On Tuesday nights, at 6:30 pm, featured entertainment at Crazy Canuck’s is crab races. The races are a fundraiser for local schools and charitable groups and give locals and visitors another reason to drink, dance, socialize, relax.
Number 57 is halfway across the obstacle course on a prison break before Kevin, our master of ceremonies, wearing a red crab hat and holding a microphone, catches him and carefully slips him back under an upside down champagne bucket in the center of the ring.
The first race begins late, after announcements, when Kevin lifts the upside down champagne bucket again and the crabs move, from being under the bucket, towards a rope perimeter that forms a circle around them on a big plywood game board resting on the sand.
The crowd is excited and some gamblers rush the platform to support their pick.
It is illegal to touch or step on the board but you can yell, flash lights, move hands and arms up and down to influence the race outcome. The winning crab is the one who crosses the rope at any point in the rope circle around them.
At the end of this first race, Daryl provides live music while losers come up with a different strategy for the next race and try to handicap the crabs that will be running next.
It is all in good fun and none of the crabs, tonight, end up on anyone’s plate.
Number 57, my pick for the first race, never crosses the rope line, and, as far as I’m concerned, can go into tomorrow’s soup.
If I were really lucky, Stephanie Kennedy, the ” Belizian Temptress ” would come through the door and try her temptation on me.
My defenses have been pretty weak the last few days.
Every Anthony has his Cleopatra.
nnnnnn.
New Mexico was once at the bottom of a great sea.
Over millions of years, carbon creatures died and drifted to the bottom of that sea and became preserved in silt. Layer upon layer of silt turned to stone and the fragile bodies of once living creatures became captured and preserved. My Geologist brother Neal likes nothing better than hiking mountains, looking for geological treasure chests and opening them to find fossil pieces of eight.
This morning we return to a quarry he was introduced to in junior high school.
A teacher brought he and a friend here to scrape away layers of shale and discover ferns, brachiapods, and other marine life. These days a teacher wouldn’t risk the field trip but that trip set two kids into lifelong careers.
As I look up at the quarry walls this morning i can easily see geological epochs as they were deposited in layers. Even a foot thick layer took thousands of years to form..
Neal knows the layers we are looking for on this dig and finds us a promising hunting spot in the side of a crumbling bank in mountains that used to be under water.
Hawks fly over us on a clear cool fall morning and we have brought our small cardboard boxes for specimens, rock hammers, scrapers, newspapers for wrapping what we find, bottles of water, a few apples and sunflower seeds, and lots of hope.
Any day you can poke into pre- history and find something only you are seeing for the first time in 250 million years, it is a good day.
This mule deer beelines to Alan’s back yard to have dessert.
There are sunflowers off Alan’s back porch and when this deer snaps one off the stem he looks like a little kid eating a piece of brightly colored candy. When I move towards a large living room window to get a better look at him, he moves away to a safe distance.
On the edge of the canyon is a new house that has compromised my brother’s view.
People here like deer but hate wild hogs. Deer get into your garden and eat your flowers but they are gentle, peaceful creatures. Hogs tear up everything.
The neighbor’s house on the edge of the canyon is large, expensive. It has a big roof, a double car garage, two porches, several stories.
Why does it take so much too keep us people happy and so little to keep a deer happy?
It would take some ranch dressing, salt and pepper, to make me even try these sunflowers.
I’m back in Texas.
These cattle watch me intently as I cross the road to take their group portrait.
I walk slowly, stop, give them a chance to get used to my intrusion. They are congregated by a fence line and don’t really want to give up their ground.
This is a small grouping but there are more cattle on this West Texas ranch. With lots of rain, grazing is good and these guys and girls are fit and healthy. There are new calves in the family and identification tags clipped into their ears look silly, too big for the size of their heads..
Later in the afternoon this family will lie down in the grass under the shade of mesquite trees, their tails swatting insects that torment. They will look like big brown, black and tan rocks in a landscape that is flat and monotonous and rock less.
These guys would love Uruguay but they don’t let cattle fly on planes.
Bovines take up too many seats, and trips to the lavatory are complicated.
The Owl Cafe was born in San Antonio, New Mexico, one of many New Mexican towns you zip past on the freeway, not even dots on the state road map.
The original cafe doesn’t have an owl on its roof and is a fifties style bar and grill with ancient cheap wood paneling, a bar of soap in the urinals, fly catchers dangling from roof overhangs. The original Owl Cafe peddles green chili cheeseburgers and cold beer and does so well that it’s owners built a new Owl Cafe in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s biggest city.
The Owl Cafe in Albuquerque has a menu with all the favorites; burgers, hot dogs, enchiladas, chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy, shakes and soft drinks, cherry pie. There is no attempt at sprouts, kale, broccoli, vegan or low fat fare. Occasionally the restaurant parking lot is full of 1950’s car shows and neon lights on the owl come on in early summer evenings when softball games start at Los Altos Park across the street.
Presiding over the Cafe, on the roof, is an Owl that you can see from blocks away as well as from I-40 that takes people across country heading east or west.
Owls have a reputation for being wise. It seems, though, that they should be well down on the bird IQ list. When you stay up all night and live off small rodents you are not radiating intelligence.
This guy never sleeps and when ambulances blast past on the Interstate, his eyes simply blink.
If he were truly wise, he would never be surprised, and, never blink.
The last gato celebrated in this blog was sleeping on a window sill in Montevideo on a warm afternoon.
Pickles is the newest feline to be celebrated.
