Cocoposts

Weed Ranch Cotton

It is all about the cottonwood cotton and fallen cottonwoods and cottonwood limbs. And weeds. The old female tree I decided not to build under - thereby moving the i-house's bright orange flex unit into a neighbor's view of the Sandias, a source of no small amount of ill-will - is busting with cotton this year and sending huge cotton chunks airborne in what will be an ultimately unfruitful attempt to multiply after sprouting in horse water buckets and mudholes.

Before the green pellet-like balls burst open, the weight makes the soft wood prone to cracking even on not so windy days. I lost an entire tree in a recent wind gust and two other trees shed huge branches recently - making magnificent crashing sounds like T-Rex in the bosque.

Hard Town for a Dog That Hates Balloons

And Big does so hate balloons of the large hot air variety. He is also not fond of large birds and low flying planes. But bright large, round and silent-until-they're-not things are much much worse. Especially that unexpected noise, the horrible "PHHHAAAHHHPT!" 

Big dog otherwise qualifies as a very mellow dog. But in any photo where he appears to be calmly surveying the Weed Ranch pasture he is actually scanning the eastern horizon in the direction of the Balloon Fiesta Park for any sign of horrible floaty colored things that roar (or "Balloons" in Dog speak.) Evidence is met with fresh emotional distress - a new discovery of hot air ballooning every sighting. And multiple balloons cause amplified spasms of anxiety -  tail-tucking and whining and pacing. It is like some dogs get on thunder. Except thunder doesn't bother him at all. Thunder is nature. He can tell when thunder is coming. Horrible floaty colored things sneak up on you and go: "PHHHAAAHHHPT!" And that is so so much worse. Apparently.

I mock him for this, his only weakness. I make the burner roaring noise with my arms up and glide across the floor. He looks at me with a very sad face and sighs and I immediately feel guilty.

Weed Ranch Portrait

Weed Ranch Chronicle

Worked a weed cutter yesterday along the driveway for 25 feet or so until the annual blood sacrifice to yard gods of whacking the blade on my ankle thus assuring another year of prolific tumbleweeds.

Here at The Weed Ranch this Spring we've got a bumper crop of mustard and early foxtail-type grass coming in. They're bounding back nicely even without water and this latest moisture will no doubt rally those volunteers for an onslaught.  Little apparent progress in annihilating these was made by opposing forces last year. Next up will be kochia and tumbleweed seedlings. We'll keep you updated from the front lines, like a Joe Monahan of weeds, talking all majestic plural but without the ads or alligators - though I do have snakes.

For my weedy explorations I'm We're using Weeds of the West, The Western Society of Weed Science. They look like a bunch of guys you want on your team. For a completely different (and British) take, Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants by Richard Mabey.

Image of Sisymbrium irio AKA London Rocket or Rocket Mustard, from Southwest Arizona Wildflowers.

 

Sierra County - 7,500 People, Two Newspapers

This place is like the rest of New Mexico only a little more so - poorer, hotter, drier. It's awfully nice if you like cactus, mesquite, sunshine, old trailers, desert mountain views and hot springs. Its other charms are not as obvious.


There is nothing nothing nothing like a spring wind to remind you of what's hard to love about southern New Mexico. It puts everyone in a mood.   Crazy Arizona dirt (it might infect you with the conservatism they suffer) blows in and collects on the window sills. It isn't merely a nuisance, it closes interstates.

Soil loss is impressive these days but the problem of erosion has apparently fallen out of the lexicon, like elsewhere. It's just accepted. Screwing around in bulldozers is very popular as is screwing around in off-road vehicles and with chain-saws. These tools are applied in the landscape to great affect.

Poverty bites especially hard into rural New Mexico. Mobile homes represent the upscale housing through sad swaths of places like Williamsburg where sheds and RVs line the streets and you don't know how they just don't blow away. Old cars and men on bicycles who don't shave fit right in. Wal-Mart's unflattering light is a good place to observe meth addiction's effect on skin tone.

