Tag Archives: New Mexico

This is Zuni Salt Lake

Posted on December 6, 2011 by | 24 comments


It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.

There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds.  Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.

Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez.  Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.

Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it.  The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.

Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother.  If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.

Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history.  A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.

It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine.   The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’.  They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland.  Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.

The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated.   Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.

Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.

They might be right.

The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area.  The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico.  The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.

Heck, it’s been a few years now.  Maybe they’re already mining it.  Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.

Old Jules

 

24 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2011, America, Human Behavior, Music, Native Americans, NM, Outdoors, Politics, Solitude, Wildlife

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Anachronistic Perceptions and Temporal Priorities

Posted on December 5, 2011 by | 6 comments

Morning readers.  I appreciate you coming by this morning.

The building pictured is on the corner of the plaza in Mesilla, New Mexico.  I don’t recall at the moment what connection it has to Billy the Kid, other than the fact he hung around Mesilla.  I do know the building was the center-piece for a lot more resounding events than some half-baked kid with a pistol could ever have added to, or taken away from.

That building, in 1860, was the County building where Jacob Snively, former Secretary of War for the Texas Republic, and his partners filed the mining claim for their gold strike at Pinos Altos, New Mexico.  They attempted secrecy, but the word leaked out quickly.  They headed back to the Gila, camped after dark, and woke in the morning surrounded by a booming mining camp sprung up during the night, home of a major gold rush.

Not much later the same building became the headquarters for Colonel Baylor and the first wave of Texan Confederate invaders of the western territories.  The primary Government building for the Confederate Territory of Arizona. 

Baylor recruited from there and volunteer recruits from Mesilla and Pinos Altos comprised the overwhelming part of the force of Sherrod Hunter for his invasion and occupation of Tucson.   One of Snively’s partners, Jack Swilling, commanded the Confederate troops at Picacho Pass, westernmost battle of the Civil War.  Swilling eventually became the founder of Phoenix, Arizona.

Jack Swilling

There it sits today, that building, proclaiming itself to be something involved with a tiny man with a big pistol, but it has a lot more to say if anyone was listening.

Old Jules

 

6 Comments

Posted in History, NM

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Old Sol’s Moodiness and Being a Character In a Book

Posted on November 29, 2011 by | 24 comments

In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life:  Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction.  But important things first:

From http://spaceweather.com/

Here he is November 28:

As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.

Here’s today.

Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.

Strangeness

SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:

“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.

The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.

I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.

Okay.  Now for the main thrust of this post.  Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3

A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson.  She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him. 

But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies.  She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.

 To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living.  Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico.  I considered him a friend.

 But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob.  He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.

I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me.  Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.

 Naturally, I bought and read a copy.  Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder.  My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.

I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction.  But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.

Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.

We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery.  But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar.  And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.

 Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself.  Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying.  Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.

But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me.  That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.

Live and learn.

Old Jules

 

24 Comments

Posted in 1980's, 1990's, 2011, Books, Creative Writing, Hack Writing, Human Behavior, Liars, NM, Portales

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Great Tick Migration – Occupy Texas

Posted on November 25, 2011 by | 37 comments

I wrote this when I lived in Socorro, New Mexico, but I’d guess it’s as timely and germane today as it was then.

http://insects.tamu.edu/images/insects/common/images/cd-43-c-txt/cimg370.html

It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore.  It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns. 
 
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemming-like they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those invading Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
 
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands, Lost Lunas, and up by Belen. 
 
There they’ve mostly already grouped. They’ve dropped off the rats, cows, deer, dogs and coyotes. The earliest ones are drifting south ahead of the others. They’re the lucky ones. Those got far enough south yesterday to find a stray muskrats along the river and get a little something to eat. The stragglers will find it hard going.
 
It’s sad, but hopeful: tiny seed ticks huddling close to their mamas at night, the great herd constricting in the cold dark, mama and daddy ticks worrying about the great crossing of the Jornada del Muerto, about the dearth of animals on the Jornada. But also knowing in their tiny network of neurons passing for a brain, that once further south, things will still not be easy……the migration there, the gathering will have already emptied the countryside of hosts, bloodmeals will be a rarity.
 
When those Isleta and Lost Lunas ticks get as far south as Socorro, the southern ticks will have eaten away everything available. Fishermen will know something’s up by then; they’ll be staying away from the river bottom country sensing some new thing, some change in the atmosphere near the river, hectored by the early gathering; the dogs, the feral cats, the rodents, all driven away from the river bottom by the strange new presence of so many tiny pests. 
 
