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.
These mounted animals look down at me like judges ready for my sentencing.
Hung over the aisles of rods and reels, shotguns and rifles, fishing tackle, ammunition, these guys are frozen in their final moment of life.
Hunters have always stayed close to their prey.
In New Guinea, deep in jungles, hunters wear shrunken heads of enemies around their waist. Plains Indians danced under the moon at night wearing buffalo robes with horns hooking the air. Ancient Incas wore feathered head dresses. Seafaring whaling men carved walrus tusks with designs of ships and harpoons. Oceanic islanders wear shark teeth around their wrists.. Texans put cow horns on car bumpers. Sportsmen hang calendars in their garages that feature big game animals and buxom women. Presidents pose with one foot on the body of a downed lion.
Nature’s variety is on display here and, fortunately,for these trophies, our eating habits have changed. Most of us urban folk don’t dine on deer, raccoon, llamas, opossums,alligators, snakes or geese.
Human consumption of alcohol, ironically, saves more of these fine animals than the Sierra Club can dream about saving.
Even in death,these animals seem too regal to be stuffed and hung on a grocery store wall.
If this was ” Twilight Zone, ” I’d be hanging up there on the wall and an elk would be buying his hunting license and talking about two legged trophy humans who are easier to shoot than ducks on a pond.
Excitement builds during the week .
As Sunday afternoon grows close, the roosters crowing takes on more urgency. On Sunday afternoons, a stadium in a local neighborhood opens for business and men pay for permits to fight their birds.
The fighting cage in the middle of this stadium looks small from the bleachers and the birds inside it are hard to see.However, you can tell how the match is going by listening to the rise and fall of waves of sound. Sound rumbles at the beginning of the fight as birds are primed and hawkers take bets. It crescendos during the match, if it is a good one. At the end, there is almost a silence as the referee picks up a dead rooster who has lost and presents it to the owner of the winning rooster to take home and put in his cooking pot.
Fighting is both human and animal history.
Martial Arts cage fighting makes the old Friday night television boxing matches look tame. Gladiators in Roman extravaganzas bled in the sand and crowds watched the Emperor’s thumb to see if a man lived or died. David and Goliath was a spectacular Biblical fight.
This early round is over quickly and a new pair of animal contestants and their human trainers enter the ring.
I bet a thousand pesos and lose, but next week will be different.
This event, for me, isn’t entertaining.
Betting on life or death isn’t a wager I like to make, especially when animals are involved.
In Belize, karaoke machines appear in bars and hotel ballrooms with guests wearing Wal-Mart pineapple and palm tree short sleeved perma-press shirts. They sing into late hours and consume vast quantities of rum.
In Mogpog, karaoke machines appear in people’s front yards, or living rooms, and friends and family wear Rock and Roll T shirts, shorts, flip flops, sing into late hours and consume even larger quantities of Red Horse beer and home cooked food.
As competitors sing they are heckled, make mistakes and laugh. The music has to shut down at ten in the evening and each party gets a party permit from city officials before it can begin.
Holding a microphone, the star of the moment follows lyrics on a tv screen and sings the melody, adding emotion and dynamics. Some of the lyrics are in English and some are in Tagalog. When a song ends, there is a moment of silence as the machine calculates a final score and flashes it on the screen.
One hundred is the best score you can make,and, when someone gets a hundred, there are whoops and hollers.
One of the things I need to practice, before going back to Mogpog, is my singing.
The best way to describe my singing is that it sounds like a hungry cat with a tooth missing.
Not being able to sing shouldn’t mean we can’t be a star.
There is water wherever you look, but it tastes salty and won’t take away your thirst.
Water falls from the sky, but, on land flatter than a tabletop, it doesn’t run into rivers and down into the sea. Water seeps into the ground and collects in cenotes, underground caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, blue blue water, fish and turtles. There are rumors that ancient Mayans dropped their sacrifices into these cenotes weighted with heavy stones.
This history doesn’t deter us tourists from donning brightly colored snorkels and masks, showering, slipping into the cool waters, following rope lines into underground caverns lit from underneath with lights, over thirty feet deep.
This particular Gran Cenote is written up in guide books as having colorful fish, but, for the record – the fish are small, not in a multitude, and not at all colorful.
On this morning tour buses out front of the attraction are already unloaded, overweight men and women parading in swimming attire to the pools, Mayan descendants renting them towels and equipment.
