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.
Between Roswell and Mountainair, in New Mexico, there is enough open space to house millions of people, plus livestock.
Land stretches from the road as far as you can see. Whether the planet is running out of space or just resources needed to support seven billion people is a topic for early morning radio talk shows.
The horizon is distant and telephone poles and barbed wire fences, ancient technology, crowd this rural highway along with an occasional grouping of cattle, old crumbling farmhouses, windmills with blades missing like a kid’s front tooth.
We wave at the few drivers that pass us going towards Roswell.. A road marker advertises Gran Quivera National Monument and Richard takes an exit to get us a look at the historical site.
People lived here long before Pilgrims, long before Columbus. When the Conquistadors came, in the fifteen hundreds, to search for gold, to claim land for their King, to convert Indians to Catholicism, there was conflict. In 1680, a Pueblo Revolt sent the new invaders packing until they returned with even more deadly force.
What is left of this Pueblo are the walls of an old Spanish church, without its roof, and numerous fallen rock walls of homes on the hillsides around the church.
It would have been strange for the Indians to learn a new religion, kneel at a cross, drink wine, eat wafers. Their Gods were of nature and their vision of creation and man’s place in it was different than those of their conquerors.
Stacking rocks and building walls in an open paradise would have been intolerable.
New Mexico is about open space.
You can’t live here without realizing land survives.
Conquerors are, in good time, conquered.
When local rancher Mack Brazell found extraterrestrial debris on his ranch and reported it to the local Sheriff a Pandora’s box was opened.
The local Sheriff called the local Air Force Base and a whirlwind of misinformation, disinformation, cover up was begun.
The Roswell Incident is known around the world, and, at its epicenter, Roswell has a museum dedicated to UFO’s and alien visits from that summer of 1947.
On Sunday, when people should be in church, inquisitive souls browse this museum, watch a Hollywood movie on ” Roswell “, snap pictures to post to their Facebook page.
The story, as told, is one of an alien crash and dead alien bodies. Mack reported strange metal scraps strewn over the desert with strange inscriptions that were impervious to destruction and, when squeezed, returned to their original shape. A mortician reported small bodies with four fingers and large eyes. There were sworn deathbed statements that documented unearthly events.
Official reports promoted weather balloons.
It is a question of faith in the absence of facts. Participants in the event have died, committed suicide, or told survivors what they saw, or did, or knew.
I wrestle with thinking versus intuition.
The explosion of technology, after 1947, is significant. The automobile was still a youngster on the block.. Television was barely into living rooms of the most wealthy. Then, after 1947, you get exponential scientific breakthroughs.
What our government is working on, in secret, is beyond this planet.
Did Einstein sit up nights discussing the universe with green men?
Russell’s Travel Center sits on a New Mexico hill just before the Texas/ New Mexico State Line.
It is close to Endee, one of those almost vanished New Mexico towns that shrink smaller and smaller as time barrels forwards. At Russell’s you can gas up, have something to eat, buy food, use restrooms, draw cash from an ATM, and, most importantly, take a trip down memory lane.
There is a car and culture exhibit in the Travel Center that is a blast to the past.
While the 1920’s roared, danced around the edges of a champagne glass, the 1930’s were filled with clouds of dust and long faces.
The 1940’s were filled with World War 2.
The 1950’s were a return to consumerism, family, stability and hard work chasing your dreams in a country that encouraged you to look to make bigger and better things, have bigger and better ideas, and hitch your coat-tails to the best of capitalism.
The 60’s were a crack in the Liberty Bell with dissent and revulsion by kids against morals and tradition.
This exhibit in the travel center holds icons of my 1950’S generation.
Roy Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Betty Boop, Elvis Presley are some of the 1950’s icons. Big chrome laden cars, soft drink machines, rock and roll music and parking meters were playing cards in our deck.