Promising Plan El Paso

The El Paso City Council just approved a comprehensive plan and the EPA gave it a Smart Growth award. The El Paso Times article says the plan promises to cure urban ills like some kind of magic planning pill.

El Paso's effort stands out in today's southwest where, as the article's comments suggest, such efforts are derided as "social engineering" or part of a UN plot to build better cities. (The horror!)

Explanations about the costs of growth in El Paso will sound remarkably familiar to proponents of Albuquerque's long ago and far away Planned Growth Strategy.  That effort was shit-canned derailed while in process by developers and their friends on the city council and county commission who got a whiff of where it was going and insisted that "benefits of growth" be examined as well as the costs. It was subsequently (and gleefully) picked apart as planners attempted to quantify soft social benefits of things like "having a lawn."

It's critics turned PGS into something they could kill. And they nearly did.  Today the impact fee system intended to implement Albuquerque's PGS by varying fees to reflect costs of public services by area - and providing an incentive of cheaper fees where public service capacity exists - is getting tossed out and lambasted as "too complex" by the developer dominated city council. Pffft.

El Paso has put on their big boy planning pants.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 5

Picnicking on the dead shores of Elephant Butte Lake in the winter is not as depressing as it sounds. At least it never really got cold.  Warmth for achy bones is why a lot of people come here. 

Looking on the bright side of the drought, there's a lot more lake shore. Big dog and I enjoy hikes down to the water and back, a considerable distance in some places.  We were spooked by rustling in the bushes near the water a few weeks ago. Wild pigs are making inroads locally - snagging habitat and being opportunistic with water holes.  Big could smell tasty piglet.

There are plenty of reasons to be watchful beyond big pig tusks. Spooked even. David Parker Ray disposed of the bodies in Elephant Butte Lake. Who knows if he had help. And those bones are decidedly not why I came here. (I never should of read that book.)

There used to be a ferry across the Rio before the lake.  It's demise was the subject of a poem, Engle Ferry, by Eugene Manlove Rhodes published in the Saturday Evening Post August 10, 1929 and excerpted in Keleher's Fabulous Frontier.

The ferry is narrow and deep... the current is strong and the banks are steep ... a winding road up either hand, between black lava and yellow sand, between red water and close blue sky...angry echoes from hill to hill mutter and clamor and threaten still... Engle ferry is gone... never again shall moon or star kiss the hill where their camp-fires are... the passionless waters are deep and still on golden mesas and dreaming hill.

Maybe not as deep anymore.

When a proposal was made to change the name of nearby Engle to Engel, U.S. then Senator Bronson Cutting intervened at Rhodes's request and the proposal was nixed. There's a connection!

Can't you just see the wind?

Mom's holding her hair out of her eyes, squinting behind ray-bans and glaring up at him and that damn pentax he got for Christmas. Mistake, she thought, turning back to the campfire to stab at the steaks.

Her mood and the wind came up at the same time. She'd begged him to leave it at home, that camera. She'd had some dentistry. The partial wasn't ready. She didn't want her gapped-tooth smile immortalized and she sure isn't smiling in this photo. But you can see that dark space anyway as her mouth is open a little saying, "Oh for God's sake Dave."

He took her picture all day like he always did. Our weekend and holiday camping trips and picnics were elaborately documented. If there'd been an internet then, my father would have facebooked, geo-cached and tweeted every one of our trips. As it was, he left multiple trunks of 35mm slides, rolls of super-8, shoe boxes of 3x5 prints, and a small library of photoalbums.

In the pictures from this day the wind is like an unwelcome family member, a crazy Aunt who visits for extended periods every spring and spends the afternoons screaming and crying at you for something that isn't your fault.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 4

These days enlightened professionals in government stand out like big bass in a shrinking desert lake - leaping out of the water because they can't take the pond full of stupid anymore.

This is one quirky-ass little town.

One of the latest movidas involves a city vote to shorten the municipal runway to benefit a developer named Greg Neal who says he'll build a truck stop there any day now.

