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I‘ve seen some strange things in my day. Had a deputy sheriff security guard staple a ticket stub to my collar at the Sex Pistols gig at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio. Saw Captain Sensible of The Damned do an encore in the nude at a nightclub in D.C. And then there was the time when The Cat with the Foaming Green Brain™ attacked our lovely country homestead. (Guess what I had to do.)

But in the middle of our momentous scenic road trip yesterday, we stopped in Chama, New Mexico for lunch. There’s a story in itself. You don’t know what it’s like. Eighty-year-old tourists come to see the train and have a grilled cheese sandwich. Guys juggle bears in winter to keep warm. All around it’s beautiful, of course, with mountains, trees, a river, and green grass, and then the screen door slams bam-bam in the wind in the little cafe where they don’t serve any alcohol and even I begin to feel a little safe, until I step outside and see a ’64 Corvair convertible!

How insane is that? Considering where we were, especially, it might as well have been a golden camel on a stick. And then I looked across the street: oh help, another one! The later model, ’65 or ’66, a clean red coupe with killer wheels. [Look beyond the steering wheel.] Dear god, another down the street the other way! And yet a fourth one sitting in the shade! Aaagh!

Not that I care about Corvairs all that much. Although I am a car nut, I’m more a student of the strange. That, and these things are a symbol of my youth. I even drove one once! My god, I’m fucking old. There is an explanation, as it turns out—not for me, but for the cars and maybe for the “tourists,”eek—and I’m sure no one will mind my showing this official poster, which I wish I had:

Anyone who loves a car that much can be my friend. There’s also a fine exalted weirdness here beyond the mere inherent. (The curious are urged to dig deeper on this page.) For one thing, you’ll notice there isn’t any third state mentioned for this “tri-state” event, only New Mexico and Colorado. The third state was supposed to be Utah, but the Bonneville Corvair Club never actually signed on back in 1976 when the whole thing started.

They’ve been holding the annual meets ever since with just two sponsors but kept the Tri-State name.

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“Look! Look! There they are!” The llamas were grazing the green grass and scrub close to the road. I didn’t have time to slow down and we whizzed right by, but at least we saw them. (Tony’s llamas, by the way. A guy named Tony owns the ranch there on the other side of the gorge, and they belong to him.*)

We climbed past the llamas and ascended the sloping plateau. The high desert passed for green with clumps of grass among the sagebrush multiplied a million times. The sky was huge with white clouds in the deep blue emptiness. Although it was mid-morning on Saturday as we aimed for Tres Piedras, the long straight road stretched empty behind us in the rear-view mirror as far as I could see, and there was no one else ahead. Just desert, sky, and mountains. Except for a stretch of US 84 south of Chama, we’d be virtually alone for the entire day on a 200-mile route that reached 10,000 feet four times.

I was totally in my element. Driving in the mountains is a glorious high when you can go as fast or as slow as you want because the road is empty. We even stopped to pee and didn’t have to watch for cars! But what impressed me the most this time was how green the mountains were. The high country valleys west of Tres Piedras were lush and wet, with running streams that snaked through fields of yellow flowers gleaming in the sun. From Chama on, there was water everywhere. The Conejos River (pictured above) ran high and fast.

After all this time in Taos, rediscovering biological value in the landscape was a revelation. To think that one could plant a thing and simply have it grow… For the first time in a long while, I found the presence of the water reassuring and didn’t want to leave. What that means for my own future, who can tell? But I have to say that coming back to Taos was something of a letdown. Oh, the vistas were still grand. It was just the sight of all those houses in the sagebrush that made me sad, until I remembered that I didn’t own one, and I decided then that I was just about the smartest man who ever lived.

* There’s a joke here, but it takes some work.

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What was I thinking? Of course it’s related to the book, i.e. The HELEN CHRONICLES: When Your Mother Falls Apart, the annotated collection of blog posts that tell the story of my mother’s chaotic last few years under the influence of dementia, Alzheimer’s, paranoia, schizophrenia, delusions, and hallucinations. All of a piece, too, those stories, today, and the still-warm detritus of the old family saga in Tucson. Open a channel, The Thing walks again.

This time it’s my brother, the emissary of sad, he of the easily-addicted persuasion, the man with no teeth who can’t wear his partials because they don’t fit, a stranger to math and a sucker for the ages. To briefly recount, he lives on Social Security in a trailer deeded to him as part of his inheritance after my mother died. The rest of that gift, a not inconsiderable sum, came and went in a few months. Early this spring, however, my three siblings and I each got a tiny fresh new bit of money from our late aunt’s estate. In an forgivable moment of idiocy, I agreed to be trust agent for my brother’s portion. She had his number, all right, and set things up so that he gets twenty percent per year for five years instead of the the whole thing in one hunk. As official agent for the trust, my job is to send him one-fifth of the total each year, which I did for the first time around April 1st. All gone now, of course.

A few days ago he called me at 7:30 a.m., 6:30 a.m. his time—hmm—to ask for an advance on the 2015 check I’d be mailing at the end of the year. “Four or five hundred,” he said, due to being “overextended.” This was outside the rules and I told him as much, and then quickly relented and said I would send it. It’s his money, anyway, right, and I wanted all the whole thing to just vanish, so I scribbled a check for $500 and put it right in the mail. No, I didn’t write “for deposit only” on the back of the check. So?

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The big news is that the orioles are back, as anyone can plainly see. Also of passing interest is that I have either eliminated the middleman or else he just left, and now the lights are back on. That’s a good way to put it, I think, even if the truth is that it’s always been dark in here and I just never noticed.

But I had a great hike yesterday! The last few times I’ve gone out, I’ve overshot my two-mile marker by fifty yards or more before realizing my mistake, and damn if it didn’t happen again. This time, however, I decided to keep going. The trail ran close to the edge of a cliff overlooking the junction of the Rio Pueblo and the Rio Grande, and I’d probably see something cool. Along the way I spied a curious arroyo I hadn’t noticed before and left the trail to investigate. (My ultimate goal in these instances is to discover a spring; failing that, a skeleton maybe, or a chest of gold coins from an old stagecoach robbery.) What I found was a small, mild-mannered arroyo about ten feet deep with a smooth sandy bottom like a manicured path. It surely led all the way to the cliff—where else?—and I wanted to find out.

Wow. Just wow.

I have to go back with my camera, because the end of this thing was one of the most dangerous places I’ve ever encountered. Torrents of water in eons past had smoothed out the opening. There were a couple of big flat rocks to draw you forward and then nothing but air! The view was amazing, of course. I stayed well back from the edge and studied the angle between the road far below and a straight line from there to where I was standing; the next time I’m down at the bottom, I may be able to look up and spot where I was. But that was enough, because the place scared me to death. As I worked my way overland back to the trail, I was surprised to discover another arroyo that also led to a sheep-eating exit at the top of the cliff!

There are so many ways to get hurt in this landscape, with compound fractures or worse around every bend. But I did make it back to the trail and headed for home. Along the way, I saw… I saw… a dam.

Yup. Across the small valley to my right, there in the middle of the freaking high desert, was an old bulldozed dam about fifty yards long, covered with sagebrush. At one end was a long-ago breach where the water had drained. In front of the dam stretched a wide, flat area like a river bottom where grasses and sagebrush grew thick and lush. The soil there was actually soft! My hiking stick went in almost a full foot with only gentle pressure. This is crazy, I thought. We’re in a terrible drought. There hasn’t been any water flowing in this little valley for decades. Even so, what little runoff there is must flow under the surface and to account for all that. I couldn’t believe it, and yes, I’ll get pictures of all of these things.

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