To nieces and nephews it is hard to describe rotary phones, push lawn mowers, Dewey decimal card catalogs, the KKK, life without pizza and hamburgers, black and white TV’s.
As old waves go out, new ones pile over the top of them.
Being on the bottom is rough tumbling, and, not much fun.
There used to be a small stream here that meandered down the hill and went over the edge of the canyon and fell into a deep dark hole below us.
The land’s owner built himself an observation platform, erected a light pole, and built a water wheel that generated electricity to power the light. The chances were good that no one would be out at night and walk over the cliff and fall into the chasm, but it was a place he could bring guests and have a beer as they watched the water wheel turn, throw rocks into the dark and listen to them splash at the bottom on hot summer nights.
There is no water coming down the hill now so the water wheel is stopped, its blades providing climbing opportunities for vines and weeds. Insect webs reach across the gap between blades and the generator is rusting. The water wheel was built with welded iron arms, bolted wood planks, and pieces cut from old tractor tires. The hub of the wheel is a rim off a car.
On a ranch, people get used to making stuff. It keeps them interested and uses junk that accumulates.
This wheel is a John Currie creation. He and Uncle Hugh always tinkered with junk piled in the corner of a barn or discarded in a pasture filled with weeds, dead brush, and cow chips.
Water wheels are old technology.
They will be resurrected at the next big reset in human history.
Drive In movies, in the fifties, were a popular family outing and also a place where teens, borrowing the family car, could get away and explore birds and bees in the back seat of station wagons.
The latest Hollywood movies were projected onto huge screens and patrons watched from their cars with sound provided by little speakers that hung on a partially rolled down car window. If you got hungry you walked down gravel, between cars, and bought Cokes and popcorn at a cinder block concession stand that had restrooms, tables to sit and eat, promos that told about coming attractions.
At night it was cool and pleasant and if you didn’t like the movie you could watch shooting stars or look for aliens on their way to Washington D.C.. The movie screen was enormous and much better than the little black and white television in your living room.
The 60th anniversary of the Sandell has arrived and the featured movie this Saturday, August 29th, is ” Love Me Tender ” with Elvis.
Deep in Jesus country, Elvis still gets air time. He is remembered as a rock and roll legend, a womanizer, a great entertainer who died middle aged and alone with a drug problem. He sang great gospel, served in the military as a regular enlisted man, and never lost his Southern roots.
Finding an operating drive in movie these days,that still shows movies, is almost as impossible as finding a roll of Kodak film, or a camera that even uses film. Technology is zipping past us more quickly than we can process its need or ethics. Humans being ruled by artificial intelligence is no longer the crazy science fiction we used to think it was. Drones are almost to our front doors delivering packages.
Clarendon is a small Texas town where my father, and his sisters, were raised and went to school. They used to ride a horse to class during the Great Depression.
When Elvis burst on the scene he must have looked, to them, like a madman.
He was a harbinger of things to come.
Snapshots are all I have of the inside of the Goodnight home, taking us back to the late eighteen hundreds and early 1900’s.
Mr. Goodnight died just after the stock market crash of 1929 and he, at 93, was ready to move on, feeling he had lived in the best possible times, much more fortunate than those that went before or those that were coming after.
Rooms in his house have high ceilings, tall windows with individually cut triangular glass panes of thick glass that has ripples and reflects light oddly. It has a downstairs for business, eating, entertaining, socializing. Upstairs is for sleeping, reflection, and repose.
In its day this home was a palace and Mr. Goodnight spared no expense for the comfort of his wife who, at the start of their marriage, lived in a dirt dugout on the prairie waiting for him to make good on his promises to cherish and protect. She was,as you can tell from a short bio on a brochure created for guests, as single minded as her husband and it must have been comfort to him to have a confidante in such a rough and tumble life of men and animals.
The rooms are wallpapered. In the restoration, the woodwork, that had been painted, was stripped and refinished to the way it was when the Goodnight’s lived here. Closets are a new touch because homes of this time period typically had no closets. When the Goodnight’s lived here, they used an outhouse, water was carried in from a well house, lights were powered with whale oil.