This is what's become of the "premier commercial and industrial zone" anchored by a "motorplex" promised in the 7,388 acre State land swap completed by former State Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons with chest-thumping pride in 2008.  Then NASCAR said they'd never heard of Greg Neal.

Now the Airport Director and somebody else has resigned.

Economic development: they'll say it's about jobs but it's all about real estate speculation.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 3

Fiesta Dresses are a distant topic from sex torture and murderous pitbulls.  Given the continuing notoriety of the David Parker Ray case and Sierra County's apparent desperation for economic stimulation, I'm greatly relieved and a little surprised no one has had the idea of re-creating the "Toy Box" as a museum piece - at least that we know of.
 
Lessons from that horrifying history seem limited to: A) Gosh, we sure hope that's history; and B) "Let this serve as a warning to girls." 

It's infuriatingly common to hear that this is what happens when girls do X, Y or Z.  Such victim-blaming is blazingly evident in the justice system and the Ray trials.*

The focus on the victim and her part in sex crimes doesn't change behavior - least of all men's behavior toward women and girls.  But it does evoke generalized fear and suspicion on the part of one-half the population toward the other. This is hardly the basis for a healthy community but it's great for gun sales. 

Pleasant and un-prurient interests abound in Sierra County, as fiesta dresses remind me.  The Geronimo Springs Museum also has a most fabulous pottery collection, including a Mimbres Black-on-White pot with an exquisite crossword puzzle-like design - as if the artist was tripping and picturing a New York Times of the future. But the fiesta dresses are my personal favorite.

My Mother, Aunts and every other female I knew had a fiesta dress or three during the day.  These particular rick-rack on-net artifacts of the 50's home sewing era were winners of T or C's annual Fiesta Dress competition. They're kept lovingly dusted and displayed in the "Barbara and Ralph Edwards Suite" along with fifty plus years worth of parade and pagent memorabilia - walls full of B-movie stars' signed photos and smiling fifty faces of Miss Fiestas.

Ralph Edwards died in 2005 and in the 2006 parade the Sierra County Sheriff's Posse honored him with a riderless horse. The Fiesta event has cooled as the town struggles with finances in the absence of Edwards's largesse. But they're still crowning "Miss Fiesta" every year.

 

*For a detailed account see Consequences: The Criminal Case of David Parker Ray, by J.E. Sparks.  But better yet, don't.  Take a picnic or go to the museum where you won't see a thing about it.

Happy Mardi Gras!

(Photos courtesy Inky Ink Inc.)

Weed Ranch Update

It's been almost two years since groundbreaking for the i-house project at the newly named Weed Ranch.  The household downsizing was successful.  Minimalization was maximized.

I'm heating the main unit with a little Hearthstone woodstove. It caused problems as the unit "settled" and the roof began leaking at the stovepipe. Now the pipe is vented out the sidewall (just to the right of the pictured unit) and there is a very ugly but effective roof patch that only the balloonists can see.

The heat is otherwise a particularly noisy forced air electric system. The "flex" unit or casita has a separate little HVAC system that is much quieter. 

Other problem: the sliding glass door is my "front" door and it's heavy and hard to open - nearly impossible with an armload of wood since it takes both hands.

But that's a small price to pay for the view.

Fencing and a new gate are the latest additions and in another week the giant weed patch, for which the ranch is named, will be plowed for new pasture.

Now excuse me, I need a hot soak down south.

More Dam Desert Diary - Spaceport

"For a fancypants spaceport this isn't much of a road."

Greetings from beautiful Truth or Consequences New Mexico, formerly Hot Springs.  I like the old name better but I wasn't around in 1950.  Just thank goodness it wasn't "To Tell The Truth" or  they'd be calling it The City of TTTT.  "Let's Make Deal," or "The Price is Right" would imply the government is corrupt.  And who would want to live in "Jeopardy?" 

There is hope and optimism about the Spaceport around here. It's probably not unlike the dreams associated with gold in the hills, health in the hot springs, and happy Hollywood gameshows that spurred speculation here in the past. 

