new name

You will notice that this is now "Sixteen Springs Journal." Another site, which I've had all along, will now carry my general observations about the village and its workings. Now that we've moved out here, and the pandemic has hit, this is the center of our lives. So this site will be more about this valley, and our lives, while the other one will be more about the village.

We have not abandoned the village. Our kids still go to school there, and we do our business there. If anything will save our lives in this pandemic, it will be that we have come to see a town of 800 people as the center of urban activity. And though the village has only about twenty cases (?) as I write, the chances are getting smaller that we are sharing space with them.

We do love the area though. We love the people and the feeling, everything. We are in the right place for us. See all those clouds? We can handle the weather. We're in this for good. And this place has been good to us so far.

A kind of rambling report

We got a gentle snow today - maybe three inches, and it's become very cold. The locals tell me that though the rain runs off and runs away, the snow is more important for seeping in, restoring the water in the ground, refilling the aquifer. So it's the snow they really love, though we are all wary of treacherous driving conditions.

Lately school is out, and the kids are home, because of COVID. We are actually happy about this, because there is less driving on treacherous roads, but also because we were wary of the danger to begin with. The covid has walked into both the high school and the lower school now, and I'm sure our kids are just like any who don't keep their distance much, being kids and all. They were invited to be at the school, being special ed and somewhat at risk, but now, everyone's gone home. And it's just as well. Better to lose a month or two of education, than lose a parent or a pair of them.

I know not everyone feels that way. It's a touchy subject and I don't bring it up much. People who have lived in the mountains all their lives somehow feel that your average flu just doesn't make it up here - and, your average flu probably doesn't. We'll see if this one does. My hunch is, it made it up here, and it made it in spades.

I'm thinking of changing this to Sixteen Springs Journal. There's another one, as you may know, that is Cloudcroft Journal. My original intention was to make one of them a media site. But let's face it, I'm not up to the pressures of a local media site. I like journalling - and I have things to say about both this valley and our town - but I'm not really a journalist anymore. Too much going on. Stay tuned and see where this thing goes.

Everyone home, less traffic, stay out of the hospitals, do your best to carry on. What else can we do? Vaccine's coming, even if it takes a few months.

October is nice and long, just how I like it. The oaks get gold and stay gold; the aspens too have turned yellow, and gold, and stayed that way. The air is fresh and cool; the sky is blue, and sometimes there's a slight breeze.

Only two things lead me to believe that things are not perfect. One is that winter is slowly but surely approaching. We will all be driven inside for hours at a time. With covid cases spiking, this can only be bad news.

The other is that there are animals all over the place. I came upon an accident on the highway last night, and I don't know if it was caused by animals, but it could have been since right there is a dangerous spot, just this side of ski cloudcroft. Locals have a name for this spot but I don't know it; a road cuts off there that follows along the highway and then goes up behind ski cloudcroft where that guy was feeding bears a year or two back.

Anyway, someone lost a pretty nice truck, and people were shook up, and because I had to pay pretty close attention to get by both coming and going, I didn't quite pick up the details which of course were none of my business anyway. But I find the highway to be overall more dangerous than any other spot. There are deer and elk way out here in the country, of course, but we are generally only going about thirty or forty, and have a much better chance at both seeing them and stopping in time.

On the highway, on the other hand, they come up out of the ditch in moments, and they're on the road. You're going fifty five or thereabouts. They hesitate because basically they have to jump up on a steep cliff and they have to get ready to land on a very uneven surface. They can do it, but they have to be prepared.

I had two close calls on the highway. In one I came around a corner and there was a deer in my half of the lane, facing me, the driver, right near the center line. He was not moving, but I came upon him so quickly, around a corner and fifty-five, that all I could do was swerve though I tried using the brakes too. Swerving was enough, since he didn't move; I simply went around him with my tire ducking momentarily into the side of the road.

In the other I came around more or less the same corner and an elk rose from the side of the road; he was just coming up onto the road from the ditch. He wanted to cross, of course, and go up onto the cliff across the road. As he put his head up, his antlers went up high in glory as he seemed to look both ways. But he also appeared to see me, and hesitate. My luck. If he had stepped into the road I'm not sure I could have stopped in time.

