On Sundays, during warmer months in Albuquerque, an old train barn opens its huge metal doors to the public. Vendors set up inside to sell their produce, art, clothes, soaps and lotions, health food, get signatures for green projects and alternative lifestyles, listen to music and enjoy the scene.
This Sunday, we come down to hear Chadd’s saxophone quartet – Sax Therapy.
It is quaint inside the train barn, good to see an old dilapidated unused piece of functional architecture used for better than a roosting place for pigeons.
Running across, and embedded in the concrete floor of this large open area, are rails that used to bring trains inside to be repaired, outfitted, cleaned, and re-conditioned. Now, the only Albuquerque train is Amtrak that has ticket sales in what remains of the original Alvarado Hotel. The real Alvarado Harvey House was demolished in the 60’s to make room for buildings that never followed, part of the 1960’s short sighted urban renewal dreams of government elected officials.
Seated at the south end of the train barn, Ruby and I watch dancers twirl to forties style big band music. A college singer croons Rosemary Clooney. Following them is Sax Therapy featuring two alto saxes, one tenor sax and one baritone sax. They do a Monk tune, a twenties style ragtime classic, and a Texas blues wail to start, then move to a show tune and Be-Bop.
Chadd negotiates his bari with ease, his eyebrows going up when he moves into the upper register and eyes looking to the ground when he goes real real low.
I’m not sure but think I hear a train whistle moving towards us in straight four four time.
When you get four saxes playing together you can almost feel your teeth vibrating on the crescendos.
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.
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.
The Albuquerque Bio park is an oasis of water in the desert.
There is an aquarium, rose gardens, a gift shop and museum, a restaurant, and a little train that blows its whistle as it takes kids on a sedate ride through the grounds. The Park has been here over thirty years and is a result of private and public money pooled.
In the aquarium, Alma and I are below ground level, separated from fish by large glass panels that are the edge of their world and the beginning of ours.
In one tank, jelly fish float, almost transparent aliens with internal power plants lit up like Christmas ornaments.
Taking pictures for her Facebook pages, Alma returns to Marinduque in December. With family, a coconut farm, and the beginnings of a pig farm, she has reasons to be there. We humans have roots that keep us grounded. Jellyfish hold to nothing.
Recently an uncle who raised her and her brothers and sisters, after they were abandoned, passed. Working in Chicago, all she could do was wire money back to the Philippines and say a prayer for the man who took her in when no one else wanted her.
To have a hard life and still be enchanted speaks volumes about the human spirit.
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 Sandia Peak Tram has been with us fifty years.
According to our tram operator there are 600,000 patrons each year and the only time the tram shuts down is when the wind blows over fifty miles per hour or threatening lightning storms are close.
The tram has been stuck in the middle of its run a few times when electric went out or a fuse blew, but the operator doesn’t say anything about an incident years ago that had people lowered by ropes from the tram car to the desert floor. In the summer, the ride makes mountain views and hiking easily accessible. In the winter, skiers can go directly to Sandia mountain ski lifts without having to drive the back side of the mountain up winding narrow snow packed mountain roads.
The idea for the tram came from a man named Robert Nordstrum, and his friend Ben Abruzzo. Mr. Nordstrum went to Europe and decided to bring a tram to Albuquerque. There were technical challenges but the tram has become a part of our community. Abruzzo started the Albuquerque Balloon Festival that maintains a world reputation and brings thousands to the city each fall.
This afternoon Robert, a friend, looks over the edge of the cliff. We are going to hike the trail that goes from the Tram to the top of Sandia Crest.
From up here, looking out, like ancient man, – my issues don’t look as important as I thought they were.
On top of Sandia Peak is a rock house built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corp. Coming out of a government prolonged Depression, the CCC was created to provide relief to unemployed men by the U.S. Congress and F.D.R.
During a short decade, over 300,000 young men got a place to stay, food to eat, and a small salary for working on public projects. They upgraded services in rural areas, built and upgraded National Parks, helped build Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, gained dignity in hard times. This program was one of the more popular out of Roosevelt’s New Deal but it was shut down, unfunded, when World War 2 provided more grim employment possibilities.
The rock house, which would make Fred and Wilma Flintstone a nice vacation home, is perched on the edge of Sandia cliff with a million dollar view of Albuquerque. To the west is the Rio Grande river. To the north is the Sandia Indian Casino and golf course. In the middle of town is an eight story bank building at San Mateo and Central, the original Albuquerque skyscraper. To the south is Sandia Labs that engineers weapons and conducts weapons research, and Kirtland Air Force Base, storage home for nukes.
This afternoon there are scattered hikers and curious on the promontory. The rock house is a mile and a half hike from the visitor center and tram and there are small pockets of snow left in shaded areas by fallen logs or clusters of granite boulders.
Unemployment is still with us, a stubborn reality.
Finding men and women to join the CCC would be difficult these days.
Picking up your check at the mailbox is much easier than stacking stones.
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