At least the road to the Spaceport is paved from TorC.  Take that, Las Cruces.  From that direction it's Journada del Muerto all over again for passenger cars.  We're going from wagons and trains straight to rockets and skipping highways altogether.

It doesn't look like much from a distance.  Big dog and I walked a little stretch of the actual Journada del Muerto from BLM's Yost Escarpment Trail. The escarpment - once an obstacle for freight wagons - now offers a view of the Spaceport. You can't see the runways so it looks like just another casino. I suppose it is in a way. Wait.  A casino would have a road.

 

See Turtle in Desert - Turtleback Mountain Diary

Spotting the Turtle in the mountain and the Elephant in the butte took me awhile. Mountains never look like animals or people. They look like mountains. Naming them after whatever object they might look like only attests to the power of alcohol and 17th century trail fatigue.  The guy that thought a mountain looked like "Fray Cristobal" was drunk on mescal or delirious from the Jornada del Muerto. Or overindulged as a child with sightings of tetillas in the hills.

The TorC turtle made his stony self known to me as the snow melted off his back on a sunny day just after Christmas. I was soaking my arthritic ass (though that not be the afflicted portion of my body) in one of the lovely outdoor pools at Riverbend and staring across the Rio at a particular part of the mountain (not pictured) - a portion of Los Caballos, so named because horses roamed there and not because mountains looked like horses. 

Suddenly there was the turtle - if there can be a sudden about either granite or turtle. He's been there draped across that ridge forever. His rocky shell black against the white snow made him obvious and showy. His prominant front left leg hangs down lazily like  he's been soaking too.  

"There's the fucking turtle!"  I exclaimed a little too loudly. I wasn't even drunk.

There is no direct evidence that either Thomas B. Catron or Bronson M. Cutting ever visited any of New Mexico's hot mineral springs.*  On the other hand, nobody says they didn't. Bronson was sick so he might have tried a soaking cure, though it would have more likely been administered in the Swiss Alps. His father had that kind of money.  Anyhow, Truth or Consequences or Palomas Hot Springs, as it would have been known in Cutting's day, catered primarily to the working class who built Elephant Butte Dam. 

The pursuit of optimal soaking conditions and locations is legitimate book research nonetheless and my excuse for wasting time down here.  So I'm doing lots of it.

Other research activities involve long drives in the desert and visits to the Geronimo Springs Museum - the museum that should be in a museum museum.

*These are the bookend characters of my to-be-some-day historical fiction, and they're both vampires! OK. Not really. But Catron was a little scary.

Turtleback Mountain Diary Vol.1 Dam Walking

I dreamed Governor Susana Martinez was on a broomstick flying above all the little people on Elephant Butte Dam. 

The Albuquerque Journal was at the Elephant Butte Dam Walk and so was I. Their thoroughly unsnarky and factual account begs amendment.

The weather was wonderful which is a big reason there are a lot of people in this part of Sierra County, if you can call 7,500 a lot.  Turn out for the event was tremendous. Possibly all 7,500 people were there. Paranoia Security meant restricting access to the dam after 9/11 and restricting access to anything makes it more desirable. 

Volunteers did a great job but there were shuttle buses involved.  The first shuttle for non-VIPs was from parking to the restaurant and recreation area for ceremonies, including a stirring rendition of all thirty three verses of Oh Fair New Mexico. The second was a shuttle to the dam itself.  Again, for all but VIPs and invalids, there was a long disorganized wait.  A meaner crowd might have mutinied. But this is New Mexico and mostly everyone was relaxed. Many, including those for whom the buses invoked painful childhood memories of bullying, walked to the dam.

It was one shuttle too many for at least a couple of impatient yankees disappointed they didn't get to see the Governor  - not that she was expected, but whatever.  They didn't want to walk or wait and didn't make it to the dam.  Instead they drove to the overlook to burn one and watch people, like tiny ants, moving back and forth across the top of the giant structure.