How did I get here? Lets step back one scene at a time: Tony, Adam and I are at the CowGirl Pickup Bar, because Colleen an old friend of Tony's from when he worked at Santa Fe's long gone slightly homo-erotic club Swig works at the Cowgirl, so it was an appropriate place to meet other people from Tony's past in Santa Fe. Tony knocked out a Masters in Eastern Philosophy at St. John's a couple years back and we spent the last 2 hours meeting old girlfriends over drinks…awkward for all I'm sure. The reason Tony, Adam and I are in the last rumbling town of the Rocky Mountains is because work has sent me here for a conference, "Finishing in the Future." Despite Tony's sexual read of it, the conference has nothing to do with holding off orgasm and everything to do with putting together big gobs of DNA into useable forms…ok so its vaguely related.
I've been put up in the La Fonda hotel, which by my ruffian standards is the best hotel I've ever stayed in. Chocolates appear on my bed everyday with a note about what the high and low temperature are to be like the next day and I have a balcony that overlooks the Loretto Chapel which in turn houses a staircase that a saint built in three days without any nails. Tony hasn't been back to Santa Fe since he graduated, Adam has an affinity for lawless states and I have a room with an extra key. Its easy to see where this is going. I knock out three days of intellectual and political jousting with other DNA sequencing center, like the BROAD institute, show my pretty little poster on my discovery of a technique to use Rolling Circle Amplification (RCA) on 40 kilo-base pieces of DNA (fosmids) and then roll into a couple debaucherous days of vacation in the high desert and mountains of New Mexico.
Now that all three of our backpacks packed and re-packed into the rental car, we head over to Albertson's to buy the food we'll need in the mountains for the next two days. In Albertson's we purchase some energy bars, tuna fish, and more booze. 30 minutes later we are at the base of the Santa Fe ski basin, packs on and roaming upwards and in my case side-wards, back-wards, and down-wards. In the black of the unlit night we ramble onto a bunch of cows and after about a 1000 foot elevation gain find ourselves atop a rather large hill where one of the ski lifts ends and the view of the entire Santa Fe – Los Alamos – Albuquerque region begins. In our alert state we climb the ski lift poles for a better look of the area and something perverse inside me convinces to jump down to the cable of the ski lift and then go hand over hand until I get beyond the capture net and to the wooden deck where winter time folks would be sliding off from their seats. The gauntlet being thrown, Tony and then Adam follow. Tony and Gavin refer to this sort of behavior of mine as the gasoline effect. The simple metaphor is that for all intensive purposes I'm a pool of gasoline, usually sublime (ing) and not note worthy from a distance however mix outdoors, booze, Tony or any other sort of spark and my nature becomes engulfing, bright, and plain dangerous.
Jumping around on the net we accidentally break it free and Adam chips up his elbow at which point we bed down for the night after doing a little night photography of the city with the tripod that I so diligently packed along for this trip. In the morning the sun wakes us and we labor on in our slumber as long as we possibly can, but I've never been very good at this sort of work, so before long I'm poking and prodding the plants and critters of the area and taking a couple of shots. Once we are all coherent and I've man handled a snake I caught that had just caught something in his belly, we take on the last big ascent on this last set of mountains that can be called the Rockies. It's a steep grade and all three of us battle it differently. Along the way I find some tiny wild onions and pocket them up. Tony also pockets some and they become key latter on.
At the ridge top we are able to spot our destination far beneath us on the eastern slope: Santa Fe lake. We take a break at the top, roll some nicely cut chopped wood down the steep slopes and climb some more ski lift equipment. We bomb down the steep unforgiving terrain, somehow managing not to fall head over heels or twist an ankle. At the bottom we of course find a trail, well built and not treacherous like the skree field we had just traversed. The lake in the distance I can see perfect rings at the surface appearing and then expanding into flatness. The possibility of fish has become and extremely ripe fruit, since me and Tony in our state of clarity the night before have managed to leave our tuna fish in the vehicle, so tonight we will all be surviving off of Adam's food and whatever else we can scavenge. As we get closer to the lake, I can see large dark bodies moving just beneath the surface. I can almost taste the delicate flesh of the trout. However, to my surprise and everyone else the lake does not contain any fish, but is teeming with big black salamanders and a few thick leeches. I catch one salamander with my hands and I'm a lover of creatures great, small, and tasty, but it looks like demon spawn; black with eerie swaths of dark toxic green, blue-ish slit eyes and big internal organ looking gills. It takes me a good five minutes to get the slime off my hands, but I've already washed myself clean of the idea of eating these amphibians. I'm also not real familiar with the salamanders of the Rockies and eating one with TTX that might shut down my peripheral nervous system doesn't seem like a good start to a vacation.
