand how much difference a few degrees north make back then. I hope I don’t make that mistake this year. let me know when it gets nice up there will you?
1-25-04
cold and drizzle again today, but the weather forecast out of Phoenix says that it will get better tomorrow, Monday. I would guess the temps are in the 50’s daytime and low 40’s at night. I took advantage of the cold weather and went through my receipts to get them ready for taxes coming up soon. I hope I get some of the results from my bank in the mail whenever it gets here. I had my mail sent to me one time only at Globe. I wasn’t able to get the main man at the PO. I hope he got the message.
I am going to try to explain how the email situation works for me out on the road in hopes that others of you that go out will have a better understanding about how it works.
When I bought this computer it came with 6 months free (yah, sure) Internet service by either Earthlink or AOL. Since we had Earthlink at the farm and I really don’t like the things I hear about AOL, I decided to go with Earthlink. I am not sure if it is because I have a ‘free’ subscription or not but the mail box that I have with them is rather small. This is not a problem when I plug my computer into a phone line because I have it set up so it dumps all the mail off the server and into my Outlook program, which is on my hard drive, and has mucho capacity. Earthlink has service all over and I have copied the free local numbers from their website so when I get a chance to hook up to a phone line, I can hook direct to them, like I just did when I got to use the phone line in the chamber of commerce in Globe.
When I cannot hook directly into a phone line and have to use a library computer, that creates a problem. To access my email I have to go to the Earthlink website and enter the email program there. The other alternative is to go to mail2web.com and use that program (that one does not have the address book available but is much faster to use than the Earthlink site and works well for ‘reply to’ and ‘delete’). I don’t remember how big the mail box is, but if I get many emails, especially emails with baby photos (keep ‘em coming Anna, I love them!) or big attachments, the mail box fills up rather quickly. So far I haven’t had it get full and return mail. To keep it from filling up I have been deleting emails after I read them, even though I would like to keep them for future reference. I would like to give a more complete reply than I can at the library, when I am under the clock timer, and often forget to reply to questions or comment. I guess I am doing the best I can, under the circumstances. The yahoo email address forwards everything into my Earthlink mailbox and will be good address with any server I have.
There is a card that you can buy that plugs into a slot in the computer that has a small aerial that works like a cell phone, only it is only for Internet. The last I checked the card cost between $100-200 and you needed to contract for two years of service at a cost of $60-70/month. This card only works in an area that has this service (it needs a digital signal) and as far as I can figure it isn’t available in most rural areas. This would be great for someone who travels to big cities and not so much for someone like me who avoids them. J. I saw one of them installed in a laptop in Billings at the radio shack store that a technician was just setting up and I got a chance to try it. It was unbelievably slow, much slower than our landline at 21,000k at the farm. It could be that he didn’t have it running correctly yet and it may work much better after he tuned it.
Another alternative is a cell phone that has the ability to transfer Internet data (usually special order and more expensive, not the free kind). There is a special cord and accompanying program that allows you to hook up and use the computer via a cell phone link. I have actually never talked with anyone who has done this yet. I have talked with several salesmen who say it is possible, but they have never done it. I understand from them, that it is very slow service and not something a person would want to surf the net with. They say it would be ok for email. The same rules apply here in that you have to have a digital signal for it to work. I don’t know the difference between the analog and digital signal availability especially in rural areas. One phone guy I talked with said that they were upgrading their systems as fast as they could and any new ones installed were digital. Another problem with using a cell phone is what company to use. Verizon and Celluar one I guess are the main ones in the west, but the best coverage is only near big cities or along main corridor routes. If you are out of your district I guess the roaming charges are frightful. Those of you with cell phones know all this but it is all new to me.
When I had the wifi hook up in Quartzite I could hook up to the internet but it would not let me download to my Outlook program. I had to use the website email programs.