Wild Horses

Near the Colorado border


Since I never unhooked, it wasn't hard to get away from Conchas Lake in the morning. I just made some coffee, scattered toast to a few rather pushy ground squirrels, and was on my way.

As I came through Las Vegas, the parking lots looked fresh, but not drowned. I ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant catty-corner to the Walmart. I'd never had a Zia taco before, which I take to be a local dish. It is a kind of open faced burrito. You start with a piece of Navajo frybread big as a plate. Then you pile on shredded roast beef, beans, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and cheese. Then you smother it all in green chile. Sopapillas on the side.

Man, do Mexicans know how to eat.

Angel Fire is the address for something everyone should see. Especially if, like me, they grew up in the 60s. Here in 1968, on a hill with a sweeping view of the valley below, Dr. Victor Westphall built a chapel in memory of his son, an army lieutenant killed in Vietnam the year before. It is a single large room, built of concrete, painted white. From without you get the impression of a great bird about to take flight. In 1983 the chapel was rededicated as the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A small museum and some statuary have been added, including a helicopter seemingly caught at the moment of impact.

In the museum there is a hall where banners hang, representing all the units that served there. To the side, in a very small room, is the heart and soul of the site. Back in there a continuous movie runs, covering the history of those years. Spliced into this film are many a home movie and on-site vignette shot by the soldiers themselves. Laughing, drinking, showing off.

On the walls are letters home.

They look so young. They were. There is a shyness there, and the nervousness and bravado of kids a long way from home. Later some of the eyes grew cold. These were my friends, my schoolmates. Seeing their faces, I feel that shock of recognition that is shared by those who grow up together. They will never grow older. And I will never be that young again.

Come and see. You cannot leave this place unshaken.


Towards evening, on a deserted highway a little south of Costilla, I came to a dead stop to watch a band of wild horses cross the road. There were seven of them, including a couple of half-grown colts.

I don't know exactly why I think they were wild. It's an impression grown from a bunch of things, seen very quickly. Most horses you see are solitary. These were part of a group. They were small, lean, skinny, unshod, a little shaggy. Their backs unbowed. Mostly it was a matter of how they moved and held themselves. They were about their own business. They had a light step, and a purposeful manner. They were intensely aware of each other, and hardly paid me any mind at all.

All but one had already crossed over, and were waiting on the east side. The laggard had stopped on the west shoulder to sniff and snuffle something in a small pile of rocks. The lead horse turned and raised his head, said something directed right at her. She looked up, her nose quivered, and quick as that she danced across the road. Right in front of me.

There are no fences here. They lined out immediately for the mountains, more or less single file. Not running, but moving with an easy mile-eating economy of motion that was in itself an inspiring sight. Soon they disappeared to dots.

I turned around and went back about a mile to a marshy lake by the side of the road, and spent the night there. I hoped to see their like again, but I did not.

Now I have this memory, which may have come merely from an old movie or fairy tale, that members of some primitive tribe, on the lookout for a Name to flesh out their narrow lives, paid close attention to certain totemic animals they met along the way. Perhaps, if the person had been smoking weed, or hadn't eaten in a while, the animals would speak to him, or even render aid. In gratitude, that person might thereafter take a name in memory of the event, such as Black Elk, or Crazy Dog, or even Dances With Wolves. Such names were reputed to have transformative power.

These horses were impressive, but I think I'll have to pass. They did not speak to me. Or even notice me much. Besides, the last thing I really saw was the west end of an east-bound horse, running away.

What kind of a Name could I make out of that?

Bob

A Slow Wet Start

Conchas Lake, NM


Morning breath in a roadside park near Clovis.

Forget the cape and tights, Ma. I need a raincoat!

I began so grandly, only days ago, with such heroic rhetoric. You probably don't even remember, because surely your eyes glazed over once I started all that stuff about Vision Quests and Reincarnation. Just as well, I guess, because here I am being held up, not by dire wolves or dragons, but mere weather.

Apparently Las Vegas and Mora, NM, through which I was to pass this afternoon, are largely under water. In fact, I haven't seen such lurid colors marching over a weather map since I left the Fire Department. Maybe since the Jarrell tornado. Waves of orange and red and green smear across NE New Mexico. Looks like a slowly moving bruise covering a quarter of the Sunshine State, and half the TV screen.

If you're in the market for suffering, there seems to be plenty a short drive north of here.

But I stopped, after less than a hundred miles, at Conchas Lake, near Tucumcari. Be careful what you wish for. It's stupid to drive on and on into really bad weather. Even carrying a kayak. There's no point in being Born Again if you're going to be infantile about it.

This is a medium sized reservoir on the Canadian River. It's not a large lake when it's full, and it hasn't been full for a while.