There are a few scuba divers who can swim far underwater in the caverns, holding underwater lights, that swim farther than we can and see what the rest of us can only imagine.,
When they surface, they look exhilerated,
Places where the insides of the Earth open up have always attracted the curious.
I don’t see dead bodies but my shivers remind me there is much more we don’t see, than what we do.
Shuffleboard is more cut throat than it appears.
Before these players take a shot, they consult, put chalk on their hands,look at the weather, visualize their stride.
You are the one responsible for propelling your disc down a slick, treacherous court. You live or die by your own hand.
In this game, strength is not needed, but steady nerves, strategy, and touch are critical. Your only uniform is a good pair of tennis shoes, loose fitting clothes and a cap.
There is no crying here because these are grownups who know the odds, and the score.
The only thing harder than playing shuffleboard here is playing shuffleboard on a cruise ship, with rough waves.
I wouldn’t play shuffleboard against any of these old people, man or woman.
I know sharks when I see them and old sharks are particularly dangerous.
Most people love trains.
Just to the southeast of the main office at Rincon West RV Resort,in Tucson, runs the Rincon Railroad.
Sitting on a little hill, train conductors sit in lawn chairs with wireless controllers and run their trains through their make believe town. A train schedule is posted at the station, and, on this day, an engineer is trying to figure out why his train loses power in the turns. His wife is adding little plastic people to displays of Old West scenes in the miniature town, scenes that are now mostly found in kid’s books.
Trains helped settle the west and in early morning hours, in South Tucson, you hear real train whistles as big boy trains speed through pulling box cars of coal, shipping containers, and empty cattle cars.
In receding light this evening, this choo choo is not running much longer. The conductor and his wife need to fix dinner, sit around their front porch with neighbors talking about old days, listening to Glenn Miller on an old radio prized by antique hounds.
At the Rincon West Railroad Club you take a stroll back in time,
Playing with trains is something little kids and big kids have in common.
By eight in the morning, on a Saturday, a tournament is humming along.
The game is simple enough.
Each player has three discs and a stick. Each turn, a player pushes one of his disks down a slick court with his stick and tries to make his disc stop in one of the scoring areas marked inside a distant triangle. Each disc that stays in the top portion of the triangle is worth ten points. Further towards the base of the triangle, the points awarded are less. A player has to play offense, getting his disc in high scoring areas, and defense, knocking an opponent’s disc out of a scoring area.
” Each court is different, ” one of the onlookers tells me, ” and they break different ways. ”
This is a tournament between the Voyager RV Resort, on the other side of town, and the Rincon Rv Resort.Cursing is kept to a minimum because women are present and all know that tomorrow is another day. As players take their turns, scores are tallied. When the tournament is done there will be certificates awarded and losers will buy beer.
The throwing motion is slow and deliberate. A disc is cradled into the U shaped handle of the stick, the player pauses, takes two steps and leans forward, extends his straightened arm towards the distant triangle. It is a soft motion and the stick, properly used, never leaves the surface of the court. After your throw, you stand back and hope your opponent, who throws after you, doesn’t erase your effort.
This is a game one would think a five year old could play, but they aren’t skilled enough, or devious enough.
Old people might be old, but they aren’t without experience in duplicity.
It takes smarts to get to old age and no one, with any smarts, wants to spend winter in a cold place.
This winter I’m in Arizona again but I don’t try shuffleboard because I’m not old enough, yet.
In the downtown historical district of Truth or Consequences, hot springs bubble to the surface.
In old days dusty cowboys would hang their chaps on mesquite branches and swap stories with Indians who hung their moccasins on adjacent branches to look like rabbit ears. In newer days, hotels have been built above the springs and guests soak in claw foot tubs to their heart’s content.
The only admonishments to guests at River bend are not to indulge in drugs and/or alcohol, limit the time of your soak, keep hydrated, call for help if needed. River Bend Hot Springs is well maintained and now you hang your chaps on hooks inside private soaking enclosures. For social folks, there is a public soaking pool just outside the office.
Looking out from my Tierra private soak, the Rio Grande meanders, not in any hurry to get to Juarez.
Each time here, there are more amenities.
Jake, as one of his worker’s admits, ” does a damn good job of fixing things and making the place better. ”
When I lived here I visited two times a week. Now, two times a year has to do.
Hot water soaks seems to often straighten out my bumpy thinking.
A good placebo usually beats bitter medicine every day of the week.
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