week 3

Finding places is a problem for me.  I’ve been frequently told directions and then the teller has added “You can’t miss it.” however I generally do.  Once I find a place its easy to find it a second time, however I still can’t tell the difference among a dirt shoulder, a dirt driveway and a dirt street.  Or I’m told, go past the dirt dam, well there are piles of dirt everywhere.  Some look like they are on purpose and some are hard to tell.  Most of them are in low rows and have been shaped into long barrows for out here dirt is dozed both to make water holding ponds and to direct water away for erosion control.  To inexperienced eyes, they all look the same.

When I did find the dirt dam, it was 20-30 feet high and the road hugged it for several hundred feet.  It would be easy to recognize a second time.  I didn’t care about the dams, I was looking for the pictographs that lay somewhere above the second dam.  (Pictographs are painted on rock while petroglyphs are scratched into the surface.) Eventually I found them and they are well worth the effort of locating them.  Naturally I chose the hardest way possible.

There was supposed to be a path, the can’t-miss-it kind, at the top of the dam.  There were dozens of paths and I was not clever enough to tell the people path from the cow paths.  So, I opted to walk in the valley to the end of a very eroded rock wall.  On the way back, I walked on the rock face climbing over broken stones, stepping where cows had stepped.  I figured if they could walk over rock looking for food, I could walk there looking for pictures.

Most of the rock was so badly eroded I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to paint on it.  When I was nearly back to my starting point, I saw a rock face that looked promising.  As I approached it, I saw a faint picture of a person sitting down holding a staff, however I didn’t know if it was old or the drawing of a clever art student.  There is a boulder in front of it that looks to be a good seat.  A couple of handy stones made it fairly easy to reach the top.  As I hoisted myself up high enough to see the sit-upon part, I saw large, bright pictures filling the top.  Wow! Expecting to sit and examine and instead seeing an array of quite wonderful drawings is still boggling.


Scout didn’t come with me on that excursion since I have learned pulling a trailer is both harder and easier than I thought it would be.  For years I’ve driven over bad roads and I have found if I am careful, Scout can come too.  Careful is the key.  One road we took was poor at best.  It had been graded since the rain months, monsoon season, so we did fine as long as I stayed around one or two miles an hour.  We were doing so well that I decided to visit a cemetery I’d seen from the road.  That road crossed a dry wash with a bed of small gravel rather than the stones I had been crossing.  We couldn’t make it.  I abandoned Scout in mid-bed and prepared for a rescue.  Fortunately I have both a tow strap and a come-along.  Together they were just long enough to reach Scout and pull her free.  Once she was out, I switched to the strap to pull her up the bank.  When we were on the level I hitched up and we were on our way.
 
The scenery makes it all worth-while. This is a state of strong contrast.  When it rains, the ground is so hard most of the water runs off so water control is a major problem.  At the same time, its desert so cactus are everywhere.  Parts of the state are very windy, roads here are closed by sand storms.  The combination of strong wind and drenching rain leaves intriguing weathering on both rock and land.  Since most of New Mexico was volcanic, there are cones everywhere rising up out of seemingly flat land.

And the contrast between owning too much and not enough is just as apparent.  I saw homes that easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and signs of people living in failed businesses.  Towns that were written up as thriving artist colonies a few years ago are now filled with closed shops.  And one town on the interstate has a loop called Motel Drive.  All the motels I saw on that road were closed.  Yet parts of the town was thriving and the community seemed to be doing what it could to attract customers. 

Maybe New Mexico is fortunate that tourism is a significant business.  Also I think government is a major employer, at least from what I have seen.  The border patrol is a huge presence in this southern part of the state.  Where I have been, patrols are frequent and installations pointing to the border are common.  Over two days, I saw one rancher on each day and dozens of border patrol vehicles each day.  I was feeling paranoid by the time I left that part of the state and the road signs didn’t help.