Doctor Who has the most unique phone booth in the Universe. but on our way back to Creede, Colorado, Richard’s idea is to stop and pay respects to one of the last pay phones in America.
On site, Richard and I both pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone to confirm the antiquated technology is working, and take our obligatory pictures. I wish Columbus had had a camera to document his first landing and native Indians had been able to shoot videos of foreigners sticking a strange flag in their hallowed ground. Seeing a You tube video of the universe created, in real time, would also be inspirational.
Dr. Who would know if there are payphones or push mowers on Mars.
He would know if there was a Denny’s hidden in the rings of Saturn.
He would know what the Gates of Heaven are made of.
I can’t call Dr. Who though because this last of its kind pay phone doesn’t take credit cards, phone cards don’t let us call outside Earth’s atmosphere, I don’t have a truckload of quarters, and the Operator is on break.
Watching a piece of human history disappear has sadness wrapped inside its wrapper.
Back in the day, we didn’t use our phones much.
We had mostly the same complaints as we do today. We just shouldered them better.
Highway 285 winds it’s way through Espanola, Ojo Caliente, Tres Piedras, Antonito, and eventually Alamosa, Colorado.
Another way to see this high country is riding a narrow gauge railroad that runs from Antonito, Colorado to Chama, New Mexico and back.
This narrow gauge train runs on steam and there is a man who works his shovel the entire trip, pushing coal into a hot firebox that heats water that makes steam that moves rods that turns wheels rolling on narrow tracks.
Richard and I pull off the highway and watch the antique train pull into the Antonito station.
These cars used to carry goods and people but now carry sightseers who want to revisit the past, imagine themselves in an old John Wayne movie and take their kids on an afternoon trip.
I look for John Wayne to climb down off the train with a big wide brimmed stetson, a red bandana around his neck, six guns wrapped around his waist and a badge on his chest.
All that get off the train this afternoon are kids with cell phones, overweight adults with walkers and oxygen, and railroad employees getting ready to go home.
Re-living the past is not for the faint of heart.
Real railroads, these days, carry shipping containers filled with stuff made in China.
Today, Gwen wants blue toenails. She is four years old but has a mind of her own, like all of us.
Today, Alma sits on the floor in a doorway and carefully puts a new more beautiful blue on previously red toenails.
Every little girl needs these moments.
Alma knows this better than anyone.
Gwen will remember this, forever.
Across the road from the Hemingway Romantic Eco-Cottages is an open air bar with picnic tables covered by Mexican tablecloths, salt and pepper shakers made with small Corona bottles, pithy signs and a cooking area where a chef makes tacos, a specialty of the house.
This VW bus, from the 60’s, has been painted, gutted, and parked in a visible location. Inside it, our waiter writes down our order, sits a moment on a small wooden bench, stands, adjusts his glasses, and, in due time, hustles his ticket over to the chef who is cleaning his grill.
This VW bus was driven down here in the 60’s and never made it home.
There are still people living in Tulum who came down, lost their passport, credit card, money and hangups, and stayed to the drum roll of the waves.
Fish, beef, chicken and pork are the four tacos featured tonight.
Joan has one of each and I have the rest.
Coming to Tulum was her idea, and it is a good one.
I call this jaunt a sparkling interlude moving to the bridge in a typical jazz standard with an AABA form.
There are sand creations on beaches.
They start as an idea, then move past idea to become reality.
Artists bring their buckets and shovels, pots and rakes, sticks or bones, bottle caps or string, shells or seaweed to make hair. They kneel in the sand, and, with bare hands, sculpt, as best they can, their visions. When all is done, what they make stands till tides or careless feet sweep them away.
Sandy is Joan’s idea and, in her bag, are buttons, mittens, sticks for arms, an old pink ball cap,a Tecate bottle, and a composition scheme that allows sand to be stacked a couple of feet high.
As helper, my job is to capture seawater in a bucket, add beach sand and mix with a shovel till you have a material that will pack, hold together, and allow itself to be shaped.
It takes ten buckets to make ” Sandy “, and, when all is done, our borrowed shovel is returned to a hotel closet and the bucket is washed out and fresh water added for Felix the cat.
After photo documentation of the event, Sandy is left to face her public
The whole project is considered a success when strangers stop to take pictures for their Facebook pages.
Art flourishes in the desert.
At the Tubac Art Festival, streets are closed to traffic, excepting horse drawn wagons, and tents are being set up while parking attendants put on their lime colored jackets and sunscreen.
Two of the parking lots are already full of cars by ten thirty, and, in the third lot, sightseers are getting their shoes dusty walking across dirt fields towards the Art Festival. Tubac is festive and shows us old and new restaurants, galleries, gift shops, restaurants, bars, white tents sheltering festival exhibitors.
Tubac is off Highway 19, between Tucson and Nogales, and, according to my brother Alan, who was here some years ago, looks different than it was.
” None of that was here, ” he remarks and points at a cluster of shops, each one trying to attract buyers with signs and special sales.
February is a prime time of the year for retailers here and a proprietor shows us his hand woven rugs from around the world as we zip into his shop to look at western artifacts.
” Is it hard to make it here in the summer, ” I ask?
The man squints a bit as if he were outside in a spotlight sun.
