Renaissance Hillbilly

The cabin across the street from us in Ruidoso is a vacation rental, and when the guests include kids close to Elizabeth’s age we beckon them over to play on her swing set.

This week’s visitors were a couple from Midland with a little boy and girl, plus the mom’s parents from a rural area near the Texas-Arkansas border. When the little boy answered Elizabeth’s call, he brought along his granddad.

That’s not him in the picture, but he was definitely a real life specimen of the Duck Dynasty breed. Short, bandy-legged and muscular, he was a lot more presentable than the showbiz hillbillies. He wore pressed jeans, fancy roper boots made of some exotic leather and a crisp camouflage t-shirt and matching baseball cap.

While his grandson and Elizabeth played happily with her sand toys, he regaled me for nearly two hours with a stream of consciousness monologue unlike anything I’d ever heard before. We sat down on a pair of tree stump seats to watch the kids, and he began as if we’d already been talking for an hour.

“Yeah, I told muh wife when we git back home I’m gonna go in to the parts store and git a buncha fan belts and hoses and spark plugs and go to work on muh truck.”

He was a reasonably good looking guy, nearly bald under the cap and with a neatly trimmed gray goatee, but I noticed his lower lip and chin were grotesquely distended. 

I presumed that was why his nasal backwoods twang was sometimes so badly mangled that I couldn’t make out what he was saying. But about ten minutes into his soliloquy he turned discreetly to one side and allowed a brown gobbet of spittle to dribble onto my pine needles. I realized it wasn’t a deformity, it was only a wad of snuff, though maybe a little too much.

He told me his old truck back home is important to him because he uses it to haul a trailer containing his spotted mules and a metal carriage that he drives on trail rides. He breeds the mules. The wagon has been in his family for three generations, but he described a number of innovations he’s made to it with his acetylene torch. 

He had a picture of it on his cell phone. The seats were covered with a tarp, because he explained they were leather buckets salvaged from an old Dodge Charger.

His parents threw him out of the house at age 13. “I was b-a-a-ad,” he admitted. Later he was an alcoholic, although he said he’s licked that problem and only drinks beer now. He's back living near his parents and they often drink beer and reminisce agreeably about how bad he was when he drank too much.

One time a friend offered him a case of beer if he’d do a favor, and he did it. But the case of beer turned out to be Bud Lime, which he considered undrinkable and saved in a special cooler for when people asked him for a beer.

He cashes in his empties at a recycling center but likes to crush the cans first because they weigh more that way. “Ah’m goin’ on the Internet when I git home to git the specs for a can crusher I saw that ah’m gonna make myself,” he told me. He described how it would work and seemed to know what he was talking about. Except the part about how much the cans weigh afterward.

The little boy’s father came over in bermuda shorts and flipflops. He took a stump on the other side of the swingset. Once he was satisfied his son was doing fine, he quickly retreated to the rental. I felt like I was taking one for somebody else’s team.

The granddad didn’t acknowledge the son-in-law, but went on talking about how he drives a truck for the school district and spends the rest of his time tending to his 440 acres, a small herd of cattle and the kennel where he breeds pit bulls with Rhodesian ridgebacks and some kind of Cajun hunting dog I never heard of.

“People say pit bulls is vicious,” he said, “but ah tell mah dogs to watch them babies, and ah guarantee you if anybody comes near ‘em they’ll tear him up!”

When he’s not using them as babysitters, he takes the dogs out hunting for the feral tusked pigs that breed copiously in the thick brush around his place. He uses a brace of automatic pistols and a sawed-off shotgun because you often don’t see the beasts until it’s too late to raise a long gun.

He’s a pretty good shot at close quarters. One time his wife got him out of his recliner to kill a rabid skunk outside the house. He selected a .22 caliber rifle from his arsenal and tried to shoot the skunk with one hand. He only knocked off its tail and made it madder, so he took proper aim and got it in the head on second try. “Skunk brains flyin’ ever’where,” he said.

