Monthly Archives: April 2022

Hi blogsters:

I never see that phrase about fish without a flash of memory.

During the 1950s drought stock ponds were drying up all over the southwest.  There came a day a lot like this one, though it was probably warmer, when a kid named David Cagle and I were wandering around the ruins of cow country and came across a pond that was maybe five acres of surface and about three inches deep in water.  Every square foot of water had a fish flopping in it.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

A few hundred yards from the pond was an abandoned barn where we’d noticed an old galvanized washtub someone had probably used to water calves when there was still water, or feed them when there was still food.  We hoofed over to that barn and snagged the tub, waded into that fish and cow-mud calf deep throwing fish into the tub.

We glowed over that tubfull of fish all the way home, him on one handle, me on the other, thinking how deeeeeelighted our folks would be with the treasure we were bringing them.

Both of us smelled a joyous combination of cow-mud and fish when we got to David’s house, went in through the kitchen door and watched his mama shriek even before she turned around and saw the fish.

“Get those fish out of this house!”

We got them out and she followed us into the yard to hose him down before she’d allow him inside.  Me, she ordered to take those fish with me and head down the road.

My own mom took a more circumspect view of things, mainly because she wasn’t home when I got there.  I cleaned myself up and filled the kitchen sink with all the fish it would hold and started killing and gutting them.  The job was far enough along to make quitting a moot point when she got home.

I gutted a lot of fish over the next couple of days, though I did move the operation out into the back yard.

My mom’s one of those kind of people who remember such things after she can’t remember her own name.  I’m not sure I’ve ever returned to her company during the past 50 years without being reminded of it.

Give a person a fish and he might not appreciate it, but he won’t starve until the fish is digested.

But give a person a fishing pole and he’ll almost surely hook an ear or nostril before it’s over.

I had a different, longer blog entry I’ve tried to post a couple of times today about other matters, but my comp froze up every time I hit the ENTER button, so you’ll have to settle for this.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

Hope you’re getting yourselves all primed up to eat a lot of flour, sugar, poultry, pumpkin innards and yams in various stages of decomposition.

On the way out to the boonies the other day I picked up a Gallup Independent newspaper off the shelf at the Acoma Pueblo gas and flour shop.  The headlines grabbed me.

Seems we New Mexicans are only forth in the nation as the US distributor of sexually transmitted diseases, but we’re struggling and elbowing our way upward.  Evidently a lot of us aren’t yet doing our fair share, are shirking our statistical duties and obligations to make it unanimous.

I’ll admit I’ve been remiss and can only say I’ve been sort of busy working on the numbers and haven’t had seen myself as having time to get out to Gallup or Farmington to try to contract a case.  Syphilis appears to be the most romantically appealing out there.  Seems there are almost as many secondary cases floating around as there are primary cases.  Which means there are plenty of New Mexicans who have the good sense to hang on tight to it, once they’ve got it, and not take any chances on losing it by going to some sawbones who might be able to rob us of it.

Makes sense.

If a person goes to all the trouble and risk to hang around the places you have to go in order to pick that stuff up, most likely you’re better off keeping the one you’ve got, rather than having to go back and try to get it again because of some nosy interfering medico.

All the rest of you states, eat your hearts out.  Eat our dust.  New Mexico is going to be number one, same as we are on alcohol related automotive deaths.  You’ll never catch us.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Had a serious case of cabin fever recently.  This morning around five I went down to Albuquerque, joined friends and headed out west, almost to Arizona.

There’s a hidden spring about fifteen miles off the pavement, an adobe ruin where vigilantes from Quemado killed a horsethief in the 1880s I’d been threatening to take them all to for a long time.  We tromped around hills pecking on rocks… brought home a lot more weight in quartz, worked flint, etc, than we went out there with.  Found a couple of ancient ruin sites I’d missed on previous trips.

Long, tiring trip, but worth every minute of it.  The fever went down about sunset as we headed back east.

Jack

Next day’s post:

I thought I’d tell you a bit more about those undocumented ruins we found yesterday, and other matters.

The horse-thief dwelling was evidently located just beside one of the outlets of the several springs coming out of cliff wall made up of ancient river bed delta/sea shore deposition.  There’s cause to believe the vigilantes dug a hole and burned most of his possessions after killing him, not anticipating the erosion factor.

An arroyo now cuts through the ashes and debris exposing the remains of what he had that the vigilantes didn’t want, along with a lot of spent .45 Long Colt hulls, metal objects severely corroded because of the alkaline ash, and not a lot else unless he’s buried back in there further, which didn’t interest us enough to try to find out.

The ruin sites are a lot more interesting.  That hilltop has been intermittently occupied throughout the known history of human beings in the southwest.  One of the people with me found a partially finished axe head, the workmanship having all the traits of the Clovis, or Folsum-Midland period, while hundreds of potsherds scattered across the terrain ranged in age from the earliest pottery makers to late enough to put a glaze on the pots.  Clovis stone work is 10,000 to 12,000 years old and marks a time when men really demonstrated some surprising skills in the rock tool making profession.

But the site also had a lot of evidence of youngsters during the times since squatting here and there chipping away, learning to make stones look like arrowheads, scrapers and other tools.

The site’s been walked over by cattle for a century or more, so everything’s fairly well destroyed on the surface.  In a few years there’ll be nothing left to see there.  However, sites of that sort are protected by Federal Statutes against being bothered by anything but cattle, so that part’s okay.

You don’t want to get caught doing more than walking around over those kinds of sites unless they’re on private land.  The archeology religion demands they be left completely alone, except by cows and archies.  But there’s no money for scholarly diggings these days, and the archies figure they’ve learned about all they’re going to about our ancients, so legal destruction of the sites are left almost entirely to hooves.

However, it was an interesting, revealing, exuberant day full of fun and the energy of discovery.

Jack