Downtown

Here are a couple of photos from a walk a little while back that we did around the Historic Plaza area.


The Capitol Bar building is over a hundred years old, and ought to reek of history. I've been inside and was vaguely disappointed. I don't know what I expected. Inebriated ghosts?



Depending who you believe, this was built in the 1890's or the early 1900s - about the time that water began to be piped around the city - and was the Water Department (or Water Commission.) Then it was, until recently, the City Police Department, and now it houses the Socorro Heritage and Visitor's Center.



I don't know anything about this building on Garfield (Garfield Street, paved 1936 by the WPA, yes?) other than it used to be a roller skating rink - remember roller skating? Looking at it makes me feel wistful.

Streets and Sidewalks

Following Fort Bragg Ron's example of noticing the little things as well as the big, I spotted this marking on the sidewalk of Fisher Street, and wondered about it. Finally had a moment to check out what Wikipedia has to say about the WPA, which, for any readers who might not happen to be up on their American History, was a government program created to provide jobs for people during the Great Depression (now there's an oxymoron for you.) I knew they built schools, and I knew about the Federal Writer's Project, vaguely, but I didn't realize they also built streets and sidewalks and Camp David (which was called "Shangri-La" when Roosevelt was President, which strikes me as weirdly fanciful.)

Speaking of presidents, here's another WPA graffito on Garfield Street:



In the news today were more stories about the recession - it's official, folks, we're in a recession. Usually the word recession has the word "mild" in front of it, but I haven't noticed them using any qualifiers this time around. Wonder what that means.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...MREs!*

A lovely comment from Jim Wetzig reminded me how much I love blogging, and how much I've seen and experienced of Socorro that I want to write about.

Tonight I went to the City Hall to attend a city council meeting, and got my first look at the mayor. The issue that got me, and many others, to attend a city council meeting, had to do with an air force "drop zone" - an area where the air force can conduct training runs on how to drop shit out of aircraft - at a proposed site not far from the city limits.

There was a movie a while back called "Operation Dumbo Drop" where for various reasons that I won't go into here, an elephant is dropped out of a military plane, and so when I think about the air force dropping things out of planes, naturally I can't help envisioning elephants and zebras and giraffes gently floating down out of the sky under brightly colored parachutes to land beside highway 60 to the surprise and amazement of the cows and passing motorists.



When I read the fine print of the proposal, however, there was no mention of elephants, much to my disappointment, and so I felt that it behooved me to get over to the meeting and learn what there was to learn. And I was encouraged by what I saw and heard, and hopeful that between the input of the citizens and the mayor and the city council we might be able to influence this decision and minimize the damage to this town which I already love and feel at home in. I'm not against this drop zone existing, or even existing somewhere close to where I live, but I'd like to see the aircraft routed in a thoughtful and responsible way.
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* MREs - "Meals Ready to Eat" - vacuum sealed pouches of "food" which can be heated or, in a pinch, eaten cold; a staple of the U.S. military, and of survivalist groups who stockpile them because they are Indestructible and Never Go Bad. I'm not really clear on what the air force wants to train their pilots to drop out of their aircraft, other than bombs, but one of the things mentioned was "rescue kits" which presumably have food in them, food which doesn't need refrigeration and can survive an 800' drop into a fresh cowpie.

Wished I had the camera

Cold day, overcast and windy and I did NOT want to go for a walk, but I was restless, so restless: that post-holiday restlessness that comes after holiday conviviality and that can only be cured by forward physical motion. So I found an LL Bean overcoat suitable for arctic expeditions and dragged a small dog with me out into the chill afternoon.

I started out walking along the irrigation ditch that runs between the railroad tracks and Chaparral Road. It's interesting, the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth on a single road in a single mile. Old architecture and falling down old buildings, spruced up mobile homes and falling apart mobile homes, consumerism and Catholicism. I started to notice the play of light and shadow on the edges and folds of the mountains to the west of town. I got to the Loop and passed the house where my boss grew up, a house built by her father who I know she misses and thinks of often.

