3

3-17-04 evening

It is quite a grade out of Clifton and up to Morenci. It gets worse the other side of Morenci. I call it a ‘turbo boost special’ of a road. The sign says 100 miles no services and the speed limit is 30 a lot of the way. Steep mountain grades and twisty turn switchbacks. You climb from desert to live oaks and juniper, some other kind of oak that has no leaves this time of year with pine trees and on up to pine and quakies (huge quaking aspen 12” stumps). I’m not sure how high I rimmed out but it is up there. I think some of the pines were bristle cone but not sure. On the north side is deep forest with four and five foot snow banks. I guess they got snow with the last storm that came through. They only plow the road part way in the winter. It was a beautiful day and “I got the radio blastin’, and the windows rolled down” to quote the song on the country station I was listing to. What a life!

It is a long way to Alpine at those speeds although there were places that were forty or fifty mph for a ways. Alpine is a resort community that starts cranking just about Easter and goes until about Christmas the kid at the store said. I had stopped along the road at a little stream so e dog and I could get out and stretch our legs. There were some huge deer tracks there and I told the kid that there must be some really big deer around here. He said that they were probably elk. He doesn’t hunt but said that his brother puts in for a tag for a bull and has for twenty years and still hasn’t been drawn. He said they sell the bull tags to out of state hunters because they can get more money form them. That seems unfair but that is government fer ya. Alpine is eight thousand feet and I had to roll up the windows most of the way by the time I got up there. I told the kid at the store that it was a wonderful day and he said don’t get sucked in, this is the time of the year when they get those heavy wet snows. March and April are the wettest months here he said and most of it is snow. Well, it was certainly nice today. I took the little gray road out of Alpine going toward Luna and Reserve. Reserve is where the govt had a station set up and the Apaches gave them a good going over now and then. It’s too bad the Apaches don’t do that anymore. There is a big forest service encampment there now and a few arrows might tune them bastards up. I went past Cuzville, not much happening there, and on to Apache creek where I turned of on hwy 12 going north and am headed to Quemado. I went up and up to what may be the top and found a small road off in the trees. I only went about a mile before a sign says dead end at private property, so I turned around and found a nice place to camp off the road. There is a small hunting road not far from camp so I got the bike out and e dog went crazy barking. She really needed a run this evening. She some times barks a little when I get on the bike but tonight she really let loose. The road started out not too bad but got steeper and steeper until I am in lowest gear and the bike wants to lift the front wheel and it was digging out on the rear wheel. I am huffing an puffing as well and had to get off and walk it up to a flat spot. Hey, I have been living in the lowlands and up here, probably more than a mile higher than I was, makes a lot of difference. I’m older too. J

I really didn’t make it that far up the little road when it started down hill on the other side and I didn’t want to have to climb that hill to get back to camp. I have found that probably the reason I lost control and crashed on my bike going down hill before is that I hadn’t lowered the seat. That makes a lot of difference on a down hill pitch. I do that now. Older and wiser. Learn the hard way….and try to remember.

I just got back to camp and I heard a pickup coming down the road. They guy stopped to ask if I was hunting and I told him no, I’m just camping. I asked if he had a ranch down the road and he said no, just ten acres and a house. He turned off the truck and we visited for a while. He bought the unfinished house from the widow of a friend he used to work with. He is a carpenter and has lived in the house about a year and a half. He still works out and only does jobs that he wants to do now. His wife (attention Carla) likes it out here and she sews quilts. They used to live in Phoenix and she sewed quilts for people down there and they now send up quilts for her to do here. He says she just loves it, she sews all day in the peace and quiet. She has a twelve-foot table on her sewing machine. We got to talking about the government boys and how they are out of control and he pointed out that the sawmill at Payson was shut down by the spotted owl and the new regulations are that the cattle and horses will not be allowed within three miles of running water around here. He said that they just threw a guy in jail for running cows someplace where they didn’t want him to. His family had been running cows there for four generations. He supposedly assaulted a forest service officer. I think you can push these cowboys just so far before they loose it. That is probably the plan to get them all in jail. We just about had all the problems talked out when it started to get dark so he said he had to get back and load up some trim work before it got too dark. I headed for the pod and cooked a bite to eat. I hope I can get better radio up here than I did down in the canyon.

