Occupation of Independence

Today was a special day in the southern New Mexican highlands. Let me write about it before the memory fades. I had mountain biked on a paved road up the standard hill, until it was time to jump out onto a forest trail. The trail was so carpeted with long ponderosa needles that I wouldn't have been able to follow it if trees hadn't been marked, even though I was familiar with the trail. At the beginning of autumn I had been pelted by falling ponderosa needles near here. Wikipedia doesn't say whether ponderosas are semi-deciduous, but it sure looked like it. Instead of being cold and dark at these higher locations like I feared, the forest canopy seemed more open than in summer. It was actually warmish, 25% sunny, and dead calm. Thus it was warmer than at the lower elevations, which are open, windy grasslands. The gaps in the canopy allowed me to always feel connected to the cold clear sky. I was giddy in a forest! Previously I had belonged to a large school that dislikes

For a second or two it felt like a real punch to my stomach when the waiter told me that the little cafe would be closing soon. I cherished stopping in on the way back from a standard summer bicycle ride. The food was surprisingly good here, just a few pedal kicks from the continental divide, on the edge of an old mining town.  To actually get pleasure from a restaurant is so rare for me that it is worth dwelling on this wonderful little cafe. Normally I consider food at restaurants to be mediocre, tasteless, and obscenely over-priced. Oh, and the background din. This year they had added a overhead shelter made of galvanized, corrugated steel, one of the building materials used in decaying New Mexican dumps, a great favorite of mine.  Red chiles hung dried in bunches next to my table. The rafters of the structure looked like de-barked pine logs, and made me think of the ponderosa forest I had just bicycled through. Off in the distance was a pair of mountain peaks which some frie

I can't quite brag that I survived the Fourth of July in the epicenter of New Mexico tourism--Red River--but it was close. I bailed out on the weekend after the Fourth and headed for Colorado. In part I was inspired from that scene in "Jurassic Park," when the idealistic vegetarian girl expressed disgust about dinosaurs eating meat. The paleontologist shrugged it off by saying, "They just do what they do." Indeed, 'free moral agency' is a pernicious doctrine. Why not just think of tourists as one more species of animal life that behaves in a way that is genetically determined? Why not stop judging them as moral beings? Unfortunately I can't seem to extend this equipoise to merchants in a tourist trap. They are as voracious as a new insect hatch in the brief summer of the Canadian Arctic--and for pretty much the same reason.  I sat down in a nice coffee shop, spread out my laptop computer on the table, and then ordered my drink. The pro

Before this trip I saw New Mexico as the least interesting of the Four-Corner States. Perhaps this still seems true with natural scenery. But the last couple months have convinced me that New Mexico has a more interesting culture than the other three, with its Spanish and pueblo Indian heritage, funky old buildings, artsies, etc. In New Mexico you have a better chance of feeling you're outside the USA than in the other three states. Where could you find fine old wrecks, adobe buildings with corrugated metal roofs, like in New Mexico? Certainly not in Utah, where everything is squeaky clean and modern. Arizona is just California. Colorado is full of transplanted midwesterners and Texans. That's fine, but it's boring.  On my way from Santa Fe to Taos recently, I went through small villages like Chimayo and Trunchas that reminded me of Mexico, without the hassle of a border crossing. At first you notice the poverty. Then you notice much more, because you can— the stree

Taos/Red River, NM: Yesterday I was struggling with the annual RVer problem of where to camp on the Fourth of July. No solution came to mind, so I tried to solve the problem the way a full time RVer should: I tried to drive away from the problem. I made it all of twenty miles north of Taos when I started lusting for land that was pinched between the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the Rio Grande gorge. Unaccustomed as I am to dropping into coffee shops, I did so in Questa because it advertised wireless internet. The bucolic barista said that she was shutting down, and recommended Red River, the little ski town/tourist trap of the Enchanted Circle drive. I don't spend much time in tourist traps, but Red River is the highest town in New Mexico. With a heat wave coming, that sounded pretty good. What fun it is to improvise at the dashboard--to head off with no hard and fast goal in mind, and work things out as you go. But was I really foolish enough to go to a tourist trap

The artsie towns between Santa Fe and Taos are quiet interesting. I say that even though I have no real appreciation for art of that type. But I like the decayed, funky, impoverished towns. Many houses had adobe walls and corrugated, galvanized roofs. My camera is a sucker for every one of these wrecks.   I drove the back way into Taos, through more funky towns. It was a high altitude route, through the Picuris Mountains. We had just started our descent to Taos when I got closer to a bear than at any time in my life. Glad I was in the van. How could such a large and fat animal  scramble up a steep, high embankment with such agility and speed? At the top of the embankment there was a barbed wire fence that he somehow got through with no difficulty.  By now I had stopped my RV and was looking up at him, no more than 100 feet away. He looked right at me for about four seconds, and then ran off.

