Cocoposts

“Camping and Forgeting Something” was the considered title here. As was, “What is it NOWWW?” But a glance in the rear view after sleeping in the car sealed it.

This time? Forgot the coffee pot and seriously weighed turning around and going back for it at the one hour mark. But I continued northward to Mesa Verde, imagining all the different ways to make coffee. Most mornings I use the stainless steel Bialetti “9 cup” mocha pot from Italy to make the near-espresso that I drink with date sugar, oat milk, and a big dash of mesquite powder. My heart sinks at the image of years-old tea bags in the bottom of the camp box.

I thought of Jerry again at Mesa Verde. He remembers going there as a kid with his family the first time and many times since. He recalled standing on the edge of the canyon across from the magnificent Cliff Palace on the 100th anniversary of the Weatherill brothers first seeing the ruin in 1888.

The Morefield campground is run by a concessionaire. So while Recreation.Gov does the tours of ruins, it doesn’t include the campground reservations. ::minor panic moment:: The great thing is that the check in enables you to pick your site on the given loop, and they serve coffee and breakfast beginning at 7AM.

The Mesa Verde morning tour of impressive Balcony House on Chapin Mesa begins with a lecture about safety. Late arrivals and rules thankfully thin the ranks.

After the tour I visited the picnic area that in the early time of Jerry’s first visits, was the campground. The little pull-outs are scaled for the era of much smaller vehicles and the remnants of the little stone restrooms are adorable. And there’s shade. It’s a perfect place to sit awhile.

At the campground the store manager tells me to take any space on Ute Loop and to secure my food. She also mentioned the morning breakfast and coffee so I didn’t remember anything else she said.

I parked at a shady space in the scrub-oaks I’d seen on google earth. After dinner I cleaned up thoroughly and put everything in a locking cooler. (Lesson learned.)

As evening progressed the dark spaces between trees grew blacker. The blackest of these was right by the tent pad. It looked like a portal to the world of night creatures. I made the decision to sleep in the car with no regrets.

During the tour of Longhouse on Weatherill Mesa the next day. I overheard the park ranger’s radio and an exchange about hazing a nuisance bear. On Ute Loop. I asked her about it and she responded very quietly. “I wish they’d haze the campers that feed them.”

No regrets.

Jerry favors the AAA “Indian Country“ map that covers parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It’s published by the Automobile Club of Southern California and still sold. About the only thing “wrong” with this map is that is can’t possibly cover all of Indian Country. Apacheria is completely outside the map area, for example.

Many many tribes and pueblos have connections to the region of southwest Colorado and southeast Utah. Author R.E. Burrillo writes about this vast landscape, referring to its “borderlands” nature where the practices and traditions of different peoples have blended “into intricate patterns seen nowhere else in the world.”

Hovenweep

The collection of ancient tower villages that make up Hovenweep National Monument straddle the Colorado – Utah border northwest of Cortez, Colorado. Ancient architects of Hovenweep constructed magnificent masonry towers at the heads of canyons over springs.

The concentration of 800 year old masonry tower structures was established as a National Monument in 1923. The monument protects five of these Ancestral Puebloan villages. The difficult roads leading to a couple of them serve to protect them as well.

Instead of taking the recommended counterclockwise drive beginning at the Canyons of the Ancients Museum, I went clockwise, west up McElmo Canyon.to the Cajon unit of Hovenweep first, after I finally found it. Signage is minimal. The roads, to the Cajon and Holly units required high clearance and minor drama of climbing up and down ledges of sandstone.

I was all alone at the Cajon ruin. It was fiercely quiet when I heard quail ticking-ticking around below the stone towers where a spring still barely seeps.

At the Hovenweep campground I commenced with the ritual struggle of erecting the tent in the wind. Efforts were witnessed by a nice guy from Georgia sitting at his nearby camp, and a huge raven croaking from a nearby tree.

The two of them had become loosely acquainted through a trash rifling incident that I completely disregarded, believing myself smarter than a bird. I stored food and trash well. I was experienced. HA!

I croaked back at the giant bird and the next morning I left to see ruins.

I took the trail from the Hovenweep Visitor Center that circles the canyon of spectacular towers. But 30 minutes later a little voice in my head started asked questions – little questions that gave me a sense of being on the edge of a sinking feeling.

The swirling question in this moment was check-out time. It varies a lot between campgrounds. I don’t know why I thought it was noon but it was not. It was five minutes ago.

There was at least an hour of packing and loading and I was over a mile from the car. I pictured an angry family and a uniformed park ranger at my campsite, looking over my things, checking the time, tapping their feet. Maybe a ticket. Getting scorned.

Sweating and panting, I finally got back to the campground. everything was quiet. A little too quiet. No guy, no bird, no ranger, no waiting family.

