I was told by a brother, Neal, and, by Pat, that the Great Sand Dunes are worth a look so I take a quick side trip to test their recommendation.
The dunes get bigger as I drive a narrow two lane road from the big highway deeper into the National Monument.There appears no reason for the dunes to be here amid natural junipers, high desert grass, cactus. It is, as if, a celestial construction crew got wrong work orders and dumped truckload after truckload of sand right here until some angel woke up from a good night’s sleep and immediately cancelled the project. In New Mexico, we have our White Sands National Monument, but none of those dunes are as tall as these. Here, the sand seems very much out of place, but, nature can’t ever be accused of making mistakes.
At the National Monument visitor center, there are photos, posters, and displays for those who want to be educated on sand. Visitors can climb the dunes by following a path out to them from the visitor center. Visitors, hiking up the dunes, look like ants trying to touch the lazy white drifting clouds.
Not having time to stay long, I get back on the road to Creede, Colorado and Hermit’s Lake.
I’m guessing, even if I don’t see these dunes again, this would be one of the first places a tour of foreign cats, from Japan ,would stop and spend an entire day romping in the kitty litter.
Seeing cats surfing down these hills on boogie boards would be amazing.
Neal and Pat, I decide,on my way out of the National resource, are worth listening too, sometimes.
There are artifacts to see at this national monument – wagon wheels and wagons, an empty jail, cannons, latrines, a visitor center, the only hospital for five hundred miles, ruts where wagons followed the Santa Fe Trail, pieces of adobe buildings that were once sheltering, a hundred foot tall flag pole where the stars and stripes flew, a white Army tent.
These photos, of what is left of this piece of the past, hint at what it was like to live out west in the late 1800’s.
Watching John Wayne westerns on re-run channels doesn’t convey fully how it feels to be smack dab in the middle of a land that is hostile and wears you down with inclement weather and the daily challenges of feeding, sheltering yourself, and staying alive.
Walking here, this morning, where soldiers walked, washed up, came back from patrols, recovered from illness, fixed wagons and stored supplies for the territories, walked patrols around the Fort in blizzards, it is easy to see how easy our lives have become.
This country was not overcome without someone else’s struggle but this fort, to the men and women assigned here, was always home sweet home, even if it wasn’t always peaches and cream.
This place was truly the middle of no where when people were still trying to figure out whether it was some place they could call home.
It should be no surprise, even in this remote outpost in the old West, that where men were, women were close by.
There is controversy whether this is a lighthouse and whether Columbus’s bones are really inside the not so small ornate iron box in the center of this ornate display.
Columbus found the Dominican Republic on the first of his four voyages to the New World. Interestingly enough, he never set foot on America’s soil but set up his family comfortably in Santo Domingo to give them a good life and claim to lands he discovered for the King of Spain.
He was a visionary, as well as a businessman, and having audience with Kings and Queens is no easy task because, being important people, their time is worth more than ours. Mounting an expedition that was going to the ends of the world was a dangerous enterprise.
The big things I learn today are that, when walking, things you see are much further to get to than they look. Whenever you get lost, call a taxi and pay a few bucks to get where you want to go so you don’t spend your entire trip walking in circles.
It seems odd to celebrate a man who discovered America,but didn’t, and odd I’m standing here taking a photo of what we are told is the explorer’s mortal remains?
He and his beloved Santa Maria , right now, are most likely somewhere north, northeast of Mars navigating under celestial lights on dark dark seas with only a compass, telescope and good instincts to guide him and his crew..
He, I’m sure, is doing in the next world what he did in this one.
His bones might be here, but he doesn’t need them for his new discoveries.
State Road 14 takes you to Madrid,New Mexico, and to Cerrillos,New Mexico, if you stay on it.
All the way to Madrid we are passed by overweight motorcycle riders wearing pony tails and Bandito Leather jackets. Madrid is an old New Mexico mining town that busted a long time ago and left old mining shacks that were snapped up by 1960’s alternative lifestyle people. Today, most of these shacks have become watering holes, eateries, jewelry shops, art galleries, antique stores, botiques for unusual clothes, cramped homes for bearded and balding hippies who have outlived their generation.
At eleven thirty in the morning, the Mineshaft Tavern, a local institution, is still not open and bikers stand outside with their women and take pictures on their cell phones to post on Facebook. After a long ride to Madrid, from Albuquerque, it makes a nice afternoon to have a few beers and tell biker stories before going home. On Monday, most of them will be wearing suits at a desk in City Hall or designing weapons to make a more peaceful world at Sandia Labs.
The mural painted on a wall outside the tavern sums the town up.
There are two dogs for each resident, horses and cowboys are allowed, and no one has to dress up or put on airs.
If I were a dog, I would want to live here too where there are no leashes, plenty of shade, free snacks from tourists and not a lot of traffic.
New Mexico, before statehood, was an American territory wrested from Mexico in one of America’s many wars.
In 1912, we became a state and were lucky to do so.There were plenty of critics, then, as now, who suggested New Mexico has more in common with Mexico than the United States, has a backward uneducated population, is not nearly close to being civilized. In our early days, outlaws like Billy the Kid shot up people, miners lived a tough and tumble life camped out in nearby ravines looking for gold, and cattle ranchers hung cattle thieves from cottonwood trees.