Such stories are, I think, very common. It could just be the time of year. It's gorgeous out, yes, but the animals are on the move.

Parable

 

We have always been on the cautious side, when it comes to risk. I drive the speed limit. I try to stay out of crowded places.

The children have no concept of risk. Even four teens, only the one who is almost nineteen has any idea. The others, they just don't get it.

It reminds me of a parable that I've been telling. This tells a little about what we've been going through, even though we have teens, whereas the story is about a one-year-old.

A couple has a young boy who always, the minute he's outside, makes a bee-line for the street. Several times they catch him right before he gets to the busy road, and he's almost hit by oncoming cars. They are exasperated. It's almost every time that he just lights out for the road.

But there isn't much they can do. They hear about leashes for kids, and the wife says, "I'd never put my kid in a leash." To her, that's treating your kid like a dog, and she can't do it. So they do nothing. They watch carefully every time they open the door. Sometimes they almost don't catch him in time.

As time goes by they become steadily more exasperated. What can be done? Finally the leash begins to look like a good idea, and they do it. It's a relief, to open the door, and not have to chase after him. They feel a little self-conscious out in public, but at least it works.

One day a woman says to the wife, "I would never put my kid on a leash." She responds, "Well, you never had a kid who ran out in the street, did you?"

update - still only one in the zipcode

I think that if you lived in this area all your life, you might feel that such a thing as covid will simply never show up around here. And I think to some degree you'd be right. It's relatively sparse up here, in terms of people, and we don't share a whole lot of enclosed spaces - Allsup's, maybe, or Family dollar, or a school entryway.

But really what it is, I think, what accounts for our luck, is that so many of us lead isolated lifestyles. How many of us even go down in the valley? I'd say, a few dozen work down there. But that's it. It just doesn't have that much opportunity to get us.

My biggest concern is the kids. They're hanging around all together, spreading whatever germs they have, and taking them home to share. That means we parents will be the first to go. Everyone else, their kids are out of the house already it seems. The ones who are raising young ones, no problem, the little ones aren't getting it so much. It's the ones about 14-25 who are spreading it like wildfire.

And it's not entirely their fault. What are you supposed to do, stop growing for a few years while it passes over? I don't think that's going to happen. I think a lot of these young people gave up fighting it off. They said, well, I can lock myself up, but I can't really bear that either.

It's partly that it doesn't hit them as hard, and they know it. They get over a flu, or another kind of virus, and go on with their lives. You can tell them that this one's worse, and your parents might die from it, but that doesn't mean that much to them. It means a lot to us, but they're like die?

They give us a confused look. Like we were trying to explain algebra.

Covid in Cloudcroft

This is a town of under 800. There are a few hundred more out in the mountains, and in places like Timberon, but altogether there a aren't a whole lot of people. That works in our favor. We are inundated by people from the lowlands on times like this, Labor Day weekend, and they all come up here thinking we have fresh air and lots of room. We do.

I'll be the first to admit, I thought we'd be swamped by now. with the steady stream of visitors coming into cramped spaces like Allsups and Family Dollar, surely someone from the lowlands would have brought it by now. Instead we have one case still in our mountain zipcode. And one squared, cubed and to the fourth power is still just one.

I don't know who it is and won't speculate here. All I can say is, best I can figure, they've kept it out of Allsup's and Family Dollar. If we were swamped, we'd know it. After all, it would only take ten cases to be over one percent.

I have friends in Florida - swamped. Iowa - swamped. Southern Illinois - swamped. It's not pretty out there. And I feel incredibly lucky up here.

It's my bad luck that my kids need, by biological imperative, to go out and be with their friends. It's my good luck that they think Cloudcroft is a happening place, where there are lots of good people they like and can relate to. And it's my further good luck that as far as I can tell, in our almost-nine-thousand feet, sunny breezy clime, the covid just doesn't have a real foothold yet.

Long may it stay that way.

