River Falls has a make believe golf course in a cow pasture not far from the Texas Palo Duro Canyon.
This area has been transformed from grazing to ranchettes. With an airport, five acre lots, utilities and roads, the development attracts people with money who want to get away from big city life. Plenty of city folks make huge money in urban jungles but like their leisure with their horses in wild open spaces.
The River Falls Country Club has a small unattended clubhouse, a short nine holes with raised indoor outdoor carpet greens, bumpy fairways of prairie grass, no traps or trees, a steady West Texas wind.
Alan and I watch out for prairie dog holes and rattlesnakes and navigate the course somewhere north of par. If you hit short of the green your ball bounces back towards you. If you hit the green your ball bounces off the green and you have a tough chip coming back.
Those old Scottish guys, who invented the game, played on courses like this in weather like this. It isn’t hard to see them savoring scotch whiskey after a round with the elements.
When I think of the equipment they used and the scores they achieved, I am glad they aren’t playing today.
We wouldn’t have a fighting chance, on the course, or at the bar.
In the 1950’s, Patsy Cline was the premier country western singer.
Her lyrics mirrored those of today; broken relationships, falling in and out of love, working for a living, heartaches and headaches. She was talked up in the tabloids, wore clothes as far removed from the range as a cowgirl could get, sang classic songs that still pop like champagne bubbles.
” Smokey “, Alan’s cookie jar horse, passes his time on the range listening to Patsy on headphones in Texas.
When cowboys get hungry in the bunkhouse they separate Smokey’s head from his neck, reach for a peanut butter cookie,then carefully re-attach the head and neck in one sure handed gun slinging motion.
Patsy’s best song is ” Crazy.”
” Crazy ” brings back memories of me and the construction guys sitting in an east side Albuquerque Waffle House, feeding quarters into a juke box, playing Elvis Presley and Rolling Stones hits while waitresses crooned out waffle and scrambled egg orders in raspy voices.
” Crazy” should be our new National Anthem.
We don’t have trouble being crazy and Patsy sounds more prescient every time I listen to her.
Home bases take different looks.
They can be hotel rooms, bungalows, RV’s, tents, apartments, houses, townhouses.They can be overlooking the Atlantic in Uruguay, lost in the Andes, on Caribbean shores with palms and yachts, standing on stilts in a Louisiana bayou.
Scott’s newest home base is a townhouse in Albuquerque, the ” breaking bad” city.
In view of the Sandia Mountains,my landscaping is very low maintenance. The two car garage has room for storage. There is an extra bedroom and bath for guests. Covenants prohibit inoperable cars parked at the curb, red front doors, loud parties, Pets are allowed and H.O.A. fees are a couple hundred a year. There is no clubhouse, golf course, swimming pool, or security gate.
There is nothing eternal about a home base. Plains Indians used to drag their homes behind them to the next camp, following herds of buffalo so thick you could walk on their backs.
Living out of a suitcase, as liberating as it seems, is never as free as it appears.
Now, I hang the key to my drawbridge by my coffee maker on the kitchen counter.
Why I’m getting ready for another trip is a question I can’t answer with one post.
In the 1960’s, a most favored slogan was ” Make Love, Not War. ”
Their were lots of babies conceived in hippie vans as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane fanned anti war sentiment, wore flowers in their hair and had meetings with Indian gurus. Flower children blew bubbles in parks and gave roses to hardened cops wearing helmets and sunglasses.
It wasn’t hard to be against a war that sent home young men in caskets.Communism wasn’t likely to swim across the ocean and take over our cities but Washington D.C. wasn’t taking any chances. North Vietnam, backed by still Communist China, was trying to consume South Vietnam and our American military machine was going to plug the hole in their border.
50,000 American dead later, the war ended with a whimper.
The 1960’s have returned without tie die T shirts, beards and hippie glasses. At the Punkin Chunkin Festival we have cowboy boots, pickups with tow hitches,levi’s and Copenhagen snuff secured in back pockets.
Shooting pumpkins is about as peaceful as it gets.
” Make love, not babies, ” is our newest generational slogan.
