Category Archives: NM

Surveillance Weirdness

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 8 comments

Saturday October 28, 2006  

 

This brave new century offers a lot of interesting twists and turns for the observant.  I was reading a blog this morning, someone ruminating over a friend request he’d gotten from someone, maybe in India.

I’d gotten a similar request yesterday, so it caused me to consider whether blogs aren’t being used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, both here and abroad, to find folks with particular sets of viewpoints.

For instance, I came across a blog the other day posted by a person who called himself something like ‘dope-smuggler’.  Hmmm, thinks I, is this for real?  The blog entries and photos all involved various aspects of the use of controlled substances.

Suppose I worked for DEA, I went on thinking.  Would I throw out a trot-line or two searching for folks who’d like to admit on blogs that they were felons?  I think I might.

Or suppose I worked for Mossad  (I think that’s the right spelling), the Israeli intelligence agency.  Would I like to know as many names and locations of people who held Nazi-like viewpoints?  Would I be equally interested in folks who rabidly approve of anything Israel might do?  Probably.

And so on.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about what’s happened with surveillance technology and general nosiness, both of government and individuals.

The technology and availability of spying equipment with amazing capabilities and invisibility at a shockingly low price is out there for anyone.

At least it was shocking and amazing to me when I found myself moved to investigate the matter.

One day I’d been sitting at a blackjack table for about twelve hours, and when I got to my car in the parking lot my cell-phone rang.  I answered and was treated to hearing a long playback of my conversations at the game-table several hours earlier.  I thought back and recalled a guy who sat next to me for a while wearing an unusual fanny-pack he kept messing with, so I figured it was him.

But his motive for doing such a thing was a mystery, and how he happened to know my cell-phone number was one, as well.

That happened several times, the casino playback thing, but I only saw that particular person once, and when he took the chair next to me I asked him if he had his equipment with him.  “Oh yeah,” he answered with a laugh.  “I always carry everything with me.”  And left the table.

During the same time-period Jeanne was in New Mexico.  We were in the living room, me standing, her sitting across the room, having a conversation.  The land-line phone rang and I answered.  Similarly to the casino experience, I had a conversation played back to me, but this time it was the conversation Jeanne and I’d just had within the past five minutes.

Someone obviously had the capability to listen to what was said in my home.  But what’s intriguing to me is that they wanted me to KNOW they had that capability.

That happened a couple more times and I could never see any signs around the house of any microphone/camera, but it was obviously here.  From then until now I’ve gotten spam emails I don’t open, but with subject lines referring to something or other that’s happened in my life, said or done, recently.

Which confirms for me that I am one helluva interesting guy.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would put that kind of effort, energy and expense into my life, but I do try to provide with them with some amusement in various ways.

Sometimes I figure it’s the rich neighbor kid, sometimes I think it’s the neighbor across the street next-door to my buddy, Wes, who’s generally known to be a negative busybody.  But that doesn’t quite fit the casino incidents.

I haven’t a clue. 

But after the first phone-at-home incident Jeanne and I went to a surveillance store and looked over what was out there on the open market.  After seeing it, I decided we live in a time when it’s useless to think there are any secrets, any privacy, if anyone’s determined enough to want to know, sick enough to be willing to put out a few bucks and plant a device.

Flattering, though, knowing that despite the fact I don’t talk to anyone but the cats these days unless I’m on the phone, I’m still one hell of an interesting feller.

Golly.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Gambling, Human Behavior, Internet, New Mexico, NM, Surveillance, Uncategorized

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Mel King

Posted on April 30, 2012 by | 7 comments

The hoopla about the dead cop in Tijeras got me thinking about my old friend, Mel King, and another dead cop just down the road from this one in Mountainair, New Mexico, in 1987. 

That one changed Mel’s life in a multitude of ways, for all the remainder of it.  I posted this on another blog December 21, 2005, the anniversary of his death:

If I ever write another book, Mel King will have to occupy a few chapters of it.  I’ve mentioned him a few times on this blog, but mostly, I’ve not been able to write much about him at all.  I’m still digesting what happened to him.

