I have been offline and sort of out of touch for a few.
Please enjoy this commentary from 2012. I didn’t have to update it much at all…
CBS Sunday Morning looked at the line in the sand between liberals and conservatives by asking Nancy Giles and Ben Stein to do essays on why they come down on one side or the other.
Ms. Giles quoted what she called the Oxford English Dictionary definition:
liberaladj. Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.
“I’m a liberal,” she said. “I love the mix of voices and the larger perspective.”
I’m down with that.
In fact, I couldn’t agree more that we need a mix of voices. Mine is right, of course, but others do add color and flavor and nuance and, yes, more data to what I say.
Hey! I must be a liberal.
The bad news is two-fold. One is the simple fact that none of the other liberals I know are actually willing to listen to other voices or see the larger perspective. The most recent example is that of picketers trying to shut down the voice of Lenore Broughton the driving force behind the Vermonters First super PAC.
Oh. I must be the only liberal.
And then there is the case of Islam. Many believe Islam is a religion of terror and war and destruction of women but, according to American liberals, there are only a “few warlike Muslims so we can’t damn the whole religion.” And yet. And yet, my liberal friends damn everyone to the Right of them for a few right wing nutcases at abortion clinics. Or most any Christians.
“I could only listen until that woman read that definition of Liberal and claimed that was what she was,” Rufus said. “Libruls are the least liberal people I know.”
Rufus leads us to the second bit of bad news. See, I own an O.E.D. “Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own” ain’t in it. On the other hand, Merriam-Webster does call liberal, “not literal or strict : loose <as in a liberal translation>.”
Looks like I am indeed a liberal in the first sense but Ms. Giles and the other self-proclaimed “liberals” I know hew to the second. They are as incorrect or inaccurate with the facts as possible. Or perhaps it was just an inexact translation.
Let’s go back to Ms. Giles’ dictionary.
liberaladj. Of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.
That’s interesting but it’s not in my printed copy of the O.E.D. Here’s her next definition.
liberaladj. believing the government should be active in supporting social and political change.
Oh, boy. That’s out of Wikipedia or the Socialist’s Bible but it has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the dictionary.
liberaladj. Tending to give freely; generous.
Ooo. I’m down with that, too. Of course most people know that the leader of the American liberal party, Barack Obama, grudgingly started giving more than a pittance to charity about the day after he decided to run for president. In other words, once people would actually notice. The leader of the other guys (that would be Mitt Romney, circa 2012, or Donald Trump today) has given away a big percentage of his, quietly, every year he’s had income. On a more personal level, all the liberals I know want to control my income while my efforts go into an arts council and Anne’s into the Special Olympics. Our choice.
Money and politics. Ms. Giles wants control of both and that’s not very liberal.
In fact, my actual O.E.D. includes definition #5 as
liberaladj. Favourable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms; spec (in politics) favouring free trade and gradual political and social reform that tends towards individual freedom or democracy.
I may not respect but I do accept your incredible naivete, behavior, and opinions that differ from mine. I give of myself without asking you to do the same. I believe in local control, free trade and social reform that moves us toward individual freedoms and democracy.
I’ve made a new friend who was kind enough to let me couch surf and to show me the sights. And had a number of firsts.
In our prior episode, after a short night’s sleep in Albuquerque, I was up and off to Grants, NM.
I visited New Mexico’s Land of Fire and Ice and found the Sands Motel off Route 66 in Grants, New Mexico, but didn’t have to stay there. I also drove past the Ice Cave and told the story of my great-grandfather and my grandmother cutting ice on Westtown Lake in wintertime. They stored it in our 10-sided ice house.
All that’s left of the Roaring 20’s (sic) is the sign.
Grants is on the Trails of the Ancients Byway, one of the designated New Mexico Scenic Byways, and right on old 66. The city began life as a railroad camp when the Canadian Grant brothers built a section of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Railroad there. At night you can fall asleep to the lullaby of freight trains rolling through. It has also been the “carrot capital” of the United States, was an airway beacon, and the uranium capitol after Paddy Martinez discovered the ore near Haystack Mesa; the mining boom lasted until the 1980s.
I saw my first saguaro of this trip.
