Tag Archives: New Mexico

UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

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

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules

 

Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947

When my mom left her second husband near Apache Junction, Arizona  to move near my granddad’s place at Causey, New Mexico, I was considerable upset about it all.  I’d become overfond of the Arizona guy, liked him a lot despite his human flaws that bothered my mom.

Time proved my level of upset couldn’t be handled by beating it out of me, nor by any of the other usual ways people tried back then to nudge a kid back into being seen and not heard.  The Runaways, 1947

My first step-dad [Arizona] was fond of reading the Alley Oop comic strip to me and I was a huge fan.  Alley was a cave man skipping forward and backward in time thanks to a 20th Century scientist.  Alley even had a 20th Century lady friend named Oola. 

About the only thing I’d brought with me from Arizona was my stack of Alley Oop comic strips.  We’d travelled light across the desert.  And when we arrived in Causey one of the jobs my sisters had was reading those Alley Oops to me, trying to bring up my spirits.  Which I suppose it did until they’d finished reading them to me.

Something more permanent had to be done, and my granddad decided to have a shot at it.  He promised to take me to visit Alley’s home.  Mesa Verde, Colorado.

What a trip that must have been, me pestering him whether we were there yet, how much further before we’d see Alley’s home.  I don’t know how long we stayed, but I never forgot old Alley and his home.  I still had one picture of the cave dwelling he took back then until Y2K.

And of the hundreds of ancient ruins, documented and undocumented, I’ve poked around in during my life, I’ve never visited one, found one, without thinking to myself with a smile that Alley Oop might have lived there, visited there ahead of me.

When Mel King and I were exploring the ruin on Gobbler’s Knob and were driving back to Socorro when he reached into his daypack for something, came out with a human skull it was the first thing I said to him.  “What the hell is that?  You packed off Oola’s skull.  Get it the hell out of this truck!” 

I screeched onto the shoulder and he hid it behind a cedar until  we’d be headed back to Gobber’s Knob so he could put it back where it belongs.

Nowadays I think I have more in common with Alley Oop than with any modern human being.  If there was ever a right time for me to pop out of the gene pool it would probably have been more appropriate temporally in some other Universe where Alley Oop lived and breathed.  It made more sense than this one.

Old Jules

 

Unforseen Consequences

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

The Great Continental Divide – The Rot Started at the Top

A few generations ago this parking lot was full of people journeying along Route 66.  People stopped here because their engines were overheating, or the kids needed to stretch their legs, or they just wanted to pause for a view of how the water divided.

The view wasn’t all that much, but a dad could walk down below with the kids, step behind a phony hogan, and tell they chillerns if they pee here their water would go both ways, ending up in two different oceans.

The hogan was a lot more inviting back then.

It hadn’t played hotel to a thousand stranded hitch-hikers and drunks looking for a roof.

The roof, of course, still held out the rain and snow.

It hadn’t entered the phase before even the drunks avoided it.

Though all the seeds were planted.  All they needed was nurturing a generation or two.

Garden Deluxe comes into Gallup on tanker trucks and railcars from California.  A local business family bottles it, labels it and keeps it thrifty enough so a bottle could be bought for half a US dollar when that roof still didn’t leak.

The Kachina were Hopi and Zuni.  Pottery, and silversmithing, all the tribes in the area.  Rugs, Navajo.  But while the years took the roof off that hogan the businessmen discovered Asians can make Kachina, junk jewelry, rugs, and pottery a lot cheaper than anyone struggling to hack out a living with craftsmanship on the Rez.

The motorists didn’t care.  They wanted the Made In China stamp already filling their homes in the lowlands.  The world they lived in took longer to send all their own jobs to Asia.  

Old Jules

 

 

Spark and Tinder for the Next Country Music Wave

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read this morning.

A while back while I was in Kerrville I was in one of the huge office supply stores that have driven all the locally owned ones out of business.  I was nosing around looking at things when I glanced at a guy, a woman and a clerk studying copiers or fax machines. 

“Small world!”  I mutters to myself.  The male customer part of the trio was a face a decade older than one I’d known too well almost a decade ago.  A guy named Tony Wossname.  Once a motel manager in Grants, New Mexico.  A man I’d been blessed to observe through the lens of the darkest side of his character. 

