Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I trekked up to Gale’s yesterday for a while to talk wind and see whether his face had gotten over the baboon butt similarity it had the previous week. He had a good photo of it during the worst stage I begged him to allow me to post for you, but his refusal didn’t appear to leave it open for discussion.
But he told me about a project I’m feeling uppidy about working on during the year. This place has been overgrazed, probably since the invention of barbed wire, and it shows. I’ve thought from the time I arrived here I’d like to do some cheap but time consuming erosion control, but it never had a priority.
Seems to keep his agricultural tax exemption on the land, though, Gale could go back to having three cows fighting over every blade of grass in the traditional Texas fashion, or he could switch to wildlife management. He had a lady from Texas Parks and Wildlife out here going over the place with him the other day helping devise a plan to submit to the County.
Assuming it gets accepted, I’m figuring something I learned in one of my professions, at least, will finally get put to some worthy use. Between now and my departure from here I’ll have rock and brush dams collecting water and soil into every channel on the place.
I truly love erosion control, but it had slipped my mind how much. I hate to admit the urge to dance naked in the meadow celebrating.
It must have been an Eve, Christmas or New Year, 1996 or 1997. Keith and I, or Mel and I were partnered that trip and the cold, or the mud drove us into town. We got a room in the motel you see just beyond the cafe with the chuckwagon on the roof. Quemado was dead, every business in town shut down except the bar underneath the yellow sign on the right side of the picture.
Sometime after dark we wandered across the highway to the bar. A couple of pickups were parked in front and we hoped there’d be a hamburger and beer to be had. At least we figured it would be warmer than the motel room.
We stepped up to the bar and examined the half-dozen other customers through the smoke as we pulled off our coats. Behind the bar a guy probably named Bad Teeth was grinning, looking us over. Same as everyone else in there, all of whom appeared to be ten-generations of first cousins inter-married to Bad Teeth’s ancestors.
“Any chance of getting something to eat?” The faint odor of hamburgers lingered in the background.
Bad Teeth just grinned and looked past me at the badasses huddled over one of the tables. “You won’t be here that long.”
“Long enough for a beer, anyway.” My partner was showing signs of irritation.
“Only certain kinds of people come in here.” My eyes followed where Bad Teeth was pointing at the cluster of bullet holes in the ceiling. “Nobody else stays long.”
But my partner, Mister Wiseass, wasn’t looking at the ceiling. He was letting his gaze size up all the drinkers, them doing the same to us. “Gay bar in Quemado?” He poked me in the ribs with his elbow, laughing. “He’s right. If anyplace else was open we ought to go there.”
The door was only a few steps away. I grabbed his arm and headed for it. “Let’s go there anyway. The smoke’s stuffing up my sinuses.” I suppose we’d have just been too much trouble. Nobody followed us out to the street.
Or maybe it really was a gay bar. I’m happy enough not knowing.
Bad judgement was driving to Quemado instead of another 80 miles to Springerville, AZ, if we wanted something as complicated as a hamburger. Just saying.
When Ned Sublette used to sing the song linked below at a honkytonk out on the West Mesa in Albuquerque he always got out alive. Maybe all those cowboys were just glad someone finally said it.
Old Jules
Ned Sublette: Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other:
A legendary man in the Quemado/Reserve area nicknamed ‘Squirrelly’ Armijo had a good working claim down near Queen’s Head in the Gallos near Apache Creek in the 1940s through the 1960s. Maybe that’s where he came across a skeleton, and probably just figured he might as well take it home, so he put it in his truck.
Driving up those winding mountain roads he lost control of the truck and rolled it. Squirrelly was thrown clear and the truck caught fire. He must have been out of his head, maybe with a concussion, because he evidently wandered into the mountains in a daze.
The police arrived and found the burned out truck with a skeleton inside and assumed because the truck belonged to him the remains were Squirrelly’s. He was pronounced dead, an expensive funeral held, and he was buried.
Twelve days later Squirrelly wandered out of the woods several miles away, which was a source of, first joy and awe, then suspicion. Initially it was thought he’d killed the person the skeleton belonged to. Then the lawsuits began, the Armijo family and the Funeral home arguing heatedly about who owed money to whom for burying some anonymous skeleton.