I guess some have finally found a war they think they can win.
Not loving babies is a hard pill to swallow.
Bennett’s Amusements moves in the day before an event, fences off their area at the Festival, back up huge equipment trucks, rides, and promotions. Agile carnies pick up wrenches and assemble a superstructure of steel connected by hundreds of feet of electric cables to a main generator run by diesel gas. Plain ole country dirt turns into an amusement venue.
In this circus there aren’t any animals or strongmen, no bearded ladies or human freaks. These are all protected species now, and midway visitors in 2017 are mostly interested in rides created by country bumpkins with time on their hands and a love for machinery.
Bennett’s, a small time outfit, moves across country, handling amusements in fields, shopping center parking lots and county fairgrounds.The king of the circus, Ringling Brothers, shut down last year and all that is left of the industry is ma and pa operations like this one.
Kids, these days, don’t run away to join the circus. Many just want to sing rap, get interviewed on television, and drive a nice muscle car..
I don’t know what is coming to replace Bennett amusements but it is not likely going to be something I like.
What people do to amuse themselves tells you who they are.
McDonalds was one of the first corporate giants to infiltrate American communities with cheap hamburgers, fast food, employee training programs, marketing strategies, toys for the kids, drive up windows, extended operating hours. You can dine in any corporate or franchise store and get sameness.
McDonalds leapfrogged across the United States leaving stores wherever its arches touched ground. Their business formula is so profitable the company has planted its logo worldwide and a generation of kids choose Egg Mc’muffins over frosted flakes.
Now Mickey’s has a new employee – the Big Mac Kiosk.
Machines make great employees. They aren’t late, don’t do drugs, don’t have fights with their spouse, don’t steal, don’t need a health care plan.
How does a society survive when its people are replaced by computers?
The Big Mac Kiosk shows the State of the Union better than a President’s speech.
Los Altos Golf Course was built in the 1960’s, near Eubank and Copper in Albuquerue.
Owned and operated by the City of Albuquerque, this public links course is open to all. In an age of dwindling play, escalating water costs, cries of environmental ruination., golfers still suit up in shorts, golf caps, spikes, and golf shirts with “Just Do It ” stitched above their shirt pockets.
The driving range,south of the clubhouse, is wide open this morning.
A rainbow makes a gentle arc across the sky, the same arc as a well struck five iron from an uphill lie into a well trapped green.
Rainbows and golf are always welcome on Scotttreks.
Both are about physics and spirits.
Old men plot wars in back rooms and give speeches.Young men hold rifles and die on the battlefield.
Football is an American preoccupation and between the goalposts this evening plays out a game that has referees and it’s own set of rules.
Halftime is minutes away and tuba players come down out of the stands, join fellow cadets on the sidelines, march out to entertain spectators that have sons and daughters enrolled at the school.
On the sidelines, uniformed men watch the game from an end zone and visit with a hunched patriarch during a time out to move the chains.
Coaches squeeze programs rolled up in their hands and look like they want to swat flies.
In this game there are no players taking a knee.
If they did they would be cleaning latrines for months.
On the football field, dying is only symbolic, but the war is real.
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.
This exterior wall is hung with mining mementos.
There are picks, shovels,axes, some wrapped with gauze, injured from too much use. There are scythes, traps for animals, lanterns, hammers, levels and long thick nails used to secure railroad ties upon which cars carried ore away from deep mines.
In the eighteen hundreds, young tough men prowled these streets.
Daily, they went underground into tunnels secured by hand cut timbers, never certain they would come out alive. They ate bad food on metal plates that doubled as gold mining pans in the river that tumbles through town and into the valley below.
In the winter, snow was up to their waists and bitter cold seeped through cracks in log houses that had been stuffed with newspapers and torn shirts to keep Old Man Winter from sneaking in.
Iron stoves, vented through the roof, got so hot they looked like meteors.
The sign on the wall says ” No Sniveling. ‘
If something can be done, do it.
If you can’t do it, find someone who can.
The pioneer spirit, in America, in 2019, is fighting for it’s life.
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