The animals left will be sucked dry. Probably when the latecomers reach Socorro they’ll have to take their chances in town. Maybe they’ll find pets or townspeople for a last meal before they try to cross the dreaded Jornada del Muerto.
 
Some of them will drift up onto the freeway to find broken-down motorists with flat tires or dead batteries. Truck drivers stopped to urinate by the road or unsuspecting drunks sleeping with the window opened a crack to release the foul tobacco smoke from inside the car will save a few. Maybe an unlucky hitchhiker sleeping under a bridge or one of the frequent escapees from the prison or jail; some hapless hobo along the railroad, waiting for the next train.
 
If the motorist doesn’t get bitten by too many at once there’ll be a chance for a jump south by vehicle across the Jornada and avoiding the hard crossing….a quick ride to Cruces, or Truth or Consequences, or El Paso for a small group if they don’t get greedy and just take it easy on the driver. But so many of these younger ticks want everything now. 
 
It might be hard going for them when they get down toward Cruces. That’s where they’ll first meet the newly arrived fire ants. Also, those deep southern ticks will resent their presence, nudging their little fat grey bodies aside as they scramble in a fold of flesh for a foothold and a meal. And ahead, Texas.

The ancestral homeland.
Renewal.
 
Yes, it’s sad, of the hundreds of millions of ticks starting home; tens of millions won’t make it. There’ll be stained smudges on the freeway where they try to cross, but many run over by recklessly speeding cars.

Thousands clogging the river with their tiny carcasses where the water rose unexpectedly during a crossing, catching many unaware, the long march, the trail of tears, the trek home; so many dead, so many lost, the seed ticks, the mama ticks, the large swollen soft ticks shriveled and wrinkled with hardship….so many friends left back there along the trail, so many loved ones, lost, so many seed ticks lying there in the massive killing fields along the route. 
 
But they’ll do as they can, do as they are able, do as they must, heading south on that lonely migration that long dusty trek, always knowing they won’t be welcomed by their distant kinsmen.

The plethora of ticks in Texas, those hungry, selfish younger generation ticks will push and shove on the hosts, fighting for the best positions in and behind the ears, high on the necks where teeth can’t reach, tiny skirmishes and struggles for position everywhere; on cows, on dogs, on rodents, in the thick hair of women and unreconstructed hippy men in cowboy hats..
 
As always, those selfish Texas ticks will not agree to share their bounty. They’ll fight despite the sad happiness of the return of their distant relations. 

 Old Jules
 

37 Comments

Posted in America, NM, Texas, Wildlife

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Stolen Horses and Baby Rattlers – The Anatomy of a Bully – Part 4

Posted on November 16, 2011 by | 15 comments

This is all leading up to the summation of Old Jules’ Unified Bullying Theory. 

Hopefully this will be my last buildup segment before trying to summarize something I’d call a theory about bullying, supported by the interactions of animals here and childhood memories that included plenty on the subject.

My childhood friend, Keith, was reflecting on how he remembered the two of us as kids recently when we met in Fredericksburg.  Fiddle-Footed Naggings and Songs of the Highway.  This pretty well dated Keith’s first clear recollections of me to the sophomore year of high-school, though we’d actually been in classes together since the 4th grade.  He remembered the two of us as being a couple of nerds, getting pushed around a lot. 

 

What I’m riding there just about says anything needs saying.  That kid I was at that stage of my life was no bully in the making.

The picture with my two sisters might be about the time I was getting chased home by Floren and his brothers.  At that point there was nobody I was likely to bully.  Anyone can see the kid needs chasing home and a few beatings on the way can’t do anything but help. 

But by the time this picture was taken I was hanging out at the school cafe with the Lindsey kids, smoking, and everyone knowing who was tougher than whom else.  In those days any kid who could ride bareback was probably in danger of doing some bullying, too.  I’m guessing all those kids from Lindsey Grade School could ride bareback.  

I was bareback because the horse was stolen, though the person taking the picture almost certainly didn’t know it.

I was keeping three hogs for an FFA project in one of the buildings in the background, though the place was otherwise abandoned.  I kept the horse there a couple of weeks before things got too hot, then took it out to the dirt road between this place and the neighborhood I was living in and slapped it on the rump to run it off.  But the owner and authorities had already decided it hadn’t just strayed.   A while later that picture glued me to the missing horse.