The story is so well-known it was used in a book about forensic pathology in New Mexico during the 1990s, the forensic pathologist explaining such a thing could never happen these more enlightened times. Journey in Forensic Anthropology, Stanley Rhine, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1998. Author Rhine elected to change Squirrelly’s surname to Aramando to avoid any sort of civil action. The Armijo family’s been herding sheep in that country since the time there was nobody out there but them and Mimbres Apaches. A lot of them are still there.
“A Premature Funeral
“Bones and Fire “On June 4, 1959, Forest Service lookouts reported smoke rising from what was assumed to be a small forest fire just east of the Arizona state line, among the 8,000-feet peaks of the San Francisco Mountains of southwestern New Mexico. A firefighting crew dispatched to the scene discovered no forest fire, but an automobile burning furiously on the side of a gravel forest road. Dousing the flames, they found a mass of burned flesh, a skull, some other bones, and some teeth resting inside the burned-out hulk.
“The car was found to belong to a Mr. Armando, well known in the lightly populated region. His fiery demise prompted the organization of a six-person coroner’s inquest in Catron County. According to former Catron County Sheriff and now Washoe County ( Nevada) Coroner Vernon McCarty, the “six responsible citizens” required by 1950s New Mexico law were most easily found by the justices of the peace at a local bar.
“McCarty observed that an insufficiency of able-bodied citizens could be remedied either by visiting several such spots or by prolonging the official quest at one of them for as long as it took to empanel the necessary six people.
“The resulting coroner’s jury in this case was made up of ranchers, Forest Service firefighters, two bartenders, and a service station attendant. It concluded that the remains were “badly burned and charred beyond positive identification,” according to the Albuquerque Journal for June 17, 1960. Nonetheless, an identification was made by Armando’s two brothers-in-law and the district attorney, apparently functioning in his multiple roles of death investigator and skeletal “expert.” That it was Armando was attested to the by the fact that the human skull was accompanied by some impressively large upper incisors. These prominent choppers had . . .”
Probably Squirrelly never paused to wonder about any moral or ethical issues when he put that skeleton into his truck. He just did it absent-mindedly the way any of us might. Probably somewhat as Mel did on Gobblers Knob:
I suppose the Squirrelly story came to mind because it’s a synopsis of the possibilities carried to the ultimate extreme, accompanied by the fact I recently had an email from his great-nephew wanting to ask some questions about my mention of his Queenshead claim in my lost gold mine book.
Old Jules, if someone had a mirror from 40+ years ago, could something be gathered from its backing?
Old Jules replies: The pastametric pressure of all that stored history would almost certainly explode backward opening a hole into a parallel universe carrying with it the identities and souls of everyone who ever looked into the mirror. Read more …..
Almost no one here is qualified to tell you how not to blow yourself up, but one of our favorite members and one of the Group’s founders, Art Corbitt, would rail about ammonia in lraches being explosive. Keyword fulminate.
Cyanide tailings are the wirst offenders, so one really has to process that out before extraction.
Geology degrees I am told could have morr chemistry and mechanical engineering, so this may be normal for the industry.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Socorro, New Mexico, isn’t long on good restaurants. But during the several years I lived there, I had a favorite restaurant, and a favorite menu item. The place was owned and operated by an elderly Chinese man with whom I was on friendly, bantering terms.
This lasted until the discovery that MSG in food causes my blood pressure to skyrocket. A few times per week I’d sit myself down, they’d bring the usual, and a couple of hours later my pulse would be visible almost anywhere a blood vessel showed. This was accompanied by a pounding in my head, maybe audible, maybe only seemingly so.
After I figured out the connection between my favorite food item and the blood pressure problem I attempted to discuss it with the owner, though we had a language barrier. The result was an outburst of anger and indignation. I didn’t know yet the MSG was the cause. Just that particular menu item.
I solved the problem by eating elsewhere, but eventually learned that Chinese restaurants, particularly, lean heavily on adding MSG to their foods, and that a surprisingly large number of people have reactions to it similar to mine.
I also began watching the labels on food I bought to prepare at home. What I discovered was that a person sensitive to MSG had best carry a magnifying glass in his pocket and read those labels carefully. Almost everything a person might buy in a can is loaded with it, but especially soups and soup-bases. If a label slips past and gets inside the vehicle it notifies the owner by the rods knocking.
But I was going to say, I love oriental food, and I was in town yesterday, so I clenched my teeth and decided it was a day for risk-taking. There’s an Oriental buffet I’d never tried, so I pulled in. I tried asking whether they had MSG in their food, but it was clear she didn’t understand me. So I went root hog or die.
