The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We seem to have slowed down and come to a total STOP if not a complete rest. Just woke up and decided to stay here in Truth or Consequences another day, hike around the lakes, see what is what while the sun is shining and the days a bit warmer. The future forecast isn’t great. Texas was a fantasy. Last night we considered Arizona, maybe Tucson, but nothing looked warmer. We can’t escape the weather and that is the final Verdict.

Outside Albuquerque and Santa Fe the land looks scorched, mostly a sea of sagebrush and creosote bush with some scattered, stunted juniper and the occasional small bare tree with vicious spikes an inch or two long. The wind holds dominion under what must be an implacable sun in the summer. It’s a hostile land, nearly waterless. The Rio Grande we’ve followed since the gorge by Taos is nearly empty, wallowing to mud and Creekside grass, a small ribbon of life. Here in Truthy Consequence they’ve dammed it, created marinas and tourism, power and electricity, maybe the CCC thought a future Las Vegas, maybe they just liked dams back then, bring the desert to fruitfulness, some quasi-Biblical calling.

The inhabitants here seem poor, scratching out a hard scrabble existence. New Mexico, Land of Not So Enchanted Single Wides cooled by swamp coolers and air conditioners powered by mighty turbines. Fruitful, not so much. Thorny, more than likely.

An old buddy from the South End moved down to these rutted wastelands of America to escape the grief of another wife dying, to escape humanity itself, and holed up in his small motorhome in a failing RV park with his 10 cats and a hermit’s pessimism. In America you can find a place somewhere any lost soul can call Home, just drive long enough and far enough, it’ll find you.

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We rolled back into our chain motel this afternoon, parched after hiking the drying reservoir of the dammed Rio Grande in the pitiless sun and relentless heat (okay, it was only 54 degrees) to find our water dribbling barely in hydrous sympathy with the Rio Gee. Why not? Everything else has gone goof, why not live a day or two waterless? The nice motel person assured me they were working on the problem when I inquired if we should seek new lodging. Of course I figured Friday night most hostels down here would have the NO Vacancy sign on. Pessimism, my new middle name….

30 minutes, my friendly motel chain Desk Lady assured me. If you know me, you KNOW I know plumbing like the back of my colon. It is NEVER 30 minutes!! Never!!!

So when we came in tonight after wandering the quaint town of Truth or, yes, Consequences, rest assured the water was still a pathetic dribble and people were menacing my friendly motel minimum wage scapegoat. The plumbers, she said apologetically, had experienced a ‘glitch’ but they were working valiantly to fix the problem. Two guys at the front desk were reaching Boiling Point, but I said, as a possible wall against violence, ‘that sounds good to me. Thanks!’ 20 minutes, she assured the mob. The two gentlemen weren’t buying it, but I said genially, ‘No rush’ and waltzed back to my room here.

20 minutes my ass!! One plumber was napping behind the wheel of their box truck when we drove out 3 hours ago. A bad sign, I commented. For all I know the siesta is ongoing. But as I mentioned, I’ve accepted the fate that drives this trip, Vaya con Dios. There are worse things than a toilet that won’t flush or shower that no longer works or a sink that gurgles nasty when turned on. No doubt they are waiting down the road….

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You think maybe a town might come up with a better name than Truth or Consequences, which sounds like a daytime game show from the 1950’s, but no, we’re parked in Truth or Consequences. We rented a CCC camp adobe cabin on the Rio Grande where the boys of the ’30s had built a dam and lived in these cabins. The view was great, overlooking the reservoir and Elephant Butte Island, an oasis in the semi-arid wasteland of southern New Mexico. Trouble was,the cabin had septic issues, crap gas backed up from, oh, 1960 to the present and finally after dark we loaded the conestoga and vacated the building since nobody was around to maybe move us to a different hut.

The trip is taking a turn toward the Goofy, hopefully not the tragic. There are probably lessons to be learned here, but … we are not lesson learners. We are people OTHERS learn from , possibly YOU/ Sure, we could have planned more thoughtfully, we could have looked at the weather, we might have opted for Hawaii, any number of alternatives, but not … we decided to roll the dice, let Lady Luck dictate our chances.

It’s only Day 4, not even half way through this Odyssey. What, us worry? Tomorrow we either haul down the Rio Grande to Big Bend, Texas or we circle back north up through a mountain range and even colder temps than here (which is at 20 degrees shortly after dark). Taos will be 1 degree tonight and Hawaii will be 75 degrees. Back on the South End it’s 18 degrees.

