I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by this morning.
I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning. Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life. The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream. But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff. I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.
The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.
Busybusybusy. It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was. From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them. I thought they’d passed out of my life.
I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up. Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.
Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back. Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description. It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.
Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again. But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream. I never cared much for him anyway.
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.
1964 was a big year in my life. I rode the USNS Breckinridge troop ship back from Korea with 2000 other GIs coming home, separated from the army late in June. Hung around Portales, New Mexico for a while, applied to join the Peace Corps, then hitch-hiked to New York to pass the time until I heard from the Peace Corps.
Beatniks hadn’t yet been displaced by hippies and Greenwich Village was jam-packed with thousands of us implying we were beatniks but carefully not saying so. Hanging around coffee shops writing poetry, playing chess, saying momentous deep-thinking things back and forth to one another. Listening to folk singers.
Being rocked back on our heels in mock, simulated shock and disgust when wheat-straw blondes from Westchester down for the weekend to be beatniks, too, refused our advances. “WHAT? You don’t believe in FREE LOVE?”
Which, surprisingly, almost always worked. Provided you’d done a convincing enough job trickling out the bona fides of being a REAL beatnik. And wouldn’t even think of hopping in the sack with someone so uncool she didn’t even believe in free love. Even if she did iron her long hair out straight.
So after I hopped the freight to go back to New Mexico, got thrown in jail in Rochester for taking the wrong train, The Hitch-Hiking Hoodoos, got released to hitch home, things stayed eventful for a while.
A guy from Buffalo picked me up on the Interstate, older guy in his 30s. When I got in I threw the pillow-case with my belongings into the back seat. “I don’t know why I picked you up,” he glanced at me with disgust.“I never pick up hitch hikers.”
Over the next few miles he questioned me about who I was, where I was from, what I was doing hitching, what I’d do when I arrived, and I explained it all in loving detail.
“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with a hitch hiker the few times I’ve picked them up. But if I do ever get killed by a hitcher it will probably be some half-baked kid who doesn’t know what he wants in life.” He thought about it a minute. “But I don’t have to worry about you. You threw your gun into the back seat in that pillow case when you got in.”
We talked a lot over the highway between Rochester and Buffalo. Enough so he didn’t take the Buffalo exit and carried me down to where a tollway squeezed the traffic going south to Cincinnati, Ohio. He pulled up beside a car with a family in it, man, woman and a couple of kids. Motioned for them to roll down the passenger-side window.
“Are you going on through Cincinnati? I’ve carried this guy all the way from Rochester and he’s okay. He’s going to New Mexico. But I’d like to get him a ride past Cincinnati. He’ll never get through that town walking.”
The couple said they were just going to Cincinnati, but we were all watching the traffic edge forward to the toll gates. “We’d better take him anyway. He might not get another ride.”
The Buffalo guy was right, but it began the next phase of a long story. Guess I’d best hold it for another day.
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.
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.
If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.
I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up. I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.
Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ‘way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].
If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting. Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home. Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it. Years of hindsight would have been helpful. Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years. But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.
After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro. Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned. But I was on autopilot.
The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit. There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.
I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself. A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling. When I finished I went to his window.
“Anything I can do to help you?”
The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local. “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”
“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour? The speed limit’s 55. If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”
“What gumment agency you working for going that fast? I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”
I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning.
I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna. The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.
I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck. I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again. A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.
Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call.
I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me. I don’t recall why I did this precisely. I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point. Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago. Even the old outhouse was still standing.
I drove on, taking my time now. But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting. He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him. So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again. He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar. He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again. But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again.
I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso. I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t. So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running. I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.
I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway. By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed. I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this.
I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight.
“Why are you following me?”
“Ahhhm not following yew. I just stopped here to take me a rest.”
“You waited back there at the intersection. You waited again in Lincoln. Why are you following me?”
“I’m not follering yew. But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.” And so on.
“I’m warning you. Don’t follow me anymore.” I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso. He wanted me to know he had a fix on me.
I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing.
It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour. As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for something.
I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there. There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.
A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe. When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know? Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”
He thought about it frowning. “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that. I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you. They’d have asked me.” Then he looked me in the eye. “You need to be careful about that speeding, though. If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked. They’ll fire you.”
What began that day lasted almost a decade. Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years.
But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me. I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.
Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.
By the time this was published in 1999, I was no longer going up that particular mountain. I was busy on my Y2K land and dwelling preparations about 50 miles northeast of Quemado.
But this will give you an idea of the general local psychological environment in the area, both while I was working the mountain and [it turned out] later, while I was doing Y2K.
