R.I.P.

This field of wooden crosses is part of an old cemetery about 30 miles northeast of Ruidoso, not far from historic Fort Stanton.

They're arrayed in a parched, windblown field of patchy wild grass, set off from the surrounding prairie and scrub juniper by an old hurricane fence. The gate is fastened with a rusty lock and chain, but there's enough slack in it for visitors to duck and squeeze through.

There are no names or dates on the markers, just a small rectangle of cement hidden among the dead weeds at the base of each one, etched with a small cross and a number.

Fort Stanton has had many missions since its founding as a frontier cavalry post to protect settlers from the Mescalero apaches who lived in the nearby Sacramento Mountains and still do.

For a while the place served as a TB sanitorium for merchant seamen, and later it was also a mental hospital. Some of the patients were indigent with no known family. The Fort Stanton Merchant Marine Cemetery was created for those who died in the hospital's care.

These humble resting places only occupy a fraction of the property set aside for them. There are smaller sections with rows of stone monuments placed by the families of sailors who chose to be buried here, probably because it was closer to survivors than their other choices.

In the past 10 or 15 years, local veterans have obtained access because the nearest military cemeteries are hundreds of miles away, and it's now known officially as the Fort Stanton Merchant Marine and Military Cemetery.

Pam's dad spent his last 20 years or so in Ruidoso and died here in 2004. John Mauldin is buried at Fort Stanton. He served in World War II and was called back with the reserves for the Korean War. A staff sergeant, he was wounded at Guadalcanal, and at the Chosin Reservoir he saw two thirds of his platoon killed in a fighting retreat from the exposed position where incompetence and lethal miscalculation had sent it.

In his honor I answered an ad in the paper several weeks ago for volunteers to do maintenance work at the cemetery. I thought I'd be handed a litter bag and spend a couple of desultory hours looking for paper scraps while others operated lawnmowers and weed whackers.

But they pointed me to a trailer load of new crosses, handed me a posthole digger and told me to look for broken or overturned markers to replace. It was harder work than I've been used to in some while, but it was very satisfying.

The cemetery got a formal designation last year as a state-operated veteran's cemetery, but the status was conferred without any budget to speak of for maintenance or improvements. I learned that a small handful of volunteers have kept the place up as best they could for the past quarter century.

They've mowed and trimmed and they've replaced every cross more than once, just because there was nobody else to do it and, I suspect, because they felt that a large institutional burial ground abandoned to neglect and ruin doesn't do credit to whoever lives anywhere nearby.

There were about a dozen people working on the day I showed up. I read that a class of high school students came out a couple of weeks later and painted some of the many markers stripped by snow and wind of their thin coats of white paint.

The first time I saw the place, I thought it looked unspeakably bleak and sad with its sun-baked, weedy grounds, its hundreds of nameless graves and the vacant distances from any living community.

But I've changed my mind. The setting is spectacular, in the valley of the Rio Bonito which meanders between Sierra Blanca and the rest of the Sacramentos looming in the west and the Capitan Mountains covering up the entire eastern horizon. It is a classic western landscape under open skies. John was born and raised in Arizona and made his home on or near the range for virtually all his life. This was his kind of country.

Nobody leaves flowers beside the anonymous markers in the section where I was working. But it was a sunny spring day, and much of the ground was carpeted with dense clusters of the tiny blossoms of some kind of small but brilliant wildflower.

Perpetual care if ever there was.

For the Birds

Last year we took an art studio tour around the county in which we bought our life-sized ceramic raven from Susan Weir-Ancker.

While we were considering the deal, we sat on the long veranda of her charming ranch-style home, where the artist had hung a dozen or more hummingbird feeders.

There was a magical feel to the place. The sunshine was bright and warm, the grass was brilliant green, and a peaceable multitude of birds hovered and flitted all around us, like a family of amiable fairies.

I thought wistfully of our own deck, where we too had hung several feeders and filled them with sugar water in hopes of creating just this kind of atmosphere.

