In all four corners of our state, as well as the middle, we have sovereign Indian nations who have land,an ancient culture, designer golf courses, hotels, and casinos.
The Pueblo of Cochiti is a thirty minute drive from Albuquerque along I- 25 to Santa Fe. Before you get to La Bajada Hill you turn off, skirt Cochiti Lake, and come to a Robert Trent Jones Architects designed golf course nestled in canyons in the heart of their reservation.
On Wednesday, the course isn’t crowded and Richard and I get on without a tee time.
This course requires straight drives, good putting, and a torrid short game. If you stray from fairways you lose your ball in snake country. When you are on the course you are lost in nature. Cell phones don’t work. The internet is inaccessible. Clouds pop up like snowflakes – no two alike.
This course seems made for heaven.
It doesn’t seem frivolous to believe angels play here regular, their bags in the back of carts and their wings tucked close to their bodies so they can maintain the proper swing plane. They play at night under the moon, watched by coyotes, and never use the Lord’s name in vain.
Los Angeles has Forest Lawn and Beverly Hills. Memphis has Graceland. Florida has Cape Canaveral. Texas has the Alamo. Albuquerque has the hit television series ” Breaking Bad. ”
This television show is a crime drama and crime and Albuquerque have more than a casual acquaintance. One can’t truthfully claim that Albuquerque is as bad as the show portrays it, but low life drama is not as uncommon on our streets as we residents would wish.
” Breaking Bad ” reigns as the Guinness Records most watched television series of all time. Its actors have won awards galore and the series has a cult following even after its dramatic final episode. A spin off series ” Better Get Saul ” has already been created and follows the vagaries of Saul, an ethically conflicted lawyer, who gets paid to keep guilty out of jail and lives off the change jingling in criminal pockets.
Those of us who live here tend to accept our city as ” already broken. ” We accept the way Albuquerque is – a laid back, sprawling country town pretending to be a big city. We are not surprised to see a Mexican flag flying in front of City Hall and Indians/non- Indians selling turquoise jewelry under the porches of the La Placita restaurant in Old Town.
Neal, Joan and myself finish our Old town stroll and drive to lunch at our favorite red/green chili haunt – El Patio, by the University of New Mexico. On our drive we pass locations from the Breaking Bad series and find them to be as sleazy as the TV show shows them.
In a terminally ill world, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are all too familiar.
Reality and fiction, these days, look like twin brothers.
Albuquerque, for all it’s bad reputation, is still where I live and call home, by my own choosing.
I don’t expect our city, even with Hollywood’s meddling, too ever change what it is, a northern territory of Mexico.
When I travel to foreign ” Third World ” destinations, I am never far from my comfort zone.
The Albuquerque Museum is in Albuquerque’s Old Town.
Old Town is not far from the Rio Grande river and train tracks that spurred growth in western communities in the nineteen hundreds. Old Town is a part of Albuquerque that is older than the city itself, originally a stopping point for Spanish explorers looking for their ” seven cities of gold. ”
Founded in the 1700’s and named after a Duke in Spain, Albuquerque is still a footnote to big brother Santa Fe that came of age in the 1500’s. We have a mix of Indians, Spanish, Europeans. We have cowboys, farmers, mad scientists. We are a melange of old, new, secular and spiritual, all explained by the state nickname ” Land of Enchantment. ”
The Museum is free today and filled with school kids. One room we enjoy features New Mexico artists. Another features the historical development of the ” Duke” city. Another is closed for construction with a sign apologizing for the inconvenience.
Neal and Joan, visiting from Colorado on their way to watch their daughter Calley graduate from college in Flagstaff, Arizona, make this time special.
One black and white framed photograph on an exhibit wall is of a solitary man wearing a hat and standing in the middle of an empty mesa by a sign saying” Nob Hill.”
Nob Hill was then the edge of town, fit only for jackrabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes and buzzards. Now, it is trendy. There are shops and restaurants and the area is a playground for University of New Mexico students with live music, brew pubs, used book stores and boutiques.
New Mexico has turquoise and silver jewelry, beautiful hand thrown pots, the Kiva, cliff dwellings, the atomic bomb, Indian rugs, roadrunners, top secret research facilities, military bases and Indian reservations. We have Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Los Alamos National Labs, Chaco Canyon, and the Catwalk.
New Mexico holds to its past firmly as we barrel into the future.
It is like holding a horse blanket as you ride a rocket into space.
The General Store and Cafe is not really a General Store.
You can’t buy barbed wire, bullets, hard candies scooped from an oak barrel. There aren’t bags of flour to load into wagons, fishing hooks or Doctor Edward’s best elixer to cure aches and pains in all places.
