Week of Enchantment: Blinded by the White

Posted on October 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

I could see White Sands while approaching Alamogordo, a stretch beneath the mountains that gleamed like the ocean. When I arrived IN Alamogordo and saw the space museum, I wondered if somehow I’d missed the turnoff to the park itself.  Instructions from a local assured me that I was on the right road, and once outside of town signs appeared.  Soon, white hills overgrown with vegetation appeared, and behind them the entrance to the park.  The park’s sheer scale makes a driving tour most practicable, though I pulled over as soon as the pavement gave way to compressed sand. I can sing many praises of my rental, that Kia Rio, but driving on sand is not among its strengths. I felt like I had fallen into the gears of a machine.  A large parking area two miles into the drive provides a marginally elevated boardwalk into the middle of the dunes, with informational signs along the way expalining the science of the Sands’ formation, and the life that persisted there.

Beyond the boardwalk, the paved road disappeared,but a compressed path extended far out into the expanse.  I decided to hike along the road,  occasionally leaving it to wander midst the dunes themselves.  Even under a partially cloudy sky, the dunes were blindingly white; I wore sunglasses and could not see otherwise.

The sight itself was not as surreal as it might have been, because my computer’s background for months has been a sunset over White Sands.  But still, to see it in person!  The gypsum expanse seemed endless, and if a visitor dared losing sight of the road, it was possible to be completely surrounded by a field of white.

When I returned home, I discovered many photos taken of the sky; my camera’s viewfinder was so saturated with light I had no idea what I was aiming at.  I walked in for about three miles, until I realized all the cars passing me were also turning around.  I assume it was a closed loop, so I turned around. The walk was shortened by two kindly Angelenos, who were on vacation and decided that I was going to die if I walked back under the noonday sun.  They gave me a ride in their Jeep Wrangler, and even it responded to the sand poorly. (I felt slightly vindicated on my Rio’s behalf.) The man driving had done it before, though, and he knew to hug the edges of the road, near the gypsum banks; there, travel was smoother.

While this looks like solid rock from a distance, it’s only a mound of highly compressed sand. I carved “HI” into this with a stick.  Gypsum ‘rocks’, if thrown into the air, exploded on contact with the ground. 

Although I had originally planned to spend a week in Las Cruces, using it as my base, as I left White Sands for it I wasn’t terribly excited. For the past two days I had enjoyed small towns and beautiful countryside;   Las Cruces would be my first major city,  requiring actual navigation. So far, my only major route change had involved a left turn in Roswell, departing 285 for 380/70.   In Las Cruces, my road unexpectedly split, and when I found the stretch I actually wanted to be on,  it changed names going through an intersection.  When I arrived at my motel, it seemed to be in a distressed area of town, and finding any place to eat involved getting turned around again. (I wound up in Mesilla, which made visiting it the next morning much easier.) Tired of driving, and hungry — my breakfast was a dusting of oatmeal, and lunch a gas station burrito from Alamagordo —  I pulled into a truck stop and ate at….Taco Bell. And then it rained!  I retired to bed early and hoped the city would look more promising in the morning.  I’m happy to report that it did.

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Week of Enchantment: Through Piney Mountains Cold

Posted on October 6, 2016 by smellincoffee

On Tuesday morning, I bid a reluctant farewell to Roswell and hit the road west. A half-hour of enormous plains gave way to the hills of the Hondo Valley.

The Hondo valley’s rocky mounts gave way to much larger hills covered in pine trees, reminding me much of northern Alabama and Tennessee.

I reached Ruidoso much more quickly than I anticipated, around nine am — much too early for a free wine tasting I’d arranged at a local winery. Alas.  I was also too early for the museum of the Old West,  but the horse sculptures outside were still available for admiration. 
I continued to climb steadily but not dramatically through the Sierro Blanco mountains and the Lincoln National Forest. A sign declared me to be 8,000 feet above sea level at Apache Summit. 
I made tracks for Alamagordo. Within the town itself was the Space Museum,  which is parked landmark-like upon a hill. The glass cube and rocket  next to it made for easy navigation, though getting back to the highway required instructions from an Allsups clerk. 
We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be awed.
MERCURY!
Moon rock collected by Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to walk on the moon.
I spent most of my time outside the museum admiring the rockets and other equipment. 
…beep…beep….beep…
The space museum displays covered not only the Mercury to Apollo programs, but the shuttle and Skylab as well. It featured sundry items: Russian space suits, the actual food tins carried in the Gemini and Apollo missions, and a plate that simulated the ground during rocket thrusts.  The plate had different strengths for Atlas and Saturns, as well as for whatever launched the shuttle and the Russians. The most intense one I tried was the Saturn, of course. 
Having read so many astronaut memoirs, I mostly appreciated the museum for the Mercury capsule and other aviation equipment, as well as the rocket plate. 
And now, on to White Sands! 