The beacon and FSS building on the airport is now the Western New Mexico Aviation Heritage Museum. It includes two 1929 historic structures, the lighted 51-foot airway beacon tower and a small building with one of the two original generators, plus the concrete arrow which helped daytime aviators follow the direction to the next beacon. The renovated 1953 Flight Service Station is the main exhibit hall.
We went to the airport museum and got a private tour and then I drove a dirt track for the first time at the Uranium Capitol Speedway. I also ate Stuffed Sopapillas for the first time in La Cafecita.
Then the white truck made its first trip across the Continental Divide. It was, in a way, an anti-climax. The truck didn’t seem to notice the thinning air and my gas mileage stayed about the same as it was at 6,000 feet. And 4,000.
Low-octane fuel — rated 85 or 86 as opposed to the 87 for regular gasoline — is common in the Rocky Mountain states, said General Motors fuel specialist Bill Studzinski. The practice goes back to the days of carbureted engines, when lower octane helped vehicles run smoothly at altitude. The electronic engine controls that have replaced carburetors make the lower octane unnecessary and potentially harmful. EPA states that these “newer vehicles can adjust the spark timing to reduce knock, but engine power and fuel economy will still suffer.”
El Morro National Monument sits on an ancient east-west trail in western New Mexico. Its primary attractions are the graffiti-laced sandstone promontory with a pool of water at its base and the remains of a mesa-top pueblo top the promontory where some 1,500 people lived in an 875 room pueblo from about 1275-1350 AD. Travelers left signatures, names, dates, and stories of their quests. The conquistadors called it The Headland (El Morro). The Zuni call it “A’ts’ina” (place of writings on the rock). Americans called it Inscription Rock.
“Pasa por aqui,” wrote provincial governor Don Juan de Onate in 1605 (“passed by here.”) His very early inscription partially covers one of the prehistoric American Indian petroglyphs also carved on the rock. Twelve-year-old Sallie Fox traveled through by wagon train; she wrote her proper name, Sarah, in 1858.
E. Pen Long of Baltimore came through El Morro with the Beale Expedition of 1859 bringing 25 camels in a short-lived Army experiment. He signed with this flowing, perfect, script. And one T. Post signed over top of that in 1872. We haven’t chased down how he’s related to my friend Bob.
Typical El Morro visitors:
We also stopped at the Ancient Way Cafe where I had a Buffalo burger for the first time with homemade potato salad served on a split top bun with leaf lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, cheddar and a real milkshake. They also let me plug in my truck.
I’m carrying a 12V/110V freezer on this trip so I plug in to run the compressor and recharge the house batteries whenever I can.
We walked across El Malpais lava flows to get to the Bat Cave. The youngest flow is McCarty’s Flow, some 3,000 years old on the east side of the monument. The Chain of Craters cinders come in at 600-700,000 years. Mount Taylor and its flows, up to the northeast of Grants, are 1.5-3.3 million years old. During the summer, tens of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats use Bat Cave, a lava “tube,” as their day roost. They emerge for their nightly feedings. I’m quite pleased to report that I saw no mosquitoes.
My folks “moved” to Gallup, New Mexico, for hurricane season a few years ago. New Mexico rarely has hurricanes, so they were actually escaping the South Puffin weather. My mom wanted to paint “on the Res.” Right on Route 66, the town catered to travelers but now is all Pawn and Trading Post. My folks rented an apartment for several months.
The downtown Gallup Amtrak train station sits right on Highway 66; it is the second busiest station in the state, with more than 16,000 passengers per year. The two-story Mission Revival building was built as one of the Santa Fe railroad hotels in 1918. It is now also the home of the Gallup Cultural Center operated by the Southwest Indian Foundation.
I started my visit through the center’s Storyteller Museum and Gallery to see the exhibits of Kachina dolls, weaving, sandpainting, silversmithing, jewelry, pottery, and other pieces by Acoma, Zuni, Navajo, Hopi, and other artisans.
Wayne Wilson was there to show his son the museum. We talked about the Navajo and Hopi Kachina dolls. Wayne explained baskets and the cradleboard story and introduced me to Navajo Beautyway Teachings/Dine’ Bi Hozhoji Beh Na’nitin.