He found some lye soap at a gift shop in the village that he says he’ll take home to wash off skunk stink. He gets sprayed fairly regularly when he’s out chasing the razorbacks. The boutique soap he got here was cheaper than he can get it at home, where some farm lady is the only source and takes advantage.

If the pigs aren’t too old and stringy, he and his wife butcher them and put them in the freezer. He hasn’t bought pork in years.

I haven’t told you the half of it. It was a pretty tedious afternoon for someone like me who likes to get a word in edgewise now and then. But if the Apocalypse comes, I’m going to wish this versatile, self-reliant guy lived next door to me and owed me some favors.

Apocolypse Later

                                          KOAT Albuquerque

Yesterday I went out to take some trash to the bin down the street and looked up as I always do to admire the peak of Sierra Blanca, a dozen miles west and 5,000 feet higher than our front door.

Instead, my eye was drawn to a plume of white smoke, rising from behind the second pine-covered ridge line between me and the mountain. A fire, no more than six or eight miles away.

Just the day before we got a terrific soaking from a thunderstorm that might have been the first of the summer monsoon season here. But such storms are a mixed blessing in drought-ridden western states like New Mexico, because of lightning.

Once again, there wasn’t enough snow here over the winter to produce a healthy spring runoff, so the forests continue to be dry as tinder, and lightning poses a mortal danger to any creature who lives in the woods. Such as myself.

I went back inside to see if the state forest service knew something was burning within single-digit miles of Ruidoso. Yes, there was an alert. Lightning the night before struck a “snag,” which the wildfire glossary defines as a standing dead tree. 

The online notice, emailed to anyone who joins the state distribution list, said a firefighting team was on its way to what they were calling the South Fork fire, and in the meantime a helicopter from the Mescalero Apache reservation was monitoring the burn and dropping water on it. 

I could hear aircraft engines overhead. Going outside again, I saw the chopper dangling what looked like a tiny bucket above and upwind of the source of the smoke. Suddenly it exploded in spray, and the helicopter turned and sped off downwind to the northeast for another load.

There were several fixed wing planes in the air as well, making wide loops over the forest that brought some of them directly over our place. Then I saw one of them make a low approach to the plume and release a cloud of reddish retardant much bigger than the copter produced. That’s more like it, I thought.

Then my mind flashed on newsphotos I’d seen not long ago of weeping homeowners picking through the remains of their former dreamhouses and describing how they had barely escaped with their lives. 

We were refugees ourselves almost exactly two years ago from the Little Bear fire. This one was a lot closer. Driven by 25-mile-an-hour winds and gusts twice that hard, it appeared to me that if it got out of hand it would move well north of us. Unless the wind shifted. Like it does so often.

The only previous thought I had given to a getaway plan was that we should certainly take the trailer, not just to save it but to live in it. Now I imagined myself in panic mode trying to get my two-inch hitch ball centered under the Airstream’s tongue. 

Then I went and got the car keys and backed the Equinox into position, so if we had to flee we only had to drop the trailer a few inches onto the hitch and go. No, wait, first unplug the power and disconnect the water hose. Then go. It only took me about five minutes of backing and filling, much better than it would have with smoke up my nose.

We spent the rest of the afternoon on folding chairs in front of the trailer, watching the planes drop their loads, checking for fresh alerts and trying to judge whether the smoke plume was growing, shrinking or holding its own.

Neighbors had asked us to dinner. By suppertime, it still looked safe enough to go up the street and join them in their own smoke watch from their deck. By dessert, it was clear the suppression effort was succeeding, and the last alert of the night confirmed they were now “mopping up.”

Disaster comes suddenly from nowhere. Yesterday we got to see it change its mind and go back. Today we bought another first aid kit for the second car and talked about preparing a “go bag.” Pam wants to put my mom's wall clock in it, so we'll probably talk some more.

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.