Sometimes I still wonder how the family adults could have been so damned stupid in those days.  Where the hell did they THINK I got that horse?  On the other hand, a copy of the picture became a small piece of a lot more damning evidence of how I’d been spending my adolescent years.  By the time I was caught it filled up a corner of the Roosevelt County Sheriff’s Office. 

Somewhere between this picture and the one above it things went south.  Coincidentally, I was attending Central Grade School when the picture was taken, where I considered everyone rich kids, which they weren’t.  But two years in a row I had teachers famous for their bullying. 

One, the fifth grade teacher, gave me a spanking in front of the class at least once every day that year.  Me, and any other kids who admitted when they were asked the first day of classes whether their parents would give them a whipping at home if they were told they got one in school.   I didn’t realize until a couple of decades later it was a ruse to find out which kids wouldn’t tell their parents what was happening.

I used  to want to go back to the graveyard in that town and spit and puke on his grave until a lot later in life than you might guess.

That’s me on the right at the pinnacle of my hellion/bullying times.  Even that snake and the baby rattlers we found got me into a peck of trouble.  Within a couple of months of the time this picture was taken I was being held in the Roosevelt County Jail for a couple of weeks waiting for them to decide whether I needed to get the rest of my education at the State Boys Reformatory at Springer, New Mexico.

They decided to keep me around on juvenile probation instead.   That ended the bullying completely.  If I’d looked sideways at anyone, or let myself get provoked into a fight I’d have been in Springer in a heartbeat.  It was open season on me for anyone who felt the urge to kick someone around, and there was no shortage of those who did. 

Here’s a year later while I was working with Kurtiss and some other youngsters for Skeeter Jenkens.    A Sobering View of Y2K

That fall would be the school year Keith almost certainly remembers.  Just another nerd.  A peaceful, inconspicuous nerd doing his best to stay out of reform school.  Midway through the Junior year it was clear I had to get out of that town, and I did.  Nobody at all was sorry to see me gone.

The next bullying post is going to pull all this together with the animal bullying into Old Jules Unified Bullying Theory.

Old Jules

 

15 Comments

Posted in 1950's, Human Behavior, Music, Portales

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Half-Century of Male Evolution – Bullying Part 3

Posted on November 14, 2011 by | 22 comments

I’m going to get away from the brave new world of the 21st Century and the animal kingdom for this segment and go back a few million years to my childhood.  I explained a little about that farm on the other side of the railroad tracks here:  Could you choose to live on the street?, but to pursue the bullying issue I’ll elaborate a bit.

The kids who lived on the other side of those tracks were overwhelmingly tough, poor, and ‘bad’.  The families were farm laborers or otherwise unskilled, lots of kids, and Hispanic or considered ‘white trash’.  The kids living there went to Lindsey Grammar School, and the RR tracks defined the boundary between Lindsey and the other two grammar schools.

In 1949, when I was starting school my mother went to war with the superintendent of schools and the school board to make certain I went to East Ward, not Lindsey.  She succeeded.

Meanwhile, on this side of the tracks and the highway there were a few neighborhoods of kids who belonged in Lindsey, but were doomed by geography to go to school with the regular population at East Ward.  One of those was a boy named Floren Villianueva and his siblings.  A tough, bad, mean as hell youngster with older brothers meaner than him.  He and I entered the first grade in the same class.

Floren and I somehow got crosswise with one another almost the first day of classes during recess.  He gave me a blow to the stomach that knocked the wind out of me, doubled me over and might well have been responsible for the hernia of the goozle that’s caused me trouble to this day.

After school each afternoon Floren and his brothers walked home the same route I did, and for a few days they went the extra distance to chase me home, throwing rocks at me when they couldn’t catch me, beating hell out of me when they could.  Me finding safety only when I went through the door to the house.

That naturally came to the attention of my mom after a few days.  One afternoon she was standing on the porch shaking a rug and saw me running across the tracks chased by Floren and his brothers.  They came right into the yard, and she grabbed a broom and chased them off, yelling insults.

When they were gone she turned on me in a fit of rage, grabbed me by the ear and dragged me into the house where she kept her switch.  While she was beating hell out of me she was yelling, “If I ever see or hear of you running from a fight again this is nothing compared to what you’ll get.”

When my step-dad got home she told him about it and he just shook his head.  “Running from a bunch of God-damned Mexicans!” 

I went about in disgrace a few days, the story circulating among the adults with me in hearing distance, all of them dumbfounded by my cowardice.