” We do the best we can, ” he says, ” you have to be adaptable. ”
This annual festival will draw thousands and some will buy. Most will look, socialize, eat, deal with parking and logistics, take pictures and enjoy the event.
Art, for me, is always a festival.
I buy something small by a Chinese man who does watercolors of goldfish and I bet the ones he drew, and filled in with color, were part of his dinner last night.
Art, in the East, is as far from cowboys and Indians as you can get.
Interstate 10 runs through Tucson and angles northwest to Phoenix.
Once you leave Tucson, the first spot of interest, higher than rabbit’s ears, is Picacho Peak. This peak is actually a group of peaks ringed by saquaros. For miles surrounding this congregation of peaks,there is nothing but dead flat dirt, mesquite, cactus.
At the exit to the Picacho Peak RV Resort, and an Arizona state campground, is Picacho Peak Plaza – a Shell gas station and curio shop. These knick knack shops scratch out an existence throughout the west and if you can get in and out without buying something that will forever gather dust on a shelf at home, you are far too disciplined.
Near the front entrance, I am confronted by a stuffed Jackalope, a mythical American West animal that is part rabbit and part antelope.
According to Wikipedia, the Jackalope prefers whiskey as a drink, can cause a lot of damage to one’s shins. There is a man in the Dakotas who still makes them and sells in bulk to Cabela’s for around $150.00 apiece. It is said that Jackalopes are good mimics, and, at night, cowboys singing around a fire under the stars, can hear them harmonizing.
My T or C friend, Kirk, buys himself a candy bar for sugar energy and we hit the road again for Tucson, on an expedition to a camera shop to look at a new lens for Kirk’s camera. He photographs homes for sale, for Green Valley real estate agents.
I think I see a Jackalope waving at us as we pull back onto the freeway, but Kirk says I am mistaken.
The human mind, our real-unreal world keeps reminding me, is more frail than some people want to admit.
Getting out of this tourist trap without spending a dime tells me I’m tougher than I thought I was.
The best way to understand the Sonoran desert is to drive to the end of a dirt road, take no water or matches, leave your phone in the car, don’t tell anyone where you are, wear light clothes and no hat, and hike till you get lost.
The second best way to understand the Sonoran desert is go to a museum and go through its exhibits.
The Sonoran desert starts in Arizona, spills into California and reaches down the entire Mexican Baja peninsula. It has multiple ecosystems and a variety of plants,animals, insects and minerals. Water is scarce but prospectors donkey’s know where to find it, the biggest discovery of all.
This morning, walking through paths notated on visitor maps, Alan and I see coyotes, a caged mountain lion, skunks, saquaros, desert springs,scorpions, barn owls, sun shades fashioned out of rope and netting, a boojam tree, aviary birds,flourescent minerals and underground bats, all part of nature’s bouquet.
We also get to see live wildlife in an auditorium where a skunk, porcupine, macaw, and bull snake are brought out for us to admire while a museum employee answers audience questions and gives nature lectures.
Our macaw is released from one handler’s grasp and flies from the front stage to an attendant’s arm at the back of our auditorium. His wings make a shoo shoo shooing sound as he flies over us and I can hear his beak cracking the peanut his handler gives him after he has completed his task.
This live presentation is a highlight of our morning expedition but two horned toads, embedded in a stuccoed wall at the front of the venue, are also memorable..
They are sharing a quiet moment before the sun goes down, like two brothers remembering baseball home runs in the intersection of Bellamah and Aspen street in Albuquerque, New Mexico in June 1955.
Tennis balls fly a long way when you hit them solid with an authentic Kentucky Slugger hickory bat.
Dogs hold a special place in human history.
In old days they slept outside the cave and warned of intruders, were tossed Mastodon bones, chased sticks thrown by cave kids. Then, they came inside and became companions and trusted friends.
On the streets of Granada, dogs are on call twenty four seven. Some have collars while others have nothing but fleas and wounds from territorial fights.
I have dog biscuits in my shirt pocket for any dogs that approach me.
Like people, some canines are wary, some are bashful, some are brash, some are demanding. Others like to lay on their back and do a roll for me.
The best thing about dogs is they don’t talk and say stupid things.
Charlie loves dogs and this gallery is for him.
If he wasn’t careful he would take them all home.
I-40 runs through Albuquerque’s midsection like a Mexican leather belt with a big rodeo buckle.
At I-40 and Carlisle in Albuquerque is a new ” Green Jeans” shopping center built using shipping containers, Albuquerque’s new building material craze. While the old woman who lives in a shoe is a theme of yesteryear, the Santa Fe Brewing Company, along with a local builder, Roy Solomon,have created a new urban retail center combining shipping containers and more traditional materials.
People are on the move in our 21st century and you can easily be asleep in Albuquerque tonight and wake up tomorrow in Singapore. Shipping containers are generic, sexless, and have no personality. They are big Lego’s; easy to move, stack, transform. They fit our generic drug, unisex bathrooms,one size fits all world.
Doing investigative research on shipping container building with Alex, the architect, we visit, see, and leave the new shopping and dining complex feeling the place is well done but not that exciting or cost effective.
Where I want is to live is in my own container mounted on the deck of a huge oil tanker sailing to the world’s ports, having scrambled eggs and bacon with green chili for breakfast, as we round the Cape of Good Hope.
Till that happens, Green Jeans, with its craft beer, home made tacos and stacked containers, will have to do.
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