Sidetracked Charley

  It is easy in March and April in New Mexico to blame the weather. And since March 2020 it has been really easy to blame the pandemic. For four years we could blame Trump. And since January 6, 2021 we can still blame Trump and his trumpsters. But I was raised to not whine. And blaming someone or something is whining. But I am going to whine. I am going to blame perhaps all of the above, except for weather, on the failure to acquire a washer and dryer for my vacation rental. I had one ordered from Home Depot. I had one ordered for delivery March 24th. They delivered to Albuquerque. Would take two more weeks to get a refund. Drove to Lowe's in Espanola and bought a set double charging the credit card hoping for the stimulus check and/or Home Depot refund before payment was required. They could not deliver until this last Thursday. But because of Governor's way of opening or shutting down whole counties Lowe's could not install due to the 16 new cases in Raton two hours away ...

Over the top and into the valley Frequent readers of my blog may remember the Revealed Truth on the Road to Raton series. The road to Raton has a huge fire burning. The Ute Park Fire is the first time in my memory a fire was actually named for the place where it began. The Hondo Fire began in Lama, NM. I wanted to call it the Cinco de Mayo Fire because that was the day it began because a person burning their trash in a barrel went to get a beer with his buddies. May is a bad month for fires in New Mexico after a dry winter. The canyon walls   But because of the   Ute Park Fire  US64 is closed between Eagle Nest and Cimarron. And if you want to get to Raton or points east or north of Raton you have to go NM120 through Ocate to Wagon Mound. My first revealed truth about this route is I rather like it. My post office is in Ocate and if you turn south from the center of town you can get to La Cuerva and the raspberry ranch. I visit this area frequently but not to...

On the road back This was the week I largely divorced myself from the news; disconnected from the ethernet and drove the highways. No long road trip just several hops to neighboring towns. And of course Raton again.  For me driving is meditative. I do not need a cell phone to make it interesting. It is along just for possible emergencies. And most of the places I drive the majority of the trip will be without a signal which is fine by me. I am willing to climb a hill if I must. And trust me OnStar is not available. I like it like that. I don't even try the radio. Most stations I could get, when I can get them, are country western. My crying in my beer days are over. Both of my vehicles have radios I can plug my jump drives into and listen to my tunes. For entertainment I look for bison, pronghorns, elk, and that quality of light which turns the view to magic. If I see none of the above I just drive into another zone as it were. Raton this week was a gift. As was the two d...

There is nothing like windshield time to allow you time to think about nothing really. And that is good because we live in a too busy world with too many talking heads telling us what to think about; what to fear. My father, who was first a pilot and then a traveling salesman, used to talk to me about the nothingness between point A and B, whether those were airports, military bases, or cities along the empty highways of the southwest. There is a lot I can tell you about the road to Raton. It is divided almost in half between canyon through the mountains and wide open high plains. I have taken the road enough times because of art deliveries or pickups, court cases (Raton is the county seat), seeking the sometimes elusive bison, or photography treks, that I know where the turns are, what the next mile marker will say, the speed limit changes, and where the bison just might be. I always allow two and half hours for the trip. This is an allowance I make for those bison which just ...

The Palisades in afternoon light Truth is where you find it. It can be in a book or a movie or a short scene from television episode. Or, quite frankly, for me in alone time on the road to Raton. Or maybe the road to Raton is just the processing time I need; the pause to meditate on the signs showing up in my life. There was this StarTrek episode with Harvey Fenton Mudd as a pimp for women to be wives of miners on a far and distant planet, Mudd's Women. He gives the women pills to transform them into goddesses and it turns out it is really an inside job. How we perceive ourselves is so much a part of how others perceive us. I first saw this show originally decades ago so it has been stashed in the back of my mind for a long time. Yesterday it joined up with another scene from something I just watched in season four of Longmire. It dealt with a rape victim and how part of her was stolen and she needed to call it back to her to be whole. Nobody could do it for her. It isn...