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Week of Enchantment: Roswell: They Call it Home

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee
After enjoying the Living Desert Zoo, I returned to 285 north for Roswell. Even if it were not Roswell, the city made a good camp for the night, its main street juncture providing access to Alamagordo and Las Cruces. But it was….Roswell.  I’ve mentioned here before that in middle school my best friend and I were obsessive fans of the Roswell High book series, and I later became a fan of the loosely-adapted television show based on it. It was for those books that I wanted to see the town;  it’s the same reason I used to comb California maps looking for the Palo City of California Diaries. (Just being on 285 gave me a  fanboy thrill, because an episode of the show is called…”285 South”).

The nearer I drew to Roswell, though, the more it became a real place. The road south of it is plains again, with hills far in the distance.  To my surprise, I spotted not just trees but orchards.  The Roswell I discovered was not a desert town surviving with  kitchsy alien crap;  it was a farming and mining town, a country town.  Trade the mineral mining and refining for logging, and I could have been home.  (There are even houses with a southern stamp!) As soon as I hit the downtown area, I felt at home;  it reminded me of Montevallo’s coziness. There is a relationship between street width and building height that has a sweet spot; some streets just feel right, while others feel too exposed or too cramped. Roswell often felt just right, and I regretted having to leave the next day. 
I winced to see all the alien nonsense coming into town, the goofy balloons with ‘welcome’ signs,  because I come from a tourist town and know what it’s like to be whored out. A visitor comes into town and is excitedly told about the city’s long history as an industrial power, a hub of transportation that produced a wealthy and expansive historic district…but invariably, their only object of interest is  something that merely happened around the town. 
Solidarity aside, I decided to poke my head inside the alien museum, because…well, I was there. I might not ever be again.

The museum proved to be in the shape of a U, with this exhibit perched at the turnaround. The walls were lined with different presentations;  photos of Walker Air Field, now a municipal airport; newspapers from the incident itself; military equipment, pictures of UFOs; models of various scenarios, including one that involved a Nazi flying saucer; a horse covered in newspapers, science fiction movie posters,  ancient art with purported extraterrestrials, and of course a few aliens being dissected.  More interesting is the research library attached to the museum. 
This photograph is only one small part of their selection. It uses the Dewey decimal system and includes actual science books and science fiction in with the UFO and aliens-among-us material. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Contact were both on the shelves.
Another room contained an entire wall full of science journals and magazine, and a wall filled with mysterious documents, NASA technical reports.  
It  would be interesting to learn when Roswell became a town that became an object of interest to tourists, and embraced it. The girl I spoke with in the UFO museum confirmed that many townsfolk were very tired of it, but main street is lined with places selling trade to tourists.
The abundance of material — statues, plaques, murals — hailing Roswell’s founding and prospering as a cattle town indicate that people wish to be appreciated for something else for a change.  I’d like to think I did, because I felt very comfortable here. 
As dusk approached, I retreated to my motel room. My plans for eating at the Mexican place next door were dashed when it closed at five (?!), and so I visited a chain restaurant across the street that I’d never seen before. 
I took a picture of it not because it was new, but because of the trees. Usually, this kind of modern development is surrounded by a parking lot apron and looks ghastly, but here the trees kept faith with the trees lining much of the main street and made it look attractive. 
A final note: based on the amount of Trump signs I saw, Roswellians’ embrace of aliens is inconsistent. 
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Azazel

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

Azazel: Fantasy Stories
© 1988 Isaac Asimov
221 pages

George isn’t an ordinary fellow, for in times past his ancestors possessed the arcane knowledge required to summon creatures — demons? aliens? — from another plane of existence.  The best George can manage personally is a tiny little fellow named Azazel, who — demonic appearance aside — conscientiously refuses to use his great powers to help George out.  Azazel will do favors for other people at George’s request, purely for philanthropic reasons. Too bad these favors always result in extraordinary trouble for the beneficiaries!   Azazel collects twelve stories featuring the attempts of George to help his friends out,  all of which backfire — either for George’s friend or George himself, since he invariably has an angle for putting his ethereal pocket pal to work.

