Insights from the long vacation

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34.  That Bosque del Apache NWR rocked, BTW.  Saw lots of things, but early May was late enough that we missed the masses of varied birds in their northward spring migration.  Given it was a destination we'd been directed to while we stayed in Albuquerque, I'm not going to rue any bad planning.

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35.  Taos, New Mexico takes faux adobe chic to patently silly levels.  The real adobe in the old core of Santa Fe is monumental.  

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36.  We visited two units of the Salinas Pueblo National Monument in central NM, the Gran Quivara and Quarai units.  I had visited them more than fifty years earlier, at which time only Gran Quivara was under national protection.  Quarai back then had been part of the New Mexico state system, which means a sign and a fence to attempt to discourage the local ranchers from harvesting stones from the ruin for their own projects.

 

Quarai has greatly benefited from federal attention, with a visitor center, information signage, lots of cleanup and some reconstruction; it really was nothing but a ruin back in 1967.  Gran Quivara was in the cleanup and reconstruction activities then, though rather short of what we saw in 2018.  The history with both of these ruins point out how truly idiotic the Spanish administration was, admittedly at least partly because there were three not really cooperative parts of the colonial power structure -- the governor (i.e., military), the actual Catholic missionary clergy, and the Inquisition.  Each of those three had more or less nothing but contempt for the other two, and ran their own show as they pleased.  Which means the substinence-level natives were shanghaied into multiple independent unproductive work projects, which of course means they could not produce enough food to keep their communities alive.  Which is, of course, the reason all those sites became ... ruins.

 

We had a long conversation with a ranger at Gran Quivara.  He had been a carrier Navy jet pilot (and retired from that), then a commercial jet pilot (and retired from that too), and had got back into federal service as a ranger for a number of reasons; money was not among those, and to him perhaps the most significant was ... the ranger hat.  Given that I've chosen to stay in a not-real-well-paying academic job for the last 15 years for reasons about as rational if perhaps less tangible than that, I admire him for his honesty.

 

I think that despite his earlier career in situations with lots and lots of sometimes nonsensical rules, he was nevertheless disturbed at being in a place with lots of rattlesnakes and being prohibited from doing anything about them.

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(Found my notebook!)

 

37.  Riding the tram from the NE corner of Albuquerque up to the top of Sandia Peak is a fascinating ride (the more so if you know some geology), and that even is leaving out the remnants of the old plane wreck that you pass over.  Just be prepared for the altitude at the top.

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38: Looking back now, not quite 2 and a half years later, the unquestioned high point of the trip was the half-day or so at the Grand Canyon.  We got to the park at 9AM so there was no problem with parking (being there on a weekday in early May helped also).  Glorious weather; good shirtsleeve conditions, neither too hot nor too cool; very little wind; not a cloud in the sky; very nice transparency.  I had visited Grand Canyon before, more than 50 years previous; it was my wife's first visit.  Everyone has seen the pictures of Grand Canyon, of course, but those do not prepare you for the vista that opens up over more than half of the compass when you get over the lip from the parking lot and get to the viewpoint.  Knowing what would happen, I made it a point to watch my wife's reaction to that unimaginable scenery.  The day got better.  The crowds were light, the wildlife went its own way with studied indifference ... I have said elsewhere that I know what I want to be reincarnated as for my next life, and that's a raven on the Grand Canyon south rim.  But to be overflown by a California condor was a joy that transcends both my descriptive powers and my imagination before the event.

 

Amplifying the wonder of the day was an insanely unlikely combination of bad-then-good events.  My wife left her cell phone somewhere, almost certainly on a bench at the viewpoint.  She discovered this after we'd walked the third of a mile from Mather Point to the gift shop, and was getting quite bitter in her self-recriminations.  I told her, "I refuse to get angry," which is perhaps the only time in my life when I've made that decision whole-heartedly, and I walked back to Mather Point (in case she'd left it somewhere along the way) while she took the shuttle bus.  I didn't see the phone, of course, and got to Mather Point first and waited for her on the bench where she guessed she'd left the phone.  After some fifteen minutes she arrived, with phone.  It seems some German tourist good Samaritan had picked up the phone, and was on the same shuttle bus as she was, en route to the security station to drop it off.  But for some reason the motel we'd stayed at the night before called that phone during the few minutes both of them were on that same bus, and my wife recognized her ring tone, conferred with the fellow tourist about where the phone had been, answered it, cleared up whatever snafu we'd left the motel with, and got her phone without any hassle whatsoever.  That capped a morning which I still think of as little else but a divine gift, and I was laughing almost all day because of it.