We've left for a new mesa halfway between Santa Fe and and Taos. The land is excellent, spacious, breezy, and at 8100 feet, but the Verizon coverage is giving me fits. Our bike ride took us up to 9500 feet, where we turned around at a grassy knoll. I could see all the way back to the Rio Grande. Just before we left our Pecos/Santa Fe mesa I had the characteristic anxiety that precedes leaving a well-loved camp site of two weeks duration.  Do other RVers experience this? Even stranger is the tendency to be sentimental about leaving a good old campsite. I felt nothing but relief when I sold off and moved out of the only house I'll ever own. Then my RVing career began, and I was quite choked up about leaving my first campsite, as crazy as that sounds. Nearby there are a couple well-publicized trailheads for the Pecos Wilderness. Capital 'W', you know. They had a combined clientèle of one parked automobile, on a summer weekend. Perhaps so few people hike ther

The other day I followed up on a tip from an RVing friend about the state park and ski area northeast of Santa Fe. It's high and cool, and popular with campers and tourists. Since I normally practice dispersed-area-camping on public lands, it's been years since I set foot in a state park or a national forest campground or any place that is popular with the masses. It was perhaps a slightly perverse curiosity that drew me thither. Boondocking RVers tend to display behavior that normal campers could live without. We tend to be condescending to the hooked-up crowd. And we proselytize. I'd like to surprise the reader by doing neither.   It was amusing to walk into these campgrounds; they seemed so exotic! For me, they are over-priced and noisy. In fairness, they do 'add value' to weekend campers. It wouldn't make sense for them to buy all the equipment needed to make an RV self-contained. A worker swept the asphalt campsites with a broom. Those sites wer

Santa Fe area, camping and riding on a mesa at 7500 feet. Only recently did I get a digital camera. For ten years of full-time RVing through the western states and boondocking in beautiful spots, I didn't take one picture. I had allies. Consider Edward Abbey, the nature writer most associated with Moab, UT. He once advised the backcountry explorer to throw away the $%@!* camera in photogenic, red rock Utah. Yesterday the little poodle and I took a nice mountain bike ride through a meadow at 7500 feet, if meadow is the right term. There were several square miles of grass, made green by all the rain New Mexico has been getting this June. The two track road was comfortable to bike on, and great for the dog's pads; the terrain was mild and flattish; the air was mildly humid. There were distant views of the Rio Grande Valley, south of Santa Fe. The edges and tops of these meadows were framed by ponderosa and pinyon forests. The flowers were out, and in three main co

When gasoline started getting expensive in the mid-Aughts, I stopped dragging my trailer to the Northwest in the summer. Would I really be able to stay cool in the Southwest in the summer? Soon after praising my high-mesa campsite near Santa Fe, we were hit by a violent thunderstorm. I should have realized the edge of a mesa is a vulnerable location. We abandoned the trailer and went to the van, thinking that it was electrically grounded better. At least it didn't have any propane tanks. If we had been in the trailer, the little dog would have been hiding behind the Thetford toilet. In the van, he just sat on my lap and quivered. I can't help believing that the standard theories about the domestication of wolves are wrong, and that it was thunderstorms that drove the Wolf to Man and the cave. New Mexico is having an unusually wet and stormy early-summer. Normally it's oppressively cloudless, and so arid that it sucks the spit right out of your mouth. Finger tips a

Perhaps the reader has concluded that anyone who would go to the efforts described earlier to camp on the rim of a high mesa must be addicted to cool air and the internet. How harsh the reader is. Consider the effort that some people in rural New Mexico make to get internet: There are other benefits to camping on the rim of a mesa. Consider orographic lift (wedge lift, ridge lift). Air that moves horizontally in the torrid lowlands must climb when it hits the edge of the mesa. And the face of the mesa heats up preferentially, too. A strong breeze is a blessing more times than not--at least in the summer. Here is my little poodle demonstrating orographic lift, right at the rim of the mesa: Hang gliders might call this 'wedge lift' or ridge lift. I love stumbling onto hang gliding sites, by accident. That happened once in my freshman year as a full time RVer. ...It was along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, near Traverse City, MI. Exploring on the mountain bike

