August '21 Stained Glass Trip: Day 2

This is part two of the Stained Glass Trip. You can read Part 1 here.

I love planning trips. I sometimes love planning a trip more than actually taking the trip. Planning is a way of learning, costing only time, while travelling usually costs both time and money. But for all the planning I do, usually meticulous, sometimes obsessive, I always say that every intersection is an opportunity to change plans. Today was a day that put that maxim to the test, and the result shows why I prefer planning to execution. 

The day started early. Way too early. I woke up between 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning. By five I had given up on going back to sleep, so I was on the road very early. My first stop was a 24-hour convenience store about 200 yards down the road in Cloudcroft, where truly mediocre coffee was available at a not-outrageous price. Okay, it was a pretty good price, or would have been had the coffee been better, but I'm in kind of a mood now and so my instinct is to say the price was just not outrageous. I stood in the parking lot drinking my coffee and smoking a cigarette and watching the garbage truck try with limited success to empty three large dumpsters. It took several tries and the driver had to get out and pick up all the trash that missed the truck, so there was some entertainment value there. I threw away about a third of the coffee and headed down the road to my first stop, which was only about half a mile away.

Mexican Canyon Trestle

Back in the day, someone built a railroad up to Cloudcroft, which sits above 8600 feet altitude, to bring
tourists up so they could escape the lowland heat. On the west side of town is a remnant of that railroad, a curved trestle across Mexican Canyon. I had asked the doyenne of last night's hotel about it, and she said that it was about an hour's hike each way, and the return trip was very steep. So I decided just to go to the overlook and see it.  I did that. Not really sure why it's a sight to see, but there it is: a trestle, sans rails. And I'm pretty sure the woman at the hotel has never in her entire life been there, because it's only about a 300-yard hike each way from the trailhead, and couldn't possibly take an hour each way unless you're on crutches.

Next stop was about ten miles farther down the road to Alamogordo, which drops about five thousand feet over about fifteen miles. A place called Tunnel Overlook, I suppose because it's just past the one tunnel along the road. The tunnel is nothing special; the attraction is the south-facing cliff opposite the road, which is, according to signboards at the parking area, an archaeological site used by native Americans of the Ancient Culture, or maybe the Fresnal Culture; the sign wasn't clear about that. In any case, I couldn't make heads or tails of the signage in relation to the actual cliff face, so I just read all the signs and took some pictures and moved on. 

Down in the valley, I stopped for breakfast at Denny's and had their version of eggs benedict. While it was not at all authentic, it wasn't bad; and the coffee was much, much better than what I'd gotten at the convenience store. I didn't throw any of it away.

Feeling restored, I started down the highway toward Las Cruces, where I'd pick up I-10 for about 60 miles to Deming, then go back up into the higher elevations with a couple of stops in New Mexico before going into Arizona. I figured to get to around Payson today, with the high point being a view of the Mogollon Rim, which I've never seen. Fifteen miles out of Alamogordo, plans changed. The United States Air Force had the road closed. "For at least an hour," the 80-year-old MP told me. I pulled over to wait with everybody else, and checked my GPS guide. It told me that if I went back to Alamogordo and then south to a point just north of El Paso, I could be half an hour ahead of the game. So, what the hell. Drove back to Alamogordo and then south towards El Paso. About halfway down the road, Google Maps told me that Interstate 10 near the Texas-New Mexico line was now closed and the Alamogordo route was now the fastest. 

 Not having a paper map to consult, I pulled into a C-store to see if maybe they had one. Maybe there was another road that crossed the short distance between the highway I was heading south on, and the Interstate that headed north just a few miles away to the west. The clerk there told me the Air Force closes that highway every time they plan to test a missile. They launch a drone that tows a target, then launch a Patriot missile to bring down the target. It all takes maybe three seconds, but they close the road for at least an hour, from an abundance of caution. 

Anyway: there's no other road, but now Google Maps shows the interstate is open again, so on I go. Very unpleasant drive, because the speed limit on the southward highway changes frequently, for no apparent reason, and because the connector from that highway to the interstate is a pothole testing ground. Only about five miles long, but five miles of really bad road. I'd have preferred a gravel road to that. Then up the interstate to Deming. Had lunch there, at a local burger chain known apparently for its glacial service. Oh, and let me tell you one other thing: that part of New Mexico swarms with flies. I took more than a dozen on a ride up to my next stop. (I tried to get them out, but more came in than went out.)

