Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
First off, the KVII story is online, you can check it out here. Really have to hand it to Mitch Roberts and Kale Steed – they made it quite fun!
new feature at KVII.com website
I’m in New Mexico and I’m already enchanted. I exited the trailer this morning and was hit with the comforting smell of the desert in the wind. There is this smell in the desert sometimes – I don’t know what it is, I think it’s some plant – that I just love love love. It’s warm and earthy and vaguely smoky… mesquite plant? Not sure but it made me really happy. Another thing that made me happy was finding this park in San Jon
on the border - and a time zone change - in a ghost town!
(pronounced San “Hone”) where overnight parking was allowed. I’m just off the interstate so I can still hear the traffic, but this is way more peaceful than the truck stop where I was planning to park. Plus I’m right next to a washroom with flushable toilets and a sink where I can wash my dishes (! the joys of plumbing !) – and only one other trailer was parked here last night. I gotta tell ya: after yesterday’s little meltdown, I really needed this.
**Caution: if you don’t have the stomach for rants and musings about somewhat private thoughts and feelings, skip this part and move to another of my more educationally-slanted posts about Route 66 itself, and not about me. This time it’s personal. **
I ended up in a bit of a dip yesterday, mostly because of time issues. The connection I had was miserable – like, dial-up bad, and it kept dropping – and getting everything loaded up onto the blog and checking emails and dealing with some nasty-but-necessary Canadian government websites (where I had to download software to make them work, and that alone took about 40 minutes)… I couldn’t get on the road until mid-afternoon, with only a few hours of daylight to drive. This is becoming a regular occurrence and it’s bumming me out. I was so incredibly frustrated at how long everything takes… and then I started thinking about money and my house and all the crap I have to sort out when I get back… then inevitably, that voice started. “What are you doing here? Why are you doing this? Your family and friends are all back home, you’ve got a house to pay for and no job – what the heck are you doing? Are you nuts?? Who do you think you are?” Yeah, I love that voice, don’t you?
I know that I don’t sit still well and that part of me who isn’t punching a clock will probably always start flapping when I feel I’m not being directly productive – especially at a time like this when I don’t have someone paying me to push buttons for them. But dammit: there are some people in this world who find a way to do what they love to do, and get paid for it. I actually know some!! And I am cursing my small-town mindset that has kept me from really stretching out to try to do – and be – something I really, truly love. Yeah, yeah: I know it’s a luxury. I know it’s not practical. I know not many people get to do that… but frig! SOME people do – so why shouldn’t I be one of those people? Unless you believe in reincarnation, we only have one chance at this life. Why shouldn’t we try to be as fulfilled and authentic to our true natures as possible? Isn’t it our duty to do just that, during our short time here? To thine own self be true and all that jazz? I’m not a church-goer but I’m not entirely devoid of spirituality either… something somewhere gave me the talents to take photographs and write blogs, and stoked in me the courageous spirit to travel solo, and instilled in me the drive to share my explorations with others using these skills. Shouldn’t I be trying to find a way to survive while honoring those gifts? Shouldn’t I??
…That last question is rhetorical by the way – this is just me working out my own demons. I have a feeling that many people don’t want to read this sort of thing – but I have a feeling that many others do. So I included it here, for what it’s worth. Some of the road blocks I hit on this journey aren’t just on the pavement. (Speaking of, I did hit up against two more closed segments of the Route, thwarting my efforts at being as true as possible to McJerry’s EZ Guide tour of Route 66.)
the 10 Cadillacs half-buried at Cadillac Ranch
OK, rant over. I want to write about making it to Adrian, TX yesterday (a very significant stop on the Route!) – but for now I’ll sign off with a pic of Cadillac Ranch, just because it’s cool and famous. Eccentric millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 (not III) commissioned the art collective Ant Farm to install this outdoor public art sculpture.
More echoes of Detroit past: ten Cadillacs from the golden age of the automobile (tail fin era) are buried hood-down at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, out in the middle of a field. The public is encouraged to come with spray cans and add their graffiti to the cars. (Only downside of that is people leaving their empty cans strewn around.) It’s beside the interstate west of Amarillo, and it’s free. Definitely worth a stop.
Oh, almost forgot: I think I came close to being bitten by a rattlesnake yesterday. I’ve done a lot of shooting in the desert over the years and I have only seen one rattler – and that one was sleeping. Yesterday, right at the border of Texas and New Mexico in the ghost town of Glenrio (totally bypassed by the interstate and now mostly abandoned), I was shooting this great old building.
ledge under door: great place for snakes-?
The door was painted this chipped, fading turquoise color and the interior looked as though it would be great for some of that decayed stuff I love to shoot so much. I started venturing in and suddenly heard this loud hissing noise. I didn’t stop right away, because I thought it was some unusual birds up in the ceiling trying to warn me off. Then I noticed the broken ledge of porch in front of the door. It would have been a perfect place for snakes to coil up, out of the sun. I backed up and waited to see if the noise stopped. It occurred to me that it could be wind whistling through the gaps in the broken roof. I really did want to go into this building to shoot! But I’d never, ever heard this noise before, it was totally persistent, and it just started up as approached the entrance. I was pretty far from anything, so if I did get bitten, I’d have a ways to drive to get help. I figured it wasn’t risking it, and moved on, feeling stymied and a bit cowardly.
dead rattlesnake
As I walked to the next grouping of empty buildings, I almost stepped right on something at the side of the road. Guess what it was? A large, dead, rattlesnake. Glad I minded my instincts – and the hissing.