But I never ran from a fight again.  I started carrying a heavy stick with me walking home and only had to whack one of those other kids upside the head with it one time.  Afterward Floren and I fought a lot of times during recess and I never whipped him, but I took the beatings rather than the alternatives.

This is too lengthy for me to continue where I’m going with it, but it’s necessary background to get in place before going forward in this segment.

Old Jules

 

22 Comments

Posted in 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, History, NM, Portales, Relationships, Senior Citizens

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Tale of the Dreamsheep Mother and the Y2K War Gods

Posted on November 8, 2011 by | 8 comments


I’d planned for some while to write up the early-post-Y2K incident with the helicopters described below.  But Jeanne looked it up in her Y2K journal, read it to me over the phone, and convinced me in the interest of accuracy her version was the most appropriate.  The human mind twists and turns events and mine had worked on those helicopters enough to make the story I’d have written somewhat different from the one she recorded that day.

I’d have sworn I’d been teaching her sons how to use a survival mirror as described in the Survival Book https://sofarfromheaven.com/survival-book-2/, and that the instruction was the reason I had the mirror readily at hand to do what I did. 

I do recall vividly my increased heartbeat when they turned to fly 150 above the cabin.  I’ll defer to her record as to whether I then slunk into the trees.

From Jeanne’s y2k journal:
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2000

A nice day all around. Jules came over fairly early, seemed at loose ends, and stayed til nearly 4 PM.  While the kids were finishing homework, he started messing around with some tools we had lying around and found a rock that reminded him of a dream sheep mother like the ones he’d bought before from the Zunis.

He spent all morning carving a dream sheep out of that rock and then decided we needed a cairn to put it on.  He and Michael and Andrew worked on that most of the day, adding flagstones for a bench to go all the way around it. The dream sheep sits on top like a shrine- I love it.  It took all day, he must have moved a ton of rock. Then he build me another bench to sit on for a view of the sunset. Glad he didn’t ask me to help. Michael helped willingly, Andrew less willingly,  but he still helped.

 After he declared it finished, Michael took off for a hike up the hill and Andrew and Julia were playing around behind the cabin.

We heard some helicopters before we saw them, it turned out to be two black military copters that were slowly flying right along the road that goes by our property.  Jules didn’t say anything but he got out his pocket mirror from his survival kit and started sort of surreptitiously flashing it at the helicopters.  I got real nervous and decided I should  probably walk off in the other direction, so I headed towards the cabin.

I wasn’t sure if they could see who was doing it since he was by some trees, but I wanted to be sure it was obviously NOT me.  Damned if those helicopters didn’t turn a 90 degree angle and fly straight over the cabin to get a closer look at us! But nothing happened, thank goodness. By then Jules had faded into the trees. A few minutes Michael came down the hill and said “Did you see THAT?”

After that Jules and the boys had a long conversation about building a catapult using a sucker rod from a windmill and some other stuff. Said they ought to be able to build one big enough to lob rocks the size of cantaloupes across the road.  They all seemed pretty excited about it.

Anyhow, the cairn is a great place to sit and drink hot chocolate and watch the sunrise. I think it’ll last forever, it’s really solid.

Picked up 25 eggs later when we went down to help him collect them.


Saturday, Feb. 13, 2000

This morning we were eating a late breakfast inside the cabin and talking about going  to gather eggs and suddenly there was this horrifying roar over the cabin which scared us all half to death- we rushed to the door and saw a pair of fighter jets that had just buzzed our cabin! I think  they were getting back at us for the mirror stuff a few days ago…too bad Jules wasn’t around to have heart failure with the rest of us, seeing that it was all because of him.  Of course we had to drive down to his cabin right away to tell him all about it.
Picked up 30 eggs while we were there.

Jeanne K.




8 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Y2K

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday Morning Flies

Posted on November 6, 2011 by | 25 comments

I don’t recall ever seeing such an abundance of flies in Texas.  I first noticed it a week-or-so in Kerrville in a restaurant.  Flies were buzzing around the place in such profusion the customers were waving forks and dinner rolls in the air trying to drive them off.

Then I began seeing them here, hanging around the windows and door, waiting for things to happen in their favor.  I usually think of fly problems in a context of fly-breeding sources, so I checked the chicken roosts, figuring I’d allowed the droppings to build up enough to allow fly eggs to hatch and go through their development cycle.  Not so.

But up at Gale and Kay’s house a few days ago I saw they were similarly blessed.  Plenty of flies to go around.  Enough for most usual purposes.

