Indian School is an east- west Albuquerque boulevard that ends at the Embudo Canyon Open Space at the far east side of the city..
The parking lot, at the roads end, is the beginning of a city Open Space area that moves into the Cibola National Forest Wilderness. The nature walks and trails, at the cities edge, open at seven each morning and close at seven each evening. If you are bold, you can hike back as far as you want into the wilderness and camp out all night under the stars.
Along our normal hike, Alex and I stop to catch a breath and catch our bearings. Along the trail is a huge city deep water well enclosed by a chain link fence and guarded by government signs showing statutes that warn bad things happen to those who trespass.Wildlife has hidden itself but you see signs they are close by and paying attention to our progress.
By the time Alex and I finish our route,more parking spaces have opened up and the lot is looking empty.
It is funny, to me, to see signs putting Open and Close times on a Wilderness and metal gates locked to keep people out at night.
Starting my car and heading home, I’m very sure no one that lives out here gives a damn about our human time.
Wilderness time and people time use different watches.
These two questionable birds remind me of cartoon characters us kids watched on black and white television in the 1950’s, most often perched on a tree limb talking about crazy humans. They were, as they appear here, angular, opinionated, and had New York voices that were like a piece of coarse sandpaper rubbed over my cheek, and not gently.
Perched on a tiny end table in front of the Madrid, New Mexico Mine Shaft Museum, they, for the moment, aren’t gossiping loud enough that I can hear who they are roasting.
The Madrid mining museum is full of old rusted mining implements piled into one large open room, under a tin roof. Through an open doorway, I see the old rust colored machines that kept town and mines operating in the 1800’s when lots of young men and painted women came out west to make their fortunes.
The docent of the museum this morning, a gray haired volunteer woman standing by a manual cash register, talks in a mellifluous voice and explains, to an equally old couple, listening attentively, how the town prospered in its heyday.
I can hear Heckle and Jeckle cackling outside over a really nasty human joke.
For some unfathomable reason, I want to buy them and the fountain and set them all on a little table on my back porch in Albuquerque.
These two could really tell me, every day, funny, but true, stories about mining in Madrid, Mew Mexico, before and after the hippies came.
Watching humans all day is as funny as it gets.
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.
On the average, Albuquerque sees the sun 280 days a year.The U.S. average is 205 days.
This morning the Sandia Mountains are hidden behind low lying clouds and visibility is limited. The clouds have no substance yet they hide the towering rugged peaks on our city’s east side.
If you ask Albuquerque people what they like about the city, most will say, most often, ” the weather.”
Now that weather, however, has been ” politicized” it is much more difficult to navigate in conversations. We old crazies, at McDonalds, have debates about “Climate Change” and whether man is big enough to have such an influence.
This morning, the sun is on vacation and wisps of clouds have draped themselves over the mountains like your favorite beach blanket.
The weather man, on TV, will call it ” a cloudy day” with no wind, with a thirty percent chance of seeing the sun in the afternoon.
Walking the trail, I tuck up inside my jacket a little more.
We can talk about weather all we like, but we get what we like and don’t like of it on a regular basis, no matter what climate theories we buy into.
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