On one of the threads recently the discussion drifted to the War on Drugs.  I suppose if I’d never met Mel I probably wouldn’t have thought much about that issue, would never have bothered to form an opinion about it.

But in many ways, Mel was a product of that war, from the time it began during the Reagan Administration, he was one of the adversaries.  It changed him from a small-time marijuana growing woods-vet to a wealthy man.  When the ‘war’ drove the price of jade sky-high he was approached by a number of ranchers in the area, asked to teach them how to grow weed in quantity.  He became their broker, as well as a grower.

The War on Drugs involved Mel in a major felony arrest, confiscation of much of his property, caused the mysterious death of a police officer, got Mel targeted repeatedly on America’s Most Wanted television series, and constant harassment by the FBI, State Police and local police for the remainder of his life.

They wanted to believe he killed a Mountainair, NM, police officer because it was the only construction of the facts that didn’t expose the rotten core of the War on Drugs.  If Mel didn’t kill that cop, another cop, or cops, almost certainly did.

Unacceptable.

Shortly before he was murdered in December, 2004, he showed me an anonymous, hand-written letter accusing him of killing the policeman and threatening to come balance it all.  The undertone and nuances of the letter suggested it was written by another member of the ‘policeman brotherhood’ who wanted to even things out, not because he knew the dead cop, but because a person doesn’t get suspected of killing a cop and get by with it.

It’s time I began writing down a few things about Mel King anyway.

Mel King was a major, financially successful marijuana grower and large-scale broker in New Mexico for many years.  During that time he was also a long-term heroin addict.  (He first became addicted to morphine while in the hospital recovering from wounds he got in the Marine Corps in Vietnam).

The only way Mel got away with what he was doing for so many years was by being considered a complete maniac, and by making certain the authorities got their fair share of the proceeds.  He drove around in a VW van with bullet-holes in the windshield from the inside.

When he got busted in 1987, with 150 pounds in his house it was because he made himself too big a nuisance to be allowed to go on.  He was attracting too much attention.

But even so, he never came to trial.  That 150 pounds of high-grade vanished from the evidence lockers.  The empty bags with his evidence numbers on them were found in the home of the policeman who made the initial stop during his arrest.  But someone murdered that policeman, probably for the marijuana, which is how they happened to find the empty evidence bags.

While he was in jail awaiting bail, Mel resolved to turn his life around.  He freed himself from heroin and when he was released he started a successful furniture business, did his best to stay clean for the remainder of his life.  Succeeded in being a trustworthy, successful man and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

During the years I knew him, Mel was a deeply spiritual man.  He was honest, guileless, hard-working, sincere, courageous, and in many ways, wise.  We prospected a lot of canyons together, talked of many things over campfires listening to the wind in the pines.  He was also my partner during Y2K.

Mel and I disagreed on many things, but he believed, as I do, that he knew what happens to a man when he dies.  He never feared death and he never believed he’d done anything in this life to give him any reason to fear it.

I believe he was right.

Old Jules

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Liars, New Mexico, NM, Police, Politics, Uncategorized, War on Drugs

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The Skins We Change

Posted on April 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Note from Jeanne:
I’d like to thank those of you who commented on yesterday’s art work. I appreciate it. It has been a while since I’ve worked on large drawings (spending more time recently on jewelry) and just getting the feedback from you has been an encouragement to follow through on some other ideas I’ve had.  I’ll post a drawing here every once in a while and I’ll try to fix the categories so you’ll be able to find them all easily.
 Old Jules has been spending a good deal of his time cutting cedar and working on a huge erosion control project for Gale and Kay and hasn’t been online much. I’m sure he’ll update you at some point, but I have some posts  scheduled ahead since I don’t know exactly when that will be.  Thanks again for visiting, reading,  and commenting here, we both appreciate it very much. ~Jeanne

Previously posted June 7, 2005  (Placitas, New Mexico)

Out in the currently vacant chicken house I found a rattlesnake skin the other day.  It was in one of the layer boxes, so I don’t know how long it was there before I noticed it.  But it caused me to do some thinking about old brother rattler and what manner of nuisance he’s likely to make of himself if he’s still around.