1

 

local news links

I will keep these updated as possible:

Otero County Lockdown
Otero County offices remain on lockdown due to threats following Commissioner Griffin comment,Ruidoso News, 6-1-20

Cuoy Griffin
He's king of the cowboys and self-promotion, Santa Fe New Mexican, 5-21
Cowboys for Trump founder, Couy Griffin: 'The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat', Ruidoso News, 5-20

The Mountain

So I'm sure nobody cares what I have to say about the coronavirus. We all have our own opinions about it, and I'm a little out there in most of my opinions anyway; I ramble just so I don't get out of the practice.

But I'm thinking of making this into a different kind of blog - one where you get resources for various arguments about things on the mountain. For example, I'm interested in the thistle invasion. I'm home a lot, newly retired, and I could actually go out and do something about it. But I don't even find an online resource that will help me read about it and find out what it is, where it's from, etc.

So I'm thinking of building this up to be a place where that kind of thing can be found. It will be a slow, gradual process. I may need something better than a stark orange plain headline banner. But if I do, you'll be the first to know!

coronavirus part IV

I promised to keep my mouth shut about this whole mess but I can't resist. It's pretty much public record. I feel badly for all the people who lost their stores, lost their jobs, lost their income, everything.

It's here now, and supposedly got here through a preschool, but it was only a matter of time before it slipped in at Allsups or some other place. People are deadly afraid and I don't blame them. It's a horrible disease.

On the other hand others are so pissed off at the governor, they're ready to go do some damage in Santa Fe or haul off on social media like she's some kind of demon fixing to take our rights away and lock us up. No, I think she's trying to keep the number of deaths down. Yes, that's causing a lot of hurt to a lot of people and their jobs. There is no way out of this without hurting someone.

I personally do not believe that she is an evil one-world rights-snatching dictator, and I also believe that Trump is an inept fool or we wouldn't be in this pickle. But in any case I'm one of the twenty or thirty percent who don't have to leave home and who are not all that inconvenienced by a lockdown. I have two jobs and they're both online, and I don't rely on them anyway as I'm retired and we pretty much wrapped it up before we got here. We consider ourselves vulnerable and with four kids to raise. So we're grateful that any set of circumstances would allow us to stay home way out in the country, and avoid the whole mess.

So I'll tell you, it's changed our lifestyle quite a bit. Lots less Allsups, lots less theater, and places we just won't go anymore. You can open them up like they're doing in Texas but about 30% of us, I figure, just won't go. We are the 30% who value our lives enough to do whatever's necessary to ride out the storm.

I don't mean the other people don't value their lives. They just want to go about living them as usual and not worry about some stupid virus. But I'll tell you, there's no "usual" if 30% of us are staying home. And it's not Trump's fault, except that he was enough of an idiot to let it in and let it ravage our population, before he figured out what "testing" or "contact tracing" was. He still doesn't know, really, and doesn't mind talking out his hat when he knows he's stumped. But I'm not swallowing bleach, and I'm not going for hydroxychloroquine, or whatever that stuff was. He said it was a game changer, but his game hasn't been changing.

You can get mad all you want, but we're in a new depression. I think things that will help us get through this depression are good, and the rest of it, let it go. If you were a bus driver, forget it. They had to throw six or seven trillion at this and as usual, the rich gobbled it all up, so it's all in the Bahamas now, and it isn't coming back. The rest of us will have to scrape up crumbs or whatever. And your tourist store on Burro Street? I think they set that back a few years, if you're even able to open. The governor didn't do you in, the 30% of us who aren't budging will do you in. We wouldn't care if the Governor opened Burro Street tomorrow. We still wouldn't go. And those poor folks who were working in the meat plants - well, they weren't coming up to Burro Street anyway. Neither were those oil boys. Those guys are all boom and bust anyway, and now it's bust, and they'll be around trying to bust something. It won't be pretty.

coronavirus part III

It's a whole new era, and there's nothing for it but for us to face that fact and move on.

I don't know any more about what's coming than any of you do, but I can tell you a few things. First, the crisis is going to last more than a month; life as we know it will be altered more or less permanently. Even if they managed to say, we're free of it all, after a month, say May 1st, would everyone rush right out and go shopping? Well, some would, no doubt, but a lot of us will have new habits that make that unnecessary.