I changed positions in the store, moving place to place studying this later model of a man who could spot desperate need for a job when he saw it and derived a lot of pleasure out of making it as painful and difficult for the desparee as his power allowed.

After I discovered I couldn’t get any other job in Grants, New Mexico following Y2K I went to work in a motel off the Interstate, graveyard shift, as a night clerk for a while.  Besides giving me almost enough money to pay rent, utilities, and buy a little carefully selected grub, the job showed me a side of humanity I wasn’t familiar with.  And it gave me a lot of time to think about what I observed.

One of the things Tony liked about being a motel manager was his radio in the locked office the 11-7 shift clerk couldn’t access.  The radio had no speakers in the office, nor in his apartment beside it, but it did have speakers in the lobby where he couldn’t hear it.

What kind of music do you like?” Tony’d asked me conversationally during the job interview.

I like any good music.”  I shrugged, recognizing a management school tactic for getting the applicant to relax.

So do I.  But there’s some on the air these days I can’t stand.”  He scowled and shook his head.  “I hate that RAP stuff.”

I just don’t listen to the radio much.  I like older music, mostly.  The modern CW swill could probably drive me nuts.”

He had what he wanted and changed the subject, now that I was all relaxed.

I got the job, which included two lobby speakers tuned to a modern CW station, 11 pm to 7 am with the volume control and station selector behind a locked door.

I did a lot of writing on those shifts while trying to stay sane.  Here’s one night of inspiration about modern country music:

3:30 AM

Hearing this country music station wailing all night so many nights has caused me to realize what’s changed in country music. It used to encompass a fairly wide range of fairly lowbrow experiences and sentiments. Love, cheating, drinking, bull riding, hound dogs, mama, trains, trucks, car wrecks, dead friends, being broke, dreams of something or another, hopes, losses, resentment, pride of accomplishment, prison, cows, land, and clothing. Now it’s nothing but drooling whining love songs. Wonder what the hell that means?

Probably  means females are picking all the hits, buying all the records, and the men who dance lockstep with them are also females.   Something’s definitely changed, in any case.  There are still Guy Clarks out there, still Prines, still Tom Russells, still Willies and Merles. That just ain’t getting hit records.

Maybe the baby boomers lost something after their quadruple bypasses. Ever heard of a woman getting bypass surgery? I haven’t.

Maybe ten years from now we’ll be hearing country songs about bypasses and prostate cancer- about Winnebagos, casinos, golf, medicare—about grandkids wanting to  put him/her in a nursing home- about hearing aids and false teeth, thick toenails and sagging skin.

If so, it will be an improvement, and I, for one, look forward to it.   Maybe tonight I’ll write the off-the-charts hit CW song for 2012. 

Cheatin’ a Broken Heart

Westbound on the Interstate
Out on the Great Divide
Our Winnie overheated
So we pulled off on the side

The sagebrush and the red rock buttes
Invoked our reverie
While the engine cooled I thought about
My bypass surgery.

Refrain:
You can have your diabetes
Talk about your brand of “C”
But when heat waves blur the red rock
I’ll take bypass surgery

We’ll be turning south at Flagstaff
For the fairways to the south
Where my third ex-wife will meet us
With the grandkids and her mouth

Those two eggs up on whiskey toast
Home fries on the side
She always made for breakfast
Were my downfall and her pride

We’ll take the brats along with us
And camp somewhere below
The international boundary
Buying meds in Mexico

‘Cause it’s not the margaritas
Nor the senoritas sweet
It’s the discount pharmaceuticals
That tug these flattened feet

Now the engine’s finished cooling
And the wheels begin to roll
And there ain’t no bloody stool
In the RV commode bowl

Refrain:
You can have your diabetes
Talk about your brand of “C”
But when heat waves blur the red rock
I’ll take bypass surgery

So here I am, 2012 coming on strong and fast.  The lyrics for the big hit for the year already written, the New CW Wave craze all mapped and ready to take off.

Gotta find a musician.

Remember where you heard it first.

Old Jules

Cold Mystery, Fevered Romance and Lost Gold

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

Time Travel

Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by. 