I took down the tent and was trying to stuff it into the bag when I got another sinking feeling and looked over at the picnic table. Something was different. The top of the food box was on the ground and there was oatmeal scattered everywhere. As I picked up the torn bag the remainder of tomorrow’s breakfast fell out into the dirt too.

The raven was conspicuously gone. So was a half loaf of sliced sourdough and some of my dark chocolate. My dinner – a precooked pouch of “Everyday Dal,” had been pecked which I didnt discover until that evening after much of the liquid had leaked all over everything else in the food basket.

Gratefully, no one came along to witness my shame.

McPhee Recreation Area

On US160 headed east. Two lanes. Fast. A lot of truck traffic as it’s the only highway across southern Colorado. Up ahead suddenly there are brake lights. Cars and trucks are pulled over on both sides. I imagine a tragedy. Then I see, through the stopped cars gawping, a young bear tearing apart roadkill – elk or deer, grabbing hold and yanking. Jumping up and down with the rib cage. It is gross but almost cute. My fast glance captured the dead animal’s head flopping in rhythm.

Unsure about what I’d eat for breakfast thanks to the raven, I was double-doubtful when I got an email saying there was no water in the McPhee Recreation Area campground. But I decided to check it out. Perhaps as a result of this email, it was nearly empty. The site I’d chosen online was next to huge old gorgeous junipers and pinyons.

I decided to sit in the car until the wind died down but it never did and I slept in my car. I woke up at about 3AM to flashlights shining around my camp. My spidey sense didnt register this as danger so I tucked back into my nest. In the morning, a man was still walking around the woods in circles, carrying a now useless flashlight.

Have you seen a cat?

I woman stumbled up beside him.

Two cats. One is wearing a little red scarf and then other…

No. Very sorry.

I find this sad and stupid but I don’t say so. After coffee I join in the unproductive search.

*****

They found her broken body on Easter morning, 1949. Like other Sundays, they were hunting rabbits on the mesa after church.

The village of Mesquite is 12 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The cemetery was remote but familiar to the three boys who spotted her body partially buried in a shallow arroyo.

A couple of reporters are why the story didn’t die. Justice was pursued based largely on their work. Cricket’s killer was never found but coverage uncovered a cover-up.

The efforts Sheriff “Happy” Apodoca made to destroy and ignore evidence and witness testimony was the start. Reporters interviewed witnesses who described what hadn’t made it into the Sheriff’s reports. The boys who found her body described how he appeared to deliberately drive over tire tracks at the scene. A man told the Sheriff he had seen Cricket getting into a car with official state plates and a car matching the description was later found burned. These didn’t make it into the official report either. Cricket’s body was buried without ceremony and when she was exhumed, they found that lime had been used to speed decomposition.

The Sheriff tried to frame a popular college football player who’d been seen with Cricket. When that didn’t work, he tortured a Black veteran to get a confession. That resulted in a ground breaking civil rights case and made the cover of Time.

The involvement of New Mexico sheriffs in illegal gambling had become obvious by 1949. A Grand Jury convened in Dona Ana County hired their own lawyers and got hold of Sheriff Happy Apodaca’s bank records. They found the gambling money. Then they drove down to the gambling joints in their pickup trucks, confiscated illegal slot machines, and dumped them on the Dona Ana courthouse lawn.

The Sheriff went to prison for some, but not all, of his crimes. Sadly he was pardoned by President Truman. He served as a Justice of the Peace until his death in 1981. He and Cricket are buried in the same Las Cruces cemetery.

The Sheriff’s Deputy got the worst deal. He didn’t get a pardon and after serving his full sentence he publically vowed to solve the murder and was shot dead. The official report said it was suicide but the coroner told a reporter the bullet entered the back of the deputy’s head.

Cricket’s death created upheaval but was never solved. People that knew the killer have likely all gone to their graves with that secret. The story is not unique. Secrets protect evil men. Hopeful views say their careless deceit makes them vulnerable, eventually. Until then, we’re cut by sharp sad pieces of a construction, like a wind chime of razor blades.

Rose Henley Hayden Fulton 1881-1968

William Shirley Fulton 1880-1964

Dragoon, Arizona

Exhibits

Upstairs in the back is the room devoted to the Folgers who established all this in 1937. He was crazy about archaeology. She was crazy about Quarter Horses.

Pictures show pastures of foals frolicking between the Texas Canyon boulders. Founding sires stand square and chunky. Their names make me smile. Ben Hur II, Canyon Tom, Texas Tom.

I finger the phone in my pocket, reaching for it as a natural reflex when I see anything I want to remember and record. No photos here though. And so I return again and again, taking the comically tight exit ramp off I-10 and driving the short distance to the old ranch.