I’m a man who holds rattlers in fairly high regard, but with a lot of respect for their clumsy bad manners when it comes to getting underfoot.  I usually try to keep enough of an eye on the places they like to show up unexpectedly to avoid offending them, and when I can corner them I’ll carry them off into some likely spot well away from humans.  Mostly they’re just minding their own business, trying to make a living the same as everyone else and don’t have the good sense to keep themselves out of harm’s way when humans are around.

This one looked a lot bigger last year (I’m assuming it’s the same one) when I lifted up a piece of plywood in a pile of debris in the corner of the lot and let out an involuntary yelp as I jumped backward in time to avoid his strike.  That skin shows him to be about two feet long, but I’d have called him an easy four from my brief look at him.

Rattlers are few at this altitude, and the one who slithered off into the cane leaving me to to decide whether to just breathe a while and let my pulse slow down, or take another tug at that plywood is almost certainly the previous owner of that skin in the chicken house.

Rattlers are lucky where it comes to changing their skins.  Happens year after year, but generally they don’t change much.  People aren’t so lucky in that regard.  We change our skins a lot of times in this life, and in a sense we leave the old ones lying around to be examined by everyone with an interest in who we are, making assumptions based on the old skin.

The other night I was down at the Range Cafe in Bernalillo …. met a bunch of old guys my age down there… retirees from the Los Alamos labs…. nuclear physicists who’ve shed their old skins and discovered they’ve let their lives slither off into the bush without doing a lot of things they wish they’d done.  Now they’re all off living other places, but decided to rendezvous down here for a hurrah into the mountains, looking for a lost gold mine.

I have a notion I’d have barely been able to tolerate those men in their younger days.  There’s a nuance about value judgements involving working on nuclear weapon development that would have influenced my thinking about them.

But these guys had left all that behind, shed that skin and now just wanting to slither off into the canyons, spend some time chewing the fat over a fire and stomp around looking for a lost mine and taking joy in being around one another again.

Strange place we’ve chosen to spend a reality, thinks I.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, New Mexico, NM, Senior Citizens, Wildlife

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The Great Escape

Posted on March 14, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Some happenings on this planet are so unlikely as to probably have transpired somewhere else, not here.  The scene below is a US Forestry Service outdoor toilet located at a mountain picnic area near the road running from Silver City to Reserve, New Mexico.  From a distance it looks innocuous enough.

I’d imagine that’s what the guy who was sitting on the john inside thought when something important happened.  In the bottom pic the unlikely is somewhat conveyed, though it doesn’t show how thoroughly the saturation of bullet holes targeting the piece of space he occupied.

The Great Escape

Call yourself a cop

I’ll call myself a robber

Corner me in an outhouse

Call in your backups

Talk to me through bullhorns

“Come out with your hands up

We know you’re in there

Watching flies strafe dust particles

In sunlight shafts

Savoring the odor and the old news

“Come out or we’ll come in after you”

Tension builds. No answer.

Anti-climax gun and badge hero makes a perfect icon

Of an eyeball peeking through a knot hole.

But I’m not scared.

I’ve escaped down through the hole

Into the real world

Old Jules Copyright©2003 NineLives Press

Most things in this life just aren’t worth worrying about.  The Universe has enough surprises and cards on the bottom of the deck to make the focus of the worry obsolete, or absolescent.

Old Jules

 

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Survival, YouTube

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Hero of a Forgotten Republic

Posted on March 4, 2012 by | 2 comments

Joe Stalin he might be
Fingers drumming green felt
Calculating his next purge
Fill an other gulag
With Ukrainians
Finger tapping
Focus on the down cards
Other players
Cardboard faces
Pasteboard numbers

Shouts past me
“Double down! Double down!”
Tired first base trucker
Parlaying his bets
To survive another hand or two
In this hell-camp.

Stalin tosses three greens
Past me to the trucker
From his four inch high
Stack of blacks and greens
“Double down! Double down!”

Astonished trucker pushes back
A weathered straw hat
Gazes at the green chips
The dealer upturned six
And his own sixteen
And doubles down.