The Hillsboro General Store and Cafe has food and gifts and memorabilia. There are ancient fans dropping from high ceilings, glass bottles and posters, an old manual cash register that still works, a funky front door that opens with a little latch bandaged up with white tape like a patient in an emergency ward.
This morning town residents and visitors sip coffee, chat, tell stories, use free wi-fi.
Breakfast is good and there is something comfortable about a place where everything is older than you are. This is a community but John tells me it is nothing like the old days when people watched out for each other, kids raised hell within limits, and a favor was always repaid. When John’s wife, Susan, wants to call her kids she still has to drive out of town on a hilltop by the Hillsboro graveyard to get cell service.
The General Store and Cafe, in operation since 1879, will go on longer it seems, until no one wants to open up and light the stove.
With over a hundred years of life here, you can feel ghosts.
If this place makes it another hundred it will most likely look just like it does now.
The sun fights hard to get through single pane windows that haven’t been washed on the outside since the last rain.
In Canyon, Texas there is a relic from the fifties that overlooks the freeway that plows through town.
This giant statue of a cowboy is known as “Big Tex”. He has been here as long as townspeople can remember and civic leaders have started a fundraising effort to save him from the dust bin.
The story goes that he used to be associated with a western clothes store that has since been torn down. The owner let Big Tex stay on the property because it would have cost too much to remove him.
Big Tex used to have all his fingers and real levi’s specially made for his twenty foot legs. He used to have a shiny hat and you could see a twinkle in his eyes. Tethered down with pipe, like a Gulliver, the elements and time have taken their toll and he needs a new wardrobe and a new lease on life.
The most recent notch on his gun came when Sports Illustrated dropped by for a visit and had one of their models pose with him for their famous “Swimsuit Issue”. What sports and swimsuits have in common is selling magazines and generating interest. Lots of Texans like their sports and lots of Texans like their swimsuit models. Put them together and you have a rising revenue line.
I think I see one of his fingers move when I am taking his photo, but, on a second glance, decide it is just my imagination.
Life, often, gets a whole lot bigger than imagination.
Just down the frontage road from the Cadillac Ranch is the Cadillac Ranch gift shop.
It is before nine in the morning so it isn’t open but they have a sign out front that encourages lollygagging.
This gift shop is presided over by a twenty foot tall cowboy sporting a big hat. He waves to freeway tourists and wears a bright yellow T-shirt that says “2nd Amendment Cowboy”. Texas, a sovereign state, can withdraw from the Union when they wish and if you have guns you are more than welcome to sit a spell.
The fact there is a gift shop in the shadow of the Cadillac Ranch isn’t surprising. In Central and South America you have knick knack shops in front of most major cathedrals. In Egypt, you have little stands selling miniature pyramids and King Tut dolls close to Howard Carter’s greatest discoveries.
In the shadow of the 2nd Amendment Cowboy are three old Cadillac’s. Driving one is Willie Nelson. Elvis waves from inside another. The 2nd Amendment Cowboy’s smaller twin brother pilots the third car.
I will come back because I would love to have a little statue of a Cadillac buried into a cigarette lighter, or a 2nd Amendment Cowboy lamp for my living room table.
You can bet, as the day warms up, there will be the sound of target practice close by.
When you pull the trigger, in Texas, you want your bullet to hit what you are aiming at.
No self respecting cowboy would be caught without his artillery.
Before you reach Amarillo, following I-40, you look to the right and see a series of Cadillac’s stuck in Texas dirt in the middle of an unplowed field.
In the old days the Cadillac’s used to be natural, like they came from the factory. They had huge fins, power windows, custom paint jobs, real rubber tires, chrome that would make any car buff salivate. You looked out in the field and the vehicles looked like they had come back down to Earth, like errant arrows, and buried themselves into the soil as far as their momentum would carry them.
On most days you see tourist cars clustered by a little turnstile and see tourists themselves following a wide path out to the cars where they pose for pictures, touch the cars to see how they feel, kick where real tires used to be. The Cadillac’s have been covered with so much graffiti that they are now hardly recognizable.
At the entrance to this entertainment is a little sign that informs you that ” This is not a National Park, Pick up your own Trash.”
This diversion is a brainstorm of an eccentric Texas oil man, Stanley Marsh. There have been not so nice rumors about his sex habits but he was a patron of the arts and how often does anyone create a Texas Landmark that has ended up in coffee table books all over the U.S.? It is unknown exactly what snapped in this man’s mind when he was having barbecue ribs on his back porch shooting Lone Star beer cans with a 45 pistol, but now we have a lasting spectacle that wasn’t here before his epiphany.
