Week of Enchantment: Tourists, Sharks, and Gardens, oh my!

Emerging from the natural history hours later, and returning to old town, I discovered that everyone else had woken up and joined me.  Cars poured in and filled the once-empty plaza, but with them came pleasant music and even pleasanter sounds. Those bronze figures shared earlier were planted outside a museum of history and art, but from what I could tell the art was modern.  My attempt in Las Cruces to find a southwestern art museum had resulted only in a large Japanese pottery exhibit, so I wasn't  excited about the prospect of paying $12 and being dismayed again.  I could see all the art I wanted on the streets!

Entering the outdoors 'mall', I drifted until I spotted a restaurant.  This was the first and only time anyone asked me "Red or green". I'd been waiting all week to be asked, and I knew the answer.  "May I have it Christmas?"  I'd like to report on the experience of having red-green chile sauce, but the dish I had it on (a chimichanga) was so large that I didn't taste much of it.   The only unqualified dining sucess I had all week was on Friday, since after a long day of driving I tended to either look for fast food I didn't recognize, or better  yet grabbed a chicken and Hatch green chile burrito from Allsups gas stations.  Those were quais-regional AND cheap.

Entrance to the 'mall'

Plaza central to the left

I saw this guy go by four times -- looking for a parking place, I'll warrant. 

Inset: I SAW THAT CAR IN ROSWELL, TOO! 

As much as I enjoyed the sights and sounds of the plaza,  one place downtown I wanted to visit was the Aquarium, Zoo, and Biopark.  It turns out that the entrances of the Aquarium-Biopark and the Zoo are two miles apart, although on my map they were parked in a continuous blob of green.  The aquarium-biopark was amazing, the zoo was an amazing disappointment.  But first, the amazing.

The 'underwater tunnel' won me over immediately to the Aquarium, as I've been longing to see the one in Atlanta, but that place is an interstate spaghetti bowl. After a few minutes enjoying the sight of fish over my head,  I next encountered a large tube of jellyfish, and a shallow pool of manta rays. One of the rays would 'surf' the side of the tank, flashing his underbelly, but they're so fast I never caught him in the act.  The big attraction, of course, is a floor-to-ceiling tank that features hundreds of fish, including several sharks.

The basement of the aquarium included several model ships, and I spied an actual boat in the back of the place. It may have access to the nearby Rio Grande.

On to the Gardens!

Short rounds: explosives and Martians

Tonight I finally gave up on Hayduke Lives!, the sequel to Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang. The plot only arrives four-fifths of the way into the book, having been preceded by lots of stream-of-consciousness rambling, pointless arguments, and enough breast fixation to embarrass even a frat brother.  There's more bosom-gazing here than in a supermarket romance novel, making me wonder if Abbey was yanking his readers' chains. I like Abbey, but not enough to make it the last forty pages. I signed on for manhunts and rants, gosh-darn it!

Another quick comment: while I was waiting for my flight to take me to Texas and New Mexico back in late September (a month ago this very day), I started reading Out of the Silent Planet. I thought a story about a man whose country walk was interrupted by an unexpected trip to Mars might be apropos for a plane ride.  There are some maliciously ambitious scientists, see, performing an experiment, and while doing a favor for an old lady and trying to find her son, Dr. Ransom happens upon them and is abducted. He wakes up to find himself on a ship, and later on a bizarre planet full of creatures who seem terrifyingly weird, but prove to be peaceful and rational company -- much more so than the men who abducted Ransom.   The book's most interesting point is the metaphysics of its world, I suppose, as Lewis infuses science fiction with medieval cosmology. The planets are not merely  islands of matter in an ocean of nothingness, but part of a heavenly plane where ethereal creatures known as Oyéresu rule. Earth is an anomaly, its presiding Oyarsa having rebelled against the heavenly higher-ups.  Having read the third book in the 'space trilogy' already, I know the cosmology gets even more interesting, with the Oyarsa of other planets being the basis of the Greek gods.  A medievalist like Lewis definitely brings the unexpected to the table when he tries his hand at science fiction.