And the pig farm! Twenty pigs? And every one beautiful - not just beautiful but intelligent and curious and clean. The pig yard was full of soft sandy dirt, and they were rooting and digging holes, and I want to go visit them every day.

Chaparral Loop is itself on another plane of existence, a parallel universe of modest well-taken care of houses and families with polite teenagers, like the young man taking four sheep for a walk, and the young woman playing with her dogs in her yard, one of which looked like a cross between a black lab, a bear, and a dachsund. If you can imagine that. Turn the corner and three vacant houses, so different from one another that they could all exist in their own parallel universe - I might have bought any one of them, if I'd seen them before the grapes and raspberries and roses in the backyard of this house cast their spell on me.

It's a shame, in a way, that I didn't find a way to walk Socorro completely before moving here and buying a house. My brain works best at two or three miles an hour - driving around at twenty-five or thirty-five miles an hour, I just can't assimilate all the information. Perhaps I may buy another house one day, but it seems so unlikely - if I do, I'll do my househunting on foot.

Last wonderful image of the day, a tall tree, branches cut off, looking from one wonderful angle like a giant albino bear, the bark stripped off except for one place where it resembled a pubic mound - or a fig leaf.

Early Birds

This week Socorro has been hosting the 20th annual Festival of the Cranes. Last year we made it to the evening "Fly In" which is something to behold - around dusk, flock after flock of ducks and geese and cranes coming in to the Bosque del Apache Refuge to rest for the night. This year, we got up before dawn to see the morning "Fly Out" - in theory, flocks and flocks of birds heading out for a day's flying and foraging and dodging bullets, or whatever it is birds do all day.

Perhaps I was too bleary-eyed to appreciate what was going on, but it seemed like the cranes, in particular, weren't in a hurry to get moving. Or perhaps we were watching the Special Ed cranes, because they mostly just walked around, occasionally jumping up and down and talking to each other. Every once in a while, a small family group would get its act together and take off, flying low, and the ones walking around on the ground would walk around in circles some more and talk amongst themselves, and five or ten minutes later another little family group would get going.


We saw a lot of $8000 cameras and $2000 telephoto lenses, or maybe it's the other way around. I made a remark about how I was almost embarrassed to take out my $200 jobbie that's got the electrical tape wound around it to the keep the batteries in, and some wiseguy leaned over and said "A good carpenter never blames his tools." So I guess that's the lesson of the day - a good carpenter never blames his tools.

fiddling around

Sick kiddo today, so we are at home. She is mostly sleeping, and I am mostly sitting on my front porch drinking coffee and admiring the view, which looks like this:



Also, I'm foolng around with my fiddle, which looks like this:



Last Friday night, the girls went to the football game and took a picture of the Socorro High School Warriors in all their costumed glory, looking like this:



And the marching band:



Last Thursday I went out near the Very Large Array to begin an Oral History of an old cowboy named Bob Lee. His place was orginally homesteaded in the early part of last century, and his well is the orginal well dug by the original homesteader, and this windmill probably dates from the 1920s or so -



I do love an old windmill.

Some maps and thoughts

The dogs really needed a walk tonight, so we loaded them in the car and drove over to the college. Daylight savings time just ended, so it's getting dark pretty early - here's a picture of the main drag just after sunset through my flyspecked windshield.


This is where we walked today.


And this is where we walked the last two times.


This book I'm reading by Thich Nhat Hanh, called The Art of Power, talks about doing things mindfully, and extols the virtues of unitasking over multitasking. Certainly the dogs would agree. If I were to ask them, I'm sure they would say "Just walk the dogs!" My western mind doesn't allow me to unitask. While walking the dogs, I am also exercising for weight reduction and better health, and having quality family time with my kids, and re-training one of my dogs to behave on a leash, and taking pictures, and doing my Socorro Stroll, and thinking about my blog, and wondering how long it will take to cook the cornish game hens and feed my family and -

I guess I have a non-minimalist monkey mind, but maybe as long as the dogs need walking, this blog will live.