Bird of Paradise bush, maybe

Rock Wren, probably

That next stop was City of Rocks State Park. The rocks are tufa ("Kneeling Nun Tufa," according to the park's brochure, but it doesn't explain where the name comes from), a fairly soft and relatively lightweight volcanic rock. There are a number of outcrops clustered in the park, with a botanical garden near the entrance and a number of short hikes around the edges, plus one hike that goes right through the middle. I ended up spending a lot longer at this park than I'd expected to. I head for the botanical garden, because somebody I know is really into that stuff. The plants are almost all cacti that are common enough from Texas to California to Mexico, but there is one very pretty flowering plant with no label that I take a picture of (see left). Then I hike up through the middle of the park about halfway, until I encounter a Little Brown Bird that makes clear I'm not welcome in its territory. I take a picture of it, too (see right); it comes so close to me I could have reached out and touched it.  I showed the pictures to the park ranger, who told me with absolutely no confidence that the plant might be a Bird of Paradise, and the bird might be a Rock Wren. I've decided to believe him.

The next planned stop is The Kneeling Nun, which Roadtrippers says is Silver City's favourite sculpture. (I suspect that it has something to do with why the local rock is called Kneeling Nun tufa.) I only put it on the trip because I wanted the route to go through Silver City, and it was either that or some bar that managed to get a listing. So I drive up to Silver City, which twenty years ago was a charming old town but now is a booming sea of suburban sprawl. My GPS took me to the center of town and told me my destination was on the right. I parked and got out at what looked like an old high school but is now a public utility office. There was no sculpture that I could see, so I opened up the Roadtrippers listing and read that it's located eighteen miles east of Silver City at a place called Santa Rita. Well.

So. On to my next stop. I realise I'm not going to get as far as Payson, thanks to the Air Force, so I'm thinking I'll be staying in Show Low tonight. The weather now is fine, so the top comes down, and I'm cruising along a nice little two-lane highway, heading northwest towards Arizona, when it starts to rain a little. I pull over and hit the button to put the top up ... and nothing happens. There's a whirring noise but no action. I get out the owner's manual and read about how to put the top up manually. I manage that chore in about 20 minutes, just in time for a gullywasher of a thunderstorm, complete with impressive displays of lightning. 

I decide that I'm not going to be able to spend a week in LA without being able to put the top down or the back windows up (they're operated by the same mechanism), so I look up the nearest repair shop. It's in Scottsdale, outside of Phoenix, five hours away according to Google Maps. Okay, that'll have to do, so I start down the road, heading now for Scottsdale. After about 20 miles, I decide I should make an appointment for service for tomorrow morning (because I know I'm not going to get there before they close today). I pull over to look up the number, but there's no service. And I manage to erase the directions. I plug in the address again and set off looking for a signal. A few miles along, Google Maps kicks in, and now it tells me to turn around and go the other way. Grrrr.

The forested road it takes me down is a road that would be the perfect drive if only I could put the top down, and not have to drive in the heaviest rain I've seen since the last flood back home. The wipers can't keep up, and in my mind I know that water is pouring in through the open rear windows, and I'm driving through the forest, making hairpin turns and going up steep climbs and down steep descents all at around fifteen miles an hour because I can't see shit. Eventually the rain ends, and I finally got a phone signal and call for a service appointment for 9am tomorrow, and book a hotel in Globe, which is a little less than two hours from Scottsdale, so I'm pretty sure I can make that. And that's where I am now, in Globe, worried that it might rain again and my car is sitting outside with the windows down.... 

But I'm still optimistic that I can get the roof mechanism fixed and still get to LA on Wednesday. Actually, I might get there sooner, because there's not much to see along I-10 out of Phoenix. Though I still plan to head up to the San Gabriel Crest on the way across southern California. We'll see what can be salvaged, when the car is fixed. But I'm pretty sure I won't get to see the Mogollon Rim.

Oh, and by the way, the pictures from this trip are all in this gallery.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part 1

THANKS TO MY SISTER-IN-LAW, who sent me an article from the New York Times about an exhibit of stained glass on show in Los Angeles this summer, I started out this morning from San Antonio to the west coast. It being August, and I having nothing pressing at the time of planning, and being assured that there would be someone to take care of the dog while I'm gone, I had laid out a trip of the sort I most enjoy: a roundabout low-key wander, away from freeways as much as possible, with every potentially interesting spot included as a stop. I was really looking forward to this excursion, four days to get there, three days there, a scant three days back.