We did get birds, but there were seldom more than a handful. And their behavior was not like anything we saw in Susan's little avian Eden.

The most frequent visitor looked to us like a male rufous. He claimed our property as his exclusive preserve. Not only did he insist on being the only diner at his favorite feeder, which was designed to accommodate four birds at once. He also kept his eye continuously on all the other feeders and left off eating to attack any intruder that tried to get a taste at any of them.

The rufous "outflies all other species," according to hummingbirds.net, "and usually gets its way at feeders at the expense of slower, less-maneuverable hummers."

Yes, that was our guy for sure.

The other birds didn't give up. They lurked in the branches of a nearby juniper and took turns trying to distract the little thug so the others could sneak a slurp or two.

It was interesting. And I realize that both down in Susan's river valley and up on our piney ridge it was just birds being birds. I don't take it personally. I know I'm no St. Francis of Assisi. But I much preferred the spirit of community, generosity and plenty that I enjoyed on the artist's veranda, and instead I was immersed in naked aggression, craven stealth, guile and greed.

This year I suppose it's still too early for hummingbirds. But Pam has a new bird strategy. She's hung the contraption shown above consisting of two long tubes of tightly woven mesh. I call them feederpants. She stuffs them with tasty seeds.

They've attracted an eager flock of some kind of finch. They look to me like house finches. But judging from the images Google serves up, they could also be Cassin's finches or rosy finches, although I can't see much sign of the pink or even red that males of all three types display in their close-ups.

Pink or not, what they are for sure is hungry. They're all over the feederpants morning, noon and often well past dusk. They seem more focused than the hummers. They cluster on the pants in as large a number as will fit, and everybody eats their fill. No fighting, not much shoving.

It only takes them a few days to empty the pants, which hold several pounds of seed. I think they have much to teach the hummingbirds, which I've read must eat continuously or starve to death in just a few hours. They don't have time for foolishness, but they engage in it anyway. I suppose I'm not the one to criticize.

As for the finches, the collateral benefit to us is that they chatter while they gorge. It's not a particularly sweet song, but it beats the audio competition, which is usually the soundtrack of  Peppa Pig drifting out of Elizabeth's room.

All in all so far, however, the bird that contributes most reliably to the ambience is still Susan's raven. Always there on his pine perch, head turned just so, beak angled upward, eye cocked our way, a model of dignity.

Back to Scratch

Our neighbor Betty up the street in Ruidoso just moved here from a little town called Texico, and she told us the first time she washed her eyeglasses in her new sink and put them back on she thought she was going blind. The lenses had frosted over entirely.

It's a common complaint in these parts. In the years before we started spending summers here, I dimly recall hearing references in detergent ads and household conversations to "hard water," but I never knew exactly what they meant and never had any reason to ask.

I know quite a bit more now. The water here in the Sacramento mountains is beyond hard. It is off the charts.

Literally off the charts. In ordinary online discussion of water hardness and even in documentation that accompanies some water softeners, there's no suggestion that water could ever be as hard as what comes to us through our village distribution system.

The U.S. Geological Survey rates water as soft if it contains less than 3.5 grains per gallon of calcium, magnesium and assorted other minerals. Above that, water gets labeled "moderately hard," then "hard," and finally tops out at "very hard" if there are more than 10.5 grains per gallon.

Well, our tap water recently measured 60 grains per gallon, and our plumber Cody told us we were lucky. He routinely sees water in triple digits and some that goes higher than 150. The problem has grown much worse in just the past few years, as drought has lowered the water table and wildfire damage has forced the village to abandon some surface water sources for wells.

Dusty white scale appears on our faucets and drain fixtures. Calcium builds up in the water lines of our appliances. Our skin and hair come out of the shower seeming like strangers, requiring ever larger doses of lotions and unguents to control the whole-body itching and dryness.

