Category Archives: New Mexico

The Price of Not Expecting the Unexpected

Posted on January 8, 2012 by | 15 comments

If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.

I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up.  I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.  

Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ‘way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].

If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting.  Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home.  Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it.  Years of hindsight would have been helpful.  Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years.  But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.

After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro.  Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned.  But I was on autopilot.

The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit.  There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.

I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself.  A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling.  When I finished I went to his window. 

 
“Anything I can do to help you?”

The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local.  “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”

“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour?   The speed limit’s 55.  If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”

“What gumment agency you working for going that fast?  I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”

I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning. 

I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna.  The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.

I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck.  I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again.  A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.

Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call. 

I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me.  I don’t recall why I did this precisely.  I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point.  Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago.  Even the old outhouse was still standing.
 
I drove on, taking my time now.  But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting.  He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him.  So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
 

But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again.  He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar.  He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again.  But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again. 

I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso.  I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t.  So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running.  I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.

I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway.   By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed.  I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this. 

I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight. 

“Why are you following me?”

“Ahhhm not following yew.  I just stopped here to take me a rest.”

“You waited back there at the intersection.  You waited again in Lincoln.  Why are you following me?”

“I’m not follering yew.  But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”  And so on.

“I’m warning you.  Don’t follow me anymore.”  I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.


 
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso.  He wanted me to know he had a fix on me. 


 I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing. 

It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour.  As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for  something. 

I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there.  There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.

A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe.  When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know?  Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”

He thought about it frowning.  “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that.  I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you.  They’d have asked me.”  Then he looked me in the eye.  “You need to be careful about that speeding, though.  If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked.  They’ll fire you.”

What began that day lasted almost a decade.  Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years. 

But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me.  I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.

Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.

Old Jules

 

15 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Music, New Mexico, NM, Portales, Relationships, Solitude, Survival, Y2K

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The Strangeness – Background Context of Unsolved Homicides

Posted on January 7, 2012 by | 12 comments

By the time this was published in 1999, I was no longer going up that particular mountain.  I was busy on my Y2K land and dwelling preparations about 50 miles northeast of Quemado.

But this will give you an idea of the general local psychological environment in the area, both while I was working the mountain and [it turned out] later, while I was doing Y2K.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/nov/20/news/mn-36275

Unsolved Slayings Have Small N.M. Town Living in Fear

Crime: With seven people killed since 1996, residents are openly packing heat. Authorities see no connections among the deaths.

November 20, 1999|PAUL DUGGAN | THE WASHINGTON POST QUEMADO, N.M.

— There’s not much to the town. You come upon it in the vast, yellow-brown emptiness of southern New Mexico’s high desert grassland. It’s mainly just a strip of old storefronts on Highway 60, with some dusty side streets.

In a 40-mile radius of Quemado you might find 500 people, about half of them ranchers living like pioneers on the plains and in the foothills, miles from any neighbor. The rest live in town, in trailer homes and faded stucco bungalows amid the tumbleweeds and pinon trees.

The sheriff, Cliff Snyder, said it used to be a peaceful place in its lonesome way, before all the killings. Now there’s fear in the air, like a foul wind.

Who murdered Gary and Judy Wilson? It’s a mystery. They disappeared in November 1995 and turned up eight months later, so many bones in the woods. Who shoved Gilbert Stark into a 20-foot well and closed the cover in ’96? Who shot the elderly Clark couple and their daughter in ’97? Who put a bullet in the heart of James Carroll, 59, as he stood in his corral just north of town one autumn day last year? The sheriff doesn’t know.

He and the state police said they are convinced the cases aren’t related. They were random eruptions of murder where murder used to be rare, Snyder said. He has no clear explanation for it. All of the victims lived in the countryside around Quemado, about 125 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Before the Wilsons were slain, no one had died by another’s hand in this part of sprawling Catron County in nearly a decade.

And no one wants to be next. In a swath of America where gun control means hitting what you’re aiming at, a lot of folks are packing iron. They’re propping shotguns and rifles beside their beds; they’re driving with pistols on the front seats of their pickups. The sheriff said he doesn’t mind. This is the rural West, he pointed out, and guns are a heritage.

“We’re raised with them,” said Snyder, 42. He shrugged. “If I pull over a vehicle, I figure they’re armed, if they live in this county.”