The food was mediocre, but I didn’t die. I took a couple of extra blood pressure pills when the pounding in my head started, and by the time I got home my blood pressure was so low I didn’t have any business being alive.
I found myself wondering why the FDA cops who faint and revive themselves over one-in-a-billion risks to human health otherwise haven’t jumped on this like ugly on a monkey.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read. I wasn’t going to make another post for today, but I thought I’d better in case some of you haven’t been visiting spaceweather.com to keep current on news events.
As you can see, Old Sol has a few magnetic field issues he’s trying to work through. Astrophysicists and Mayan priests are trying their best to walk him through the tough spots and get him back on track.
You’ve also probably been having nagging questions about what else is going on in the solar system. Nothing to get excited about though. Uranus and Saturn are standing off opposite one another with their seasonal spin axis configurations and their ‘not fully understood’ offset magnetic fields whirling around firing something a bit strange at one another and Old Sol just found himself downrange. No big deal. It will pass.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably also been asking yourself what the Galilean moons are up to today. As you can see, Europa and Ganymede are somewhat lined up down-orbit, Io’s sort of off to the side and Callisto’s way-to-hell-and-gone back the other side of Jupiter.
Other than that, there’s not much going on. I hope this helps you through the day.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
After I finished my morning download ritual this morning and prepared to go outdoors to bring up Old Sol and turn out the chickens I checked Ask Old Jules Biggest Regret?to see which of my brainstorms of the past she’s picked for the day. I take a lot of things about myself for granted and occasionally one of my answers rattles me a bit, gets me asking questions about me and what makes me tick. This morning is one of those.
Sitting out there under the tree I found myself asking, “What in the dickens is wrong with me that I feel so content and can’t come up with anything to regret? It ain’t as though I haven’t gone the last mile to assure myself of plenty any sane person would prefer to be otherwise.”
I can’t guess how many people live the way I do, close to the cuff, physically having to force myself to maintain a comfort range that includes whatever the Universe tossed my way. Probably a lot do in the poorer countries, but likely not too many within the boundaries of the US. But when I see some evidence of them, I generally find myself on the edge of feeling sorry for them.
But meanwhile, I’m about as content, almost euphoric about my own life most of the time as a person could be. Yeah, there are nagging things need doing, need changing, forever being pushed forward in time for one reason or another because of limited options. But they whisper from the wings and mostly I don’t pay them any mind.
“Would I like, or trust someone like me if I came across him?” That’s what I finally found myself asking. And the answer’s a bit confusing to me. “No,” I’m forced to admit, “I probably wouldn’t. How the hell could you trust someone like that? “
“So, do you want to change it?”
“I’d hate to. I’m more-or-less fond of being happy. But it might be better to cultivate some regrets, some yank-your-heart-out-things I wish I’d done differently. This satisfaction thing can be taken too far.”
Cultivating regrets, yearnings, deep feelings of loss might just be what it takes to live a life of fulfillment. It would open the door to finding things to be scared of, frightened they’d happen. Angry because they did, or didn’t.
If it hadn’t been for an old friend who was a pilot telling me I could fly an airplane as cheaply as I could spend an hour on the range practicing with a large-bore pistol every week, I’d probably never have thought of doing it. But something about the idea grabbed me.
I went out to the Killeen, Texas airport and took a few lessons to find out whether flying was one of the adventures I wanted to give myself this lifetime. Turned out there was no question in the question.
But being a man of ideas, not much time passed before I decided I could buy an old aircraft and save a lot of the cost of renting one while I learned. A 1947 Cessna was sitting on the strip with a for sale sign on it, that one at the top of the post, so I bought it.
But finding an instructor to teach me to fly a taildragger cut down a lot of my options. I ended up with a guy named John Rynertson, who introduced himself by saying he was one of the best pilots around. He owned a Cessna 120, and John taught me enough to get me started.
But we had a falling out, him not soloing me in a timely manner, me thinking he wasn’t doing so because he wanted to maximize the trainer fees. One day we landed, me thinking this was the day of the solo, and he sneered I wasn’t ready yet. We were standing by the airplane, so I climbed inside, started the engine and taxied down to the end of the runway, gave myself my first solo flight, illegal.