On and on
Same vein
Stalin winks at me
At second base
Throwing chips past me
The driver promptly loses
But always looks now
To see what Stalin
Thinks is best
While downstream
In third base Stalin
Plays three hands all at once
Table max 200 on each place
And wins wins wins

Speznatz tattoos
On chubby knucklebacks
Stalin and I exchange small talk
And knowing smiles
Once advised
The other side of a line
I was on this side of
Did his final tour in Afghan
Got out first chance he could
When things got shaky
And the walls went down

Now he hauls produce
From east to west coast
Always stops here in-between
Shouting orders
“Double down! Double down!”
To the bloated capitalist pigs

Grumbles price of fuel
Trainloads of Chinese goods
And tyrant highway cops.

Old Jules
Copyright©NineLives Press

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Posted in 2000's, New Mexico, NM, Poetry, Politics, Senior Citizens

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Placitas – Impossible to Stay but Hard to Leave

Posted on March 3, 2012 by | 19 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

That adobe was built sometime in the 1930s as a turkey barn, then later converted to a dairy barn until the 1950s.  The walls were 18 inches thick, the floor a couple of inches of poured concrete, flat roof that held several thousand gallons of water when snow accumulated on the roof and the canales intended to drain the melt became solid ice.

No heat, rotten iron pipes for plumbing, and a back wall ready to collapse next snowfall.  The vigas holding up the roof, cracked timbers sagging with the weight of 75 winters.  Roof leaking into the adobe walls, eroding them beneath the vigas enough to cause me to arrange the couch I slept on in such a way there’d be something between me and it if the whole thing collapsed.

The rent was so high I couldn’t afford to pay it, eat, feed the cats and pay the utilities, even with the intermittent jobs I could pick up.  So they’d cut off the utilities every few months until I could raise the money to have them turned back on.

Maybe the best place I’ve ever lived.  Certainly the hardest.

That last winter living there I was shovelling snow off the roof, slipped and fell into the snow on the ground below and lay there unconscious some undetermined time before I awakened and struggled indoors.  Stove up something awful the rest of the winter.

But the cats loved the place and so did I, even as I watched the walls dissolve and the crack between the back room wall and ceiling widen.  The near-certainty the house wouldn’t last another winter gradually had me wondering whether I could find a bridge to live under without giving up the felines.

Gale had been suggesting for several years that I move here and live in this cabin on his place.  Another winter in Placitas, the cat necessities, and the vice grips of no-obvious-alternatives gradually persuaded me.

Gale and his brother drove up from Texas with a trailer, packed me up and hauled me, the cats, and all my worldly goods down here in one fell swoop.  A person can count himself lucky if he can have one friend in a lifetime like Gale’s been to me.

For several years here it’s been easy to not think about what comes next, to just savor being here and the absolute luxury of not being in the joy of Placitas, the adobe, the proximity of some bridge to live underneath.  We seemed a lot younger, that short time ago, Gale and me.  The cats, too, for that matter.

But aging comes more quickly these days and it’s creeped into the picture until it fills it.  The Coincidence Coordinators are nagging at me with increasing urgency and insistence to look for the next bridge not to live under. 

So far I believe I’ve been the luckiest man ever to walk the face of this planet, possibly among the happiest.  I’ve discovered I’m nowhere near as tough as I once thought myself to be and Placitas taught me I’m also not the pioneer my ancestors were.  I wouldn’t change a minute of those years after I gave myself a Y2K, but I sincerely won’t regret not doing it again if I don’t have to.

But maybe now I’ve toughened up enough to make the next step as much a blessing as this one’s been.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Marriage Before Sex?

Old Jules, why is it important to get married for having sex?

 

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Posted in 2000's, Homesteading, Music, New Mexico, NM, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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Dear Hearts and Gentle People – [Bullet Holes in the Ceiling]

Posted on February 28, 2012 by | 11 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

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:

 

Dinah Shore 1949 – Dear Hearts and Gentle People

 

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Communication, Country Life, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Prospecting, Relationships, Survival

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‘Squirrelly’ Armijo Survives his own Funeral

Posted on February 28, 2012 by | 13 comments

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:

Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947.

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

Previous posts:  Skulls, skeletons and homicides:

The Ruin Skull – A Long Day Ago

Cold Mystery, Fevered Romance and Lost Gold

The Strangeness – Background Context of Unsolved Homicides

Meanwhile, today on Ask Old Jules:  Mirror Holds Information From the Past? –

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 …..