If you went outdoors with a clear sky last night early evening and craned your neck to look directly overhead you might have seen Altair.   Around the time the light that met your eye was leaving Altair I was a young man approaching the age of 50. 

I was beginning a new career, male hormones raging, severely involved in a tempestuous relationship with the lady described if you clicked the ROMANCE [https://sofarfromheaven.com/romance/ ] tab above.  [When the light reaching your eye from Cassiopia is as old as the light last night from Altair]

When that last night Altair light was leaving home on the way to a rendezvous with your eye my old friend Keith and I were doing a different kind of time travel.  We were stomping up and down mountains exploring the country around Santa Fe,  discovering the ruins of numerous hippie communes begun and abandoned around the time the Altair-light was leaving on the journey to meet our then-eyes.

We were also searching the Zuni Mountains for a lost gold mine from a time when the orange giant in Scorpio was headed on its voyage to our eyes as we sat around our night camps gazing at the sky.

I was going to do a lot longer post about this, but I’m having a connection problem slowing things down.  Probably moisture getting into the repaired phone line:

Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3

.

http://spaceweather.com/

The light leaving Old Sol at the time I hit SAVE DRAFT will reach the earth about the time this furshlugginer computer finishes doing it.  Roughly 8.5 minutes.  I’m going to have to do more on this sometime when the connection’s not taking much longer than the light from moon-to-earth, start to finish.

Old Jules

Christmas Eve for a Hermit and Cats in a Mountain Village

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

A Few Things Zuni – Part 1

During the early 1990s the Coincidence Coordinators conspired to make Zuni Pueblo and the geography surrounding it a major focus in my life.  I mentioned a bit about Zuni here:  This is Zuni Salt Lake, but over the next couple of whiles I’d like to tell you a bit more about them. 

At the time the overwhelming part of my salary was paid by FEMA and a part of my job involved mitigation of recurring natural disaster damage behind federal disaster expenditures.  In New Mexico a huge percentage of the recurring expense was located on Navajo lands, but flooding on the Zuni River reared its head as a concern during the same time period.

Meanwhile, the Coincidence Coordinators got into the act.  The search for the lost gold mine was being driven by documents from the US Archives, New Mexico State Archives, fragments of mention from 19th Century newspapers, later-in-life memories of men connected to the events and documented in books, topo maps and other researched sources.

Keith and I, examining and submerging ourselves together during that phase of my search, concluded the areas to the east of Zuni, and to the south were prime candidates for the location.  Candidates based on what we knew at the time.  Wilderness Threats.

By my own recollection that phase of the search lasted only three, maybe four years, maybe less.  But it led by numerous routes, into more than a decade of closer association with Zuni, both as a tribe, and as a geography.  I’ll be posting more about that, about Keith’s and my explorations, about the Zuni pueblo and the people living there, and about some aspects of the history and culture.

But I’ll begin by posting this piece of doggerel I wrote a long time ago about my first visit to the Zuni Rez and my first encounter with the Zuni and Ramah Navajo.  That meeting with the Zuni Tribal Council burned itself into my memory as few things I’ve experienced this lifetime have.

Flooding on the Zuni land
Tribal chairman calls
Upstream Ramah Din’e band
Over grazing galls.

Ancient ruins I travel past
Forgotten tribes of old
And finally arrive at last
On Zuni land as told:
Tribal council meets, he chants
A time warp history.

I Listen long the raves and rants
And river mystery:
Navajo must have his sheep
To have his wealth, it’s plain.
Too many kids, too many sheep
Too little grass and rain.
Forgotten white man wrongs and deeds
The raids of Navajo
Corn that didn’t sprout the seeds
And stumbled Shalako
More sheep grazed than in the past
Arroyos grew wide and deep
Siltation settled hard and fast
In riverbed to sleep.

Navajo siltation choked
An ancient channel bed
Water rose above the banks
200 cattle dead
Houses flooded, ruined cars
Fields of grain were lost
A playground field a channel mars
And who should bear the cost?

The tribal chairman Ramah band
Listened to my tale
Stony silence, steady hand
Informed me I would fail.

“If those Zunis don’t like floods
Tell them to reduce the chances;
We’ll hold back our streams of muds
If they’ll call off their damned rain
dances.”

(Doggerel to smile by)

Old Jules