Cracked mud flats and fingers of water spread out below some bluffs. I drove just across the dam to Conchas Lake State Park, and found some picnic tables a long way from the water. I hope the fishing is good out there, because there's not a lot else to do. The shoreline is largely treeless but tawny with buffalo grass, at least down to where the water used to be.

Heavy clouds and varying winds kept the afternoon cool. No rain here, but the sky looks black as a banker's heart up north. I brought a bunch of books, and tried to get started on one my cousin sent me: "The Coming Generational Storm" by Kotlikoff and Burns. This is a serious tome about social security and the future economy, full of charts and graphs outlining the coming demographic terrors of the 2030s. Very earnest.

There's a graph here that shows the age distribution of the United States. In 1900 it looked like a pyramid. Right now it looks like a house with a peaked roof. The projection for 2030 looks like a barrel.

They talk a good bit about what they call the "dependency ratio". The normal working life usually runs between the ages of 20 and 65, give or take. These are the people in the middle, who support the ends. The ratio of those under 20 and over 65 to the working middle is growing every day. By 2030 it is expected to reach 35%.

These are some tough nuts to crack. I offered them to the ground squirrels, but they just ran away. I am tempted to join them. I'm not eligible for Social Security, anyway.

Why is it we tend to view the past with equanimity, as though it were safely gone, and contemplate the future with an expression like that of a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights? The past is never past. It dogs us every day. And as for the future, well, beyond a certain near horizon, it is the only thing in the world we are surely safe from. It cannot touch us.

It's the kids, of course. There's a wave coming, and they'll be there.

But I keep drifting off and staring at the sky. I have met the slacker, Pogo, and he is me. Yawn. I think I'll go inside and check out the couch.

Ahhh. Here it is, folks, fresh from the snobbishly intellectual rack at the local Stop-n-Rob: Tom Clancy's latest, "Teeth of the Tiger". Good title, but not nearly as scary as those awful charts and graphs. Something about investment bankers setting up as secret private hit squad contractors in a attempt to ease the burden on our poor overworked and undersighted CIA. Right. Arbitrageurs vs Arab (you guessed it) Terrorists. Poke'em in the butt and watch'em drop.

I kid you not. Video game to follow.

Whoda thunk you could make assassination seem like a boring middle-class day job? Where does he get this stuff, the New York Times? And yet it sells.

zzzzzzzzzzzzz.


Bob,
waiting out the storm in this little rolling house out on the prairie.

A Dark and Stormy Night

Farwell, Texas

It was a dark and stormy night... No, wait. That comes later.

I left Georgetown under cloudy skies at noon, and drove straight on through to Brownwood, where I stopped at the Gomez Cafe for a pile of chicken livers, fries, and gravy. Waddling back to the truck, I opened up the trailer to get a coke for the road. There was a bottle of Chilean cabernet lying in front of the fridge.

Uh oh.

And a one inch round hole in the middle of the dining table.

O noooo.

Time once again to review a life of oops and errors. When I ripped out the dinette seats last February to put in chairs, I moved the wine rack into an overhead compartment. Looked good up there. Many a bottle had sat there complacently all through the winter, apparently waiting for a chance to escape.

I guess that moment arrived going round some curve between Georgetown and Brownwood, when this belligerent and ill-mannered cabernet pushed open the door and plunged neck first through the formica top of the dinette table. And half-way through the particle board beneath. Then it must have cartwheeled onto the floor, where at last it ran out of imagination, and options.

For that is where I found it, label scratched but glass unbroken. They make good glass, down there in Chile.

I put the bottle back where it belonged, and secured the door with a small bungee. Don't ask me why I didn't think of this before.

O well, something more to fix. And a heretofore undiscovered reason not to let passengers ride in the trailer. If a quart of wine upside the head doesn't kill you outright, you'll most likely bleed out anyway before the driver becomes aware of the tragedy.

Nasty mess to clean up, too, unless of course your head was also made in Chile. A word to the wise...which I was not.

Unable to pass up a Sam's Club, I stopped for gas in Abilene. And no, it is not the prettiest town you've ever seen. Next stop, Lubbock. That's the great thing about Sirius satellite radio. You can get wrapped up in NPR and forget the passage of time, even in the Panhandle.

Ah, the Panhandle of Texas. I can't ever seem to slow down in this stretch of returning prairie. There's probably lots to see. I first blew through here in the summer of '67. It seemed like a desert then, and it still does.

Not the interesting sort of desert, like Big Bend or Ansa-Borrego. Too many people here for that. More a desert of the mind. A land of hog reports and twangy music, gospel-besotted panhandling radio preachers, and the weekly epiphany of high school football.

The sort of place I've been escaping all my life. Boredom unlimited.

