Cocoposts

Sierra County - 7,500 People, Two Newspapers

This place is like the rest of New Mexico only a little more so - poorer, hotter, drier. It's awfully nice if you like cactus, mesquite, sunshine, old trailers, desert mountain views and hot springs. Its other charms are not as obvious.


There is nothing nothing nothing like a spring wind to remind you of what's hard to love about southern New Mexico. It puts everyone in a mood.   Crazy Arizona dirt (it might infect you with the conservatism they suffer) blows in and collects on the window sills. It isn't merely a nuisance, it closes interstates.

Soil loss is impressive these days but the problem of erosion has apparently fallen out of the lexicon, like elsewhere. It's just accepted. Screwing around in bulldozers is very popular as is screwing around in off-road vehicles and with chain-saws. These tools are applied in the landscape to great affect.

Poverty bites especially hard into rural New Mexico. Mobile homes represent the upscale housing through sad swaths of places like Williamsburg where sheds and RVs line the streets and you don't know how they just don't blow away. Old cars and men on bicycles who don't shave fit right in. Wal-Mart's unflattering light is a good place to observe meth addiction's effect on skin tone.

Promising Plan El Paso

The El Paso City Council just approved a comprehensive plan and the EPA gave it a Smart Growth award. The El Paso Times article says the plan promises to cure urban ills like some kind of magic planning pill.

El Paso's effort stands out in today's southwest where, as the article's comments suggest, such efforts are derided as "social engineering" or part of a UN plot to build better cities. (The horror!)

Explanations about the costs of growth in El Paso will sound remarkably familiar to proponents of Albuquerque's long ago and far away Planned Growth Strategy.  That effort was shit-canned derailed while in process by developers and their friends on the city council and county commission who got a whiff of where it was going and insisted that "benefits of growth" be examined as well as the costs. It was subsequently (and gleefully) picked apart as planners attempted to quantify soft social benefits of things like "having a lawn."

It's critics turned PGS into something they could kill. And they nearly did.  Today the impact fee system intended to implement Albuquerque's PGS by varying fees to reflect costs of public services by area - and providing an incentive of cheaper fees where public service capacity exists - is getting tossed out and lambasted as "too complex" by the developer dominated city council. Pffft.

El Paso has put on their big boy planning pants.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 5

Picnicking on the dead shores of Elephant Butte Lake in the winter is not as depressing as it sounds. At least it never really got cold.  Warmth for achy bones is why a lot of people come here. 

Looking on the bright side of the drought, there's a lot more lake shore. Big dog and I enjoy hikes down to the water and back, a considerable distance in some places.  We were spooked by rustling in the bushes near the water a few weeks ago. Wild pigs are making inroads locally - snagging habitat and being opportunistic with water holes.  Big could smell tasty piglet.

There are plenty of reasons to be watchful beyond big pig tusks. Spooked even. David Parker Ray disposed of the bodies in Elephant Butte Lake. Who knows if he had help. And those bones are decidedly not why I came here. (I never should of read that book.)

There used to be a ferry across the Rio before the lake.  It's demise was the subject of a poem, Engle Ferry, by Eugene Manlove Rhodes published in the Saturday Evening Post August 10, 1929 and excerpted in Keleher's Fabulous Frontier.

The ferry is narrow and deep... the current is strong and the banks are steep ... a winding road up either hand, between black lava and yellow sand, between red water and close blue sky...angry echoes from hill to hill mutter and clamor and threaten still... Engle ferry is gone... never again shall moon or star kiss the hill where their camp-fires are... the passionless waters are deep and still on golden mesas and dreaming hill.

Maybe not as deep anymore.

When a proposal was made to change the name of nearby Engle to Engel, U.S. then Senator Bronson Cutting intervened at Rhodes's request and the proposal was nixed. There's a connection!

Can't you just see the wind?

Mom's holding her hair out of her eyes, squinting behind ray-bans and glaring up at him and that damn pentax he got for Christmas. Mistake, she thought, turning back to the campfire to stab at the steaks.

Her mood and the wind came up at the same time. She'd begged him to leave it at home, that camera. She'd had some dentistry. The partial wasn't ready. She didn't want her gapped-tooth smile immortalized and she sure isn't smiling in this photo. But you can see that dark space anyway as her mouth is open a little saying, "Oh for God's sake Dave."

He took her picture all day like he always did. Our weekend and holiday camping trips and picnics were elaborately documented. If there'd been an internet then, my father would have facebooked, geo-cached and tweeted every one of our trips. As it was, he left multiple trunks of 35mm slides, rolls of super-8, shoe boxes of 3x5 prints, and a small library of photoalbums.

In the pictures from this day the wind is like an unwelcome family member, a crazy Aunt who visits for extended periods every spring and spends the afternoons screaming and crying at you for something that isn't your fault.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 4

These days enlightened professionals in government stand out like big bass in a shrinking desert lake - leaping out of the water because they can't take the pond full of stupid anymore.

This is one quirky-ass little town.

One of the latest movidas involves a city vote to shorten the municipal runway to benefit a developer named Greg Neal who says he'll build a truck stop there any day now.

This is what's become of the "premier commercial and industrial zone" anchored by a "motorplex" promised in the 7,388 acre State land swap completed by former State Land Commissioner Patrick Lyons with chest-thumping pride in 2008.  Then NASCAR said they'd never heard of Greg Neal.

Now the Airport Director and somebody else has resigned.

Economic development: they'll say it's about jobs but it's all about real estate speculation.

Turtleback Mountain Diary 3

Fiesta Dresses are a distant topic from sex torture and murderous pitbulls.  Given the continuing notoriety of the David Parker Ray case and Sierra County's apparent desperation for economic stimulation, I'm greatly relieved and a little surprised no one has had the idea of re-creating the "Toy Box" as a museum piece - at least that we know of.
 
Lessons from that horrifying history seem limited to: A) Gosh, we sure hope that's history; and B) "Let this serve as a warning to girls." 

It's infuriatingly common to hear that this is what happens when girls do X, Y or Z.  Such victim-blaming is blazingly evident in the justice system and the Ray trials.*

The focus on the victim and her part in sex crimes doesn't change behavior - least of all men's behavior toward women and girls.  But it does evoke generalized fear and suspicion on the part of one-half the population toward the other. This is hardly the basis for a healthy community but it's great for gun sales. 

Pleasant and un-prurient interests abound in Sierra County, as fiesta dresses remind me.  The Geronimo Springs Museum also has a most fabulous pottery collection, including a Mimbres Black-on-White pot with an exquisite crossword puzzle-like design - as if the artist was tripping and picturing a New York Times of the future. But the fiesta dresses are my personal favorite.

My Mother, Aunts and every other female I knew had a fiesta dress or three during the day.  These particular rick-rack on-net artifacts of the 50's home sewing era were winners of T or C's annual Fiesta Dress competition. They're kept lovingly dusted and displayed in the "Barbara and Ralph Edwards Suite" along with fifty plus years worth of parade and pagent memorabilia - walls full of B-movie stars' signed photos and smiling fifty faces of Miss Fiestas.

Ralph Edwards died in 2005 and in the 2006 parade the Sierra County Sheriff's Posse honored him with a riderless horse. The Fiesta event has cooled as the town struggles with finances in the absence of Edwards's largesse. But they're still crowning "Miss Fiesta" every year.

 

*For a detailed account see Consequences: The Criminal Case of David Parker Ray, by J.E. Sparks.  But better yet, don't.  Take a picnic or go to the museum where you won't see a thing about it.