The trip started auspiciously enough. It was fairly cool in San Antonio, especially considering it's the middle of August or near enough, and there was some cloud cover to keep the sun at bay for a time. My stops were all laid into the Roadtrippers App that I finally paid to use after so many years as a free-rider. And I had used it enough on the recent trip up to Pennsylvania to be comfortable with it as a guidance tool. And for back-up, there are always paper maps.

I got to my first navigation point at Tarpley, Texas, chosen only to ensure my transit along one of the most beautiful drives in Texas. FM 470 (or whatever it is) takes you through an achingly beautiful part of the Texas Hill Country, not with any spectacular vistas or important Must-See places, just mile after winding mile of well-maintained, lightly-travelled highway. A nearly perfect Sunday drive. 

At a certain point the clouds gave way to bright blue skies and the temperature soared to eighty degrees. Mercy. Well, at that point I thought it best to stop and lay on a slather of sunblock. Naturally, though I had passed perhaps six hundred and seventy-five picnic areas, historical-marker pullouts and church parking lots in the 80 or so miles since leaving the house, there was not so much as a wide spot on the side of the road for the next thirty minutes or so. Ever notice how that happens? It's like trying to pass someone on a winding road: as long as you're stuck with the solid yellow line in your lane, not a single  car comes from up ahead, but as soon as the road straightens and the solid line gives way, the oncoming traffic is relentless. 

Eventually, of course, I found a place to stop and apply my protective coating, and judging from how I feel just now, at the end of the day, I'd say it was soon enough; except that I forgot about the back of my neck.

During that stop I tried to load in the directions to my next waypoint. I had no signal whatsoever. I couldn't even get the Roadtrippers App to find out what the next planned spot was, so I had to wing it.  Time for the backup plan. I reached behind the passenger seat for the Texas highway map ... and it wasn't there. At that point I recalled throwing it away because it was so worn and torn from a year and a half of mild use, with the intention of taking another, more pristine copy from the other car. Unfortunately, I had not carried through with step two of that plan. But fortunately, I thought, I've wandered these roads often enough that, surely, I would recognise the turns or the destination signs when I come upon them. 

Not so, it turns out. I recognised every single town name, and could not guess which ones were to be on my planned route. So I flipped a mental coin at a T intersection, and went right. That turns out to have been a bad decision. While it eventually took me up along the beautiful South Llano River (which had, at one point, been a part of the plan, but had not survived to the final version), it led me, despite every avoidance maneuver available, to the town of Junction, a place I didn't want to be. I gave up on getting even a 3G signal and bit the bullet, heading to Junction. Junction is two hours from home on the freeway. Thus I arrived at a spot two hours from home after only four hours of wandering the Hill Country.

At a pit stop there, I bought a bag of Boston Baked Beans. I don't like to use the restrooms at convenience stores and not buy anything, and I remember that, as a child, I thought Boston Baked Beans -- peanuts covered in some reddish kind of hard candy shell -- were a real treat. Let's just say that my tastes have changed, or the Beans have. (It didn't help that they were stale enough to make me think they may have been hanging on that peg since I was last a fan.)

At that point it was still cool enough for top-down driving, even with the sun directly overhead, but top-down driving at freeway speeds is the opposite of fun. So the top went up and the audiobook went on. (Up until then, I'd been listening to the music I have loaded on a USB drive, about three thousand of the best songs from my youth, plus about fifteen hundred other songs. Anything I like makes the cut, so I have  Je t'aime, je t'aimais et je t'aimerais (my all-time favourite love song, even from before I translated the lyrics) to Carmen played by the Canadian Brass, and a smattering of Russian bluegrass and a heavy dollop of fado, particularly by Cristina Branco, who has the most perfect crystalline voice.) The audiobook of choice was Far From the Madding Crowd, by Henry James.

Henry James is one of those writers you have to read in school. After all these years, I've finally gotten over that, to the point where all I could remember of his work was that there was dialogue in impenetrable dialect, and that he tends to be wordy. (Yes, I appreciate that here I am the pot to his kettle. So be it.) But I have discovered over the slew of decades since I studied literature in college that many, even most of those dusty ol' novels they make unwilling students read in school are actually quite good stories. Not always, but often. And so I had determined to give ol' Hank another try.