The Navajo Ceremonial or Wedding basket’s step designs are clouds or mountains, Wayne told me, that are reflected in the center. The red ring is a rainbow, and the center represents the sipapu, where the people emerged from the prior world, born through the inner coils of white. As you travel outward on the coils you begin to encounter more and more darkness, struggle and pain but you can climb into the rainbow and prevail. The wedding basket is built around that pathway, adapted from the Navajo creation story.
Wayne’s nephew, Irving Tsotsie, painted this slice of the history of the People. The original hangs in the Storyteller Museum.
Manuelito was a war chief of the Dine people in the time of the Long Walk; he rallied the People against the United States military. Sadly, he died in 1893 from measles complicated by pneumonia and alcoholism.
I wanted to see where the Legendary Lieutenant worked so I drove to Center of the World, Window Rock, on top of the Defiance Plateau. Also called the Perforated Rock, Tseghshoodzani is part of the Navajo Water Way Ceremony as one of the four places where medicine men take the traditional woven water jugs to get water for the rainfall ceremony.
Jim Chee is the other principal detective in Mr. Hillerman’s novels of crime on the Reservation. Chee’s most important (and final) romance is with Bernadette Manuelito, a full-blooded Navajo and also a member of the Tribal Police.
I found NOSHA, Navajo EPA, and Navajo United Way. And I stopped in at the Dispatch and Records Office of the Navajo Nation Police Department. The NNPD is scattered among many trailers at NDOJ; Criminal Investigations was in practically the next trailer.
NNPD officers are cross-commissioned with Arizona State Police so the agencies can work together and have arrest powers across the state, Sergeant E. Garcia told me. Currently, there are 210 sworn police officers, 28 criminal investigators, and about an equal number of civilian support staff. Each officer patrols 70-80 square miles of reservation land in seven districts: Chinle, Crownpoint, Dilkon, Kayenta, Shiprock, Tuba City, and Window Rock. The rumor in Window Rock is that all of that office will be consolidated in a new building soon.
The P.D. was very nice. They let me out.
I found the Navajo Nation Museum and Library, the Navajo Nation Zoological and Botanical Park, and the Navajo Nation Code Talkers World War II memorial all in Window Rock. The memorial is at the foot of the in a lovely park.
The Zoo is “the only Native American owned-and-operated Zoo in the Country.” It gets over 40,000 visitors each year.
I’ve been chasing golden eagles in North Puffin where sightings are rare indeed (we have some that “fly through” but none that are building homes. Called “Atsashzhiin” in the Navajo language, golden eagle is sacred and important in the Dine culture. The Zoo provides daily care for nine golden eagles as well as about 50 mammals, all identified in English and Navajo with descriptions linking the animals to the culture.
I left the 6,830 foot elevation of Window Rock and drove down down downhill, down past Snowflake and Bear Flat, through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, almost a mile downhill toward Paradise Valley and some days off from traveling.
I am still more or less following the Mother Road, Route 66.
In our prior episode, I had stayed in Amarillo, Texas, and was off to Palo Duro State Park and then on to New Mexico.
Palo Duro Canyon is part of the Caprock Escarpment located in the Texas Panhandle near Amarillo. It is the second-largest canyon in the United States.
No, I don’t understand why Texas calls it a “panhandle.” Granted, it is a narrow section but it sticks up from the broader area of the state. Oklahoma has a definite panhandle. Florida comes close with a very deep pan. Texas and Alaska, not so much.
Saturday was Palo Duro Canyon State Park’s annual History Day with lotsa lotsa stuff I’d like to see: living history reenactors, live firing of a real artillery piece and historic small arms, Kwahadi Indian Dancers, the Frontier Regiment of the High Plains, the TPWD Buffalo Soldiers, the 1st Texas Light Artillery, an atlatl throwing contest, cowboy poetry, a guided nature walk on the Pioneer Nature Trail, a tour of the CCC built cabins, and so on. I was there the day before.
It was great. I walked about six miles up and down hills, over rocks, and past rattlesnakes. The volunteer I spoke to also pointed me to the wildlife viewing stand where I’d be likely to see a “herd of turkeys.”