3-18-04

a little chilly this morning at 23 degrees. That is about a 30 degree difference from where I have been living. The quilt was perfect last night and I was toasty warm. When I got out on the road it went down to 21, it was nice when the heater kicked in. the road to Quemado drifted downhill and the country started to open up from the solid forest. By the time I got to Quemado the ground was almost completely bare. I guess that is the result of serious overgrazing and serious drought. The cows didn’t look that bad but the ground seemed bare other than a few bushes. It looks very similar to the Great Basin country of Nevada. The country just opens up more as I got down to Albuquerque. I did take a side road that makes a loop up to Acoma the sky village. It was started in 1300 or so and was populated by the pueblo Indians down below. Acoma is up on a hill and it was a good place to defend. It must have been a bitch hauling water up there to make the mud for the buildings and just for water to live. I guess it would be better than being dead. As I came up to the base of the hill where it is perched, there is a place where you have to check in and they charge you ten bucks and another ten bucks if you have a camera. Screw them, I just kept going and headed down to Albuquerque and the Rio Grande jewelry supply store. I needed to pick up some supplies there and I parked in their lot and took a short nap and then went in and placed my order, The counter man that helped me took out a couple of small boxes on a hand truck for me. He is really nice and has lived here for seven years. he is from Pennsylvania. He said that he brought his wife out here and she hated it for a couple of years and now when she goes back she can hardy wait to get home. The desert has that effect on some people. He said that except for a week of bad weather he only wore a sweatshirt for winter. I said that for being in a valley it wasn’t very smoggy. He said that the wind seems to keep it out of here and that is one reason that the balloon people like it here so much. Evidently there are two opposing winds at different levels. The balloons go up and go one way and come down and go back where they came or vise versa. That sounds a little far fetched but it could be. He said that a hundred balloons would go up on weekends and 600-800 when they have the balloon festival. What ever the reason there doesn’t seem to be much smog for all the people living here.

I pulled out of there and found a truck stop and got a fill up with diesel at $1.519 which is about 40 cents cheaper than what I have been paying. Regular gas was about the same, Im not sure why gas is cheap down here but I am hoping it stays that way as I have a long way to go over to MO. I was ready to scat as it was getting to be close to quitting time and the roads were filling up. I headed for Santa Fe and it is sure built up along the highway in that direction, probably all directions form what I can see. I finally had to bail out and head for the nearest hills. They have built houses up to and past the base of the hills. The road finally narrowed and it is minimum maintenance only, and a lot of no signs, I didn’t pay much attention to. The road is really rough and there wasn’t a place to turn around for several miles where I made a place and just barely made the turnaround. I am parked alongside the road where I am probably not supposed to be but I can’t imagine anyone coming up here to toss me out. There is so much population pressure around here I guess they have to make it illegal for people like me otherwise there would be trailer trash everywhere.

3-19-04

Nobody came to throw me out last night. It was not near as cold as it was the night before. I’m not sure how high I was but I would guess 6000 ft. I think Santa Fe is about 5000. I went on into Santa Fe and it is one big city for sure. I was trying to get to the old part of the city and ended up at the College of Santa Fe. I am waiting for the library to open and I will check my email and head for the old part of town if I can find it. I th ink the town has grown so much that the highways and streets have not been able to keep up as there was almost bumper to bumper coming in this morning.

I got my bike out and took a little cruise around campus. It is spring break and it is very quiet especially early in the morning. The Santa Fe Art Institute is here and it is closed up tight this morning too. There are quite a few sculptures around and that is nice. Some are good and some are wild for sure.

