May 1, 2010 – Of Aliens and Trinitite, New Mexico – Part I

When we are home — which has become more and more occasional of late — people ask is there any place in America we have visited that “we could totally live in?” This is of course a subjective question. But if you think about it for a second you arrive at the conclusion that if Red Deer, in our remote neck of the woods, was all that compelling, climate or otherwise, it would contain about two or three million sorry inhabitants, maybe more if it was nearer to the ocean or had decent ethnic cuisine. On the positive side Red Deer is a self-declared nuclear-free zone, which allows me to sleep more peacefully at night… when we’re home.

Southeast Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana and particularly the hill country of east Texas are blow you away beautiful…even more so than Blackfalds, Alberta, which is not a nuclear-free zone and thus subject to an eastern-block missile strike. Any one of the afore-mentioned of the United States would make a fantastic place to reside and America is so big that even its most crowded places have enclaves of privacy, peace and quiet.

Fort Stockton, in the west of Texas… not so much. When we arrived at 6pm at the Ft Stockton RV and Demolition Derby Park it was noisy and 86 degrees with a hard wind blowing straight from the south out of old Mexico at a constant 30mph, gusting to 50mph. We checked in and, in an effort at small talk, asked the sandblasted woman at the front counter whether it was always breezy like this in good old Ft. Stock. She looked up and, wiping a forlorn dusty grayish lock from her face, wearily pointed to a sign hanging directly over her head:

Is it always windy like this round here? No. Some days it really blows.

We retired to our engaging trailer site where the satellite internet access was also disgruntled, interrupted by the gale. During the night things changed. The temperature dropped to 81F but the wind smartened to 40mph. Ft Stockton is the type of place you read about in the news where a Taco Bell employee, after 20 years of anonymous non-existence, quietly rises one blustery morning, carefully makes his bed, loads up a bunch of ammo and methodically, without malice or motive, begins randomly unloading a semi-automatic weapon at passing truckers. Local television then interviews the neighbors: “He was always kind of quiet like… mostly kept to hisse’f… Ya’ll gonna pay me fer this interview?”

We were only there one night but I think I can empathize.

In the morning we headed north and crossed out of Texas into New Mexico. We toured the world famous Carlsbad Caverns. This enormous limestone cave system is a must see, particularly on Thursday which is free admission day, a big draw for our fellow retirees, to whom we granted no passage, bull-dozing them indiscriminately out of the way, off the designated path and into million year old stalactite formations. We then settled for the night at Bottomless Lakes (well not quite but they do apparently go down to around ninety feet) State Park near Roswell, NM.

Roswell’s claim to fame arises from a 1947 UFO visitation and the subsequent, well-documented cover up by the US military. We eagerly toured the International UFO Museum and Research Center in downtown Roswell. If we had previously harbored any doubt about a conspiracy, the UFO Museum quickly put all questions to rest: Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact an alien. I wandered down a back hallway to the “Research” section of the museum to seek an update on the latest worldwide UFO sightings. There I found the backroom paranormal intelligentsia — Bill and Edna — engaged in a heated debate about the spelling of the word Gupitur. Like in the planet. I shudder to think how they’d butcher Uranus. Edna thought the Drake Equation involved a Martian duck. No canard. Meanwhile Bill was adjusting his ill-fitted toupee to, in the event of invasion, (ineffectually) fend off randy aliens seeking to copulate with elderly bald-headed male earthlings. I blanched, slightly.

In what can only be termed an inexplicable coincidence, we actually encountered an extraterrestrial later that day just up the road at the Roswell Wal-Mart. Our checkout clerk, in human years, appeared to be about 31. But her oval face, pointed chin, small mouth, enormous wide-set eyes –adorned with accentuating eye-shadow — and inability to speak English, all dictated that she was third generation progeny of the 1947 visitation. She wasn’t exactly my cup of tea but I believe she’d be a real knockout on Rigel IV.

Gerry & Florence