Musings

Dust Bowl revisited

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Today we crossed Oklahoma west to east. That’s a lotta miles. We came across the Panhandle to see what communities that JCB read about in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2005; NYTimes review by Elizabeth Royte here) look like today, something like seventy years after the Dust Bowl.

This about sums it up. Some communities we went through were doing better than others, especially as we drove farther east, but many had long-empty buildings, both commercial and residential.

Once again we crossed paths, in space if not in time, with John Steinbeck, who wrote about both Okies/the Dust Bowl people and the people of Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, 1945), where we were in late October.

Plain plains

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Out in the desert flats, the horizon is wide. Even in a city.

We made it to Santa Fe* in time to lunch at the highly recommended The Shed. Nothing pretentious, despite the James Beard award posted in the waiting area. And we did wait; the place was mobbed. But the dining area is a series of small spaces, including in an outdoor patio, so while you dine you don’t feel like you’re in a large restaurant (nice!). We had some enchiladas and some carne adovada, all very yum. With the sides, the lunch orders were substantial, so we only wanted a modest sandwich for dinner.

Heading east, we pondered staying in Roy, but the town was just too desolate, and the hotel was right out of the 50s, and not the best of the 50s either. Roy is doing far better than Yates, however. Yates is on the NM state highway map, and even has a sign posted on the road at the east and west ends of town. But “town” it isn’t. Ghost town, yes. Now, it’s a bend in the road with one ranch house and outbuildings. No lights on when we went by at dusk plus a few minutes. Couldn’t tell if the house was abandoned, but there was a looming combine parked out by the road, as if it was for sale.

Even after sunset, we pushed generally eastward. The vegetation and landscape shifted dramatically as we motored beyond Las Vegas (the NM one). We saw pronghorns everywhere in the dying light for a while when we were near the mountains, and then just cattle. Or maybe only the beeves showed up in the dying light. We watched the horizon become a simple dividing line between the blues and greys (along with a few orange-reds from the absent sun) of the sky with the greenish dry yellows of the grasslands. This, after all, is the Great Plains!

* Santa Fe is so fun to photograph that it’s not uncommon for photographers to take pictures of other photographers, simply because they’re part of the landscape.

Karma call

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Several interesting adventures in this day, including a major karma call that ended up just fine (reminder to self: Priuses are pavement vehicles), but the ones I want to mention have to do with wildlife sightings at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Species sighted included snow geese (I think), many sandhill cranes (lacking hills of any sort down on the marshes of the Rio Grande), various ducks, hawks, and small birds, as well as a few (black tailed?) deer (okay, not in the park) and one dog-family creature we’re assured is a NM-sized coyote (much larger than those I know from the East).

Note: if you are in Albuquerque, you can’t do wrong dining at the Indigo Crow in Corrales, most especially if good friends join your table!

Cliff dwelling details

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That picture is not just a visual texture. It’s the roof of Cave 3 at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (natural light; no flash). It took lots of smudge and smoke to get that sooty coating on the stone (although some has flaked away). Realizing this may be of little interest to you, Gentle Reader, I include a second picture.

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This is a top-down view of a model of the linked rooms in this same complex, dating to the late AD 1200s. What’s especially interesting is the chain of rooms built across the inside/back (top) wall of the natural caves, and that they all have connecting doorways. This means that people in front had no way of knowing whether people were traversing the back of the cave, perhaps to heighten surprise during a ceremony viewed by an audience in the front of the cave?

No cholla spines today

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Today we lived stress-free, or at least I did.

In the morning (almost) cool, we walked up a dry wash and back. There is nothing comparable in the part of the Midwest I have spent time in. Dry washes always look to me like they’re awaiting the next rainstorm, and are in a pause mode…. We even got in a little hammock time under the cottonwoods down by Little Bear Creek.

I finished the (yawn) novel I mentioned yesterday (yawn), and began Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008, translation by Reg Keeland from Swedish of Män som hatar kvinnor). This one is well worth the time (much better than the Yawn), and I’m only 138 pages into it!

Become stress-free

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If you can marshall the resources (and time), please visit Casitas de Gila, and leave your cares behind.

The place is exceptional, the owners lovely, and the time you spend here will be incomparable.

Guaranteed.

The amenities are superb. I especially recommend the walking trails, the hammock under the cottonwoods down by the river, bird/deer/horse-watching, and the hot-tub.

We are enjoying some stress-free downtime, getting caught up in some ways, and escaping in others.

I am reading a Dan Brown-imitator (or so it seems to me), a crypto-novel written by Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza called The Gaudí Key in English (translated from the Spanish La Clave Gaudí by Lisa Dillman; originally published in 2007).

Like Brown’s books, the writing’s, well, not the best. The Gaudí characters have many parallels with the bunch in The Da Vinci Code, including the sweet young thing and her male helper. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far my reaction’s about the same as to Brown’s books. Eeeh. Still, it’s a reasonable downtime read, given my selection!

Expect the unexpected

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Tromp. Tromp. We were headed back out on the Catwalk trail near Glenwood, New Mexico, backtracking toward the parking lot after traipsing over two miles (up, at elevation, a considerable undertaking for flatlanders), when JCB spotted a family group of bighorn sheep spying on us from above.

I admit to occasional jealousy of the Marquis‘ close-ups of wild things—mostly birds—but today I think I scored a big one. These are wild bighorns, and we while we watched them the one that’s lower down on the rock face (a female with a radio collar) kept walking around and dislodging small stones that fell down on the trail in front of us!

Gorgeous Sonoran desert

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Short version: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument—cool place!

The reality is that since the property kisses the US-Mexico border for miles, many of the coolest places are off-limits. Sadly.

So, in the interests of attempted perkiness, let’s keep to the upbeat stuff. Like the organ pipe cacti. Each one is a large multi-armed mini-forest. Yet, my eye kept being drawn to the saguaros looming above all the other plants, and to the various cholla species, dense with spined branches, as well as the ocotillos and palo verdes, all liberally sprinkled among the ubiquitous, uh, uh…(forgot name—see how much I was looking out the window rather than studying the handouts!).

Owl’s classy digs

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Most of the time we were at Casa Grande today, we were thinking about ancient times, when Hohokam farmers kept irrigated fields between and around their mounds and houses, out in the flats near Coolidge, Arizona—not quite so near to the modern town of Casa Grande. One of those quirks….

Anyway, people go to the Casa Grande ruins to see the ruins, and we did, especially the big ruin protected from the rain by a big FL Olmsted-designed roof. We also spent time gazing up at this Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), denizen of the roof, keeper of the ruins, and demographic controller of the immediate area (for selected species).

Tidbit from USPS website: “Did You Know? Casa Grande Ruins National Monument was the first cultural and prehistoric site to be protected by the United States government. It was set aside in 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison.

It’s November

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Time change. CHECK.

Costumes stowed (mostly). CHECK.

Leftover candy consumed (partly). CHECK.

Yeah, November has arrived.

And, tada!, we’ve will have made the third corner of The Box come early tomorrow morning.

We laid low today, recharging batteries (the real kind and the personal kind, too!), doing laundry, resupplying, and making travel plans afresh (thank you, Google Maps).

We’ll be sad to leave, although we are looking forward to the next couple of states we’ll be visiting.