Occupation of Independence

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

There are disadvantages in being a solo traveler. It is a serious topic, but somewhat long. I prefer to just nibble at the edges of this topic. There are several assets that could make life less lonely for a single traveler. For instance, a perfect salesman-like personality would help a lot. Or be a cute woman with an interesting foreign accent. Bicycle tourers attract attention and help because they don't look like the standard tourist. Lacking any of those advantages I came up with another. Consider a recent experience. A construction worker noticed my little poodle who was doing his usual routine in the cargo trailer behind my mountain bike. We were all delighted to find out that the construction worked had once had a small poodle with the same name as mine. We had a nice chat. I wish I had a nickel for every person who approached the little poodle and me when he was on the job in the BOB trailer behind the bicycle.  I usually ask them, considering how many horse trailers t

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

Right now I'm mixing old and new posts on this new blog. It probably seems weird. But I really enjoy editing as well as reliving some past experiences.  Why must a blog imitate a daily newspaper? Isn't the whole idea of "news" a bit silly? Our culture is obsessed with the Latest and Greatest, whether it be fashions, slang words, pop-singer-sluts, fads, etc. But is this a moralistic scold talking or is it an old man who has seen so many people and things come and go during his life that he just doesn't give a damn anymore? I don't want to become one of those grumpy old men who hangs out at the Golden Arches. Try talking to one of them; they don't actually want to talk with you; they just want an audience for their interminable stories about the good old days; today and tomorrow mean nothing. While waiting for a victim they kill their time reading the daily news, ironically enough. But hopefully I'm not that bad yet. I want to think of time-agnos

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

The lives of the gods living on Mt. Olympus is starting to resemble a tawdry soap opera these days. Zeus in particular has fallen in stature as far as the English royal family did in Princess Diana's day. If that wasn't bad enough, the Norse equivalent of the Roman Vulcan is throwing temper tantrums in Iceland. A quick perusal of Wikipedia did not reveal the Indo-European god of debt. Whenever I read an article about Germany's response to the financial dysfunction of Mediterranean Europe, it brings a wry smile to my face. My goodness, the north-south split. How long has it been going on? It is charming, and must explain much of the popularity of the movie, "A Room with a View," which I rewatched recently. In the movie English tourists were visiting Italy; full of primness, they were confused or offended by the chaos of Italy. As usual, the commentary track neglected to credit the mostly-Puccini soundtrack with the movie's popularity. One can&#