There is an out building used by Mrs. Goodnight as a school for cowboy children and as an Infirmary when hired hands got sick.
Dishes on the kitchen table wait for hungry animated ranching people to say a prayer and ” pass biscuits and gravy, please.”
Downstairs, in Mr. Goodnight’s study, there is a fireplace, a buffalo robe on the floor, horned furniture, a couch with a quilt for cold nights.There aren’t many books.
Mr. Goodnight was a rancher.
He didn’t have to read books to know what the world was about.
Not far from Clarendon, Texas is the homestead and ranch headquarters of Charles Goodnight, a pioneer Texas rancher.
In the mid to late 1800’s, he controlled a ranch of over a million acres, had 180 cowboys on his payroll, and was an industry by himself. He was a tough man who lived to be 93, fought Indians and had Indians as long time friends. He experimented with crossbreeding buffalo and Texas longhorns and was responsible, with help from his wife Molly, for saving the short hair buffalo from extinction. He entertained Presidents and panhandlers alike in his dining room and, as a cowboy employee once said , ” when he told you to do something he expected it to be done. ”
His house is on the National Register of Historic Places and was restored with private funds, grants, and donations.
On a small horned couch in the upstairs master bedroom is an open Bible with a pair of reading glasses holding his place in Psalms.
There are temptations and lines to be drawn in accumulating a million acres of land and running men and cattle.
Mr. Goodnight was reputed to be a gruff, stern, no nonsense kind of man. Yet, he was also reputed to be kind and generous with his time, his money and attention to those who wanted to work hard and learn. If he liked you he would do most anything to help you rise on your merits.
My brother Alan tells a story of our Aunt Roberta, my father’s sister, who lived in Clarendon where an old Mr. Goodnight had his city house and spent the last few years of his life. She and a girlfriend used to play jacks on the sidewalk in front of his home and she remembered a nurse coming out with a plate of cookies and telling them they could come anytime to play.
Stern and gruff as he is in his photos and paintings, the man that sent out cookies to two little girls had a heart of gold.
1990 was one of the last years Toyota made these mini-motor homes.
This little baby has a 6 cylinder 3.0 EFI engine, gets sixteen miles per gallon depending on terrain and weather and road conditions. She has air conditioning, a refrigerator that runs on electric or propane, propane heat, a small bathroom and shower, a kitchen sink and counter, microwave, a dining room table and a couch. You sleep in an overhead bed over the truck engine and there is cabinet space for the few things you take with you.
Research shows Gypsies have long been in America and the gypsy soul is a part of our American experience. There is an entire culture of retired middle class couples who move back and forth across the United States living in two hundred thousand dollar diesel pushers staying in National Parks and State campgrounds. There are disabled vets and singles who live in recreational vehicles and park at a different Wal-Mart each evening to stay one step ahead of homelessness.
Living life as a RV snail has advantages because you can drive away from your problems with a turn of an ignition key.
A gypsy soul is hard to get rid of when you were born with it.
Music is a tougher taskmaster than writing, but not by much.
Laid on the bed is a 1940’s Conn ” Naked Lady ” Alto Saxophone.
Her sound is sweet, her lacquer finish is imperfect and worn, her response is excellent.
This horn was bought at Baum’s Music Store in Albuquerque and cost two thousand dollars. You read about famous violins that are hundreds of years old but are still coveted. This model was used by Charlie Parker and it is hard to question ” Bird’s” musical talent and taste even if his personal life still raises eyebrows.
Autumn will be here soon and leaves will fall from swaying branches. The leaves will tumble in space and then, before they hit the ground, will be sent back upwards by gusts of wind.
Playing a good chorus of ” Autumn Leaves “, with no music, out of your own head, is worth working for.
Music comes from places of dreams.
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