Such retail spots as malls, J.C.Penny, Macy's, Kohl's, etc., I think, will be gone. Restaurants will be damaged in the sense that, even with lots of government bailouts, they may not be profitable when they reopen, or for years afterward. The fabric of society as we know it will be drastically changed.

In our town Burro Street was living with the hopes of expanding and in fact, it did seem to be getting more business. There were more people walking up and down the sidewalks, stepping into the shops, and buying things. Now I don't know if running one of those little shops was actually profitable; I couldn't see how you'd make enough selling beads, for example, to feed your family. But now, I think, finished. People don't want to walk slowly up and down the boardwalk. And they won't for the rest of the month, and even for a few months. Even if they get a lot of tests, and use them, and know everyone who has it, and quarantine them, I don't think people will come right out onto the boardwalk and go shopping. If there is even the slightest risk, they'll get it online, or just simply not get it. Or make it. People are learning to make stuff.

This especially goes for food. We were a spoiled society, my family being a prime example, and we were going out a lot. This wasn't because we couldn't cook, as my wife could, and did, and actually preferred cooking to going out. But we were lazy, and gave in to our kids' preferences, and of course they prefer grease and sugar. But now, we tell them, yes we go to town but we risk our lives, not yours so much as ours. And we've made it a once a week thing (we get groceries once a week too), and that's it, that's how often we go in. We save our cars and our gas. We are living more like life should be lived, when you are twenty miles from a small town, and we are just much more scarce than we used to be. But as far as the food goes, people are hurting. We don't go to Allsup's anymore; it's too cramped. We go to Fam Dol maybe once a week. We just aren't buying the junk as much.

I'm not saying the downtown will die. Rents will probably go down. Places will be vacant and stay vacant. It will be like a depression, maybe, with lots of people out of work, unless they're willing to do medical. Someone who makes masks will have a good market, and that reminds me, I need to talk to my sister (she makes them). People, I think, want to work, and need to pay the bills. They won't be happy with 30% unemployment.

I say this from a comfortable berth. I have retired, more or less, and am doing two part-time jobs, both of which are online and unaffected by the crisis. We get our social security and will be ok whether the world around us goes to hell or not. We of course fear marauding bands of unemployed vagrants, or rampant inflation, or city people moving out and taking over the countryside. More than that, we fear the virus itself, as we are older and vulnerable. It seems to us that a lot of people from our generation are going to be swept up in it, and it won't be good. We hide out here, out at the end of the road, and I'm grateful sometimes that I'm not famous, and never have been. The world is willing to forget about me. That isn't true of a lot of my musician friends.

As the sun goes down on another day in the mountains, I'm grateful to be here. We moved out to the end of the road while we still could, before this whole thing happened. We turned out to be in the right place when it did happen. We and our kids appear to be going to survive it, though the kids may not pass their level, being too powerful around here, and in some cases wanting to know what they can get away with not doing. The school wants them online, working on their skills. We support the school, but we're caught between. If they don't work, what happens? We keep feeding them, I suppose.

Life has changed forever. They may not learn another thing, except how to survive in it.

coronavirus part II

There's a rapid and interesting shift. People who used to not take this thing seriously are beginning to take it more seriously. At first they were like, live your life and wash your hands. Now, they'll tell you, it's time to back off and take care of yourself.

A lot of people, I think, have a hard time keeping their kids at home, or keeping out of the bar, or even keeping out of Allsup's. You're going to go in to those places, if that's your habit, because it's too hard not to. And this, in my opinion, means we are probably spreading it around as we speak.

New Mexico has gone steadily upward, 13 to 19, 23 to 26, now 31. In some parts of the country, testing has been unavailable for a few weeks, so numbers are vastly higher. We never had that many to start with, and we don't have all that many people, but I think we're doing better than most with the testing. You test, you get to know who has it and you keep track of who they've been around.

