We hiked four miles though the New Mexico desert yesterday. The plants are as strange and alien as a coral reef 100 feet down.
These are scrubby, tough, prickly survivors and desert flowers. On the spaces where nothing grows the sandstone has reformed into many strange gray nodules that look like very small cabbages growing close together.
Later, a 20-mile motorcycle ride to Baxter (population 200) for a shared turkey and avocado sandwich. No vehicles on the road at all either way. Then another swim in Bottomless Lake and Google planning for the next move to Ruidoso. Ruidoso has four tennis courts and will serve as base camp for a motorbike ride up 10,000-foot El Capitan Mountain.
The Crossroads
a place where ghosts
reside to whisper into
the ears of travelers and
interest them in their fate
Area 51 turns out to be in Nevada, not Roswell, New Mexico ... what a letdown. On top of that, the largest hurricane ever recorded seems to have drawn a bead on my Florida home with a projected arrival time of 2.00AM on Sunday. I'm only a block from the bay.
On the bright side, we saw a double rainbow in the west this morning and also my first wild porcupine. It was huge but, unfortunately, dead on the Oklahoma roadside shoulder.
Groom, Texas has the largest cross in the western hemisphere. It's about twice as high as the town water tower and is made of pipe and fabric so it can be lighted internally at night. The sign, visible from the interstate, said 'Gift Shop Open'. We were really tempted to stop in the Blessed Mary restaurant.
A little later, another sign said, simply, 'Rattlesnakes. Exit now.'
The high plains of North Texas and New Mexico seem like flatland, but the elevation signs coming into towns show them as being just short of a mile above sea level.
A bottomless lake is outside Roswell, the site of the flying saucer crash. The Air Force pilots I flew with were convinced that the alien bodies were stored at Wright-Patterson Air Base.
The small, bottomless blue lake is spring-fed and ringed by red limestone bluffs. The temperature of the lake felt like about 68°F. We are the only people in the campground.
There are lots of large yellow wasps or hornets flying everywhere. Two got inside. I killed them and disposed of the bodies.
Star viewing conditions are as good as they will ever get. It's now or never for seeing the Milky Way.
Paul and I install greenboard and concrete backerboard in his main bathroom with the big jacuzzi. He approves of my wine. We fish for striped bass in Lake Norfolk and play more tennis.
The drywall 'mud' guy shows up on Saturday. He is alone because it is the beginning of muzzle-loader hunting season so his helpers have run off hunting. He says his dad, Lee, owns the business... or at least he thinks Lee is his dad, it's hard to tell, he says.
Paul's 87 year old mother-in-law makes blueberry pie or blackberry cobbler every night. She gives us crossword puzzles and old Smithsonian magazines for the road.
The Mountain Home 'senior' centre is located near the municipal swimming pool and tennis courts. They send out shuttle buses to collect the old folks who want to play cards or swim. Paul says the local officials are into reality-based management and don't want them driving anywhere, if possible.
There's an interesting local story about a judges daughter, a murder cover-up and many witnesses who have now met with untimely deaths. Marshall, Arkansas may have the highest rate of unsolved murders per capita in the US.
The local police have an occasional big day of stopping pickup trucks to inspect for seat belt violations. This is always on the front page in advance with news about the war on page five or six.
I replace a burned out RV tail-light bulb and clean, tighten and lubricate the motorcycle chain with WD-40 and molybdenum disulfide. It's time to move on. West on Route 66.
We will spend the next six weeks exploring 'the mother road', Route 66. On 13 October, 1984, the last stretch of the legendary road was decommissioned near Williams, Arizona. It was replaced by Interstate 40. About 85% of the old road is still drivable. Many of the ghost towns along I-40 were killed by the bypasses.
I play the 1965 hit 'Ticket to Ride' by the Beatles on the RV CD player and remember a drive the same year along Route 66 in a TR4-A, painted British racing green, with the same companion. Everything we owned was in the trunk.
Paul's new house in the deep Arkansas woods is nearly ready to move into after two years in process. His front porch floor is built of salvaged two-inch thick maple bowling alley lanes. He's done almost all the work himself, but has hired workers to mud the drywall this week so he can move in later this month.
Paul loans us his old red 1977 Dodge Ram pickup truck every day to drive into the Mountain Home municipal tennis courts. We pull up to the empty tennis court parking lot in the thundering Ram and jump out in our tennis whites for two hours of free tennis. Mrs Phred wins 6-1, 6-1 each day. The tennis grandmothers ask us if we live here or are just passing though. We disappoint them.
In the evening we take Paul's ancient pontoon boat, The "Ratty Bastard" out on the huge Norfork lake for dinner and wine. He has outfitted the boat with cheap plastic chairs and tacky Tiki torches all around that he lights after nightfall. I swim in the dark with my old black fins in the middle of the lake. No alligators or sharks for a change, but Paul warns me about Volkswagen-sized man-eating catfish. The water feels about 78 degrees F. There are whole towns under the lake which was created when the TVA dammed the river for hydroelectricity.
We drink two bottles of Paul's excellent home-made Bardolinlo on the lake and Paul goes into an angry 'Bush-the-Deserter' rant. We both laugh and discuss how the world would have been much different with a MacArthur/Patton ticket in '52. Paul is concerned that Bush is packing the Supreme Court with ex-corporate attorneys. He tells me to wake up and smell the money. He says it's not about abortion and Roe vs Wade. He tells me we are seeing the masses being distracted by phoney issues like gay marriage while the powers cook up the next massive wealth transfer scheme.
Mountain Home has the World's largest sales volume Wal-Mart. The product variety and prices are amazing. We buy some turkey-and-chicken-thigh mozzarella-garlic smoked sausage to try for breakfast. They also have an eight-pack of Chinese 90-decibel door and window alarms for $5. These are installed by pealing off a paper backing and simply sticking them on a smooth surface.
Property values here in Mountain Home are 'sky-rocketing' and the population is expected to double from the current 20,000 in the next two years as boomers from California and Florida retire to the area. Property that went for $200 an acre five years ago is up to $5,000 an acre... in Tampa ¼ acre building lots are $250,000 or more, so this still sounds pretty cheap.
The campground Woolly Meadows State Park in Arkansas is deserted in October. No tennis courts. I think it's part of the Ozarks. Orion was up and bright at 4:30 AM. At 4:30 in Woolly Meadows, one has time to gather wool.
The central star in Orion's belt is Alnilam.
Alnilam is the title of a novel by James Dickey, who also wrote Deliverance. I bought all his old books and poetry on E-bay. The novel is about a blind man and his seeing-eye dog who visit a WWII training centre to learn about his son who was killed in a flying training accident. The son has so much charisma that he has established a military conspiracy that... but wait... I'm spoiling the plot...
There is a passage in the book about seeing the cannons on a German fighter wink at a flight instructor head-on and it becomes his insight like a diamond to the brain... later this 'diamond to the brain' insight concept was stolen and put in the mouth of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
Now it's later in the day and I'm parked in a heavily wooded clearing in Mountain Home, Arkansas in the backyard of a very old friend. We met just after we both got back from Viet Nam... He likes to make wine too... I'm anxious to share my Sauvignon Blanc with him and see what he's brewed up. When he moved here five years ago from Tampa, I drove a diesel truck with some of his household goods 1,040 miles to help him move his family.
Mountain Home is ethnically very homogeneous. There are no black families at all and no synagogues. There is a Mexican restaurant 20 miles away in Flippin, but that's about it. This is the home of President Clinton's Whitewater land development scandal. They have a law here in Arkansas that if a couple gets divorced they can still be brother and sister. Everyone waves at us as they drive past.