Reads to Reels: Brave Cowboy/Lonely are the Brave

Lonely are the Brave dramatizes Edward Abbey's Brave Cowboy, and I daresay improves upon it.  As with Abbey's original, the plot features a cowhand who still lives and breathes in the Old West, thrown into conflict against the forces of the modernizing west. When he learns that a friend is imprisoned, he rides to the rescue, arranging a jailbreak and fleeing to the mountains to elude the law. But in the modern west, sheriff's posses include Jeeps, helicopters, and CB-radio coordination.

Here again is the solid story, of a man defending his friends and their conscience against cold, bureaucratic tyranny.  The sheriff here is a warmer character, though, played by Walter Matthau, who admires his foe from afar.  The acting in general is superb, and the cast includes many a familiar face aside from the stars. Carroll O'Connor, better known as Archie Bunker, appears  several times as a truck driver....and George Kennedy, whose booming voice and massive teeth appear in Cool Hand Luke to Oscar-winning fame, shows up here as one of the cruel deputies. The cinematography manages to capture the beauty of New Mexico even rendered without color.   The ending, too, is improved with a dash of ambiguity, creating ample reason to believe the cowboy will hit the saddle again.  I enjoyed the music, done by the same fellow who later scored several Star Trek films, and could only find one little fly in the ointment. The cowboy's friend, Paul, is imprisoned not for fighting the draft, but for helping Mexicans cross the Rio Grande.    I suppose on the eve of American involvement in Vietnam, defying conscription wasn't quite as palatable as it might have been in the early fifties when the book was set.  (Central characters Jack and Paul had served in the Army, after all; their contempt was not against fighting, but what they and Murray Rothbard viewed as state slavery.)

Lonely are the Brave is easily the best book-to-film adaptation I've seen, in terms of faithfulness and cinematic quality.

The Brave Cowboy

The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time
©  1956 Edward Abbey
277 pages

"Where're your papers?"

"My what?"

"Your I.D. -- draft card, social security, driver's license."

"Don't have none. Don't need none. I already know who I am."

When  stock wrangler Jack Burns heard tell that his old friend Paul had gotten himself thrown in the can, he knew there was only one thing to do: get himself thrown in so he could arrange for a jailbreak. So,  riding north he goes on his not-so-faithful horse, Whisky. Two problems:  one, Paul doesn't want to be jailbroken, because it's only a two-year sentence and that's a lot easier for his young family to bear than a lifetime of being hunted.  Two, the sheriff isn't an old-timey fellow with a tin star and nothing else. He's got helicopters.

  The Brave Cowboy is a western in the modern era,  and ends fairly badly for those who pay more attention to the 'western' part than the 'modern' part.    One of Edward Abbey's earlier works, it features two quasi-anarchists, one of whom is imprisoned for resisting the draft,  and several other characters whose paths violently intersect toward the tale's end.  It's a sad story,  almost announcing the Death of the West.    Burns isn't a lantern-jawed hero on a white horse, but he holds to an older sense of honor, and he counts among his friends more recognizably 'good' characters. (Paul is such a fellow,  a pillar of his community who refused to comply with the Selective Service: not because he objected to soldiering, he objected to the government's assumption of ownership over citizens' lives.)  Abbey's terrain description is more functional than poetic here; his talent for conveying the ecstatic beauty of western vistas may have still been in the honing.  What's not absent is Abbey's attitude, his righteous beef against the government and corporate power, against anything oversized and overmighty: half the book is a chase scene through the New Mexico wilderness, as Burns on his horse defies and eludes the local cops, State Police, and even the Air Force, while living off the land.

Dated and crude, but it's hard to lose with a cowboy fighting the Man.  Burns may be a prefigure of Hayduke, from The Monkey Wrench Gang -- there's even a horse named Whisky in Abbey's sequel to MWG, Hayduke Lives!   Another note: this book was the basis of Lonely are the Brave.