The misfires are never predictable;  sometimes they’re simplistic, caused by George not phrasing his request wisely enough;   other times, the fulfilled wishes simply produce unexpected results.  One woman who wishes to become more beautiful destroys her engagement after the transformation renders her vain and less interested in her homely finance;  one man’s favorite singer gives a performance so incredible that all other music is ruined for him forever.  Other times, the wish succeeds brilliantly but it is George’s covert desires that are stymied. To a friend suffering from writers’ block on a novel, George promises him boundless creativity…if the friend will sign over 50% of his future novel earnings. The wish comes true and the man writes brilliantly — but not novels, and thus no revenue for George!

 This is light fiction, mere amusement — but I find Asimov a very companionable writer, one whose offhand comments match my taste for humorous storytelling, and for that reason I hunted a copy of this book down and brought it with me on my weeklong tour of New Mexico.

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Week of Enchantment: the Living Desert

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

High on a hill north of Carlsbad is the Living Desert Zoo, a nature preserve with some animal exhibits. The zoo is unusual in its coherence; instead of gathering random animals from all over the world, the Living Desert focuses exclusively on the flora and fauna of the Chihuahuan desert.

Although it appears natural, the preserve is carefully sculpted. It’s a desert garden, I would say, with interspersed animal exhibits. 
.
I visited this in the afternoon, after climbing out of the Caverns, and the wind was still ferocious at times. 
The view of the town far below us, and the wind, made even placid scenes like this feel almost intense.
Dozens of these little guys, all munching on watermelon and digging little holes as shelter from the wind.
The Living Desert also featured a greenhouse of ‘succulent greens’, with signs posted warning visitors to use their own judgment about entering. Being from Alabama, the heat and humidity felt perfectly normal to me — just a June day!
As much as I enjoyed the peaceful scenery, and the occasional sight of foxes, it was time for me to move on to another town.  A town…called Roswell. 
…here we go. 
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Week of Enchantment: Into the Hole He Goes

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

My first morning in the west opened to a glorious sunrise. I was up with the dawn, for after a ride into town to eat breakfast, I intended to drive the twenty miles out to the Caverns to be there at their opening.

After a hearty breakfast of sausage and waffles, I returned to the wide-open plains south of the town, very much enjoying the 75 MPH speedlimit.  After close to two hundred miles of open horizons, the turn off into the national park area brought a staggeringly impressive change.

  A winding path carved into a rocky hill took me further and further up; this was not a path cut into dirt, but one which surrounded me with walls of rock.  As I neared the top I could feel my small car buffeted by something,  and realized upon parking that I was standing in the strongest wind I’ve felt since Hurricane Ivan. The grass growing alongside the road was virtually flattened, and I could not decide which was more impressive: that steady and exhilarating, force…or the view.

I’ve gazed down from mountains before, but the view from Chattanooga’s rocky tops was nothing like this. There, the view was hemmed in by other hills, by the abundant forests, by the city itself. Here, I looked across a seemingly infinite landscape. I was riveted, and the view was made all the more spectacular by the vault of the heavens. Far above me the sky threatened with dark gloom, but at one point the sun was breaking through; a half-dozen beams of light pierced it and created a radiant fan. Reluctantly, I broke off from staring into eternity to enter the park. It had just opened, and only a middle-aged couple entered the trail downward before I did. A park ranger briefed us on the rules before our descent into ‘the big hole’.

Where is Virgil when you need him?