He has come, from Flagstaff, to stay at the Albuquerque homestead on Martingale Street for a month and a half.
This move was unexpected but Pickles has decided, like most cats, that there is no use for worry. As long as food and water bowls are full, attention is available, and there are no dogs – all is good . He has become used to humankind and their peculiarities.
This evening, several days into our acquaintance, the two of us watch the evening news. There is nothing on the news that either of us cares about. Both of us know there is nothing we can do to change the narrative, or the events.
Pickles is a fine boy. It will be difficult for me to say good bye. Till then, he will brush against my legs, sleep curled up on a living room chair, and purr as I tell him fine things about himself that he already knows.
When something questionable is said on the news, his right ear dips.
He can spot phonies a mile away.
In July, my niece Calley takes Pickles back to his new home in Phoenix and cat sitting is done.
If only humans were as simple to understand as cats.
This morning the clean up crew is roosting in a tall dead tree across the bridge that gets you over Percha Creek into Hillsboro, New Mexico.
This tree is dead as their breakfast and gives the buzzards a good place to open their wings and catch the sun’s heat, talk about yesterday’s trips over hillsides, tell grisly buzzard jokes.
Buzzards are a part of western living. In the evening, before the sun goes down, you watch them gliding on updrafts of wind off the hillsides, not in a hurry, conserving energy.
This morning they look big and healthy.
Buzzards, for those who haven’t been paying attention, share many things in common with the Hillsboro residents.
Even if you don’t see them, there are residents in coveralls sitting in these tree branches too, waiting patiently for the next town person to move up to the graveyard on the nearby hill.
In a place like Hillsboro, the pickings are small and nothing goes to waste.
Anything you get your hands on here is worth something to somebody.
Driving back roads through flat dry West Texas prairie, one comes upon mule deer grazing among mesquite trees.
They look at you as you pass with dark intense eyes. They are always aware, can turn quick and be gone even quicker, leap over barbed wire fences like child’s play. Deer are handsome animals with deep set eyes, black noses, and ears that are their security. They move freely between Palo Duro Canyon and the ranch and farmland on top where it is windy and exposed and people live.
Turkeys are harder to call handsome.
This afternoon a group of gobblers appear in the back yard and Alan feeds them lunch. When he reaches into his bucket, grabs a handful of corn and pitches it onto their prairie table, they don’t scatter.
He has been feeding them for months and now they come up to his house, onto the back porch, and peer into his living room.
He calls them his “Peeping Tom’s”.
Animals and people now have relationships. Wild animals have become less wild, less something we eat, more something we befriend.
Still, animal’s are wise to be cautious. Human’s easily do inhuman things in a heartbeat.
Nature in the canyon is never far away, and neither are humans.
As our tour boat moves slowly through the water, paralleling Stone Island, we see mangroves form a wall to our east. We leave the marina and head north past large shrimp boats, tuna ships with miles of net piled on their decks, one of the largest fish canneries in Mexico, the Pacifico beer bottling plant, some ship repair yards and ocean going vessels in various shades of rust.
Rounding the northern tip of the island, we head now, towards the south, on the opposite side of the island from where we began. You can look further south and see breaking waves as waters of the Pacific meet waters of this estuary fed by rivers. Mangroves grow where salt water and fresh water meet and they are crucial for this aquatic environment.
While we chug along, a pelican flies down to the deck at the bow of our boat and looks at Polo, our guide.
Pelicans are odd looking birds with huge beaks, beaded eyes and bald heads, huge jointed wings. This visitor’s webbed feet splay out on the deck and he isn’t going anywhere.
Polo reaches for his microphone and tells us a story.
“This is my friend Juanito,” he begins. “He comes and joins us on most of our trips. I will give him fish later for a reward …”
“Some years back,” Polo continues, “we found this pelican who was covered with oil and couldn’t fly. So we wrapped him in a coat and took him home and my family cleaned him up and fed him till he could fly again. We had him at home a year before we brought him back here and let him go. His home is over there …”
Polo gestures at the mangroves.
“He joined us on a tour one day and now he always comes to see us. He is a very smart bird. When I feed him he knows which fish to eat and which fish to leave alone.”
After telling us about the value of mangroves to the ecosystem, and stressing the importance of fishing to the local economy, Polo feeds Juanito his first treat.
For a bunch of tourists, on vacation, Juanito is a high point.
It isn’t every day you are visited by a Pelican and get to watch him grab a fish in his beak, wiggle his long neck to get the fish down to his stomach, then look back at you with contentment and anticipation, as his friend, Polo, reaches into a white five gallon paint bucket for yet another snack.
Juanito takes this fish gently from Polo’s hand, and swallows.
He has become, and he knows it too, our official trip mascot.
The Temple of Music belongs in a different time and place.
This edifice is in a downtown San Jose, Costa Rica city park where music is performed and people congregate. This afternoon there is a group of young gymnasts practicing handstands under the temple dome, entertaining those who are passing through.
A young man with tattoos seems to be the leader, and, while I am watching, he is instructing another young man who is practicing handstands with wooden blocks set on the ground directly in front of him.
While doing a handstand, the student lifts his right hand off the right block and supports himself with his left hand. Then, he drops his right hand back to the right block, supports himself, and lifts his left hand in the air, off the left block.
It takes practice to learn to stand on one hand.
Passersby take pictures and one girl says she only wishes she could do half the things these gymnasts are practicing.
Pigeons, roosting on the outside edge of the dome, an upside down bowl, are nonchalant.
They don’t have to work on their balance and keep people below them on their toes.
Recent Comments