Henry James writes like a greedy man who is paid by the word, and paid extra for polysyllabic utterances. (Again, yes, pot:kettle.) And yes, there are characters in his books who speak in a dialect that I can hardly penetrate at times, when reading the printed page. They're like those closed-captions one encounters during a live interview with a non-native English speaker: they seem vaguely like words you know, but they run together at a pace that the typist can't keep up with. Worse than reading a B'rer Rabbit story. But I also find that (A) when they are read out loud by someone who understands what they mean, as in an audiobook, they make perfect sense, and (B) the dense dialect is only used by secondary working-class characters. The main characters all speak in what used to be called, back before we all became egalitarians, U (for University), or Received Pronunciation. (The working-class dialects were, of course, Non-U. Received pronunciation had no counterpart, as anything other than it literally did not matter.)

I also discovered, much to my astonishment, that Henry James, who is more English than the English, has a sense of humor, and will show it to you from time to time. If you can get past the dated attitudes, mostly about class or the proper roles of the sexes; and if you can overcome words like "vermiculations" and "colloquist" -- which words I, being once upon a time a fluent speaker of even the snottiest variations of English, can deal with -- the man's writings turn out to be soggy with wit of an ironic sort. He manages to damn all the things he praises, to point a focussed beam on the idiocies of society (and he wrote in the late Victorian and Edwardian times, so there was a lot of idiocy lying thickly about, unused on the grass), even while grabbing those extra pennies from his publisher by naming in a list many of the cows owned by Bathsheba Everdeen, as if Daisy and Lilly and the others were important to the story; or while describing the hind-end of horses with reference to Moorish architecture. 

There are, I admit, occasions when James' allusions escape me; as when he referred to an ancient poet who, apparently, made up an overly-long love-poem for a pair of famous Ancient Greek lovers whose names I knew I should have recognised; but Ancient Greeks ... well, once we get past the main gods, and the above-the-title stars of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I fold. I can't keep 'em straight. I might recognise a name, but I don't recall if it's a god or some person who gave birth to a farm animal, or turned into a bush by the side of the road to avoid saying hello to someone coming the other way. I understood what James meant when he spoke of Zeus and the others leaving the "cramped quarters of Olympus" for the more ample spaces of the skies above, but that's pretty much the end of my cognisance of all them Greeks. Even so, the thrust of his reference to this long-winded poet and these unknown lovers was clear enough in meaning, if not in casting, that I didn't miss the gist of what he said.

(One thing I remember not understanding is the statement that a certain character, Sgt. Troy, was indifferent honest with men, but lied constantly to women; in fact he "lied like a Cretan." Maybe it was "lied like a cretin" -- it's an audiobook, and the two words are sometimes pronounced the same -- but even if it was, I don't think that advances my understanding at all. Why on earth should either Cretans or cretins have such a reputation in early-20th-Century England? Unless they were, in fact, actually phenomenally prolific liars as a group. I somehow doubt that.)

My planned route took me down the Fort Lancaster Scenic Loop. I'd been to Fort Lancaster, a 19th-Century military outpost on the Old Chihuahua Road, many years ago. It was there that I saw my first vinegaroon, and for being so remote a memory, it's a surprisingly clear one. Not just the vinegaroon, but the whole Fort Lancaster experience. I thought that in the intervening thirty or forty years, something of note might have happened there, what with the Texas Parks Department being so keen on staying relevant and all. 

Just before getting to Fort Lancaster, I stopped at a picnic area to take what turned out to be the only photograph of the day. Here it is:

Overlooking Fort Lancaster

Fort Lancaster is closed on Sundays and Mondays, it so happens. So that will be a stop on another trip, somewhere down the road.

After that it was back on the interstate for a stretch, then up along the Pecos River into New Mexico. I pat myself on the back for having the foresight to buy a turkey sandwich at a convenience store at some dusty village at the farthest edge of Texas, and for getting gas (again) at Artesia, New Mexico. It was a hundred and seven degrees there. Half an hour later it was cool enough (90) to put the top down again, and half an hour after that I had to dig a long-sleeve T-shirt out of my duffel bag. 

I had planned to stop at something called the Mayhill Lookout, just on the odd chance that it afforded a scenic view from the mountains it's in to the plains to the east; but as I feared, it was several miles down (or up) a gravel road, and my little convertible roller skate doesn't do gravel. I continued on, with not too much in the way of regret. But I didn't make it to Alamogordo, where I'd planned to stop for the night, because of those extra hours wandering in a circle in the Hill Country this morning. So now I'm in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, up in the Sacramento Mountains, with a wood-burning fireplace in my motel room and I'm wondering where I might get some firewood. This is shaping up to be a really great trip. Really.