Yesterday, or the day before they began finding their way into the cabin.  They weren’t docile enough to allow chasing and swatting as an option, and I’m not all that big about having flies walking over my face while I try to sleep, type, or meditate.  The military surplus mosquito net head-cover I’ve had for thirty years or more works as well as anything I know of to keep that from happening.

I’m a person who tends to believe most things are indicators of other things, but I haven’t a clue what this is an indicator of.  Probably someone somewhere would say it means we’re going to have a hard winter, or some other unusual kind of winter.  Usually Texas has a few flies and they’re worse in the fall season, but on its worst day this part of Texas usually can’t compare to a normal fly-day in the high desert country.  Desert flies converge on perspiration and any other water from miles around.

Swatting Flies in the Last Century

But this year Texas can brag it has something to compete with New Mexico.  Rich folks from Houston and Dallas won’t need to go to Ruidoso, Eagle Nest and Taos to have as many flies as they hanker to have crawling around on them.

Old Jules

25 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Flying, Solitude, Texas

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Sobering View of Y2K

Posted on November 5, 2011 by | 7 comments

That tribal talk a week or so ago got me thinking about an old Mescalero bud I’ve known on and off through the parts of this lifetime that matter. We go long times without seeing one another, but we top off the long spells by bumping into one another in unlikely places.

Kurtiss and I first met working on Skeeter Jenkins’ ranch near Kenna, New Mexico. Must have been 1958, ’59. Skeeter wasn’t a joyful man on his ranch-hands. He’d berate Kurtiss by comparing him to us white lads, then he’d turn around five minutes later and tell us we weren’t half as good cowboying as that damned Apache over there.

I guess the only good that came out of that job was the bond that formed between Kurtiss and me, and the lifelong lesson I learned about not trusting ranchers. Old Skeeter cheated all of us spang out of a hard week pay and spread around the word none of us were worth the board he’d furnished working for him.  Fortunately, he’d done that sort of thing before, so nobody paid him any mind when it came to hiring us for other jobs, which we frequently got screwed out of our pay on, same as with Skeeter.

The last time I ran into Kurtiss must have been 1998, ’99. He and a couple of Arizona broncos were sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked for a powwow in Albuquerque when I came across them and a case of beer that was too close to gone to be any good.  When we’d killed what was left of that case we kicked out of there and spent the night singing ’50s rock and roll songs, getting roaring drunk and filling in on the minutia of our lives since we’d last met.

Spent a good bit of time talking about Y2K also, which was much on my mind at the time, and they’d never heard of it.   I expected that and explained to them. Those Apaches thought that just might be something really fine.

Kurtiss immediately thought of a state cop over toward Ruidoso who’s bad about kicking around folks who’ve had a bit much to drink, “I hope nobody gets to that prick before I do.”

Those Apaches demonstrated some rich imagination concerning the nuances of Y2K aftermath.  “We’ll be able to run raids on the Rio Grande tribes like the old days!”   This didn’t interest the Arizonians.  They were fairly sure Mexico would be open for a bit of raiding, though, and better pickings.

Then Kurtiss went thoughtful.  “I’d sure as hell like to kill me some Navajo.”  He told the old story of Bosque Redondo and all the slaughter the Din’e did to the less numerous Mescalero during the decade years they shared the reservation.   Apache numbers there were decimated until only 1800 were left alive when they escaped the rez and went back to Mescalero.

Bosque Redondo was fresh on his mind because of Navajo whines he heard at the Gathering of the Tribes Powwow. “Mescalero’s too large for such few people.” (The enormous Din’e Rez is getting jam-packed these days, by comparison.) “They ought to take some of that land away and give it to us,” was the general theme.

“We fought our way down,” Kurtiss quoted himself. “And you guys multiply like rabbits.”

This led to some laughs and sneers about the theme of the Gathering of Nations Powwow, “Celebrating 400 years of unity (among the tribes)“.

“I wonder where that was,” one of the Coyoteros grunted. “The Apache never saw it and neither did our enemies. Those Mexicans and Pima and all those town Indians were lucky the whites came along to save them.”

Mostly those guys were in agreement in their scorn for other southwestern tribes. “They don’t know how to use the land,” gesturing with a nod and a slight pucker of the lips.

A whole different view of the end of life as we know it.

