November 22 to December 18, 2016—ABQ
The past month has been taken up with enjoying the company and hospitality of our daughter and her fam in Albuquerque (a.k.a. the Duke City, ABQ, Kerky). Hillary and Tom and our grandkids Clementine and Tavish live in one of the most pleasant neighborhoods (Southeast Heights adjoining Nob Hill). It is known for the strong sense of community evinced here. The neighbors have keys to one another’s homes, are often visiting with one another, and hosting neighborhood street parties a couple of times a year. At Christmas the neighborhood streets, walkways, and parts of the houses are decorated with luminarias, paper bags weighted with sand with a small candle placed inside. (This is a distinctly New Mexico custom, altho in northern New Mexico they are called farolitos.) The folks on Hillary’s street go from house to house on Christmas Eve, enjoying a nosh and a nip at each. So the past weeks have had us enjoying/chasing/chastising the grandkids, the details of which not many would find interesting.
[Then again, who doesn’t want to hear about my grandchildren. This is Tavish in a reflective moment. He has an obsession with buses and we were stopped at a light coming back from the shop that is working on the Scamp. He saw lots of buses there and even sat in the driver’s seat of a huge motor coach, and that’s what he’s recollecting, I believe.)
[Clem attends a school that, on Fridays, consists of spending the entire day in the bosque along the Rio Grande. It is a great program, some German import called something like ‘Wilderness Kindergarten” –they go out in the woods in all but the most inclement weather, they make up their own play, the adults hang back and only intervene to avert the most extreme injury. I joined in one Friday. Clem, as is her usual during the Bosque trips, elected to take a short nap after lunch and story time, looking like something from an old world fairy tale.]
Another local Holiday tradition practiced in the Nob Hill area is the Sparkle Parade, a nighttime event in which all kinds of vehicles are covered over with increasingly elaborate displays of Christmas lights and paraded down Central Avenue—vintage cars, the volkswagen club, trash trucks, cement trucks, firetrucks, bicyclists, horse brigades. It is an unpretentious, jolly event that gets bigger every year.
Albuquerque is the largest city in NM, with about half the state’s population. The city was founded along the Rio Grande, which is usually shallow and about fifty yards wide here, in 1702 and continues to expand in all directions. The city is in a rift valley at an elevation of 5,000 feet. The Sandia Mountains loom over the city to the east, at 10,000+ feet. Their appearance changes every time you turn around—crowned in clouds that disappear and leave behind snow on the crests that melts in the afternoon, and throughout the day the stone changes from pink to purple to gold to black. A pastel pink is one of the defining colors of the region, the color of the granite that the mountains are composed of and from which the pink-tinged sand is derived. A few miles to the west of the city one sees a seventeen mile long escarpment and, on the mesa above, a string of extinct volcano cones.
The escarpment is a cliff face of basalt produced by the volcanoes. The surface of the basalt gains a patina of black over the millennia, and if you chisel away the black surface a reddish-yellow stone is revealed. The native people’s (Pueblo, mostly) engraved images in the basalt boulders, some recognizable as stylized representations of snakes and lighting and such, some abstract, some seeming to depict alien beings. There are many thousands of these petroglyphs concentrated in a relatively small area and in the 1980s the whole area became Petroglyph National Monument. Within the park are three very nice hikes, two going through the canyons containing the most ‘glyphs, the other going around the base of the cinder cones that remain of the volcanoes. At the park visitor center we watched a short film about the stone symbols advancing several academic and spiritual theories about the meaning of the writing. Surprisingly, to me, no one advanced the idea that it was the work of young graffiti artists; I think I know goofing off when I see it. “Hey, man, this one looks like your mother.”
I also took a long uphill hike in the Manzano Mountains, a smaller range south of the Sandias. Tunnel Canyon, Birdhouse Crest, and part of Otero Canyon. There was snow in patches on the higher elevations. Be sure to bring water with you no matter how undemanding the trail might appear; this is parching country.
[Don’t know if there is enough resolution here but this is from the volcano area looking east across the rift valley. Albuquerque is somewhere in the middle distance and the Sandia Peaks in the far distance.]
[Manzano mountains at maybe 7,000 feet looking north to the east side of the Sandias.]
Getting the Scamp and our heads ready for Mexico. Bought the requisite car insurance, decided on a first base camp destination about two hours south of Mexicali, in San Felipe on the Gulf of California. We expect to cross over around January 8. The couple that I mentioned we met in Key Largo, Florida, starting their second year of living in their small Trillium trailer, might caravan with us down the Baja coast. I hope it comes about, comfort in numbers and they are good company, but the idea just emerged and isn’t settled yet.