John and I didn’t have much truck with one another after that. I flew that old Cessna without having a ticket allowing me to do it, while he flew his C120 up one day and pulled the wings off it in a snap-roll, killing himself exactly the way a man ought to do if he’s going to pull the wings off a Cessna.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d taken off downwind for the first time. I couldn’t find another instructor, and I was relocating to another town at the time, where nobody knew me. So for several years I flew that Cessna, 500+ hours flying time, as though I was entirely legal. Flew out to New Mexico, over to Savanna, Georgia, sleeping under the wing along the way, with no license to pilot an aircraft.
But eventually word got around the Georgetown Municipal Airport and someone cautioned me the FBO was going to rat me out to the FAA. I decided it was time to complete my training. Found an old outlaw pilot to sign me off and made an appointment with the FAA examiner in Austin.
When he looked at my log and saw I had 500 hours he shook his head a longish time. “I’ve been checking out pilots for thirty years. Before you the one with the most flying hours I’d ever seen was a guy with 100 hours, and he almost killed me during the check ride. Couldn’t fly an airplane.”
I grinned at him. “You care to watch me take it around the patch a few times before we do the check ride? I’ll get the numbers every time around and turn off by the first taxi way.”
We did the check ride and I flew back to Georgetown legal, for the first time.
Even for people who lived it, the past squirms around and tries to avoid close examination of how things looked going in, compared to how things appeared later.
It’s not easy for the mind to put itself into a time when Vietnam wasn’t a name anyone would recognize. But in 1962 when all the enlisted men in my unit in Massachusetts were required to attend counter-insurgency training the first session required an explanation: “Vietnam is Indochina. Next to Laos.”
Everyone had vivid recollections of a ‘brink of war’ incident in Laos a short while earlier. And Everyone remembered the daily news reports from a few years earlier of the French getting themselves soundly booted out of French Indochina.
Counter-insurgency training turned out to be the pointee-heads in the US Army feeling around for soldiers interested in one of two particular types of duty. ‘Special Forces’ units were being organized, mainly for people who’d already gone through Airborne and Ranger training. Some were already serving in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. “Sneaky Petes” they were dubbed.
The other type was the Military Advisory Group. MAG. Regular troops stationed in remote areas with Republic of Vietnam units to provide advice, which we Americans were already good at giving a lot of without following it ourselves.
We went through the training, but nobody from my unit volunteered for either of those duties. But within a couple of months three of us who’d attended the training were levied for overseas, to Military Advisory Groups in Vietnam. May, or June, 1963, we’d arrive there.
In those early days a soldier, even an enlisted one, had a number of options regarding assignments, despite the initial levies, if he played his cards right. Sitting down with a friendly Sargeant-Major early in the game and asking advice was the first step.
Vietnam and MAG duty was considered a ‘hardship’ tour, as was Korea, and at that time, Alaska. It wasn’t combat duty. It was just one of the particularly lousy places a troop could be sent in the service of Queen Jacqueline Kennedy.
“It’s a tough call.” Sargeant-Major Griggs had served all over the Pacific during WWII and afterward. “Korea’s colder than hell in the winter. It’s the reason we call it ‘Frozen Chosen’.” He held up his hand showing me the finger he’d had shot off while he watched the Chinese coming across the Yalu River during the Korean War.
“But unless you want to take a chance on getting Malaria, you might be better off in Korea. All that crap down in the South Pacific is a mosquito hell. If you’d like me to I can call the Sargeant-Major of the Army in the Pentagon and see if we can get you a tour in Korea instead of Indochina.”
So, after kicking it around a while, I asked him to make his call and find me an assignment in Korea. May, 1963, I found myself on the USNS Sultan with around 2000 other GIs headed for Frozen Chosen.
We had a wild old time on the Sultan. The cruise was a long one because every few hours they’d shut down the engines and lower some kind of sensor to the ocean bottom as part of an ongoing undersea research project. The sea was generally calm, almost glass most of the way, porpoise and flying fish cutting the surface, sometimes banging themselves against the side of the ship.
Below-decks fortunes by enlisted-man standards were lost and won in 24/7 poker, gin, and rummy games. So long as there was no fighting nobody cared what went on down there.
We reached Pearl Harbor and everyone got shore leave for a few hours, preceded by dire warnings about HASP. Hawaii Armed Services Police. “Don’t mess with them. Do what they say or you’ll end up in the stockade or back here on a stretcher.” But 2000 GIs with cabin-fever were too many even for the HASP to keep in line. “Be back on board by midnight. Anyone who isn’t checked in here at midnight is going to wave us goodbye from the stockade.”