Old Jules

 

7 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Native Americans, Senior Citizens, Y2K

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Near-extinct Spiritual Weeds Springing up on the Rez

Posted on October 29, 2011 by | 17 comments

There’s a temptation to believe we moderns living within the boundaries of the US have a lot in common with one another, and in many ways we do.  But what we have in common with one another isn’t necessarily what we believe we do.  One of those areas of commonality probably has to do with the perception of Native Americans as a somewhat generic group of people with a lot in common with one-another and far less in common with whites and Hispanics.

 This leads to a lot of packages of thinking among people not living on the Rez, whether they’re whites, second or third generation off-Rez Native Americans, Hispanics, or folks who carry a bit of tribal blood in their veins a few generations old, but never lived on the Rez.

 One of the packages contains a romanticized view that the cultural heritages on the Rez still exist, still carry some similarity to those before the coming of Europeans, and are similar to one-another.   The phrase, ‘the old ways’ has found its way into the language of those seduced into buying the package.  The “I-know-the-old-ways-too-because-my-granddad-was-a-Cherokee [or Apache, etc]” syndrome frequently found among artists, blue-eyed-blond-haired ladies in Atlanta, and in cities across the nation among those who see something wrong with modern life and hunger for a deeper spiritual life.

 The fact is, those tribes don’t have much at all in common with one another, aside from being packaged and treated as though they were similar for at least a century-and-a-half by the US Government, far longer for some in the eastern US.   Bits and pieces of the original cultures have survived on some reservations, less on some, almost none on some.  And those cultures remaining are as unlike one another as they are different from European.

But I’ve digressed.  I began this blog entry with the intention of talking about a particular cultural phenomenon re-emerging on Navajo tribal lands, strange and not easily understood by anyone including the Din’e living there.  The Skin Walker.  A person who voluntarily adopts witch-like and other behaviors that violate the most fundamental religious/spiritual forbiddings of the tribe.  The subject, even the name is such that even most Din’e have only a general  understanding of what those practices are.  But there’s no lack of agreement that Skin Walkers are a threat to everyone, a cause for revulsion, anger, fear, hatred.

 On the Pine Hill Navajo (self-determination) Rez south of Ramah Chapter there’s a place that’s come to be called, “Skin-Walker Valley” by everyone who’s willing to use the word.  Interestingly, the valley extends into an area checkerboarded with white-owned lands called Candy Kitchen.

 What’s surprising is that, while the Skin-Walker phenomenon clearly began on Din’e land, the weirdness and negativity spills over and permeates into the white community. Although some good folks, both white and Din’e, live and make out as best they can in this remote area, it’s shockingly pervaded by all manner of crime. Speed freaks and laboratories are drawn there as by a magnet.

 Violence is pandemic. As an example, a few years ago three Navajo youths tortured and killed an octogenerian white woman in her home, puncturing her skull with a screwdriver eighteen times until she died. She had nothing much worth stealing. They did it for ‘fun’.  When the lads were identified they were arrested on the Rez, where tribal authorities resisted giving them up for white justice for several days.

 Meanwhile, deep in the Rez to the north, near Pueblo Pintada, another valley is rapidly coming to be known as ‘Skin-Walker Valley’, and another at Alamo, far to the southeast.

 This phenomenon, were it discussed openly and recognized as in need of investigation, would be far easier for tribal officials to develop strategies to deal with. Open discussion would also help nearby residents and authorities off the Rez toward a clearer perspective concerning an energy and a belief system that is oozing up through the cracks of their lives, slouching across from tribal lands.

But this is getting too long and it’s time to turn out the chickens.  Maybe more later.

Edit:  7:50am

This poem was written a few years ago about an event on the minds of northwest New Mexico at the time.  The fact it happened near ‘Skin-Walker Valley’ was a cause for a lot of concern and confusion.

Last Friday Night

“It’s just too deep in the Rez
For a white-man style killing,” he says:
“A bullet each to the back of the head,
At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead;
Two Navajo brothers are dead.

“It isn’t a skin-walker killing;
No feud, not a woman too willing.
A knife, a club, a thirty-ought-six
Is common enough and at least doesn’t mix
White man logic with Navajo tricks:
No bullet each to the back of the head!
But at Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!
Two Navajo brothers are dead.”

From Bread Springs to Shiprock you’ll hear people say
“No place is safe now! You can’t get away!”
Nageezi to Yah Ta Hay
You’ll hear the Din’e people say
“The killer’s from Pie Town or Santa Fe.
Some white, somehow, somewhere must pay
For a bullet each to the back of the head!
At Pueblo Pentada two brothers are dead!
Two Navajo brothers are dead.”

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 2011, Native Americans

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,