This time there are hundreds of people there for a competitive run through the boulders. The museum is empty but for devoted docents. I go back to my favorite exhibits, trying to burn them into my brain: the pots and artifacts, the room built to resemble Paquimé, the Zuni and Diné jewelry, the contemporary art by Native American and Western artists. And the exhibit, “Ma Fulton’s FF Ranch.”

 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day

 And with thy bloody and invisible hand

 Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

 Which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow

 Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

 Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

 Whiles nights black agents to their preys do rouse.

 Thou marvel’st at my words, but hold thee still.

 Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

Act III Scene II

En route to Tucson, visiting the Luna County Historical Society’s Deming Luna Mimbres Museum in the old Armory building again. Down the long hall past the not-great paintings are the gems and minerals.

I was staring at the “Apache Tears,” like my brother collected in the Jemez in the 1950s, when I heard a loud person. They are everywhere. But this particular guy was enthralled with rocks, moving from case to case, pointing out specimens. He repeatedly compared these to those at “the show.”

“What show?” I finally asked.

“You haven’t been to THE SHOW?! You’re better get out there because it closes in three hours!”

Three hours later I had some serious quartz crystal energy swirling around my motel room.

Rock Hound Roundup was full of collectors and characters from everywhere and tables crammed with gems, crystals, sculptures, jewelry, orbs, fossils and things with teeth I’d never seen before. There were even more heaping tables outside. Vendors of gorgeous rocks remarked on the gorgeous weather.

There is a road south from Tucson past the subdivisions where growth slows and the Sonoran emerges. Eyes drawn to the southeast for a view. Like the distant horizontal stretch of gypsum draws eyes toward White Sands, here is the bright vertical of San Xavier’s walls, spires and domes. White Dove of the Desert, Ansel Adams called it.

I’ve been here before. At dawn on a day Halley’s Comet got the closest, February 1986. We were on a long road trip across the West, looking for signs and wonders. We drove all night and parked at the far edge of the giant parking lot to stare at the sky.

There was a cold breeze and it was hazy. Long liminal moments passed as the light grew. Over our shoulders the big fat tall stucco church changed. We turned around and watched the hulking mass became weightless in the light. Looming. Going from glowering gray to angry pink, to glowing opal white.

More like a winged horse than a dove.

That friend is gone and the comet won’t return until 2061.

Mission San Xavier del Bac was established in 1692 by Jesuit Francisco Kino. This Spanish Baroque church was completed in 1797 by Franciscans.

With Mexican independence from Spain, Franciscans were forced out and the church was abandoned for 16 years Then it became part of the very distant Santa Fe Diocese after the Gadsden Purchase. Bishop Lamy ordered repairs and assigned a priest. I’ll bet he visited and saw the place at dawn.

Restoration is ongoing. The tour guide provided a lot of details. He said there’s an angel tally. A kind of contemplative practice. Searching for them dancing and flying around in plaster and paint. The count was 183 but more and more are peeking out from behind old curtains of soot. The current tally is 200.

I feel like I’m cheating on Albuquerque with Tucson when I’m there. The Festival of Books on the pretty University of Arizona campus was great. The venerable Arizona Inn was impeccable. The Sonoran rowhouse in Barrio Viejo, quiet and cool. The microbrews are delicious. 4th Avenue is hip. There’s rail through the great downtown and an art store next to campus, family owned. When you say “botanical gardens” you have to ask “which ones?”

On the other hand, it got to 104 degrees on the first day of Spring and I didn’t hear any coyotes.

Festival Tally – 12 authors, 6 sessions, 7 books bought.

Being surrounded by thousands of readers and writers at the Festival was inspirational and humbling. Notes scribbled in the tiny notebook:

Everyone here reads and writes a lot. ::smiley face::

He’s magnetic. ::Underlined with curliques::

Never sit in a room named for a saint who was into mortification.

Salman Rushdie radiated wisdom and humour. He spoke to a packed ballroom about India and his latest, “The Eleventh Hour – A Quintet of Stories. I got a signed copy and devoured it in a day.

I met John Fugelsang. Well, our eyes met. He’s warm. Hot, even. And so was the tent. I sat in the back behind a bald spot. I shifted around in my captive plastic chair. Finally he looked right at me. Or it could have been at a member of his family in front of me. Whatever. His book is called, “Separation of Church and Hate; A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible From Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds.”

Authors Ana North and Shobha Rao talked about their female characters who hold on to their agency by caring for others – landscapes and people. North described how she enjoyed writing “mythical interludes” in her new book, “Bog Queen” where she gives voice to the moss.