I went in the library and asked to use the computer and she told me that this is a private college but since it is spring break she would let me use it for a few minutes to check my email. That was nice and I quickly checked out the email site and found I had several warnings that my mailbox was full and error statements as to what the problem was. I did get a message from Ken that said that it took twenty minutes to come through. I must have sent the big photos rather than the ones that I resized and compressed. {That is what the problem is, I sent huge photos and I apologize to all for that} I really didn’t have much time and there was a guy standing over my shoulder waiting to use that chickenshit little computer. I’ll have to try again to send the road log again for sure and maybe a photo or two if they didn’t come through. It didn’t look like there was anything terribly important so I headed out. I got on the wrong road evidently because I found myself lost almost immediately. The road I was on had signs pointing to the museums on the hill, so I kept going and ended up at a place where there are three museums. I picked out the museum of Indian arts and culture. There are three museums on the hill and two more downtown that are under the museums of New Mexico. Each museum costs seven bucks or you can get a pass good for four days to see them all for fifteen bucks. I just didn’t think I wanted to stick around that long so I opted for the one. I’m glad I did as it is a big one and it took me maybe four hours to go though it and that was skipping some of the video displays and cultural stuff. They had a wonderful collection of Anazi pots and other artifacts. It had just opened and I got in on a tour by one of the most self-important assholes I have ever suffered though. I finally had to bail out of the tour. There is a room that has a display of the pots from different pueblos. This display has both the old pots and the new ones that are being made today. This guy was essentially pimping for his favorite potters and telling us how wonderful these pots are and how nice they would look like when we took them back home and set up a ‘Santa Fe Room’. Oh, yuck.

After I got away from that prick I had a good time looking around. Years ago I went to the world famous Herd Museum in Phoenix to check out their Anazi stuff. They had a few pots on display behind several layers of bulletproof glass and I was very disappointed with what they had on display. They have thousands of pots in storage but only have a few available for public viewing. There was a info board up announcing coming events and one of the events was for members to tour the basement where there are 70,000 artifacts in storage. It just somehow seems unfair to have all that stuff where a person can never see it. The prick was saying that they have a lot of ceremonial stuff that should be returned to the Indians but it was treated with arsenic years ago when they collected the stuff to protect it. They cannot return that stuff to the Indians because it is hazardous and they don’t want the Indians taking it and polluting some secret place. They had nice displays of a lot of the tools as well as other things that were used in everyday life. They did have some of the older silver jewelry that I found interesting and am always amazed at what impressive quality work that they did with the most primitive tools. Some of the weavings of the Anazi using the cotton that they grew were extremely nice. They had some samples of cotton from over a thousand years ago. they didn’t go to Wal-Mart to shop. There were some small copper bells that they must have made out of native copper that were from 1200 I think.

I met one of the guards on the tour that was just hanging around keeping the peace I guess. He was just a little guy and I said that it must be hell standing around all day. He said it was when it was slow but when it was busy he got to talk with a lot of people. I asked if he was Indian and he said he was Chicano because he was Irish, Indian, Spanish and Mexican. He turned out to have a ranch and he worked two jobs, six hours at the museum, for the health insurance and an eight-hour night watchmen shift at one of the schools. He had eight cows and a bull and a few sheep. He sold some calves to pay for the winter feed for his cows and ate the sheep and a few of the calves. He said he ate really well. He has a little over three hundred acres with thirty acres irrigated. The farm was bigger but his dad sold off most of the farm. He invited me up to his place if I was going to stay around and go to the other museums because I was telling him how hard it was to find a campsite. He doesn’t like to camp near other people either.

I had fears of being able to find my way out of town, as I was finished with concrete for a while. I need to get some sort of concrete friendly shoes, if I am going to be around towns. I saw a beautiful long tall gal out in the parking lot who gave me the most complex instructions on how to get back on the highway, I finally just nodded my head and said ‘yah, I got it’. I headed out on my own by dead reckoning and found myself on the old Santa Fe Trail. I followed that about a mile and presto, I was on the highway. I should have known better than to ask a tall beautiful blond. I should have asked the stocky redheaded gal with the tattoos.

I headed for Las Vegas where I found a grocery store and fueled up the truck at $1.61. I headed out of town going east toward Tucumcari. Just as soon as I left town the ground opened way up and I am in rolling short grassland. There isn’t anything out here but a few scattered windmills and very short grass that hasn’t greened up yet. I did go by a road going to a ranch and then took the first road that must be a county road that led me out in this beautiful prairie. I can still see the high peaks of the mountains to the far west, but otherwise I am completely exposed to the horizon. I can see the slight glow of Las Vegas and Santa Fe over the horizon but it doesn’t seem to interfere with stargazing. I haven’t heard if anyone saw the asteroid that went by today. I think it was during the day here but the people in Europe were supposed to be able to see it go by like a satellite.