We find a place to set up camp near a large boulder that's been split in half. I use the gap between the rock to build a shelter out of all the scrap wood and dead trees I can push down. We wander around the area and find a small meadow just beneath the lake. An older big horn sheep stares down upon us from a cliff lingering above us. For fun I make what I believe to be big horn sheep mating calls and low and behold the old ram comes down the rocky side to the meadow we are in. He checks out the old building, chews on some currant flowers and then spends a good half an hour trying to make sense of Adam, Tony, and I as we all make noises at him. He approaches us cautiously, hiding behind rocks close to us and then leaning his head out just far enough to catch a glance. I try to rile him up by climbing up to his original precipice and pissing on it, but he seems far more interested in getting close the Adam, the clothed monkey laying on the rock. Eventually he takes off towards the lake and we loose track of him
Back at camp a collection of wood is put to use after a spark from Adam's flint finally catches some grass on fire in our little burn ring. With tents set and shelter halfway constructed, the summer day turns to winter in a bolt. A few rumbles of thunder echo up the valley as marble sized hail begins to extract themselves from the puffy thunderheads above. We hide beneath my shelter long enough to realize I would have never made it as an architect and then spend the duration of the hail storm beneath sleeping platform someone had constructed between two trees. The ground now white with hail crunches beneath our feet and the fire is some how still alive after nearly suffocating it with wood pieces to keep the hail off of it. The two cans of tuna fish are graciously split between the three of us at Adam's discretion. We spend sometime using the coal from the fire to make petraglyphs of the day's events and then hit the sack.
In the morning we pack out and meet a couple of local old timers who tell us the area we were "not" camping in carries a $5000 dollar fine. At the vehicle we find the tuna fish that had been left behind and on the way down the hill we found a car that had been purposely pushed off the edge of the steep road. Back in town we hit up Castro's and stuff ourselves with stuffed soppopillas and chiles, real live chiles like no place else. We peter around the plaza in the center of town; Adam buys things for Liz while Tony and I buys liquids for ourselves. Around 4 or so we gather up Devon, one of Tony's friends from Swig and make our way to Albuquerque to drop of his car and then down to White Sands five hours south. To our great disappointment the gate to White Sands closes at around 8pm, so we are forced to rent a Motel 6 room in Alamogordo.
The next day we check out White Sands. The gypsum based sand dunes are brilliant white, cool to the toe, but reflect enough light to burn your nether regions if you've got any sort of opening in your shorts. Soap Tree Yucas and a couple other plants surf the dunes, or to be more precise, they grow fast enough to not get swamped by the sands of a moving dune. We all spend some time doing flips off the dunes and unintentionally filling our shorts with grains and starring off into the large dunes with their white shimmer and the occasional smaller brown dune. Tony and Devon even got to borrow someone's modified skateboard and sail down a couple slopes. On our way back to town we get a picture of Alamogordo's "Friendliest Place on Earth" billboard displaying people with a PR agent's ethnic blend dream with a bunch of fighter jets and bombers behind them. The irony was over whelming. The last stop on the irony train was at the scuba diving shop that well didn't seem to be getting much business in the desert and was sun bleached from under use and care.
After a meal at Chili's a dip in the motel 6 pool we hit the road for Carlsbad. Along the way we passed through the Lincoln National forest, which was beautiful and we even did a little bit of back roading in the hopes of finding a good campsite, but not luck. A yearling of a black bear popped out in front of us and before I knew it I was barefoot and running up a forested hill after him with my camera. No good shots since the camera settings were all set for the brilliant white sand and not the shady forest.
