Occupation of Independence

Silver City, NM. Today confirms an ever-strengthening prejudice of mine that pain and pleasure are linked in a dialectic, and that Comfort is the great false Idol of the tourist and RV newbie. There is a pleasure unique to a morning like this. On my drive back into New Mexico I saw tumbleweeds ensnared in the upper horizontal members of utility poles. "Only in southern New Mexico," I smirked. But actually the wind has been howling in this entire quadrant of the country. It doesn't bother me as much as it does some people. Still, it does take its toll on you. You begin to feel like you are under constant assault. And now this. Perfect calm, perfectly blue skies, clean air. At my dispersed campsite, a turkey vulture is searching vainly for a thermal; it i s too cold. U ntil then it can only do languid spiral loops over the grassland.  The inside of the trailer reached the low 30s F this morning. I slept in until sunrise. Never underestimate the pleasure of morning su

I n fact I l aughed when she rolled into camp . All that "mighty" thinking and w orrying, and yet I had overlooked the obvious. One way or another a woman should help to in tensify the experience of the best wildflower season in years. And that was the mission.   At first 'woman and flower' sounds like an o ld-fashio ned cliche for poets and songwriters . And it is , but only for society in general. It's a good gue ss that men, who retired early and became full-time travelers, did so because they walked away from women rel atively early in life. T herefore for us, the 'woman and flower' connection is not a cliche, but in fact , is radical and naughty.  The diabolical scheme was simple enough: I would take her along on the walk into the Florida mountains to enjoy the best wildflower season in years, and some how something might happen to take things way beyond the tourist level.  It's one thing to say that you really want something to s

For many people in many places, Spring means rain and flowers. But in the American Southwest a wet winter -- normally the secondary rainy season -- produces wildflowers only at the lower altitudes, that is, the desert floor. Really great shows don't occur every year. Fortunately there was enough rain this winter to produce a good show.  If you are seeing the wildflower display for the first time, you have no choice but to be wowed. I agree with all the ecstatic praise about spring wildflowers in the desert. But please remember that this blog targets experienced travelers, a group that the touris m industry (and virtually all RV blogs) could not care less about. It is natural for the magic to wear off once you've seen a couple good springs. Then what? Do you resign yourself to a lukewarm experience? Some people would prefer to deny that this happens, o ffer you a pe p talk full of half-truths, and then attribute their attitude to "positive thinking." But it is mo

First day's "growth." Whether or not April really is the cruelest month, Spring ( primavera ) is the most difficult season to appreciate on a non-trite level. The timeless cycle of the seasons and the old principle of new growth are hard to find new expressions for, or at least, fresh embodiments of. But if we play defeatist and accept hack neyed celebrations of spring -- such as postcards of desert wildflowers or Hallmark card platitudes about Renewal -- we'll end up with a vague, but troubling, sense of opportunity lost.  The Tucson area, my usual haunt in March, is a fortunate place to be in Spring if you are looking to really work on this project of appreciating Spring. Normally I like to start writing from concrete experiences and then migrate to the Big Picture. Today is an exception. What a heartbreaker of a result! A reminder to leave your camera default in spot focus instead of center-weighted. Vermilion flycatcher south of Tucson. Is it possible th

OK I admit it: I'm a bit sad to leave Yuma tomorrow. That's probably a "first" during 15 years as a full time RVer. If a place is worth going to, it is worth staying at -- until something goes wrong. Usually the weather becomes uncomfortable, or you've used up your time limit, or you've acquired a noisy neighbor. It's fun to leave when you really want to leave. Otherwise you are just wasting money on frivolous sightseeing -- the thing that some internet-wit or other called "channel surfing with gasoline." Don't think that I've gone soft  in the head. Yuma itself is not interesting. But I hope to long remember how pleasant it was to get back into club road bicycling. The moral of the story is to stay flexible when "lifestyling". Once again the upward and northward migration starts. Once again I yearn for some way to start a loose caravan or club of outdoorsy RV campers -- as opposed to mainstream, sedentary, portable suburba

It's rare to get a chance to smile at animals, aside from our domestic pets. The best shots at this occur when a normally boring or stupid animal suddenly becomes clever. For instance, ungulates don't seem like the brightest bulbs on Mother Earth, but under the right circumstances... Going down a road in the Socorro NM area I was surprised at the number of "hunters" parked along the road. Which season is it now ? But then again, maybe they were joy-riding four-wheelers, rather than hunters. The "lower" Rio Grande starts at Socorro by my estimate. It is reminiscent of the Mojave Desert, even though it is the Chihuahuan Desert, officially. Although I postpone "winter" locations in order to keep North America from shrinking too soon, it was fun to start walking arroyos again, which is something I only do in the winter. What really makes walking these arroyos delicious is the cold, dry air. On today's walk there were some cows. That'

BLM land near Cuba NM, 7100 feet. Many a Northerner, in Florida for the first time, has been amused by the weather guys' and the locals' talk about a possible "hard freeze." The very term seems ridiculous to the Northerner, and he might easily conclude that Floridians are thermal sybarites.  This morning I remembered that experience of long ago and my disgust (grin) toward Floridians when I had to get out of bed because it was too cold to sleep. In fact there had been a "soft freeze" overnight. But on this blog, hard and soft freezes refer to the temperature inside the trailer. It had reached 30 F inside, so the water pump wouldn't work. But it was just a soft freeze since the water in the dog dish was still liquid. So I had to crawl through some sagebrush under the trailer and turn on the propane shut-off valve for the catalytic heater. Gosh I dislike the inconvenience and cost of propane. In the summer I can go as long as 4 months on one small (