It is a flat and sandy land that owes it's whole life to artifice. Ancient aquifers have been emptied out to paint these green circles on the surface of the prairie. It's an inspiring trick while it lasts. An inch outside those sharp-edged circles, though, the original dusty desperation shows, and the staked plain of legend waits.

I guess this prejudice got its start on ski trips, back when time was short. But now that I have all the time in the world, all the time I'm ever going to get, I still feel the need for speed come over me around Abilene, and it doesn't let up until I see the mountains of New Mexico.

I talked myself into stopping, this time, at the very edge of Texas in the dark. I'm circling a deserted roadside park outside Farwell, looking for the flattest spot. A light clatter of hail convinces me that maybe it's not so all-important to be level, just this once. I barely get inside before the heavens open up, and rain comes down in sheets. Some of those sheets are nearly horizontal.

Me for a glass of whiskey, a bit of typing, and to bed.


You know, there is a sensual aspect to living in a trailer that you hardly notice in a normal house. The storm is right there over my head, inches away. I can feel it drum and shake and splatter and roar and flash. It is like having a second skin.

Yikes! That was close.

If all this stuff starts going round and round, a second skin might not be quite enough. I could be flying featherless. That would be a little too entertaining.

Less snug now, certainly less poetical, I've definitely taken a firmer grip on the covers. The bed's lit up by lightning as the swollen sky swirls by.

I bid you all safe slumber. And good night.


Bob

A Deliberate Year

Georgetown, Texas


Okay, let's be serious for a moment.

Okay, thanks.


No, wait. There's more...

It has come to my reluctant attention that Things Fall Apart.

And ever since that bit of angioplasty in Canada last fall, I've been worried that one of those things may be me.

It's pretty darn cold comfort that this happens to everyone. I know, I know. We all show up the same way, coming round the bend, waterborne as Moses ever was among the reeds, washing out of woman and -whoops- into the light.

No dress rehearsal. Or at least none that we can remember.

And hey, then we get to hang around here for a while, until another current comes along. Then off we go into the night.

Simple enough.

A fun game in the middle and a mystery at both ends. We make what we can of it, shaped by what we do. I myself was a child and student for 26 years, and a fireman for 30 more. That's the Reader's Digest version. And it's all done now.

I've had three heart attacks and a broken neck. Lucked out every time. Go figure.

But let's get something straight. It isn't Death that makes me nervous. Really. You can't screw up Death. C'mon. You ever see an epitaph that reads: "Gee, what do I do now?"

Death is not a problem. Death takes care of itself. Wherever we're going, I think we'll get there much the same way we got here. Willy-nilly. Without a dress rehearsal. Ta Da.

The real problem is all this life we've got left.

It's a practical problem. Which gives me pause, since only this morning I learned that I can't reliably make an omelette, even when I do break eggs.

And so it is, late in life, that I find myself intrigued by the mechanics of reincarnation - especially this side of the Void. This is where all the work seems to be. Like a child is born again to be a man. Like I somehow morphed into a fireman.

Think I can do something like that again? I guess I could pray on it. And maybe I will, though God probably gets entirely too much spam already.

I'm having a little trouble remembering the mechanics from the last time. Seems like there was a good bit of desperation...er...motivation involved. Some organization and effort. Maybe a dollop or two of entirely ridiculous despair. A short leap of faith....

Hey, I've got all the ingredients right here.

Except, except.... Those old indians, the ones that used to go on Vision Quests to get their True Names and be Born Again.... weren't they supposed to suffer for it? Hunger, thirst, fatigue, bruises, that sort of thing?

Hmmm. Suffering. Don't get much call for that, living in an RV. Let's see what I've got with me. There's clean clothes, hot showers, a soft bed, vented heat...steak and ham and eggs and cantaloupe in the fridge, pie and ice cream, various interesting warm and cold libations, a whole rack of spices.

Even a small jumble drawer full of irritations and annoyance. Better empty that out. Any traveler can tell you that annoyance is a weed that grows wild by the side of the road, everywhere you go. Saving that is like saving string.

But I'm fresh out of suffering. Darn. Guess I'll have to go shopping. And that means another trip.
You knew this was coming, right?

If the fabric of the cosmos doesn't always ride up in the crotch, maybe I can find something out there that fits me. On sale, even. Hmmm. Another careen...er... career. Of course, if I do, there's a good chance I may not be strong or smart or good or even good-looking enough to deal with it.

But what the heck, I'll give it a shot.

What do you think? Is it likely? Is it foolish?

Here between lives, and shortly before Things Fall Apart, can a man still climb up out of the canyon of his years, dragging a trailer behind him?

I guess I'll find out. You can come along if you want.


Bob