The surface of the hot tub gets scratchy and rough. To control it, we add even more toxic chemistry to whatever is already seething in there. That's not working, so we plan to empty the tub and give it an "acid bath". I tell the guy who does this for us that he should wear rubber gloves, but when he's done we climb inside nearly naked.

I have some idea what all this is doing to us from looking at the glassware as it comes out of the dishwasher. It's opaque in a smeared, unwholesome way that makes you wonder if it's safe to drink from.

We haven't been just sitting back and letting this happen. Before we moved into the new cabin in 2012, we ordered a water softener. Our builder said we could save a bundle if we ordered it online. We did, and it seemed to work for a little while, and then it didn't.

When I called the help center in Pennsylvania last year, the guy on the phone asked if I knew how hard our water was. At the time, we were showing 70 gpg, as they say in the trade, so I told him.

"Oh, no," he laughed. "That's impossible. Let's set your softener for 25. That would be really, really hard water, a lot harder than our chart shows for New Mexico."

After a week of fruitless adjustments, it turned out that our machine wasn't designed to handle anything beyond 30 gpg. It's in a dumpster now. Cody said it's useless in Ruidoso, and there's no market for it anywhere else.

Three days ago, we installed a unit that looks almost exactly like the discarded one, but Cody assures me it will handle water up to 150 gpg. "I've got one just like it at my house," he said. "It's great."

Supposedly it takes several days for a new softener to clear the lines and flush out the hot water heater so we begin to notice the difference. It does seem to be starting to work. The skin on my hands has stopped cracking. My scotch glasses are clearing, so happy hour is back.

I hope that's it. If not, we'll have to start buying our Lubriderm by the case.

Climate Change

Pam and I endured our first northern winter as a married couple in Pittsburgh. Cabin fever hit us hard by late February, so when we finally began seeing a few warm days in March, we decided to celebrate spring with a weekend road trip.

It would have been a fine idea, except we headed north to Niagara Falls, where overnight lows were still in the 20s or worse. The falls themselves were frozen almost to their tops. 

It was a spectacle worth seeing to be sure, but not when we were longing for a Maypole dance. Thirty five years later, it’s all coming back to me, because it feels like we’ve done it again.

We left Mexico a few weeks earlier than planned this year because it was starting to get a little bit steamy in the late afternoons. Also, our friend Becky at the Ruidoso Chamber of Commerce kept posting tasty photos of Sierra Blanca looking springish. (No great trick in evergreen country.}

I began wondering on the road if we’d jumped the gun when we got to Saltillo and realized it was too chilly for flipflops. To find long-sleeved garments we had to grope to the bottom of the duffle that wasn’t even supposed to leave the car until the end of the trip.

Saltillo is about 5,200 feet above sea level. Here in Ruidoso we are now 2,000 feet higher. I am not writing this from our deck, which like the mountain out the window looks inviting in the morning sunlight but lies.

The thermometer nailed to a tree on the gravel drive is still clawing its way toward 40. At least we can go to the closet here for the right clothes, and we’ve got a fireplace.

But it’s not the temperature I wanted to whine about. You can’t very well keep a mountain cabin for the coolness and then complain that you have to wear socks. (Socks!) It’s the wind that has taken us by surprise.

Yesterday it blew a constant 35 miles per hour with frequent gusts to 60. Today promises to be the same or worse. The pines roar and gyrate. Deadfall branches skitter across the street. The swing set and hammock swing by themselves. The cheery double pinwheel I planted in the yard spins to a blur and then snaps off and away down the hill.

Chiquita the skinny little chihuahua stiffens her legs and rolls her eyes when it’s time to go outside and can’t get down to business when we carry her out the door. I think it’s the wind, but of course you can’t discount the chance she’s distracted by novel smells. Such as bear scat.

How could we have prevented this?

Well for starters, it wasn’t so hard to go online for my wind report. We might consider checking our destination weather before the trip instead of after.

