Blue Mesa 7 comments

12 Mar 2006 @ 21:22, by John Ashbaugh Notes on the road from a drivearound. Monday afternoon, third day out. Letter to the tree across the gully. Saturday drive to Will and Raeanna’s. Will’s mother Kitty stops by in the evening and stays for a corned beef dinner. Abigail is almost two months old and Jackson is almost two years old. Breakfast is grits and a couple of eggs on top, and it’s off to the road by one for the drive to Rock Hound state park, which is not very inviting; so I continue on down to Poncho Villa state park, which is rather urbanized, but there is a cozy little section for tents and the botanical cactus garden layout is intriguing. Fellow in a van nearby tells me to go on down to the border in the morning, and walk over and visit the Pink Store in Las Palomas. Half moon descends through the night, and the constellations turn. Morning sun is bright through the clear horizon. Drive the three miles to the border, and find the free parking. Pass across the line into a third world country. One block, two blocks, past the Pink Store, three blocks, look right, a large square block open space and a church across that expanse, so I angle through the park, around the central gazebo, catching glances from some citizens along the way. Wait the longest time in the park across from the church while a trash truck and its crew slowly make their way from one trash can down the line to another. Get my pictures and visit the church. Then it’s back around the park in a slightly different direction, and on to the Pink Store, where the lady gives me a fresh cup of coffee from her restaurant and I browse and buy a plaster Aztec calendar. Maria Lopez, younger teenager, catches me halfway across the street at the last intersection, and convinces me to donate a dollar to her charitable cause. Return across the line and back to the road to Hachita where there is a church, a ruin, and a rest stop to photograph. Then on to Portal, Arizona and the Coronado national forest and my long sought for isolated campsite. All sound returns to the source. Sunlight and hazy clouds take their turns this afternoon. Morning in the grove at the Patagonia Lake state park. After sleeping through the rainy morning at the Big Gully campground yesterday morning, finally decide that hanging around in an empty tent in the rain is neither enlightening nor fun; pull the soggy thing down around noon and pack the mess out to the road to Portal and Rodeo; lots of really nice formations and terrain, the kind I’d like to spend some time walking through, like across the valley and around the tower in the view from Vista Point. Pictures along the stream at Big Gully, under the arching bough, and around it, leaving her untouched in her graceful dance over the tumbling waters. Grassland and hills and empty spaces on the road to Douglas. Stop for a Quik Stop gas and coffee; then on through Bisbee, a strikingly beautiful town to drive through, an old mining town still very much alive, with all kinds of old structures, kept up pretty, stacked into the sides of hills, like to put San Francisco in the shade. Then to Tombstone and a walk through the old west part of town along where the OK Corral is; gotta pay to get in and see it so I pass it by, but the old town boardwalk and dusty streets, and row upon row of old time storefronts is entertaining. One could spend the afternoon going in and out all of these places, including the saloon, but I’m a headin’ on down the road to Sonoita looking for a dry campground. Wind up down here at Patagonia Lake as the sun is settling into the horizon and find a perfect little grove to trees amidst which I raise the soggy lump of a tent into place so the breeze can dry her off. Shooting star through the cup of the Big Dipper, pouring a flash of light into the moonlit darkness. From Patagonia down the quiet morning road to Nogales. Find the tourist info lady in her castle on a little hill, who tells me of the things there are to see in this very old city on the border with her sister city Nogales, Mexico. Here is a little city street map to help you get your bearings in this unfamiliar terrain. The old Sacred Heart church is large and elegant on its point of high ground, since perhaps the beginning of this city. Who knows? Circle the building, and its tall tower, and as I open the front door, a small group of grieving mourners, most notably an elderly woman in black holding her kerchief to her face, followed by several middle aged people, perhaps her children and their spouses. So I hold the door for them as they entered the daylight. No words. They just all go by, with a look of appreciation from a couple, and simple bewilderment on the part of others. Maybe half a dozen or eight or so, who’s counting? When I enter the church, there is no one else in there at all except for an old man sitting off to one side next to a pillar, and a young boy maybe eight or so, rather energetically going from pew to pew on one side of the church and the other with no apparent reason except restlessness, and the old man has to hush the boy still, and I enter a pew about halfway down the center aisle to kneel and say my prayer for All My Relations. Watch the children at the school playground at recess on the way back to the car. Drive down to within a block or so of the border where hawkers try to get me to park in their lot for so many dollars per hour or whatever. I decide I’ve had a good visit to Mexico at Las Palomas and I’ve got some driving to do today, and so it’s out to the road to Tucson, from where I head out north on 77 to Oracle and the highway that goes down and then up across the Salt River canyon. The endlessly multifarious forms of our Earth are always a wonder to behold. Up on the other side is the northward rise through the piney forest to Show Low. Snow’s a comin’ down. Haven’t seen snow blowing into my windshield like for real for a good stretch of road since at least last winter, and maybe since those Texas panhandle days. Come a long way from south Arizona today, and this here is a different kind of place, so I’ll be staying at the Motel 6 tonight. No reading on this trip, except maybe brochures I pick up along the way. Morning breakfast at JB’s buffet up the street on the other end of town, with the smile of the young friendly hostess to make my day so far. The sky is overcast and the road is to Concho where an old ruined adobe building grabs the attention of my pocket camera. Gives me a reason to stand outside from time to time along the road, and smell the air my wheels are driving through. Finally, it’s the south entrance to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert national park. Two big rock shops, one on each side of the road across from each other, just before the park entrance. Lots of places to go in this park, and it is very clear that the people who run this place are quite sensitive to removal of the slightest speck of a rock from the terrain by passers-by. Clearly, this is as it should be, for this place would soon be picked clean if everyone who passed through here took a piece home. The wind at the Crystal Forest is cold and fierce. The Blue Mesa and the one-mile trail down through the heart of the canyons where petrified wood is loosened from the mud through geological erosion is stunningly beautiful, in black and white, on an overcast day. No shadows. Only values. Then there’s the pueblo ruin and petroglyphs from eight hundred years ago. Then all of the various lookout points overlooking the vista of the Painted Desert. Which gets me up to the north entrance by getting on close to four, for the two hundred eight mile drive back along highway 40, through the evening sky through Gallup and Acoma to an eight o’clock return to my adobe abode. Time to unravel, settle, and reflect. Time in the morning to drop off five rolls of film for developing, buy some eggs and bread and juice, buy a newspaper from Mona, and get a burrito from the ladies at Blake’s. Water the plants. Two loads of laundry. I’ve only been out of here for six days and five nights, covered 1270 miles, camped for three nights in a row, walked a few blocks through a small quiet town in a foreign country, where I was the stranger and the one who is different, got to know a few more places, small and large, intimate and grandiose, on the Earth, and added a little more cement to my friendships in Alamarosa. I slept and ate at Show Low, through cloudiness and cold, and found my way from place to place with thoughts for my friends, some of whom I will never see again, a some of whom I will. Soon enough, I will be returning to school. For today, the day after the journey which followed its own logic, I’m winding it all down very slowly. *\.-_/*

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