3-20-04

I was up at first light this am. It wasn’t that cold but a stiff wind made me reach for a sweatshirt and down vest. After breakfast I headed back to the main road and came across a set of crosses alongside the dirt road I was on. It is really strange, as I don’t think they were killed here, like a roll over or something, but buried here. Could it be that they are illegals and they just bury them alongside the road? I forgot to mention that when I was down near Bisbee I came across a very small grave that must have been a small child that died and was buried along the trail. It would sure save a bundle on mortuary costs.

Not far after I got rolling again, the ground got more hilly and I dropped into a lower country with scattered juniper and big valleys with mesa or rimed hills all around. The grass was a little taller at least on the highway side of the fence. This country has been grazed hard. There were deep rutted red dirt roads where there was access off the highway. I stopped at one of those roads to pee and found that the roads weren’t clay at all, or at least where I stopped, but red sand. The mud that was thrown up by a tire was just crumbly and didn’t stick together when dry. In the bigger washes that crossed the highway there was a trickle of red water or puddles of red water. The country is open but there are a few ranches that don’t look very prosperous. As I came into Tucumcari I saw a few fields of irrigated pasture and maybe alfalfa.

Tucumcari is a nice little town I thought when I entered. I parked the truck and hopped on the bike to have a look around. Down town is very bleak with empty buildings and not much in the way of upkeep happening. I did finally find the main highway that goes through town and that has all the business out there. There is a freeway that bypasses the town but this highway is a main thoroughfare. This is the old Route 66 highway. I saw some young people and asked if there was a library around and they pointed me there. That is where I wrote the short note apologizing for the screw up on my last post with the huge photos. I had two files with about the same name, one with the original photos and the other with the photos shrunk down and compressed to a manageable size. I sent photos out of the wrong file. The librarian allowed me to use the computer and when I asked if I could use the CD and send email she said yes. She didn’t know that the cd drive bay is disabled on the six or so computers that they have. I had a chance to take a quick look at email and respond to a couple of them quickly. I don’t see why I was only allowed to use it for just a half hour since I was the only one using one. Oh well, rules are rules!! Aren’t government rules just great?

I hopped back on the bike and finished touring the town. I found a ranch supply store and went in looking for a straw hat. The hats are different down here than the ones I am used to seeing. It must be the Mexican influence or something. The owner of the store came over to help me and he said that he didn’t have anything over 7 ½ so that leaves me out. I asked him about the farming and ranching around here. He said that they have had a serious drought and there has been no water in the reservoir the last two years. The farmers have just had to suck it up. The ranchers have done no better but at least this year has started out better and they may get some grass. I asked how the town was handling it and he said it was not good at all. A five years ago the railroad pulled out their work crews based here as well as three or four trucking firms that were based here. He said that there are between 200 and 300 families leaving the area every year now. I said that there must be a Wal-Mart around someplace because everything is dead downtown. He said that there isn’t one but he was hoping that they would come in and help the tax base. Yah, right, what few businesses that are here would be gone I told him. He said that they would not be coming in anyway because the population base is shrinking. Everyone goes to Portales or one of the other big towns around to shop. He said that when you loose that many guys with seven or eight hundred dollars in their pocket every week to spend, it hurts.

I headed out of Tucumcari and made it as far as San Jon which isn’t far. I’m on the plains now and the wind is a serious factor. I have been getting over 16 mpg but with this head wind I don’t think it will last. Fuel is $1.59 here but I don’t need any for now. This is a really poor looking town but they do have a couple of baseball diamonds and a couple of picknik tables where I am parked taking my nap. The wind is shaking the trailer and it put me right to sleep. There are a few kids out on the gravel baseball field now fooling around. A tall Mexican kid is throwing some real smokers.

I was just pulling out of the small park where I see the sign says free overnight camping. I guess they want anybody that they can get to stay in town. I came across the Official Scenic Historic Marker for the

LLANO ESTACADO ;

Rising above these red-earth

lowlands to the south is the

Llano Estacado or Staked Plain,

a high plateau covering some

32,000 square miles in eastern

New Mexico and adjacent areas

in Texas. Topographically, it

is on of the flattest areas

in the United States, and rises

to 450 feet above the surrounding

Great Plains.

So, here I go….. out on the staked plain.