Easy Street

I fretted for weeks about our three-day drive north and east to the Texas border, but the trip turned out to be mostly pleasant and blessedly uneventful.

We spent the first night in Mazatlan, but we couldn't stay in our favorite beachfront hotel, the Costa de Oro, because of Chiquita, our shelter chihuahua. Instead we slept at the far more modest Azteca Inn, packed with Mexican families on Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacations.

At the crowded pool, Elizabeth spotted a big group in the tepid whirlpool with a little girl about her age, so she quickly made herself at home with them. I slipped awkwardly in too, nodding in what I hoped was a benignly polite way. Soon the toddlers were best friends.

"How well she speaks Spanish," the mother said to me.

"We live in Puerto Vallarta, and she goes to a Mexican school," I explained as the girls tried to see who could stay under water longest. (I got no compliment on my Spanish.) Half an hour later when I told Elizabeth it was time to go, she was ready too.

"Ya me voy," she casually informed her new amiga, which is a simple but nicely turned phrase I had never heard her use before that means "I'm going now." Then off we went for a vast seafood platter of grilled whole fish, shrimp, lobster, scallops and octopus at Pancho's on the beach.

The next day was the scenic highlight of the trip, the climbing journey through the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental over "the Devil's Backbone" via the newly completed toll road with its dozens of tunnels and bridges, including the impressive Baluarte Bridge pictured above.

Pam made a video as we crossed, which I was going to post, but Elizabeth later deleted it. Mexicans are proud of the engineering and construction skills that created the bridge, and there's plenty of video online if you're interested.

We had planned to spend the night in Torreon, but neither we nor a travel agent we called in Mazatlan could find a dog-friendly hotel there. So we pushed on for another three hours to Saltillo, where an old business suite motel in the midst of remodeling near the airport allowed pets and probably anything else that would pay for a room.

It was on the main highway route through town, but we had a terrible time finding it because, as we've noted before, there are no route markers after the toll road disgorges you into any given city. We expected this and had studied a Saltillo map, but we still got lost.

That wasn't entirely tragic, because we ended up getting a much better look at some charming old sections of Saltillo we weren't planning to see. Pam's Mapquest went in and out of range, and even when she could get some directions, there were few street signs. At times we had no clue where we were. And then suddenly we found Blvd Venustiano Carranza and got to the hotel with daylight to spare.

Road trips in Mexico are an odd mix. The toll roads, though terribly expensive, are first rate, but signage is sometimes ambiguous or absent altogether. And there is virtually no en route dining, not even fast food. My theory is that recreational car travel began decades later in Mexico than in the U.S., and the infrastructure we take for granted at home hasn't evolved there.

We did spot one brightly bannered "tourist support" station on a median north of Monterrey, but it was staffed by more than a dozen balaclava-clad state police in riot gear holding automatic weapons. No tourists were visible, and we didn't feel like stopping either.

We got to the border at Nuevo Laredo well before lunch time on our third day on the road. I think I was supposed to show my "residente temporal" card to Mexican immigration authorities and get an exit visa. Pam's application for her card is still pending after months of delay, so I had gotten her a temporary permit to leave and return. We were supposed to get that stamped too.

But there was no Instituto Nacional de Migration office visible at the border, and by the time we were in the thick line of cars at the bridge, we couldn't have exited to look for one if we'd wanted to. Which we didn't. I guess we'll find out how much it really matters when we go back.

In the meantime, we're just glad to be here, visiting family in Del Rio, Texas, on our way back to New Mexico. As we also say in Mexico, there's no place like home.

Stand Up Guys

The other day we were passing the Mexican naval base just north of town, and a half-ton truck was pulling out of the gate. The big open cargo box was empty except for two marines in battle dress standing with their rifles at port arms looking over the top of the cab.

It reminded me how often I've wondered why I see so many Mexican men standing in the backs of cruising camionetas (pickup trucks), even when there's plenty of room to sit down.