 The entrance smelled, faintly; I couldn’t put a finger on it but it had the smell of damp, rot, and possibly bat waste.  That aroma disappeared as we followed the hairpin turns into the cave — though it’s more likely we simply grew used to it. The natural hike takes nearly an hour to complete, and is a spectacle in itself. The cave lighting is spare and tasteful, providing as little illumination as possible while giving the place a strange atmosphere. The lights are there, but hidden.  Our party grew larger, including a pair of younger couples and another middle aged set, this one from Taiwan. I spent most of my time in the caverns traveling with the Taiwanese, who proved very friendly.  The path down was often dark, and we used the faint gleam of the metal handrails to locate it;   although signage urged travelers to use the rails to steady themselves on the damp path, the rails themselves were moist.   If all was still — if treading steps and beeping cameras were silenced — the water can still be heard dripping, and in one area we could see the water falling upon the tip of a stalagmite.

Neither my phone nor my camera were up to the task of turning the dim light of the trail or the Big Room into many good pictures, but I will share a few snatches. One memorable sight wasn’t captured at all; this was the Iceberg, an enormous rock the size of a small house, which had fallen from the cathedral-like ceiling above us.  There were moments on the trail when even the petite pair I was keeping company with had to duck: personally, I had to crouch-watch.

The two most memorable spots in the Big Room for me were the Hall of Giants, filled with massive round formations which stand column like, and ‘fairy land’.  The cavernous aspect of the caverns can’t be captured by a photograph, though. One woman I walked with remarked that the place was like a cathedral, and that may convey some aspect of the size. But a cathedral nave is one space, and your eye can create an outline of it, can frame it to ponder. It isn’t possible  to do that in the caverns, because the spaces stretch out and vanish in darkness, only to reappear as you draw closer — and they go off at odd angles. One area is known as “The Top of the Cross”, because that part of the room is roughly in the shape of a cross or a large X. In the light, though, that shape isn’t discernible from the ground.

Needless to say, going from the top of that hill to deep within the heart of the Earth, to a place where geology isn’t something in books but something happening  audibly, visibly, was extraordinary. 
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Week of Enchantment: Go West, Young Man!

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

My journey west began last Saturday, when I rode with family to the Birmingham Airport. There, after saying my farewells and tripping my way through my first TSA checkpoint,  What would flying be like?   Kind of awesome, as it turned out.

The look on my face as we rose into the air and I watched the interstate and cars shrink in size was utter boyish glee, and it didn’t stop until I heard the shocking announcement that the jet was preparing for final descent into Dallas. I hadn’t even seen the Mississippi yet!

Dallas is an enormous airport, with a Skytrain trolley linking the six terminals. You can imagine my glee to ride an actual electric trolley! I was soon in El Paso, where I claimed my reserved rental (a Kia Rio of which I would grow increasingly fond), and then on my way.

160 miles of this, with a brief mountainous interlude

The road from El Paso to Carlsbad concerned me more than anything, because it appeared on the map to be a hundred and sixty miles of nothing. Combing GoogleMaps, all I found was a small cafe called Cornudas, and a border patrol station. Who would traveling this empty road? Who would help if I broke down? As it turns out,  as empty as this road is, it’s also a solid traffic corridor.  While never busy,  I always had company.  Radio stations were sketchy, but fortunately I have a large repertoire of geographically appropriate songs, from “Don’t Fence Me In” to “Should’ve Been a Cowboy”.  I warbled happily.

The Guadalupe mountains, featuring beautiful views and watchful police.

The approaching New Mexico border made me laugh, because it seemed as though whoever drew the Texas state lines had said “We’ll take as far north as the grass grows.” The seemingly-approaching desert quickly changed to plains, though, and in no time at all I was in Carlsbad.

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Return from the Rio Grande

Posted on October 2, 2016 by smellincoffee

People of the Blogosphere, I HAVE RETURNED!

Last Saturday I boarded a plane and put into motion which was months in the making. Back in May, I decided to take a vacation to the Southwest, and by the first week of June, I fixed my destination as southern New Mexico. Why New Mexico? I wanted to see something different, utterly different, and the Southwest was it.  No doubt Edward Abbey helped; his writing could woo an Eskimo to wanting to see the sun-baked wastes. But New Mexico is a curious place,  the site of many things of interest to me: the nuclear program and the early space race.  Although my initial plan was to use Las Cruces as a base to explore various sites of interest (archaeological, cultural, historical, scientific),  this developed into a driving tour of New Mexico, ranging from the Texas border to Santa Fe.