Hotel Street briefly had all the usual suspects of merchant mariners, US Navy, and enough wild-assed drunk youngsters off the Sultan to satisfy the most discerning needs of the community. At 11:30 I was standing in line at a tattoo parlor waiting to get a tattoo on a dare. The guy in front of me was getting a cherry tattoo with the words, “Here’s mine! Where’s yours?”
As the artist finished up someone shouted, “We’ve got to get back to the ship. We’ll be lucky if we make it!”
Luckyluckyluckylucky. Back on board as everyone began sobering up the head was full of GIs trying to wash off tattoos. One guy had “In Memory of My Mother” with a rose vine wrapping itself around a tombstone on his bicep. “She ain’t even dead. What the hell did I do that for?”
More endless days at sea, a brief stop in Japan for half-dozen of us toughees to get the socks whipped off us outside a bar by three Australian Merchant Mariners, and on to Inchon.
13 months later the trip home on the USNS Breckinridge was a different matter entirely. The sea was rough, pervasive odor of vomit on all decks. Discipline severe, pecker checks every few days to ferret out the multitude of VD cases. I’ve sometimes thought those troop-ship pecker-checkers might have found the sorriest job a human being could have. Imagine hitting the floor in the morning knowing you’re about to have to watch 2000 of those things milked down before breakfast.
And everyone suddenly knew exactly where Vietnam was. Rumor had it anyone who was going stateside reassignment would be going there in a few months.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this cold morning.
The adventurers are getting old and long in the tooth. I’ve written about this in the past a number of times, but a few days ago I got an email that got me thinking about it again:
Hi J, I hope this finds you well….cats too.
Age 72. Raised in northern Wyoming. Made my living mostly in electronics and related technology. Army vet.
I have been obsessed with that lost gold mine since 1974 and many years ago received a copy of your CD via a guy I think you know….If you had ever watched him shovel.
Bought your book several years ago. Lots of good stuff but editing sucked on the CD.. Also, someone you might know, Bob Gordon of Dallas went on a trip with us once to the Mangus Mt. area (probably in the early ’80’s) and I think I gave him his first copy of Allens and Byerts. Excuse me, but I am currently too many margaritas along right now and need to cut this short. I am convinced I have a lot of the story figured out….Yeah, like I’m alone. But seriously.
I would like to chat with you if only email, Fergy
I replied to his email saying I’d be willing to discuss it by email. Back during the day I spent enough hours on the telephone hearing where it was to break me of any desire to ever do that again. But there’s always a chance someone will come along and add the piece to finish out the puzzle.
When his reply elaborating on his ponderings arrived, he didn’t clear anything up, but it did get me thinking about some things.
Over the years those phone calls and emails have gradually squeezed down to men of advancing age. Most of us are getting so old we’re not likely to tromp up high mountains anymore. And we’re dying off. Of the hundreds of letters and phone calls I got over the years, every one of the originators had solved the mystery, or was near unto solving it. As I always was. Heck, as I still am, though I don’t think about it much anymore.
During the 20th Century thousands of men tried to find that lost mine, as did a similar number during the 19th Century. There was even a movie made about it in the late 1960s.
Sprawling frontier adventure with Gregory Peck as a sheriff who is given a map, said to show the location of a large cache of gold hidden in a valley, and soon finds he’s the target of every fortune hunter in the West. The star-laden cast also includes Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Julie Newmar, Lee J. Cobb, Edward G. Robinson. 123 min. Standard; Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital stereo; Subtitles: English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai; biographies; theatrical trailers.
But as the 20th Century wound down something interesting happened. There were no new legions of youngsters replacing the old ones, researching, reading, poring over maps and trekking into remote canyons. Something was gone, and it’s over.
Old Fergy, Keith and I, a few others are still out there thinking about it, but what we are and what we were is something modern humanity has left behind without noticing it’s done so. I don’t know what that means, but I’m not overjoyed about it. My preferred view of humanity and youth is going to require some adjustment.
Old Jules
Previous posts referring to the lost gold mine search:
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
![Mackenna's Gold [DVD]](https://i0.wp.com/www.moviesunlimited.com/boxcovers/100_Wide/D17790.jpg)
So Far From Heaven 
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