These mounted animals look down at me like judges ready for my sentencing.
Hung over the aisles of rods and reels, shotguns and rifles, fishing tackle, ammunition, these guys are frozen in their final moment of life.
Hunters have always stayed close to their prey.
In New Guinea, deep in jungles, hunters wear shrunken heads of enemies around their waist. Plains Indians danced under the moon at night wearing buffalo robes with horns hooking the air. Ancient Incas wore feathered head dresses. Seafaring whaling men carved walrus tusks with designs of ships and harpoons. Oceanic islanders wear shark teeth around their wrists.. Texans put cow horns on car bumpers. Sportsmen hang calendars in their garages that feature big game animals and buxom women. Presidents pose with one foot on the body of a downed lion.
Nature’s variety is on display here and, fortunately,for these trophies, our eating habits have changed. Most of us urban folk don’t dine on deer, raccoon, llamas, opossums,alligators, snakes or geese.
Human consumption of alcohol, ironically, saves more of these fine animals than the Sierra Club can dream about saving.
Even in death,these animals seem too regal to be stuffed and hung on a grocery store wall.
If this was ” Twilight Zone, ” I’d be hanging up there on the wall and an elk would be buying his hunting license and talking about two legged trophy humans who are easier to shoot than ducks on a pond.
News is only a bulletin board away.
The Rainbow Grocery is South Fork’s main grocery and, besides food, you can buy fishing licenses here, camping gear, lures and flies, ice and bug spray. Right on the main drag, it is next to the Rainbow Motel , close enough to walk to on a chilled morning. Their bulletin board is so full of notes it needs some cleaning up by an assistant manager, or higher.
Their bulletin board has all the standard fare – ads for travel trailers and ATV’s, promos for upcoming Art Shows and Music concerts,cabins for sale, who to call to get your septic tank pumped.. If you need your dog groomed, your health improved, a place to live, a place to worship, you have times and dates and phone numbers.
Most people’s most important messages, though, will never make the Bulletin Board. Their special notices will stay locked up deep inside their hearts waiting for the right person to reveal them too.
I don’t want to know any deep secrets this morning and am relieved to see only trivial stuff.
I’m looking for what real estate goes for here in a place that is too cold for me to ever want to live.
I don’t want to know why someone can’t find love in a world precious short of it.
Warning about the side effects of exercise, however, are mildly amusing.
Leaving Antonito, Colorado, it is not hard to see two gleaming towers off to the east, the sun glistening off silver spires made out of hub caps, flattened beer cans, wire, window casements and whatever other material comes into the hands of it’s builder.
You drive a few blocks to the east, off the main highway, and, in a residential neighborhood, you come to temples created by a Vietnam vet who came back home after the war.
Dominic Espinosa, who prefers to be called ” Cano”, lives nearby the castle, in a little trailer, and tends to his garden, living off the land as he did when he was a kid with eleven brothers and sisters, his mother a cafeteria worker at a local school. There are interviews where he explains that ” Jesus lives in the castle, ” and that ” God built it. ”
Besides Jesus there are two crossed arrows at the entry to the yard that warn that alcohol and tobacco are poison, but marijuana is the best answer to many things.
It is normal to wonder about people, but the fact that one man would so consistently pursue a goal most others would label eccentric, causes me to think about personal obsessions.
On a personal level, Scotttreks not far from Cano’s castle.
Cano uses metal and wood while Scott uses words.
Highway 285 winds it’s way through Espanola, Ojo Caliente, Tres Piedras, Antonito, and eventually Alamosa, Colorado.
Another way to see this high country is riding a narrow gauge railroad that runs from Antonito, Colorado to Chama, New Mexico and back.
This narrow gauge train runs on steam and there is a man who works his shovel the entire trip, pushing coal into a hot firebox that heats water that makes steam that moves rods that turns wheels rolling on narrow tracks.
Richard and I pull off the highway and watch the antique train pull into the Antonito station.
These cars used to carry goods and people but now carry sightseers who want to revisit the past, imagine themselves in an old John Wayne movie and take their kids on an afternoon trip.
I look for John Wayne to climb down off the train with a big wide brimmed stetson, a red bandana around his neck, six guns wrapped around his waist and a badge on his chest.
All that get off the train this afternoon are kids with cell phones, overweight adults with walkers and oxygen, and railroad employees getting ready to go home.
Re-living the past is not for the faint of heart.
Real railroads, these days, carry shipping containers filled with stuff made in China.
Mogpog has typhoons. Colorado has snow.
This morning Colorado vehicles have a snow blanket of white and a rising sun is beginning to melt the blanket.
The United States has launched cruise missiles into a Syrian military base claiming chemical warfare was used against other combatants in an ongoing proxy war. Russia is moving a carrier to the gulf and adding missile defense systems to Syrian military installations. North Korea will start a nuclear war if attacked by the U.S.. American troops are moved to Poland. The stock market continues to go up as earnings and U.S. GDP goes down. Fifty million Americans are on food stamps. Homeless vets hold signs on corners asking for loose change.
This snow is a message that the Philippines are very very small in my rear view mirror.
In Mogpog, I didn’t worry about tomorrow, think about World War 3, or dream about fire cutting through big cities where apocalyptic wandering lone wolfs fight each other for survival.
In Mogpog, we sat next to a little fan on the front porch and watched lazy clouds hopscotch across the sky.
I should, I suppose, be seeing the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Everest, or kangaroos in Australia,but tomorrow I drive back to Albuquerque.
New Mexico, for those who don’t know much about it, isn’t even a flyover state.
I would book a trip to the moon if it was affordable and available, but, for now, I’m stuck on this planet driving a vehicle that uses fossil fuels and requires me to drive it.
Airports are portals to the world.
The Denver International Airport was built in cow pastures to the east of Denver, after Stapleton closed, and was turned into condos.
To fly out of Denver you follow I-70 east till you see white sails in the country, shuttle parking lots, arrival and departure ramps, east and west terminals. There are other ways to see our world but by air is the quickest and most dominant. Percentage wise, air travel is safer than walking to your local grocery.
Airports have not been designed for long term comfort though, which causes sleepless nights for those of us who travel.
This trip, the quietest place to sleep, is an interfaith chapel in the east terminal overlooking TSA processing on the commons below.. A note on the chapel doors reminds you not to put your feet on chairs, move furniture, leave trash, or interrupt prayers.
This spiritual portal should be full of travelers since we are all about to board aluminum cans and be carried thirty thousand feet up into the sky, but no one is here but me.
The screening to get on planes is daunting, but nothing compared to the screening we have to go through to get into Heaven.
I admire Mark Twain’s quip that ” I want to go to heaven for the climate, but go to Hell for the company. ”
Stuck in the airport till my flight boards for Manilla , early in the morning, I am feeling like Hell will not be a place I want to go even if Twain says the company is good.
I bet the seats down there will be several sizes too small and the sound system will be blasting rap music as loud as it will go.
Recent Comments