This “Grand Canyon of Texas,” the second-largest canyon in the U.S., got its nickname for its size and for its multicolored layers of rock and steep mesa walls. It is about 70 miles long and some 6 miles wide on average but it narrows to nothing and widens to 20 miles in places. It’s up to 1,000 feet deep. The Spanish “Palo Duro” means “hard stick.”
The first European explorers to discover the canyon were members of the Coronado expedition, who visited the canyon in 1541. Apache Indians lived in Palo Duro when the first Spanish explorers arrived in 1541. Comanches and Kiowa tribes pushed the Apache west and traded with the Comancheros in nearby New Mexico. U.S. Army Captain Randolph Marcy mapped the canyon in 1852 and the army later forced the Indians to reservations in Oklahoma.
The canyon is filled with tent rocks, fairy chimney, or earth pyramids, better known as “hoodoos.” These tall spires of rock protrudes from arid drainage basins like the Palo Duro. The best known of the hoodoos is the Capitol.
The trails are also popular with mountain bikers.
I met one experienced hiker who had often spent a week at a time heading back into the untraveled, unmarked sections of the canyon. “That’s where the animals are,” he told me. “I’ve seen bear and bobcat, plenty of deer, and of course, lizards and snakes back there where few humans travel.”
The area is riddled with caves. This cave is a natural sluiceway, open at the top to funnel the rainwater through. “I’ve been here when it rains,” the hiker said. “The water comes through like a tsunami.”
And I couldn’t go through a canyon without looking for water. This small riverbed still had some, despite the dry weather.
Finally, the famed Palo Duro Lighthouse.
Onward.
I think pretty much everyone knows by now that I mostly stay in the Motel 4-1/2 when I can’t couch surf. I generally find these motels by stopping at state welcome centers and grabbing the coupon books. I hadn’t done well on the coupon book so I went online to see what I could find [Sort: Price, low-to-high].
I met some other turkeys at Choice Hotels customer service.
See, I booked and pre-paid a hotel room through the Choice Hotels web portal. Unfortunately, they made the reservation for Friday, Nov 18, 2016, and I didn’t catch it; the hotel had never heard of me when I got to Albuquerque.
The front desk clerk was wonderfully sympathetic but didn’t have a mechanism to fix it since “you didn’t book through our own website.”
Huh? Choice Hotels is a holding company that owns Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Quality Inn, Sleep Inn, Clarion, Cambria Hotel & Suites, Mainstay Suites, Suburban Extended Stay, Econo Lodge, Rodeway Inn, and Ascend Hotel Collection. They have over half a million rooms in 6,379 properties worldwide.
I kinda figured that the Choice portal was the Rodeway portal. Of course, I thought I was booking into a Comfort Inn
Nupe on both counts.
She gave me three different Choice numbers from her directory to call. One was out of service. One connected to a veteranary clinic in Spokane. One was finally right. The foreign call center gentleman who answered wouldn’t fix the reservation dates; he just wanted to book me a new room for that night so I could pay them again. And to put me on hold three times to take breaks.
I escalated.
And waited.
And waited.
The Choice hold system repeats the same eight bars of two melodies over and over. And over.
I waited.
The supervisor, also overseas, was very polite but said he didn’t understand my problem. I mansplained the issue. He put me on hold and went on vacation. An hour later, after an hour of that intolerable hold music, they hung up. Just flat out disconnected the call.
The local crew took pity at least on my stick-to-it-iveness and figured out a way to put me in a room. It was late and I was tired and had missed supper but I slept in a $34 bed.
Two weeks ago, it was a Comfort Inn.
After a short night’s rest, I was up and off without my drivers’ license to the northwestern corner of New Mexico but that story is for our next installment.
In our prior episode, I had stayed in Weatherford, OK, and was off to Dead Women Crossing. There wasn’t a lot to see at the Crossing but I found some ghosts anyway.
I didn’t travel far that day. Weatherford, Oklahoma, to Amarillo, Texas, is under 200 miles and just about three hours driving time but I managed to take all day doing it. I went through Dead Women Crossing twice and in the meantime found sweet potatoes and cotton and more than enough red clay. My nice white truck is red.
Schoolteacher Katie De Witt James filed for divorce in 1905, then left by train from Custer City with her 14-month-old daughter Lulu Belle. The rest is an eerie, haunted tale of an angry husband, a reputed prostitute, a detective, and a headless corpse. A century has bleached Katie’s bones but her name is still attached to the last bridge she crossed.