 

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Posted in 1950's, 1960's, 1990's, Adventure, America, New Mexico, NM, Prospecting, Science, Senior Citizens, YouTube

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The Ruin Skull – A Long Day Ago

Posted on February 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.

Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.

Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.

She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.

Old Jules
Copyright©NineLives Press

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Posted in America, History, Human Behavior, Native American, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Poetry, Politics, Prospecting, Solitude

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Vacating the Premises – A Vanishing Act

Posted on February 11, 2012 by | 24 comments

The mountain I used to prospect for several years is covered with ruins wherever there is water.  Big ruins.   I used to sit on one near my camp and try to imagine what it must have been like.

One summer solstice afternoon I was sitting on the cliff boundary of the ruin watching the sunset.  In the basin below there’s a volcanic knob out toward the center of the plains.   I’d discovered a single kiva on top of it years before and puzzled over it vaguely.  What was that kiva doing there, miles away from the big houses?

But because that day happened to be solstice, I suddenly noticed when the sun went down, it vanished directly behind the point of that Kiva knob!  Yon damned Mogollons used it to mark summer solstice!

A place like that fires the imagination, and I spent a lot of time thinking of those people who lived in that ruin. Some of these groups had evidently been in the same locations for 300-400 years, and suddenly their government leaders decided they had to leave.  Politicians, or priests, or both, deciding what was best for them.

One day they  just left.  I’ve always thought it was because of that grim civil war nobody knows anything about that happened among them around the time these ruins were abandoned.  Bashing in the heads of anyone who didn’t agree to migrating.

They probably watched and even hosted strings of these travellers along the trail until their own turn came.

What a thing it must have been to be one of them on that last day, saying good bye to the place your great-grand-dad, your granddad, your dad, and everyone else as far back as anyone could remember, including you were all born, lived, and mostly died.

Everyone voluntarily packed a few belongings, a medicine bag and blanket or two, a stone hatchet and a few scrapers, and left, leaving corn in the bin for those coming behind.  Abandoned pots lying around all over the place measured the things they couldn’t carry.

Sometimes sitting on that mountain early in the morning it sort of overwhelmed me, the pain and sorrow in those villagers.  Probably they all left in the morning one day, after a while of maybe being notified it was their turn.  A few weeks of  planning.  What to take?  What to leave behind.

Finally they probably finished the last minute packing the night before.  At dawn they made a line down the basin heading south, looking back over their shoulders as long as they could, feeling so sad.  Knowing they’d never go home again, wondering about the place they were going.

Remembering how it was playing on the mountain with their grandads when they were  kids, remembering the special, secret places kids always have.  Just looking and yearning to stay, and already missing that long home where their ancestors had roamed for 2000 years.

They’d have tried to keep it in sight as long as they could, each one stopping to wipe the trail dust off his face, pretending to catch his breaths.  But yearning back at the old home place, piercing the heat waves with their eyes, straining to see it one last time, maybe crying, certainly crying inside.  The kids probably screeching enough to cover everyone elses grief.

As they trekked south they were joined by other groups from the neighboring villages.  The dust rose on the trail making a plume, a cloud around them.  They examined these strangers who were now trail mates and wondered who they were.

Some, they probably soon discovered had a mother-in-law, or uncle who came from their village.  They got to know one another better there on that hot, sad, lonesome trail away from all they they’d ever known, and they shared the hardships of the journey together for a long time.

Today, it’s just piles of rock, potsherds, holes left by scholars and other diggers for spoils.  The land still falls off across Johnson Basin, sun going down over that volcanic nub that once measured the time to plant.  Cow men ride their motorized hosses across the old trails, cows stomp around looking for grass, making the pottery fragments even smaller.

But sometimes late at night when the wind howls down the mountain a man might hear, or think he hears an echo of the chants, the drums, the night mumbles and whispers of lovers, the ghosts of lovers.  Pulls the bag tighter around his ears and wonders.

Old Jules

 

Today on Ask Old Jules:  What is Forgiveness?

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, History, Native American, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Survival

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