But one of the surprising things, none yet in southern New Mexico. Alamo, none. Cruces, none. Cloudcroft, none. People are beginning to feel invincible. Believe me, we're not. People come through here. They get out of their cars or motor homes, and breathe. It's only a matter of time.

One place to keep your eye on is Texas. They don't believe in mobilizing the state to prevent the spread. They haven't shut the schools; they believe it's every county's responsibility to just take care of their own. But this, combined with a lack of testing, means that Texas has maybe ten times what they know about. A lot of people are walking around with it.

And that's bad news for us, because we're on the road out of Texas.

coronavirus comes to town

So the schools are canceled, starting Monday, for three weeks; that's a state thing. The state got six cases in two days, most of them up in the center of the state, and just did it. People here are still of the mindset that it's not that big a deal, not a single case in southern New Mexico. I see it differently. I think it's all over the place.

There has been an acute shortage of tests, so even people who have symptoms and want to check, can't. Now I know some people dispute this, and feel it's not that hard to get a test in so. New Mexico or any other place, but if you look at exponential numbers spiking, then what you'll find is that we should be reporting about ten times as many, by now, as we are reporting. And that's because tests simply aren't available. If you were on the front lines, finding every person that had been exposed to someone who was positive, you'd be able to confirm that for me.

Here are two characteristics of Cloudcroft. One is that visitors come through here at a steady clip. Many are from Dallas, Lubbock, Midland, Las Cruces, El Paso, Mexico. We don't keep them out; we need them. Our economy depends on them. We aren't about to encourage the drying up of our main source of income. But second, we're on the highway. People have to stop here, because there are no more gas stations for as much as seventy miles to the east, forty to the north, indefinite to the south, twenty to the west. They stop here. They have to. I wouldn't want to be working at Allsup's right now, but somebody has to, and I recognize this: they are on the front line too.

But really the second thing I want to say is that it is enormous hardship to have one's kids at home for three weeks, as you might in the summer, when you have no activities planned for them, and no childcare. People work and rely on the schools. It's not the school's fault that they are forced to close, but it's a hardship for almost every parent. I'm wondering what medical workers must be doing: they have an incredible burden. They go down and treat the sick every day, but their kids, also, rely on the schools. Without them, then what?

I am surprised that people take it cavalierly. All I can say is that Fox News is seriously deluding them. Or, maybe they just don't believe it will hit or be a problem (my view: it's hit, and it's a problem). Or, finally, they feel the outdoor lifestyle, lack of contact with anyone but neighbors, and general isolation is a pretty good protection for us. Whatever it is, a lot of people are shrugging it off, as the president tried to do.

But anyone who shrugs it off is on the wrong side of history. It won't be long before we look back and say: we saw all the signs of a serious pandemic, and you shrugged it off. You thought you were better than this virus.

If it does to us what it did to Italy, we're in for a big shock.

Mardi Gras

I don't know whose idea it was to have a Mardi Gras celebration in a town where late February is a mixture of ice, snow, cold rain, and hard wind, but it's an interesting idea. They probably sell a lot of booze in the big tent, or maybe they sell hot food and people go drink a lot of booze at the Western. My guess is, there's a lot of booze. And with it raining, and just around 32, and a little slippery, things are going to happen.

I had a good view of the Mardi Gras parade this year. Our Volunteer Fire Department brought two fire trucks and one ambulance, and we were in spot #13. I was the passenger in one of the fire trucks, and threw candy and beads to all the folks down on the highway or on Burro Street coming back east. I looked in their eyes and noticed they were sick of winter. We have long ones here and standing out on the street in 35 degree weather letting your kid chase candy close to the wheels of a firetruck, isn't my idea of a warm-hearth kind of place to spend late February. On the contrary, that place would be this chair, where I reflect on the events of the day.

My first reaction to it was, you should hold a Mardi Gras in a place with a chance of having steaming, pleasant weather (like New Orleans, or Mobile), not a place 9000 feet with the snow still melting onto the road as it goes below 32. But my second reaction was, gee, green yellow and purple make a cool combination, and it sure is a lot of beads. I myself threw maybe a hundred. And I saw people who had as many as a hundred around their necks. And almost all of them were green, yellow and purple. A good combination.