At El Sarape Cafe on Quemado’s main street, Irene Jaramillo, 43, keeps a .22-caliber semiautomatic on a shelf near the griddle. One morning last week, Paul Strand, 67, who owns a horse ranch south of town, was sipping coffee in the cafe with his wife and holding forth on the subject of their firearms.

“I sleep with a Colt .45 under my pillow,” he said. “I have a loaded assault rifle beside the bed, a Russian-type, ready to roll. And a sawed-off shotgun next to that, loaded, legal, but just barely, in terms of the barrel length.”

Across the street, Carl Geng, who is in his 60s, runs the Allison Motel with his wife. They also own a ranch outside of town. Geng said he thinks he knows the culprit in one of the homicide cases. “I’ve got a .38,” he said, gesturing to his truck in the parking lot. “He sets one foot on my ranch, I’ll blow his head off.”

The sheriff said he and the state police think most or all of the victims were murdered by acquaintances with whom they had personal disputes. As for suspects, investigators have only “theories,” he said.

It’s a crime in New Mexico to carry a concealed loaded weapon in a public place but legal for anyone 21 or older to carry one openly, no permit necessary. James Clark, a Vietnam veteran, started packing two handguns after his parents, William Clark, 84, and Pearl Clark, 74, were slain in 1997 along with his sister, Sharron Hutson, 44. Folks in Quemado are used to seeing him in town with a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker on his right hip and a .40-caliber semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.

“Which is fine,” said Irene Jaramillo’s husband, Jimmy, who is one of Snyder’s deputies. “I told him, ‘As long as I can see them.’ “

James Clark and his wife, Elaine, 42, now live in the remote trailer home where the elderly couple was murdered. Elaine Clark, who prefers a lighter-weight .35-caliber, sat in the kitchen one day last week with her husband’s heavy semiautomatic on the table in front of her. There was a loaded hunting rifle propped against the freezer by her left hand.

“We always used to brag that it was like the Old West, in the way that your house was never locked,” she said. “Someone passing by, if you were gone, they could come in and get something to eat. But now it’s more like the Old West the way you’re always on guard. You don’t walk up to my house unless I know you’re coming . . . or you could darn well get shot.”

Catron County, with just 3,000 residents, covers almost 7,000 square miles. It’s bigger than Connecticut. Snyder, who was a deputy when the seven homicides occurred, was elected sheriff last year. He has an undersheriff and four deputies, including Jaramillo, who patrols the northern half of the county around Quemado. Half a dozen state troopers also work in the county. But with such a vast area to cover, it sometimes takes an hour or more to reach the scene of an emergency.

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Posted in 1990's, New Mexico, NM, Survival

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Cold Mystery, Fevered Romance and Lost Gold

Posted on January 7, 2012 by | 33 comments

A burned out cabin ruin with an aspen tree growing out of the inside, bear claw marks 12 feet up, 3 hand forged nails, a longtom sluicebox axed out of a 3 foot diameter log, a spring 75 feet above the sluice, an arrastra below. 

A mysterious map chiseled on the face of a 300 pound rock surface depicting the exact layout of the canyon, the cabin, the waterfall, all so accurately depicted the person had to have scrutinized the layout from the mountaintop, then scratched it on this stone 600 vertical feet below and half a mile away.  The rock was carefully placed on the canyon wall above eye-level so it was easily seen, but only by someone looking up.

I’m guessing the date must have been spring, 1995.  I’d moved my search to the mountain I described above and was performing a systematic search of  the canyon from the discharge to the mountain crest.  I’d filed two mining claims at the location of the cabin and sluicebox pictured in the earlier post, and downstream.  I hadn’t yet found the map rock, and I was spending every moment I could squeeze between job duties, romantic obligations and financial constraints camped on that mountain.

I headed down there planning on spending a week, but on the road the Mitzubishi Montero sprung a water hose a few miles outside of Grants.  It was raining while I mucked under the hood, taping the hose and getting enough coolant in it to drive it to a parts house in Grants, where I installed it in the rain.  I was chilled and soaked as I drove south from Grants, but in too much of a hurry now to change clothes.

By the time I arrived at my usual camp site I was running a high fever and feeling my breathing becoming hard labor.  I hastily dragged a tarp out of the truck,  put my sleeping bag under it and got inside, hoping I’d shake off what I was afraid was coming.  I’d had pneumonia enough times this lifetime to recognize the onset.