A note on the venue:

The room was hot. The chairs, attached to each other in tight rows of collective bondage. It’s airplane seating without armrests. I got uncomfortable and started fanning myself. I realized I can’t just stand up and stretch which made me even more uncomfortable. I took several deep breaths, inhaling all the hot air of other people, thought about Covid, quit breathing. The women around me figure I’m sighing from boredom. It’s partly true and guilt joins the anxiety party. I try to relax and pretend I’m moss.

Be wary of any room named for the Patroness of Impossible Causes who cut herself. Lastly, Santa Rita and her little sister rooms are flat so it’s impossible to see the presenters. Everyone has to move their heads around as those in the rows in front of you do the same thing. Everyone is rocking back and forth like they’re in different boats. No wonder I was uncomfortable.

The magnetism of writers and thinkers at the Tucson Festival of Books recalibrated my senses, improved my outlook, and made me want to be a better writer and reader. It spun my compass.

They wake me in the morning, keening. Crying and counting themselves. Telling about the territories and where mean humans live. Calls about when and where to cross the highways and probably boasts about their conquests.

“They can live almost anywhere; they can eat almost anything. Poison them, shoot them, trap them – coyotes come back. It is their super power.”

Just finished the 2024 book, Coyotes Among Us: Secrets of the City’s Top Predator. Authors Stanley Gehrig and Kerry Luft describe their groundbreaking twenty-years of coyote research in the Chicago area.

They found that coyotes avoid people and human attacks are very rare. Conflicts are almost entirely limited to cases where humans feed coyotes and encouraged boldness. They are well equipped to survive with or without us, as they have survived centuries of persecution.

They are monogamous, unlike the wolf. They rarely fight each other, unlike the wolf.

Their howling indicates individual personalities and communication bonds. The researchers speculate that they can assess the health and location of others.

As if coyotes can count.

Generally they can be hard for us to see. Two are very good at appearing as one. A ghost presence, their shadowing partner, often sees you first.

What I can see is what they eat. Unlike felines, they’re very proud of their scat. There is little or no fur in the piles they leave in paths. They eat everything and they’ve wiped out the native foxes and outdoor cats. Undoubtedly they brag about that in their song too.

I didn’t like that they began to routinely harass the visiting cranes on my pasture.

So I got a slingshot and a bag of little clay balls and began wielding it, practicing on a target and shooting at them a couple times. Hindsight suggests I was far more threatening chasing them in by bathrobe waving a walking stick.

Whatever. It worked. They’re wary of me now and that’s healthier for them. They see me and trot a little faster, a little further away. I expect the word is out about me and that it’s tinged with mockery.

.

I love the cottonwood tree. Everything about it, including the nuisances of cotton and pollen (not the same thing,) the soft wood that’s not great for stoves and fireplaces, the tendency to “self prune” and drop heavy branches onto cars, roofs, and fences.

I still love it because “they aren’t making trees like that anymore.” We’re losing 80 foot tall trees and what goes with them. I’ll miss their shade the most.

Where I live, in the Middle Rio Grande valley, the trees are relative newcomers. I understand much of the bosque (forest) was cut down long ago. Somehow this is supposed to comfort me about their loss now. It doesn’t. Attempting to describe their deaths as a natural part of forest aging and decline ignores temperature extremes that stress the trees, among other living things.

The particular species I admire and love, is the Rio Grande Cottonwood, specifically Populus Deltoides wislizeni. It can grow 80 feet tall and is distinguished from Populus fremontii by ten “teeth” on each side of the leaf.

This subspecies was named for a German American doctor, botanist and explorer, Frederick Adolf Wislizenus. He must have been quite a character, not unlike the tree. He fled Germany after his involvement with an attempt to overthrow the German monarchy and ended up in St. Louis, bored. For amusement and without much preparation he joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company on a journey to the Northwest in 1839. When the fur traders turned back, he joined a band of Native Americans and went on to cross the Rocky Mountains with them. He wrote an account of his travels that was published in German in 1840.

Back in St Louis he continued his medical practice and worked with George Engelmann, for whom the spruce tree was later named, at the Western Academy of Natural Sciences. But apparently he got bored again and joined a merchant expedition to Santa Fe in 1846.

Despite the onset of the Mexican-American War he traveled south into Chihuahua and was taken prisoner. He spent months in the country studying and collecting plants. After he was freed and returned to St Louis he published another report, Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico 1847-1848. In it he describes 180 plants, many previously “unknown.”

Engelmann studied the plants he collected and as thanks, named some species for Wislizenus, including our tree, a shrub, and the long-nosed leopard lizard, Gambelia wislizenii.

The great New Mexico writer and historian, Marc Simmons (1937-2023) noted that soldiers regularly mangled unfamiliar words and names. They changed “frijoles” to “freeholders” and they called the German doctor “Whistling Jesus.”