I asked Norma, who cooks for us a couple of times a week and sometimes helps us over cultural speed bumps like this one. Her instant reply was that Mexican men ride standing up because nobody tells them they can't.

But she couldn't say why they would need to be told, considering that it's more comfortable and a lot less hair raising to lower your center of gravity on roads that are cobbled, rutted, potholed or punctuated by actual speed bumps. Most streets here are at least one of the above.

Norma assures me she never rides standing up, and she's pretty sure it's against the law, but the police never say anything.

Well, why would they? The police themselves are the biggest offenders. Their trucks prowl the streets of Vallarta bristling with heavily armed officers glowering in every direction. Some of their vehicles are even designed to facilitate standing passengers with a padded grab-bar frame over the truck bed to reduce the chance of personnel attrition on sharp turns.

Thinking about these municipal squads and the marines mentioned above, I'm at a loss to imagine how a man struggling to stay upright in a moving vehicle can maintain a true state of readiness for anything that could require the use of a long gun. He won't hit what he's aiming at, and he's a fine target himself.

I suppose there's the intimidation factor to consider. A pickup truckload of tough looking hombres waving automatic weapons is a bowel-watering sight if you're not the one who called them.

On the other hand, I had to chuckle when we drove to Morelia last year and spotted a flying convoy of black-clad federales on the toll road in black trucks, each with two commandos looking over the cab. Balaclavas protected their faces against the gale-force slipstream. At that speed, they posed a threat to flying insects but not much else. How often did they have to stop to clean their sunglasses?

So here's my theory. This is a country where nearly everybody, including Norma, seems to have a rancho and where the respectful way to address a man is still "caballero," which translates among other ways as "horseman."

Standing on a pickup truck bed, one makes eye contact with the pedestrian world at approximately the same lofty angle as one would on horseback. To the cultural descendants of the conquistadores what could seem more natural?

Make sense? Probably not, but it's what I'm going to believe until somebody tells me I can't.

Small Box Stores

We shop regularly in a near suburb of Puerto Vallarta called Pitillal, where little one-room stores line all the streets.

Big box retailing has certainly arrived in these parts. We've got Costco, Home Depot and multiple Walmarts. But the little guys still predominate, and now and then I'm struck by the tiny market spaces they occupy.

This store is called "Ruedas y Rodajas." Ruedas are wheels, but I had a hard time finding out why the word "rodaja" was on the sign.

Normally it's a kitchen term that refers to a round slice of something like a carrot, banana or onion. But one dictionary included an alternate meaning: furniture castor. And sure enough, there they are in the foreground.

The store is packed with nothing but hard rubber wheels for your wheelbarrow, wagon, hand truck or dolly, and steel or plastic castors for your heavy furniture or planters. No need for frustrated trolling of Home Depot aisles or hunting for a ferreteria that might have the disk for you.

In ferreterias, hardware stores, you generally ask for what you need at the counter and wait to see if what the man brings turns out to be what you thought you were asking for. It generally isn't, so you ask if there's another store that might have it. Several stores later, you buy beer instead.

If I wanted a wheel, I would head straight for Ruedas y Rodajas.

Seeing this store reminded me of a time a couple of years ago when I was looking for a small stainless steel screw to replace one that was missing on our swimming pool drain cover. The pool supply store couldn't help, but they told me about a store called Casa de Tornillos, the House of Screws.

The name isn't nearly as amusing in Spanish as in English, and the store wasn't either. Two stout middle aged women in severely cut dresses stood behind the counter. They looked like school principals, but they offered any kind of screw you might want, including the one I was looking for.

If your mind was serving up suggestive wisecracks on the theme of screwing, save them for the business pictured below, the Condom House, no translation provided since its customers are all apparently frisky tourists and expats from north of the border.

I think the jaunty graphic conveys just the right message: carefree pleasure and fun await those who take the appropriate precautions first.

Words we might all take to heart.