So okay, Hawaii wins. Forget Hawaii!!! We’re here and we can’t drive to Hilo, forget it! We’re headed to Las Cruces where Ansell Adams photographed the full moon rising over that ghostly cemetery. Right now the moon is quartered. But the stars are endless. Maybe we should travel at night.

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We’re headed south down off Taos where the world is frozen, ice-packed and snow covered, temps down into the low teens. We’re headed for warmer weather — after all, we didn’t come for the skiing and snowball fights. We’re actually contemplating going to Texas. There’s a great Chris Rea song by that name. In a low growl he sings about how life where he is has gone to shit and he feels like he has to do something about it. His wife looks at him and asks’ what’? He says Texas. She asks ‘what’? He says Texas.

So … we’re saying Texas. Maybe. It’s a road trip now, meaning plans can change, plans will change, there may not be any plans. Have car, Will travel.

Karen and I fell in love on a road trip with my brother and his buddy, supposedly a backpacking trip to Idaho where Jeff had fought fires one summer after high school. We left Wisconsin in mid May. Flatlanders who didn’t realize the snows in the mountains don’t leave until June, maybe early, maybe late. First night we slept in the open next to hay bales in a North Dakota field, second night the snows covered our tent in the Big Horn Mountains. After a hasty conference we turned south, down through Wyoming and into Utah and kept going until we crossed into Mexico with Buck, Jeff’s 1963 Impala on its last legs. Mexico was 114 degrees in the shade.

The rest of the adventure was the stuff of tall tales for decades. Montezuma’s Revenge, poison oak, police stops, Federale bribes, sleeping on a sidewalk in downtown Tijuana, police bust at our San Clemente campground with larcenous surfers we let pitch tents on our site, backpacking Yosemite, kicked out of the Kalaloch Lodge for left wing political ranting around the time of Watergate,a final run in the dark with a battery going dead with no lights on drafting behind semi’s until Buck died 15 miles from home.

Road trip. It’s a movie. Karen and Skeeter got married. They lived happily ever after.

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So we left the frozen South End locked in ice and frigid temperatures, glad to put that Siberial hell in the rearview … only to leave Albuquerque headed to Taos and end up in a blizzard, 40-50 mph winds and white-out conditions, trying to reach our old Camano ex-pat friend’s house before the roads closed or our rental car sluiced off into an arroyo or down a canyon whose bottom was beyond visibility.

We made it — of course, otherwise how would you be reading a posthumous blog? — and arrived at Jeanine’s and Jasper’s warm adobe abode with all her art and the art she’s collected for a lifetime. We even saw the circling mountains reappear, the sky turn blue and the reason she moved here fairly obvious, the weather only part of it. If you think Taos is a high end, hedge fund enclave of jet-setting ski afficionadoes, like we did, not so much. Up on the ski slopes, maybe so — we didn’t go up past the city limits of town. As Jeanine put it at the brewpub that night where we waited for an old time, bluegrass jam, Taos is similar to the South End, a potpourri of trailer parks, adobe ruins, hidden mansions, a strata from poor to rich mingled together in sagebrush and red mud. This is where Kit Carson’s home was. This is Indian country. This is part Pueblo, part Hispanic, part Trump. It’s not an easy country.

The small crowd rolling into the Eske Brew Pub mostly glugged high gravity ale, rolled out into the snowy beer garden huffing steamy breath in sub freezing weather, then returned to their stools for another pint. A few musicians finally arrived with instrument cases dripping melted snow in the bar’s heat. Jeanine’s banjo buddy Bud never showed, no doubt stranded by the storm. We probably left too soon. But as Jeanine commented, this is SO Taos.

We’re gonna take her word for it. And head for warmer weather in the morning.

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After a grueling day of multiple airports, missed flight, midnight check-ins, we finallyu woke up in Albuquerque, some hotel off the interstate, (audible traffic in the background). So with a fairly okay night’s sleep we stumbled down to the hotel’s breakfast for some java and juice with our fellow travelers who all watched a program called, appropriately enough, Good Morning America.

From the back of the breakfast nook I couldn’t tell who were the celebrities and who were the hosts. The crawler told us the names of a movie star and TV star while we skimmed a USA Today, about half the size of the last one I read years ago.

If that’s all the news fit to print, yeow, we might as well do like the rest of our fellow sojourners, just spend our morning getting to know the temporarily famous. Some woman from the Walking Dead was chatting it up with some woman I sure didn’t know either alongside a woman from a movie I’d never seen. The sound was off or else I’d gone into involuntary audio shutdown.