Men do all kinds of crazy things and, for the most part, they don’t need a reason. In Texas, the Lone Star State, you are still free to speak your piece and act out your fantasy’s.
If everyone buried a Cadillac halfway into their backyards, we wouldn’t be standing here taking pictures, shaking our heads, getting mud on our shoes.
It’s people who do things no one else would, that we remember the most.
Our tour boat docks, by a grouping of mangroves,and we disembark into a thatched eating area where a local family will serve us lunch in a few hours.
While they prepare our tour’s meal, we are taken for a look at this island’s coconut farm, watch Polo skin a coconut using a metal spike stuck in the ground.
There are chickens roaming free around the homestead, pecking each other in territorial disputes. In one cage is a crocodile, and, in another, snapping turtles fight over fish in a small bowl.
When done watching the coconut skinning, a gray haired man in a ball cap loads our group into the back of a long wagon, with wood seats and a canvas top, starts his tractor, and we are pulled up a winding sandy path to the uninhabited beach on Stone Island.
“Be back in an hour,” Polo says to us, as we hit the beach, then he looks for a chair and a shady spot to talk with the tractor driver, a couple of young men renting ATVs, the skipper of our boat, and a few tourists who don’t care about seeing more sand.
The beach here stretches unimpeded for miles, in both directions, and coconut trees tower over all. It must have been what islands in the Pacific looked like to our father who fought in World War 2 , as a LST Captain. He didn’t talk about the war but I’ve seen old black and white filmstrips of action in the Pacific and it was never a tourist vacation.
Members of our group spread out along the beach according to their interests.
The island has been protected by an order of a past President of Mexico – Felipe Calderone. He decided that the island, once owned by a rich family, would serve the public interest by being left protected. This simple decision has probably had a more lasting influence on his country than some of his more lofty calculations. Presidents can do many things but not all of them are right, or necessary.
After our beach jaunt, we are taken back and have lunch on a big covered patio.
On our way back home, Juanito, Polo’s tame pelican, revisits us again on the Acutus.
It is a memorable expedition. No one gets lost. There are plenty of refreshments and diversions. The price is cheap, thirty U.S. dollars, our guide is informative.
It would be fun to spend a night on the beach and have a bonfire made of driftwood and listen to pirate stories.
I would pay to go on that one too.
Back in the day, after school, our tribe would gather around the new black and white television in the family room and watch TV serials.
There was Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Little Rascals, Gene Autry, the Three Stooges, and Tarzan.
One of the pleasures of childhood was watching Tarzan, live in the jungle, free from teachers, swinging on vines, communicating with a grunt, fighting evil men stomping through his jungle with guns on their shoulders and gold on their minds. Every show a lion would get one of the slave traders and make him lunch, which brought cheers. To be able to swim every day in crocodile infested waters and pal around with Cheetah,who was always the middle of mischief ,was the greatest luck.
This morning, our expedition is going to Stone Island outside Mazatlan, visiting a beach with no hotels or development, having locals make us lunch, then taking the long boat ride back home.
Around nine in the morning we board the Acutus, following Polo, our guide for this trip.
These tours are a mainstay of a vacation. You take them for the tidbits they bring, and, over time, you accumulate insight into a place from someone who lives here and knows it.
Life here follows tides, seasons, weather.
Chugging around Stone Island, we become just another piece of the Mazatlan puzzle – a small tour boat in the lower right hand corner of a colorful jigsaw puzzle, a slow moving excursion boat with sun burned visitors wearing baseball caps and straw hats.
There are two city zones that tourists see most in Mazatlan.
There is the Zona Dorado where newer hotels congregate and bars and discos service night crowds. The beaches are here as well as ten taxi drivers to every tourist and street vendors selling hats, sunglasses, ironwood carvings, jewelry, fruit snacks, hair braiding, whale and dolphin tours and anything that will make money.
Then there is the Zona Historico where you find old adobe homes built by the city’s founders, chic art galleries, restaurants, bars, shops, and boutique lodgings for visitors with money who like to sit on balconies reading French existential novels and sipping red wine.
In the plaza just north of the historical district, where our taxi driver drops us, we discover a map of the Zona Historico on a wood sign.
Guarded by two pigeons, the mapa gives landmarks, streets with names, shows compass points, and points us in the right direction.
All we have to do to get where we had wanted to be dropped off in the first place is go a little more to the south and west. In guide books it is mentioned that the Zona Dorado and Zona Historico are safe parts of Mazatlan for visitors from the north.
Dave takes a picture of it with his I phone and keeps us where we want to be the rest of the morning.
What did the world do before I Phones?
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