Now in a town this small it doesn't take long before you know people that you see in a parade like this, and that was certainly true for me. I saw lots of people I knew. They too were cold. They too let their kids scramble around beneath them, picking up candy and beads. Seemed like every kid on the mountain was there.

Our fire department supplied boatloads of candy and beads. I was proud of them for that. We washed our trucks; we brought them in; we put the basketball teams on top of them; we threw a lot of candy; we did the whole route. We won. Everyone knows who we are.

Cold, rainy, bleak, yes. Another Mardi Gras is history.

History of the area

I'm interested in the killing of Captain Henry Stanton, who Fort Stanton is named after. He was killed in 1855, near Mayhill, according to this account:

Shuster, J. (2012, Dec. 31). A Cold New Mexican January in 1855. Jack Shuster's Western History blog. Online. jackshuster.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-cold-new-mexican-january-in-1855.html. Accessed 1-2020.

This account puts his killing in a deep ravine near the modern town of Mayhill, but on the Rio Penasco, which runs through Mayhill

I'm dying to know more, so to speak, also about the German prisoner of war camps in Mayhill at the time. There's stuff out there to be learned. In this situation, the Mescaleros appear to have won the battle, but lost the war. They were unprepared to really go up against the American army, though they knew this area, and knew where to ambush Stanton and his men, and got the best of them in this particular encounter. Overall, historians point out, it was bad for the Mescaleros; they couldn't sustain victories against the army at that time.

I'll post more as I get it.

The snow has become more serious, and is causing problems on the road. At first it was only flurries, not sticking, not even all that cold. Now it is cold and there is a lot of it. It freezes everywhere someone isn’t driving, and freezes quickly.

The plows in cases like this sometimes make it worse. They take a couple of inches of loose snow and turn it into a single inch of well-packed snow. But it’s the well-packed snow that makes ice, that makes a normal car go careening off a mountainside.

They’re very careful to close the roads if there is too much of that kind of danger. But often you don’t see the danger until it’s too late. The general wisdom is, drive slowly, consistently, don’t use the brake, just get where you’re going, keep going forward. I sat here in my chair, wondering about my wife; she was out there in it, and I could picture every inch of that windy mountain road that she might be stuck on.

The first part of it rises straight out of Alamogordo and goes sixteen miles, straight up, to Cloudcroft. While Alamogordo is at about 3300 feet, Cloudcroft is at 8700, at least where the road levels out and goes straight through the town. 5400 feet in about thirteen miles makes it one of the steeper roads in the country, but the scary part is the steep dropoffs at the side of the road where, if you miss, or slow down, or get to sliding back down the hill, you could so easily go right off the edge. It’s all National Forest there. People are used to the windy, icy nature of the road and that still doesn’t make it easier. There’s a tunnel about halfway up; at that point, the drop-off is so steep that there would be no recovery. There are tiny guardrails, though. Trucks are known to hurtle to their death, but my wife, in her Subaru, would probably be ok.

The next part would be from Cloudcroft to our house. I am not so confident about that part either. I was in Cloudcroft earlier today, with three teenagers, when the flurries started. We got supplies and started on our way. The road winds down through the mountains, from 8700 to about 7300, when then it turns left to climb a ridge. That ridge takes it back up to about 8200 or more, and has its own snow systems. So, there are times when that ridge is much slicker and more dangerous than anything else in the area. And, it has less traffic. More likelihood of getting stuck, or being in some kind of trouble, up there.

The locals are used to it, and careful to stay off the ridge in weather like this. Most of them have 4-wheel-drive, and aren’t especially concerned. I’m mostly concerned, because of my wife’s general fear of the conditions.

Tonight she is taking the back road, since the main hill highway is closed. The back road winds around treacherously, and actually crosses a river twice. But this isn’t rain, so that river is not going to have much more than a trickle in it. Nevertheless, the winding curves of that road might be trouble, especially if anything gets frozen. I’m almost more worried about her on that back road, than on the main highway, where at least, when you get stranded, somebody will come by to help you out.

I have a feeling it could be a long night.