Windows off Main Trinidad, Colorado Every dying town has its cave people. I have been doing research on the Village of Angel Fire, New Mexico for an article I just finished writing. I live five miles south of the village near what was once the town of Black Lake. It once had a store and a school and a church and a post office. Now Black Lake is where they shot the Montana scenes for Lonesome Dove. I love old towns with history. Angel Fire is not old and it does not have history. No old school house or cemetery with tell tale dates to contemplate. It has no grand buildings or even a real main street. No sidewalks. Angel Fire was incorporated as a village in 1986 severing itself from the ski resort of the same name opened in 1965. The resort is still upset. As I was preparing to write this blog it dawned on me I have no pictures of Angel Fire. It has nothing worthy to photograph beyond the mountains which surround it. It has no park like Los Alamos, also a young town, and wh...

Cattails in the Snow I live in Black Lake, New Mexico. It is five miles south of Angel Fire, 2 1/2 hours from Santa Fe, 45 minutes from Taos, and two hours from our county seat of Raton. And, most importantly at the moment, a 40 minute drive from my post office of record. Ocate Post Office is on the other side of the mountain, and in another county. It has no grocery store, no court house, no feed store, no WalMart, and no UPS store. In short the only reason to go to Ocate is to go to the post office. When I first moved here,14 years ago, we had no mail service. Most of us of Twix, Tween and Beyond Black Lake rented a box at the Angel Fire Post Office. It did not come free because our post office of record (your US government at its best) was in Ocate. The Angel Fire Post Office then was not a government run post office but contract, and fees for boxes got expensive. After some lobby efforts we managed to get rural route delivery three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday....

Moon Over Distant Peaks When you are an early riser you get to see lots of dawns. My moon rises tend to be in the winter because I do not have to stay up so late. Yes, the full moon rises as the sunsets but when you live in a valley surrounded by mountains the moon rise can be an hour after sunset. Last night, however, I was driving back from Trinidad when the moon made an appearance going over Raton pass. It rose looking like something from Battle Star Galatia. There were no safe places to pull over on the pass and retrieve my camera from the trunk. But as soon as I got off I25 and headed home on Hwy 64 I took advantage of the wide shoulders to record its diminished size. Then it became just a matter of getting the right combination of peaks lined up underneath it. Horizontal version Or horizontal vs vertical. I ended up adding 30 minutes to my travel time, but it could have been a lot more if I had tossed my tripod into the trunk too. Then there was the sun setting be...

Tour of Eagle Nest Dam Eagle Nest Dam is the largest privately built dam in the United States. It was begun by the Springer family in 1917 and completed in 1920. It and the reservoir beyond it one was privately owned by the CS Ranch which recently sold it to the state of New Mexico. Eagle Nest Lake is now a state park, but the dam and the waters in the lake are another matter all together. Water is well regulated in New Mexico especially during a drought. The lake is now at 25% of its normal capacity, and the water in the lake are water right lease holds of Raton, Cimarron, and historic ranches in the area like the UU Bar and the CS Ranch. Game and Fish department also get involved because the Cimarron River is an active fishery of the state. Our guide was a state engineer and the Gateway Museum secured permission of the land owners below the dam for us to gain access to the area. Some 100 locals and tourists attended this rare event. I have lived here almost twenty years and th...

On the Road to Raton Had the cataract taken out of my right eye on the 25th and on the 29th drove to Trinidad and Raton. If my first reaction after surgery was that the world has edges, my reaction on the familiar road to Raton were the colors. Who knew the plains could be so colorful even in a drought. Distant Volcanic hills Vision is about light, color and definition. Painting is about all those and sometimes lack of definition as Monet proved. Photography is supposedly about light. Though lately it seems to be about pixels and hyper definition. A photographer friend and I got into a discussion about the differences in photography as a craft and photography as an art. We were, as artists frequently, critiquing the judging on a recent show. And talking about the ones we will not enter again because of the judging. I was thinking about that and color, light and definition as I drove. It takes effort and money to enter shows. I do it to expand name recognition and audien...