The next morning found me weak, fever skylining, knowing I’d better try to get out of there while I still could.  I threw some brush over my gear because I was too weak to reload it onto the truck, and started down the mountain.  My vision was blurred and I was hallucinating, barely able to stay on the two-track.  When I reached the US Forest Service road a line of fenceposts ahead briefly became a line of riflemen aiming at me.

I remember nothing of the trip after that until I found myself at the home of my lady friend in Albuquerque, wrapped in a blanket on the floor of her downstairs because I wasn’t strong enough to climb them, burning with fever, shaking with chills.  She, nursing me with herbs and leftover antibiotics from her medicine cabinet.

“There are some people missing out there where your claims are.”  She was sipping coffee at the table, looking over the paper at me.  “A man and his wife.  The State has people out searching for them.”  She shook her head.  “They must have been right near where you were.”

The couple lived across a basin at the base of the mountain.  I could probably see their dwelling through binoculars from the mountaintop.  They were woodcutters, but I’d never encountered them, to my knowledge. 

As I recovered in Albuquerque the search died away.  The local sheriff announced the couple had probably just abandoned their house and gone somewhere else.  They were nobody, outsiders.  He refused to treat their vanishing act as a possible crime, didn’t allow the State Police to investigate their home.  But the time on the floor in Albuquerque weak as a kitten, tended hand and foot is one of those tender, grateful memories of my years with the lady.

Over the next several months I continued, sometimes in company with Keith, sometimes with other friends, sometimes alone, exploring, sampling, puzzling over what I was finding there.  Then, the first day of elk season that fall I encountered two elk hunters with their truck stuck in a stream bed.  When I finished towing them out, we introduced ourselves.

“Did you hear about those bodies they found in the canyon over there?”  He gestured to the mountain indicating a canyone one over from mine, plus one.   Renfro Canyon on the rock map sketch.  Less than a mile from my claims.  “A bear dug them up.  They were buried in an Indian ruin and a hunter found them this morning.”

The bodies turned out to be the people who’d turned up missing while I was giving myself pneumonia.  I felt reasonably confident the police would be contacting me with questions about whether I’d seen anything, because I was probably the only person on the mountain besides the victims and the murderers at the time it happened.

The Bureau I worked for, Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] was part of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, though a step-child and somewhat separate.  I went to my Bureau Chief and explained what had happened, asked whether he thought I should go over to the State copshop and volunteer to talk to them about it.

“Man, I wouldn’t touch that.  Let them come to you.  You might be the best suspect they’ve got.”  A lawyer friend gave me the same advice, informally.

So I kept quiet and waited, and they never came.  I kept working that mountain, homicides and multiple-homicides continued to happen over the next couple of years remaining unsolved and generally thought to be uninvestigated, and the entire county became a quagmire of paranoia.  Everyone carrying firearms, nobody trusting anyone.

Meanwhile, the mountain echoed the weirdness and pressure the county was experiencing.  Somewhere during that time began the strangest chain of events and experiences of my entire life.

Which I might describe in a later blog or series of blog posts.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting, Solitude, Survival

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Christmas Eve for a Hermit and Cats in a Mountain Village

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 20 comments

I wrote this several years ago in a previous lifetime before Social Security kicked in when I was trying to make a living playing blackjack.

Casino’s Shut Down for Christmas!

Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn’t get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.

Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn’t have expected of them.

Fact is, all those gamblers who aren’t aware that blackjack’s a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway.  Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.

So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia.  Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernalillo and picked up three bean burritos and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.

Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas…. looked as though something awful had happened here….. flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road.  Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road.  I rolled down my window, “Accident?”

“No.  Most of the roads are shut down.  People in groups in the middle of the roads singing carols.  You’ll have to take this road.  Be careful.”

Happened ‘this road’ was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.

I don’t so much mind people singing carols.  I think it’s kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they’re singing.

On the other hand, I honestly don’t want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.

I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who’s president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die.  I’ll know I’ve lived right, at least one period of my life.

Anyway readers, if you’re reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.

But if you don’t have somewhere else to be, don’t have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice.  Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.

If you don’t have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck.  As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,

You got me, babe.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, America, Country Life, Gambling, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM

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