A few interesting covers:

West of the Revolution

West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776
© 2015 Claudio Saunt
288 pages

In 1776, the bid of thirteen colonies for independence wasn't the only interesting goings-on in North America.  From Alaska to Cuba, colonial and native powers were fighting, trading, exploring, and competing with one another. West of the Revolution begins with Russian forays into the Aleutian islands,  moves south to Calofornia, where Spain frantically attempted to create a safeguard after catching wind of the Russians,  and then takes readers across the Rockies and plains until the Mississippi is reached. There, we travel south to Cuba, which was not only a prospering sugar plantation but a potentially powerful trading partner of the Creek people in the Southeast.   Brief and full of interest,  West of the Revolution not only sheds light on what else was happening in 1776, but provides the context for future developments in American history --  the drive towards the Mississippi and the hunger for Florida.  There's also a rare look into Canada, or rather the Hudson Bay area and still later, a region that encompasses both Canadian and American states. A section on the Black Hills, known to Americans as the home of Mt. Rushmore,  makes plain their importance to the Sioux and other tribes: the Hills are an oasis of rain in a relatively dry region, and for generations a source of food and materials in lean periods.   I discovered this book via a podcast (Ben Franklin's World) and can pass on the recommendation,  no less for the information on Russian and Spanish colonization as for the tour of North America, this most diverse and extraordinary continent.

Week of Enchantment: Epic? Nay, MAMMOTH!

The natural history museum in downtown Albuquerque is monstrously big, and after arriving at its service doors I made my way around the campus ("building" does not suffice), admiring the way the landscape was sculpted and filled with plants to deliberately portray different areas of New Mexico.  I was very nearly the first person in, and decided to do only the museum tour. There's a planetarium, but I was just at the VLA yesterday and had seen massive photos of galaxies, not just stars, there.  The museum is so incredibly HUGE that simulated stargazing wasn't missed. (And...the last time I visited a planetarium, it turned out to be a light show and I fell asleep.)

Where to begin with this place?   Its heart and soul is natural history, with an extensive and winding tour through time that involves dinosaurs, the ice age, and early American man.   The museum tells the story through massive skeleton reproductions, murals, 'real-life' models, and flat pictures.  Just as Carlsbad gave the definition 'cavernous' real weight, here too the megafauna gave 'mammoth' a new meaning.   They were imposing even as frames, and people used to summon the courage to attack them for meat!

Note the the man in the foreground for scale.

A computer science wing attracted my interest going in, though I found it too noisy; television monitors are everywhere,  with interviews of various people like Bill Gates talking about New Mexico's role in turning computers from warehouses into pocket conveniences.  They had all manner of interesting gadgets there: early portable radios, an array of vacuum tubes and transistors; teletype machines, even a UNIVAC.

The plate said UNIVAC, and I've realized now that UNIVAC is a brand name and not a particular machine. 

 The noise moved me out, though, and into the space science hall. There I played with a Mars rover, rotating its camera around with a joystick. It's not as easy as it sounds, because the rover's eyeball isn't obvious.  Massive models of the planets ("and Pluto") line the wall, and a small theater offered a depressing film on environmental destruction, ozone depletion, that sort of thing.  Natural history is king here, from the the T. Rex models to the enormous rock collection. There's even a reproduction of a cave, and live animal exhibits.  In another area, Actual Science is done -- there's a closed off area visible by glass where people were peering into dishes and studying their computers.  Perhaps they were an exhibit: "Science At Work".   The museum also has live animals, at least fish and reptiles.

Week of Enchantment: Takin' that Left Turn at Albuquerque

Ever since I arrived in Albuequerque, I'd be haunted by the constant din of traffic. I entered town in the middle of it, and remained surrounded by it. It never ceased -- even at three am in the morning, I'd awake and hear the steady roar of the interstate and Coors Boulevard.   Here in Old Town, though, long before tourists and shopkeepers had arrived, I was free from the storm of steel.

I beelined for the church, of course, it being the largest and most attractive building. Called San Felipes, it was closed for the moment, but early visitors like myself could still wander the courtyard.  After getting my bearings, I noticed the doors being opened and entered.

Sanctuary of San Felipes. Notice statue of Mary on left, posed above an entombed Jesus.  

San Felipes later in the day

San Felipes was the only church I visited whose aura hadn't been trampled under by throngs of fellow tourists, and I enjoyed five minutes of peaceful silence before anyone else came in. They came armed, with cameras, so I took my own shots and departed.  From here I would wander in and out of streets admiring the architecture.  I decided to see if I could find the science museum, but on the way encountered art.

Does that say 'Christmas Shop'? Yes. Does it refer to red and green chile? No.

Monument to Spanish colonists

To the left of our intrepid explorers lays the rear of the science museum. Onward!