I had to fuel up as I passed the gas station. $1.47 diesel. $1.55 unleaded. I wonder what Texas will be. Could it be that Bush gives his fellow Texans a good deal on oil? As I got near Amarillo there was some farming on the plains. This is dry land farming mostly, but it did see one pivot and some linear pivot type systems at an irrigation experiment site at a USDA site. It looks like they are growing winter wheat and most of the fields are being grazed by stockers but I did see some mother cows and new calves on a couple of them.

The Texans are doing ok with oil. I saw a station with diesel at $1.61. I followed the signs on into town and there is a major freeway interchange here. I was doggedly following the signs to hwy 60 when I saw a big billboard for a Gun Show and it is this weekend at the convention center. I had no idea where the convention center was until I came right by this huge building called the convention center. Well, what timing, it must mean that I am supposed to go, eh? The center is on the edge or the rail yards and it is mostly large warehouse buildings around that area. I found a large parking lot and stopped and let e dog out. She was ready for a little exercise and started yipping just as soon as I got the bike out. She needed a run. It was about seven o’clock and just getting dark. The streets were almost deserted and off we went. The streets in this area are all paved with brick. It looks like it has been this way for a long time and I can see where they patch them. The main streets that cross are all paved and I suppose someday they will pave over these too. I ran her little butt off and I was huffing and puffing when we got back. There is a big Santa Fe railroad station that it looks like has been turned into a museum or something. I hope it is open tomorrow along with the gun show.

I decided to treat myself to a restaurant meal if I could find one. I hopped back on the bike and rode around until I found a pedestrian who pointed me in the direction I needed to go. The first one I came to was more a bar than a restaurant so I kept going until I found a really nice Mexican restaurant. There were a couple of nice young Mexican girls waiting tables as well as a couple of older ones. It’s too bad how they seem to kind of run to the bottom as they age. It took a long time for the food to come and I finished off a big bowl of tortilla chips with a bowl of hot/hot sauce before the meal came. I could hardly wiggle when I left I was so full.

The radio reception here in town is great. There are twenty-one FM stations that I am picking up. There is almost any kind of music a person could want. The trains don’t seem to be blowing their horns, but there is sure a lot of crunching sounds as they make up their loads and the power of the engines as they start to pull the load.

3-20-04

There is an am station here that carries Art Bell and I listened to him last night. It was so unusual to not have him fade in and out. He had some hotshot financial advisor who says that God talks to him. it was a great interview and Art asked him a lot of hard questions. They covered a lot of financial questions as well as what God has to say about it. He thinks that the market will tank out just before or just after the election. His take is that we will get bombed (H bomb) and that pretty much should finish us off since our debt is so huge. The national and personal debt is enough of a bomb to knock us down, I think. I just heard on the radio that they bought a few suitcase nuke bombs that were for sale. this could get very interesting.

I got up early and went out on the bike to get a little exercise while it was still calm. It is Sunday morning and the area was very quiet. I stopped to look in a big dumpster next to the Amarillo Hardware Supply just for fun and found that they had thrown away five new frost free hydrants. Some of them are a little short, I guess it doesn’t get that cold around here but others are deep ones. That was a good start for sure. I next totally cleaned up the pod and dug out a pistol that I was considering trading off. The show wasn’t that big of an event but I found several guys that I had a good time visiting with. The story is that the economy is slow and not much is happening out there. I didn’t trade off the pistol and there was nothing there I wanted that bad other than a hundred rounds of 45auto and a really nice leather, sheepskin lined pistol case made by Browning.

I didn’t make it far out of town when I took a farm road out to a nice grassy field. From here I can see the lights of Amarillo and a big power plant. There are a lot of radio towers around as well with their red lights blinking no wonder the reception is good.

3-21-04

Welcome west Texas wind this morning. I hear on the radio that it is a normal spring wind and it makes it somewhat brisk this morning at about 40 degrees or so. I ate breakfast and we went out for a short ride. The road was mostly down wind, which was nice until the ride back into it. This is flat land and there isn’t much to slow the wind down. The forecast is for 25 to 30 winds today. I saw my first meadowlark this morning and I thought I heard one yesterday. I remember Jeanne telling me that the meadowlarks come back to Miles on the first day of spring and look pretty miserable in the snow….. The one I saw was having a hard time hanging on to his fence post. He sounded the same as the ones in MT unlike the people around here. There were even some of the famous Texas ‘big hair’ gals at the gun show.