Unsolved Slayings Have Small N.M. Town Living in Fear
Crime: With seven people killed since 1996, residents are openly packing heat. Authorities see no connections among the deaths.
November 20, 1999|PAUL DUGGAN | THE WASHINGTON POST QUEMADO, N.M.
— There’s not much to the town. You come upon it in the vast, yellow-brown emptiness of southern New Mexico’s high desert grassland. It’s mainly just a strip of old storefronts on Highway 60, with some dusty side streets.
In a 40-mile radius of Quemado you might find 500 people, about half of them ranchers living like pioneers on the plains and in the foothills, miles from any neighbor. The rest live in town, in trailer homes and faded stucco bungalows amid the tumbleweeds and pinon trees.
The sheriff, Cliff Snyder, said it used to be a peaceful place in its lonesome way, before all the killings. Now there’s fear in the air, like a foul wind.
Who murdered Gary and Judy Wilson? It’s a mystery. They disappeared in November 1995 and turned up eight months later, so many bones in the woods. Who shoved Gilbert Stark into a 20-foot well and closed the cover in ’96? Who shot the elderly Clark couple and their daughter in ’97? Who put a bullet in the heart of James Carroll, 59, as he stood in his corral just north of town one autumn day last year? The sheriff doesn’t know.
He and the state police said they are convinced the cases aren’t related. They were random eruptions of murder where murder used to be rare, Snyder said. He has no clear explanation for it. All of the victims lived in the countryside around Quemado, about 125 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Before the Wilsons were slain, no one had died by another’s hand in this part of sprawling Catron County in nearly a decade.
And no one wants to be next. In a swath of America where gun control means hitting what you’re aiming at, a lot of folks are packing iron. They’re propping shotguns and rifles beside their beds; they’re driving with pistols on the front seats of their pickups. The sheriff said he doesn’t mind. This is the rural West, he pointed out, and guns are a heritage.
“We’re raised with them,” said Snyder, 42. He shrugged. “If I pull over a vehicle, I figure they’re armed, if they live in this county.”
At El Sarape Cafe on Quemado’s main street, Irene Jaramillo, 43, keeps a .22-caliber semiautomatic on a shelf near the griddle. One morning last week, Paul Strand, 67, who owns a horse ranch south of town, was sipping coffee in the cafe with his wife and holding forth on the subject of their firearms.
“I sleep with a Colt .45 under my pillow,” he said. “I have a loaded assault rifle beside the bed, a Russian-type, ready to roll. And a sawed-off shotgun next to that, loaded, legal, but just barely, in terms of the barrel length.”
Across the street, Carl Geng, who is in his 60s, runs the Allison Motel with his wife. They also own a ranch outside of town. Geng said he thinks he knows the culprit in one of the homicide cases. “I’ve got a .38,” he said, gesturing to his truck in the parking lot. “He sets one foot on my ranch, I’ll blow his head off.”
The sheriff said he and the state police think most or all of the victims were murdered by acquaintances with whom they had personal disputes. As for suspects, investigators have only “theories,” he said.
It’s a crime in New Mexico to carry a concealed loaded weapon in a public place but legal for anyone 21 or older to carry one openly, no permit necessary. James Clark, a Vietnam veteran, started packing two handguns after his parents, William Clark, 84, and Pearl Clark, 74, were slain in 1997 along with his sister, Sharron Hutson, 44. Folks in Quemado are used to seeing him in town with a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker on his right hip and a .40-caliber semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.
“Which is fine,” said Irene Jaramillo’s husband, Jimmy, who is one of Snyder’s deputies. “I told him, ‘As long as I can see them.’ “
James Clark and his wife, Elaine, 42, now live in the remote trailer home where the elderly couple was murdered. Elaine Clark, who prefers a lighter-weight .35-caliber, sat in the kitchen one day last week with her husband’s heavy semiautomatic on the table in front of her. There was a loaded hunting rifle propped against the freezer by her left hand.
“We always used to brag that it was like the Old West, in the way that your house was never locked,” she said. “Someone passing by, if you were gone, they could come in and get something to eat. But now it’s more like the Old West the way you’re always on guard. You don’t walk up to my house unless I know you’re coming . . . or you could darn well get shot.”
Catron County, with just 3,000 residents, covers almost 7,000 square miles. It’s bigger than Connecticut. Snyder, who was a deputy when the seven homicides occurred, was elected sheriff last year. He has an undersheriff and four deputies, including Jaramillo, who patrols the northern half of the county around Quemado. Half a dozen state troopers also work in the county. But with such a vast area to cover, it sometimes takes an hour or more to reach the scene of an emergency.
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.
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:
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.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 