Farther north along the N2440 Road, I picked a boll of cotton and discovered that harvesting sweet potatoes is still back-breaking work, despite our increased reliance on farm machines. I will never again complain about paying 29 cents/pound for sweets.
This may turn out to be the story of wind: thousands of windmills inhabit the prairie. Factory-made windmills have been used for pumping water on farms since the 1850s. Last year, wind power generated over 18 percent of the electricity produced in-state. At the end the year, Oklahoma’s installed wind capacity was 5,184 megawatts.
I’ve been following the Mother Road and stopped at the Farm & Ranch Museum in the National Route 66 Museum Complex in Elk City. I noticed that the lady on the cash register gave me the geezer discount.
“Nope,” she said. “I gave you the AAA discount.” Quick, she was. I wonder how she knew?
A couple was there from somewhere else. The museum has a Ford 9N on the floor and I said I had one. He has an 8N.
I also talked to a visiting nurse from Michigan who saw my Vermont plates. We were the only people there in shorts. She’s on her way to Phoenix for the winter. I wondered how it had gotten so cold!
I saw more windmills in the distance and went looking for them. The towers are along the historical route of the Beale Wagon Road. In 1857, President Buchanan appointed Lt Edward Fitzgerald Beale to survey and build a more than 1,000 mile wagon road from Fort Defiance, New Mexico to the Colorado River, between Arizona and California. From then until 1860 Beale, a crew of 100 men, and 22 camels built the first federal highway in the southwest. Beale’s road roughly followed Lieutenant Amiel Whipple’s trail west across Arizona through the Flagstaff area and then a little north through Peach Springs and Truxton Wash, which was named for Beale’s son, before making its way through the Kingman area and on to the Colorado River.
The 123 Red Hills Wind Farm near Elk City has 82 turbines spread across 5,000 acres on land dominated by cattle grazing. The steers were unmooooooved by the windmills.
While I was photographing the turbines, an old farmer about my age stopped his pickup to ask “Did you know the tips reach 100 mph?” I said I did and we talked a bit.
That speed is in just 10 mph winds. The wind speed pushes the blades at 10-20 rpm. With average wind speeds of 13-15 mph, the tips travel at 120 mph but at maximum wind speeds, the blade tips can spin up to 180 mph.
“I live close by,” he told me, “about eight miles up the road.
“You know, you and I would have done right good to own the land under these.”
Ayup.
Political N00z JOAN JETT 4 PREZ
painted on a barn.
Welcome to Texas.
The Leaning Tower of Britten got my attention, as it was supposed to. The lean is intentional. Deliberate. Good, old-fashioned, American marketing got me to stop in the parking lot of Ralph Britten’s truck stop and restaurant in Groom, Texas. Two legs of that water tower dangle in mid-air.
I also visited the world famous Cadillac Ranch which is not the world famous Mustang Ranch.
Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation in Amarillo. Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels of the Ant Farm created it about 40 years ago when they half-buried ten 1949 to 1963 Cadillac automobiles nose-first in the ground, all at the same angle of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The project’s patron, Stanley Marsh 3, also did the Floating Mesa, Amarillo Ramp, and the Dynamite Museum collection of fake traffic signs throughout the city. Writing graffiti on or the cars is now encouraged, and they are extraordinarily decorated. I may have been the only visitor without a spray can that day.
The Mustang Ranch has other attractions.
I landed in a $10 motel that should cost $20 and did cost $30 in Amarillo. On the plus side, its two-door refrigerator had a separate freezer so I could refreeze some of my ices. Maybe I should have just left them outside; I had the heat on for the first time since Vermont.
I went out to buy a cake for dessert and got thoroughly lost trying to find my way back to the motel. “Lila Too,” my Garmin GPS, doesn’t recognize the address they give and I hadn’t (then) figured out how to get it to store “right here” as a saved address.
Palo Duro and New Mexico next. If Lila Too can find ’em.
CBS Sunday Morning looked at the line in the sand between liberals and conservatives by asking Nancy Giles and Ben Stein to do essays on why they come down on one side or the other.
In fact, my actual O.E.D. includes definition #5 as