In a world rampant with creepy trollers, you might ask yourself who would want to be famous. And the answer — ready made for a PhD sociology paper — is … everyone. We apparently want others to know us, at least superficially. A member of our band came to a practice telling us how she’d met a person who had never heard us live, but knew OF the South End String Band. She was visibly upset. I said offhandedly, ‘that’s cool,’ but she shook her head and replied, ‘they didn’t know who I was.’

‘Isn’t that kinda the point, that the Band got some name recognition?’ I asked. She said accusingly, “they knew who YOU were.’ What they ‘knew’, of course, didn’t matter. They didn’t know HER.

The Band had its 15 minutes, I apparently got 5 seconds, but she got nada. So she quit. The South End String Band got zero Grammy nominations once again this year, our 17th. I play the banjo. I could care less if they know my name. I’m the banjo player and we’re the South End String Band. I feel bad, but not very sorry, some of us lost our way. I hopes she’s auditioning for American Idol. If it’s even still on …

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The mizzus and me are cooling our heels in the SeaTac aerodrome for a few hours, having missed our flight to Albuquerque. Our baggage made the flight okay — our luggage is probably down there now waiting for us to get there around midnight. The way things are going our baggage probably shouldn’t stick around, just go on without us. I’d certainly understand, no hard feelings.

We have no one to blame but ourselves. Which is too damn bad because there’s plenty to go around. Icy roads, slow traffic, late departure, long lines at the TSA checkpoints, only one of us given a pre-check on our tickets so we got sent back to the long line we’d vacated after 15 minutes and then we opted for one that looked shorter and was but was barely moving. We hit the guy who checks ID and tickets before the strip-down and x-ray just as the plane took off. With our baggage.

Sure we could blame TSA or the weather or the airline that gave only one of a pre-check. But we should have gotten off from home two hours earlier. Bad math on our part, don’t even ask. Icy roads, rush hour traffic— trust me, usually I’d have left plenty of slop. Even if it meant more quality airport time. But we just didn’t do the right math when I gave us 3 hours. Before lift-off. I’ve taken longer than that just to get to the airport on days when slush and snow and glare ice aren’t factored into the equation. On good days we’d leave 4 hours earlier minimum.

So when we waltzed into Delta check-in with an hour to spare, I thought we were incredibly lucky. Ho ho. An hour in the TSA lines. Bye bye Birdie.

If our luggage hadn’t left us behind, I think we’d have decided our luck had run SO bad we’d have gone back to the parking lot, gotten in our car and driven south to wherever time allowed. But we’re waiting on another flight now. Personally, I’m worried this is just the beginning….

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Get out those hankies one more time. Skeeter’s going on a sabbatical to the deserts of New Mexico, maybe help with Trump’s wall if the National Parks are closed up again. We were hoping to catch a little solar down there, but the weather reports looked a lot less than promising. So … it appears we will be on a full blown, all-out Road Trip, no itinerary, no plans, about what we usually do and yeah, sometimes it doesn’t work out too well but then sometimes half the fun is the adventure.

Woke up today to 25 degrees and 4 inches or more of snow. Which makes this place a wintry wonderland. No tracks except the deer and the squirrels and me. Schools are closed, airport down south is on 2-3 hour delays. Life has slowed down to a standstill. As usual we’ll wander through the drifts and take pictures. Like we need more snow photos….

With the usual admonition to take a break from Skeeter and his curmudgeonly tirades, we leave you with the President’s State of the Union speech. Really sorry we’ll miss that, would’ve been Huge to hear how we’re doing going into Year 3 of the Trump Fantasy. Rumor has it he’s calling for national unity. Meaning, I guess, we should quit blaming him, ridiculing him, fact-checking him and investigating him and just come together to build that Wall, go back to coal burning, deport illegal aliens and their kids, lower taxes on the wealthy, call global warming the hoax that it is and get rid of most regulations that drive businesses in the Land of the Free to other countries. Sure wish I could stick around to hear that.

But like a lot of folks after two years of what seems like a national nightmare, I’m tired of it. This, I suspect, is how you shrink government to the size you can drown in a tub or a toilet, just wear us down, make us think how ineffective it can be, convince us to become apathetic and sow the seeds of viral pessimism. Tell us you’ll bring back coal because global warming is bullshit, tell us you’re bringing back factory jobs when we all know they aren’t coming to these shores, tell us the #1 Priority is a Wall at the border, tell us lie after lie after lie until none of us listen or care anymore. The Tantrum Tweet King is at the wheel, one tire in the ditch, the rest of us strapped in the back. For a couple weeks I’m going to get out and hitchhike across New Mexico, see what America looks like at ground level, slowed down and not so scary.

Skeeter

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