The Cerrillos Station is a new, remodeled version of an old General Store that our family visited back in the fifties.The coffee is fresh, the owners cordial, the merchandise arty and fashionable. The repertory theater that produced melodramas in the 50’s for families is no where to be seen but this little town is still typical small town New Mexico with adobe walls, pinon rail fences, garden plots in back yards, fifth wheels pulled up to utility poles, dogs running around unattended and without leashes.
Friends Robert and Eric, who came along for the ride, enjoy their coffee, and we take a quick break before heading back down the road to Madrid, another New Mexico mining town turned into a hippie hideaway and retreat for non-conformist souls who aren’t much different than the neighbors they live next too.
The old pictures of Cerrillos, in black and white on the shop’s walls, make me wonder how the Hell this territory ever made it to being an American state?
I guess those back room politicians just didn’t want to see a gap on the U.S. map between Arizona and Texas?
Where you have gaps you always have issues.
This morning, the Fountain goes off at nine sharp, the same time as all the local businesses open. Ducks cruise past it like little feathered boats as a steady geyser of water is propelled several hundred feet into the air.
I film the eruption from several directions and barely get it all into my camera viewfinder.
I’m not sure I would come to Fountain Hills just to see this fountain, but, being here, it is icing on the Fountain Hills cake.
In the desert, you see lots of things that don’t seem to fit.
Why, in the middle of a desert that sees less than ten inches of rain a year, would there be a lake? Who, in their right mind, would build a fountain that shoots up several hundred feet in the air?
Regardless of the fountain’s history, I’m duly impressed with the ability of the human race to come up with engineering marvels that still can’t out do what Mother Nature routinely does, even without putting her make-up on.
The landscape in this part of Arizona has few trees and even less water.
It has jagged rocky hills that rise from the desert floor like turtle heads coming up out of their shell. The tallest vegetation, for miles, is the saquaro cactus that we first began seeing as our Arizona state highway takes us from higher cooler elevations down to the torrid desert floor.
The saquaro, this morning in Fountain Hills Park, look like banditos and some only have one arm. One has his six shooter pointed at me.
Fountain Hills is a sleepy bedroom community not far from Phoenix, a place to escape the rigorous winters of the East coast and Midwest, a place to leave big urban centers for roadrunners in your front yard and sometimes temperamental rattlers.
This man made lake, with its world famous water feature. makes a good quiet place to stroll as the sun comes up. The fountain used to be the tallest man made geyser in the world till some prince in Dubai wanted to make a new number 1 and made it happen in his back yard..
This morning, the sun rises fast. Palm trees stand like men in lime jackets on an airplane runway waving flashlights at the sun as it docks into its assigned gate.
Mining for memories is Scott’s full time, no pay retirement job.
I never thought I’d see anything that used to be number 1 in the world.
Most life I document isn’t on anybodies list.
Across from Billini plaza is a well to do man’s home of the nineteen hundreds.
His home, which I am shown through, is several hundred years older than the Alcazar de Don Colon and several hundred years behind homes you find now in the Zona Colonia with modern refrigerated air, jacuzzi’s, fancy kitchens and garages. In another two hundred years, the homes of our future will be with us and who knows what rich people will demand that might filter down to the rest of us.
This home, luxurious in it’s day, doesn’t even meet the required building codes in most American middle class neighborhoods in these times.
What is more worth weighing is whether this man and family of the eighteenth century, compared with another man and family of our twenty first century, flourished and lived a happy life.
A house doesn’t need to be new and fancy to be a happy home.
What is more important than square footage and stainless steel appliances is whether the man of this house was happy to go home, and the people in his home were happy to see him when he hung up his hat and came inside the front door.
Rum has been around for centuries.
Columbus brought the first sugarcane to the new world, and, shortly after, the first sugar cane plantation, worked by slaves, was begun in the New World in the Dominican Republic. A trade route was begun with Europe bringing African slaves to the America’s, trading them for rum, tobacco, cotton and other resources to take back to Europe. A rich European merchant class was built on people working under a hot sun having someone else tell them when they could stop.
Rum is said to increase good cholesterol, combat artery blockages to help prevent heart attacks and disease. Rum is low calorie, strengthens bones,promotes heart health,combats muscle pain,fights the common cold, acts as a sleep aid, extends longevity, reduces the risk of alzheimer’s disease.
Sir Francis Drake gave his sailors a daily shot of rum and pirates drank the stuff instead of water, which was not always available, especially in the middle of an ocean.
The Museo of Rum in the Zona Colonia makes rum on its premises and has a free tasting bar.
I buy myself some coffee flavored rum I hope I can get through Customs and back home, and I plan to implement a daily regimen of rum for all the health benefits that accrue from drinking it.
I will , though, never become a Los Angeles Raider football fan.
Pirates, even Jack Sparrow, are too shady for my taste, even though we both like our rum right out of the bottle. .
Plaza Espana is a popular night spot in Santo Domingo.
There are events and live music here. but, this evening, early, people are just beginning to arrive as the moon rises just above Columbus’s right shoulder.
The Alcazar de Don Colon is closed and there is only a light on in the front entry where a night watchman fixes himself a cup of hot tea before he walks the Palace and talks with ghosts.
Tables in front of the restaurants will be filled before long and waiters wearing red pirate bandana’s will be shuffling out drinks till the wee hours of the morning.
In the old days, this Plaza must have been filled with shrubs, tropical plants and trees with secluded alcoves where men and women exchanged carefully worded letters sealed with wax and lipstick.
Today, through the night, cell phones light the romance way, fingers moving like those of a nervous groom just before his wedding.
The Plaza Espana, this evening, is just beginning to heat up.
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