FUN FACT: If you followed my reading here, you followed me! I arranged the books’ settings and schedule to correspond to my location; so,  my Saturday landing in El Paso connected to Send More Idiots, my Sunday in Carlsbad/Roswell with Loose Ends, my drive through the mountains with Fire on the Mountain, etc. 

Basically, this area.

I have hundreds of photos, and hope to produce a few collections in the next few days that are fit for public consumption. I’ll be sharing them and stories from my travels here over the coming weeks.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:  Carlsbad Caverns, Roswell, Ruidoso, White Sands, Las Cruces, the Very Large Array, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe.

And now, some sneak peaks!

 
 
 

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Los Alamos

Posted on September 30, 2016 by smellincoffee

Los Alamos
© 1997 Joseph Kanon
416 pages

A man lies dead in Santa Fe, but the answer to ‘whodunit’ lies in the hills above the city — or on The Hill, the site of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where something very mysterious is being cooked up.  The Hill’s residents, many of them foreign scientists, are not even known by name; if a local sheriff asks them for their I.D., the card they present merely has a number. They are the creators of the most secret project in human history, and easily one of the most expensive: the Manhattan Project. To find out who killed the man, and why,  Army Intelligence PR man Mike Connolly must get inside the most secret place on the planet.  Los Alamos  is a murder mystery turned spy thriller, set in the last year of the Second World War,  when man took Death in his hands and released it on the desert.

The story unfolds over the course of several months, Connolly working in secret after the ‘official’ cause of death is a romantic pickup turned violent. Though Connolly has arrived on the Hill to penetrate its secrets and find a murderer, he soon creates secrets of his own, beginning an affair with a bored scientist-wife, an English rose who occupies her free time studying the Anasazi.  Working with local cops and sometimes against the government, which is rightfully obsessively secretive about the Project,  Connolly struggles to connect the dots of a very mysterious murder. The man’s death carries with it enormous scandal, not just because he was a security agent on the Hill, but because his body was arranged to make it look like a sexual liason gone very wrong.  Ultimately the resolution of the murder isn’t love, but power — the power the United States is working to perfect, power other nations want to share.

I have read Kanon before, starting with his The Good German, and found it dark indeed. Los Alamos isn’t nearly  as dreary, though an isolated mesa in wartime doesn’t lend itself to much merriment. I did enjoy the way Kanon slow-cooks the plot, minor details acquired over months creating a larger picture when they’re assembled together. In a way it reminded me of NCIS, in that a character who seems rather minor turns out to be the missing piece: in NCIS, there’s a rule of thumb that an adult who appears and is then forgotten about is usually the murderer.   I think Kanon captures the wartime feel well enough, a mix of optimism, wariness, and horror as the Nazis are drive back, but their retreat exposes the full horror of their ideology to the world.  It succeeds as a mystery-thriller, though as usual I could have gone without the bedroom play-by-play.

Related:
Engima, Robert Harris. Also WW2 spy thriller.

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The Pawnbroker

Posted on September 29, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Pawnbroker
© 2014 David Thurlo, Aimée Thurlo
304 pages

Charlie and Gordo are two Afghan War vets returning to civilian life, but as it turns out, parts of Albuquerque aren’t that much safer than Kabul. When their friend and attorney is gravely injured in a drive-by targeting someone else, the two are obliged by honor to find and wreak vengeance on the shooters. The Pawnbroker opens with the drive-by and is loaded with fist fights and shoot-outs; Charlie and Gordon’s roles in these affairs is gamely tolerated by the ABQ PD, in part because one of their officers is the live-in girlfriend of the attorney . Perhaps the definitive scene is the two leads, standing back to back and taking down a gang of tattooed gangstas with Krav Maga. The scene is later described as being one out of Rush Hour. It’s accurate, because this is a buddy-cop movie in book form, but instead of two suited lady-charmers, we have two working class soldiers turned business partners. The book is filled with the kind of action Rush Hour provides, although the wisecracking isn’t quite as abundant. The plot is reasonably tangled, so it’s an enjoyable thriller for passing time.

Comments welcome, but I’m somewhere in the mountains..

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