On Mogote Ridge, near El Rito, NM. Would you smile about being woken up at 5 in the morning? No? Well I do, and remember, I'm the alleged curmudgeon. Hunters really do keep some strange hours. The funniest thing is when they go by at 5 am with six hounds in kennel boxes in the back of the pickup truck, all baying at full volume. One bear hunter stopped at my campsite today and told me that one of his hounds was lost or perhaps stolen. The dog had a GPS tracker on its collar, which went blank a couple days ago. He said the hound cost him $4000-5000, after training and other overhead. On top of that he has five other hounds, a thousand dollar rifle, a hunting license costing several hundred dollars, GPS gadgets, and a $50,000 four-wheel-drive pickup truck, which of course is a requirement for getting to the places the bears are or might be. That is getting to be one expensive bear. So much for my stereotype of male consumers as sensible, no-nonsense sort of guys. How strange an

Southwest of Monte Vista CO, national forest, over 9000 feet. The aspen were at their peak blaze. I enjoyed it for -- forgive me -- a few seconds, and then looked for more interesting things to think about. After slamming one of the holiest cliches of the tourism industry, I should propose an alternative. I'll do so shortly. Seriously, why do people waste time and money to go to look at yellow aspens? Sure, bright yellow is a fun color, but you could stay at home, close your eyes, and imagine the color yellow. It would be just as vivid. If your imagination needs help you could buy a blue-ray DVD travelogue put out by National Geographic, say, "America's Top Ten Fall Color Road Tours." Don't underestimate how good the modern big screen televisions have become. If you are still not satisfied because your retinas haven't yet registered all that they are physiologically capable of, then go to menu-setup and blast the contrast or saturation on the television scr

Hmmm....it looks like thermal collapse in a couple days in southern Colorado. Here I go again. After 15 years of full time RVing there is still a nervous drama to. I still feel anxiety about the fall migration, so much so in fact that it's a bit embarrassing. Or is it? Although I can't really explain it, it seems that I must be doing something right if I still have strong feelings about the migration, after all these years.  But why do I only get emotional about the autumn migration, and not the spring migration? You'd think that it would be symmetric. But there is something that I can explain: it is important to resist hitch-itch in migrating too far south too fast. It's not that the warmer desert locations aren't appealing. I like them well enough. But in migrating south, imagine pouring yourself and your rig into a conical funnel whose downstream tip is at Yuma, AZ. As you proceed "downstream", North America keeps shrinking. Your options become fe

'Be careful of what you wish for' is an old saying that deserves respect. In years past I suffered and obsessed over Dry Heat in June. In the Southwest it is the hottest and most oppressive month. But then I did something stupid: I got good at avoiding the Dry Heat! I've been cool all May and June, while everybody else has been whining about the heat. You can credit Luna NM and Springerville AZ for this tragic turn of events. Alas, the lack of June Agony makes it hard to experience the usual Ecstasy when the monsoons finally arrive near the first of July. How great it would be to flop on the ground during a monsoonal thundershower and scream, "We're saved!" It would be reminiscent of something Bertrand Russell once described: Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do.  I have seen a boy of two years old, who had bee

Sigh. I missed my calling in life as the writer of newspaper headlines in the yellow press. OK, so Glenwood NM is not really threatened. Still, it was an interesting day with the local forest fire. You would think that a forest fire would produce hazy, smeared out clouds, as well as weird orange or yellow colors in the sky at the right time of day. That's how it looked during this morning's mountain bike ride, which was chosen to go in the opposite direction from the fire. On a late afternoon walk into town I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this cloud peeking over the nearest ridge. I had never seen such a solid and serious-looking cloud. Is this how Mt. St. Helens looked when it blew its top? A dog walker behind the library (where I go to internet) told me the official name of this kind of cloud is 'pyro-cumulus'. Presumably that is condensed water vapor at the top of the forest fire's plume. The particulate matter browns up the bottom of the cl

Southwestern New Mexico. There is so much change in altitude in the Southwest that you can stay comfortable all year, despite your winter hangout being only a few hours drive from your summer place. Considering the price of gasoline, tires, and a new pickup truck (over $60000) -- while the narco-keynesians pay zero interest in bank accounts -- it seems advantageous to concentrate in this area, and abandon the notion of transcontinental "channel surfing with gasoline", which is how the RV lifestyle used to be seen. And so I have. But there's always pro-s and con-s. This morning I took a stab at a forest access road. I decided to hike since it seemed likely that it would get too steep for mountain biking. Everything went well. Coffee Girl had a great chance to chase squirrels, while I was delighted with trees-that-have-leaves. (Actually there isn't a technical word for that, is there?) I was a bit astonished with the grandeur of a couple of Arizona Sycamores along t

Who were the first "bloggers" in the English language? Arguably they lived in the 18th century. They were fellows like Addison & Steele, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin. They wrote with a goose quill stylus and paper instead of a laptop of course. But the term, blogger, still seems right since they wrote personal essays on a wide variety of topics. Sometimes they wrote in a hurry, as Johnson admitted to. There are advantages to both slow and fast writing. If the blogger is working on a difficult theme, the slow approach works best. But fast writing can better capture the spirit and mood of the writer. Sometimes that is the better approach, such as when a traveler arrives in town and feels a bit giddy because things are working out better than he expected. Don't let anybody tell you that concerns and worries are terrible and negative things. Without them, how could we have upside surprises? I'm having one right now -- right this minute -- in Glenwood, N