Hope of Rain by J. Binford-Bell Yesterday was another trip to Raton. Another two hours each direction to search the barren landscape for buffalo or antelope or signs of rain. Another opportunity to Zen Out as I like to call it. I have always been a chop wood, carry water sort of mediator, and trapping me in a car with the cell phone off is almost like taking a retreat weekend on the fly. And yet I so resist this repeat journey. I have the road signs memorized even. And the effect of the drought on the land has been painful to see. And yet drought comes and goes especially in the high desert. It is difficult to remember that with the extremes in weather we are now seeing. There is more and more proof of climate change. This drought might not end. And yet the trees think so. Their roots deep in the aquifer they have leafed out yet again. Their fresh and hopeful green a stark contrast to the dried grasses and barren soil. Toward the mountains on the north side of the highway there ...

Teeth of Time by J. Binford-Bell I drove to Raton again on May 1st and it was a dazzling spring day. But it was clearly evident, if by spring we mean the bursting forth of buds and flowers, that spring was very late. Delayed by cold or drought? Or are our definitions getting in the way? Time as we mark it on calendars is arbitrary. There have been many changes in calendars that have governed our lives, and by the Mayan Calendar, some say, we should not be here. Spring or the lack there of and a recent experiences in Raton and Trinidad had gotten me thinking about definitions, and boundaries, and divisions. I had just picked up my paintings from the New Mexico Women Artists Show in Raton. The Old Pass Gallery it seems wants to put the focus back on local artists. And that got me thinking of the definition of the adjective Local. How would you define it? One source says "Belonging or relating to a particular area or neighborhood, typically exclusively so . . ." This le...

Open spaces Trinidad, Colorado is just 23 miles north of Raton, New Mexico where I go it seems entirely too often. But it seems I do not pop over Raton Pass and the state line very often. I have before because there is a super Walmart. And there used to be a rather fantastic Chinese restaurant under the overpass by the train tracks. It could still be there. If you are from a rural area like Black Lake Trinidad seems a whirl wind of railroad tracks and on and off ramps. I have come a long way since my days of commuting 25 miles across downtown Kansas City. I was delivering paintings for the Splash Exhibit at the Trinidad Area Arts Council (TAAC) on the suggestion of an artist who has shared wall space with me at the Old Pass Gallery in Raton. I had printed out a Google Map but never had time to consult it because I had just started breathing after going over Raton Pass when I was at exit 13A and B or Main Street. Trinidad has a lot of those cute midwest street names like Main and...

This beautiful area of north central New Mexico where I live has been carved into counties as the population and terrain made it harder and harder to govern. What is now Taos, Colfax and Mora counties was once one huge county. Colfax needs carved again. I suffer the problems on living on its far southwest corner. I am in fact closer to the county seats of Mora and Taos than I am to that of Colfax. In my blog Off to Vote Early I mentioned the difficulty of voting early. It is an hour and 45 minute drive in the best of weather. A couple March's ago it was a 36 hour drive because of snow. I listed some statistics for the County of Colfax in that same blog. Raton is the county seat and the biggest city but has a declining population due to the downfall of mining and the drought which is having a prolonged downward spiral on ranching. As of the 2010 census it was barely over half of the population of the entire county. And my side of the county has grown in population to the point...

Raton, New Mexico is one of those mining towns that survived the shut down of mines. It was one of the towns that got a railroad. The Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe came to Raton on its way west to the Pacific. Routing of trains through the wilderness depended upon many factors in the late 1800's: water for the steam engines, coal for the boilers, timber for the ties. And ways across the natural barriers that existed out west. Raton had a pass over the mountains, coal in its mines and water so it was blessed with a railroad that did not go at the time through any of the towns in its name. I am not sure why it skipped around the Kansas towns but it probably had something to do with the size of the right away the builders were granted. In parts of Kansas the railroads were given 20 miles each side of the track. Many railroad companies competed for routes and the Raton Pass was fought over by the Denver and Rio Grande and the ATSF, who surveyed the pass second but filed first in Wash...