After finding that wonderful campsite at the top of an 8000 foot high mesa, we needed to take a bike ride into town, in order to really feel at home. We enjoyed the smoothest dirt road ever! The county had sent the road grader out. What heroes those guys are. On the way to town we passed a modest historical marker for the Battle of Glorieta Pass, the so-called ' Gettysburg of the West.' That might be stretching it a little, but apparently it was the biggest battle in the West. I had honored the occasion by rewatching the spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in which the main battle was supposed to be at Glorieta Pass. It was shot in Spain of course.    Our camp was 1000 feet above town, so the ride in should have been a breeze. Instead, the pedaling seemed hard due to a slow leak in the tire.  Naturally it was a goathead. Now why do they call them 'goatheads,' you wonder? Look carefully:

The traffic around Santa Fe started to annoy me. There was no way to access the national forest near town so we headed off towards Pecos to find public-lands-camping with wireless internet. With this topography it would take a lucky ridge or mesa. I spent most of the afternoon striking out and then struggling to turn around. It would have been more sensible to drop the trailer and go searching just with the van. Late in the afternoon, options were running out. Rather foolishly I headed up the only dirt road that climbed this part of the mesa. It was so narrow and steep that if someone had been coming down the other way, it would have been a mess.  Getting on top of the mesa required flooring it, in first gear. Finally I reached a flat area, large enough to get turned around. The fork to the right had a tire-swallowing cattle guard. I've never seen one so damaged. The left fork headed back in the direction where there was no internet. As much as I despised the idea, i

Before surrendering yesterday I had ample opportunities to watch women enjoying their shopping, usually with a man in tow. The woman would say (for the 200th time that day), Oh, This Looks Cute, or cyyooooot as they intone it. The pitiful man's shoulders would slump. Most of the men showed a suffer-in-silence heroism that would have humbled the most severe of ancient Stoic philosophers. Santa Fe is a veritable laboratory to test your own pet theories. For instance, consider all the New Age religions here. Are they more popular with women than with men, the latter merely dragged along, just like the shoppers? Here's a normal and attractive church somewhere in New Mexico. Wait a minute... Long before the 'Church of What's Happening Now Baby' grooved away, a man living near the site of old Carthage confessed that he had been converted to Christianity by his mother. And then St. Augustine established Christianity on a solid enough foundation to las

This was my first visit to Santa Fe in many years. On the first visit, downtown Santa Fe had had quite an impact on me, primarily for its visual appeal, but also for its historical interest and compact walk-ability. It's easy to feel trepidation in revisiting an old flame. What if it has lost its magic? Is it you or it? On today's visit it took only minutes to realize that the architectural eye-candy just wasn’t having the same effect on me as before. Perhaps I was counting on pure novelty to make travel interesting. If so, what would that mean for the whole idea of RV travel over the next few years? Perhaps Santa Fe was just too cute, too over-restored for me. I had just been wallowing in the sun-bleached, decayed ruins of impoverished towns in New Mexico, where they simply don’t have the budget for over-restorations, and where old things stay dignified by honest decay. You see, I was an accomplished aesthete by now, and Santa Fe was beneath me (ahem).  Relaxed

It's hard to believe what happened on my first day of blogging. But this is a true story... Central New Mexico. We visited an old Spanish church at an Indian pueblo, built in the 1600's. It is easy here to imagine yourself far away in time and place from the drab uniformity of modern America. Why, we might as well be watching the movie, El Cid, with Charlton and Sophia. Other than the Fortress of old Quebec City, where can you experience anything like this in North America? This fine old church was starting to redeem a day that had not started too well. We found plenty of fine, high-altitude land and beautiful old ruins. But there was barely a grocery store to be found--or a wireless internet signal. So we continued on our way to the old imperial outpost of Santa Fe. Halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe I suddenly realized that my worries about staying high were over. I hadn't checked the weather this morning because there was no internet. So it was pu