We rolled into a little reservoir about 20 miles from Carlsbad just as the sun was setting. A lightning storm in the distance and a fiery red sunset to the west swelled us with good moods. As I jostled through the back of the vehicle to get my tripod, I managed to dislodge a Corona and bring it to its crushing demise and at that moment the universe also decided to implode. In a mad rush to not have our rental car smell like beer I pulled items from the back to get at the bottle and its now vacated contents. Tony stuck his hand in and sliced it open on a piece of glass. As soon as our gear was out the winds begin to rip forth from hell. The black depths of the reservoir grew into white tips and sprayed us with sprites of fishy scented moisture. I opened a door to get a different angle and dislodged Devon's camera, which took a nasty fall to the hard mudstone below, slightly chipping the camera body. Gear began to blow away and we scurried too and fro to collect it all. Devon also managed to slice open his hand on some glass and somehow that little slice of New Mexico heaven had turned blood red and black in a matter of moments. Once the sun was completely down the universe began to fester back out from its implosion spreading lighting out against the horizon for the remainder of the night. We cooked and at dinner as a repetitive, but not orderly sound of a bilge pump or something of the sort lumbered on, and on and on, and on into morning.
After surviving flocks of insects at night we got an early start the next morning and got to the Carlsbad caverns and hour or so after they opened. From the gaping natural opening swallows turned in and out of the sky and we walked beneath them into the labyrinth of caves below. Vero e che 'n su la proda mi trovai, de la valle d'abisso dolorosa (IV.7). Dante's Virgil could have easily been a tourist here for the many conjoined airport hangers that stretched far beneath the surface in this surreal under-landscape could easily harbor all the souls of hell, but what a waste it would be for a place of such beauty. Our soles, and not Geryon, labored us down through the upper caverns, around iceberg rock, and down into the big room. The size is unimaginable and so is the psychic impact. Remember the first time you saw Yosemite in its totality? Its like that, but invert, in the earth, and un-see able all at once. You wander corner by corner, stalagmite by stalactite, piecing together a visual brail of what this absence of limestone has birthed. It's incredible. I am a dwarf amongst a forest of limestone, water and time. Trees grow up from the stone and leaves chandelier down from the finite sky. My camera taxed from shooting lighting the night before lasts not quite long enough to capture what I had hoped, but alas one never captures with light what one hopes.
We exit the caverns via the elevators, yes elevators, right there in the main cavern, right there across from the snack bar that looks like a scene from Total Recall. I wait patiently for a three breasted woman, but she never arrives. At the surface our rods turn off and our cones turn on, more or less with a little wincing and cerebral pain. Back in the vehicle we go, northward towards Santa Fe. We stop in Roswell for a bite at a café that decked out like a military UFO crash site. The food is cheap, good, and the service is friendly. Roswell is lot more of a town than any of those paranormal shows would have you believe and the main road is scatted with UFO related shops…a brilliant marketing ploy by the city if you ask me. We would have done this in Calaveras if we didn't already have the frog jump. A New Mexico sunset rises, bakes, and burns out black on us the Sandia Mountains appear on the horizon. By ten we are back in Santa Fe at Devon's pad and by eleven there are people, drinks, drums, guitars, bass guitars, and general a commotion. By three we've made our way across town to someone else's house where we've decided its time to go and we retire back to Devon's house. Tony and I contemplate just making the drive down the Albuquerque now while vibrantly awake, but wane long enough that I nap a few hours on the couch, Adam sleeps a bit on the floor and Tony snoozes briefly on a bed before hitting the New Mexico highways one last time.
The flight is luckily uneventful. Adam is squeezed between me and Tony and we are carrying on like twelve year olds. Tony is doing the robot which annoys the shit out of Adam and I'm letting my gut biome release potent gases into the cabin. At one point the steward tells Tony the robot has been outlawed on US planes and this helps settle us down to crass jokes for the rest of the flight and occasional nappings that in no way make up for the lack of sleep we've had all week.
"Welcome to Oakland."
The Cowgirl Saloon, Sante Fe, NM
Santa Fe Lake...which only contains gross non-edible salamanders and not fish
outside of the squirrels this was our best food option. After it got done with Adam.
Alamogordo: The friendliest place on Earth (b/c otherwise well bomb you)
Yucca at White Sands
Agave flowering in the storm
Desert sunsets...nothing like them
Desert sunset version 2, same night
And then all hell broke loose
Carlsbad Cavern - photos will never do this place justice
The Crew in Roswell: Devon, Tony, Damon and Adam spotting a UFO
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