NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/travel/17122

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From: [e-mail] (mark.r.leeper)
Subject: Arizona and New Mexico (part 4 of 4)
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Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 16:15:28 GMT
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Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 49



     Go into a Taos bookstore and you will find the best books on Indian
culture on the bottom shelves (they are not high-profit items) in Dover
editions.  With the possible exception of Penguin, Dover is the only
publisher I know that has a fandom.

     After shopping we had dinner at a Mexican restaurant and returned
to the room.

     Actually the Super 8 in Taos is one of the nicest motels we've
stayed at.  The furniture is all in Mexican and Indian style.  When's
the last time you stayed in a hotel room where the furniture was signed
by the maker?  The room is very nice-looking and everything works as
expected.

     October 27, 1992:  Well, there was a message on the radio telling
you to warn your children about cutting between parked cars when they go
out trick-or-treating.  There are lots of warnings on the radio.  As a
fan of horror and the macabre, I sort of regretted that Halloween has
been turned from the scary event it once was to a light, fun children's
holiday.  In its origins it was a time when evils were loosed on the
world.  Apparently, however, the tide is turning and Halloween is once
again becoming a time to fear the unknown evils around us.  Halloween is
once again a really scary time for people.  And you thought the world
was going downhill, huh?

     We found a restaurant on the main drag of Taos that had an
overflowing parking lot, a place called El Taoseno.  Most of the
clientele look like laborers, most of Mexican descent.

     Huevos Rancheros seem different each different place they are
ordered.  I ordered this with green chiles but it still wasn't all that
spicy, I think.  Of course, I think my tolerance for spicy food has
increased so that it does not taste as spicy to me as it once did.  The
dish came with a tortilla and margarine.  I am not sure if you just
butter and eat a tortilla or what.  I used it to sop up chile sauce.

     We headed out on the Enchanted Circle.  This is supposed to be
really beautiful scenery, but as the Southwest goes it is over-rated.  A
lot of it could be the Mohawk Trail.

     Along the drive we came to the DAV Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  I am
of mixed opinions on the various Vietnam memorials.  I do not want to
understate the seriousness or depth of the wounds of the Vietnam
tragedy.  I just wonder if this country spends a lot more effort licking
its wounds than other countries do.  I kind of doubt there are as many
memorials in Vietnam, which lost a lot more people.  It's like the
Challenger accident.  You keep seeing memorials to the Challenger
astronauts.  People start seeing the space program as costing billions
and it only kills people.  If mankind is going to survive, we have got
to get to the point where we can have viable life in space not dependent
on the Earth.  We have got to get to the point where no single disaster











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 50



can destroy all of mankind.  Planets don't last forever.  Either man-
made or natural, the disaster will eventually come.  I would call
breaking dependence on Earth mankind's number one long-term priority.
But we can't do that if we keep simpering over the first few casualties
and deciding space isn't worth the effort because people can get killed.
If it isn't cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sedentary lifestyle, or
handguns--any of which kill Americans in horrendous numbers--then it is
too dangerous to fool with.  Just on one Saturday night how many more
Americans die from these causes than have died in the entire history of
the space program?  And the Saturday night deaths went for nothing.

     Vietnam was really, really bad.  But considering the number of
really bad things in this world , it has gotten attention out of
proportion.  So has the Challenger accident.  Let's move on.

     Our next stop near the Enchanted Circle was the town of Cimarron.
This was one of the wooly towns of the wild and wooly west.  The town
saw the likes of Kit Carson, Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Clay Allison,
Buffalo Bill Cody, Davy Crockett, Evelyn Leeper, and Blackjack Ketchum.
The big attraction in Cimarron is the St. James Hotel.  It started as a
bar built in 1873 and was made into a hotel in 1880.  Twenty-six men
died in gunfights at the St. James.  Perhaps the best known gunfight was
on November 1, 1875, between Robert A. Clay Allison and Francisco
"Pancho" Griego.

     Clay Allison was born in 1840 in Waynesboro, Tennessee, where his
family had a farm.  In spite of a club foot, he was something of a
scrapper.  When the Civil War broke out he could have been deferred
because of his foot, but chose to defend Tennessee.  After the war three
Allison brothers, one sister, and her husband all moved to Texas.  Clay
signed on as a cowhand and went on several cattle drives.

     In 1870 when local cattlemen Coleman and Lacey moved to New Mexico,
Clay drove their cattle in exchange for three hundred head he could
keep.  He started a lucrative ranch in Colfax County, New Mexico, near
Cimarron.

     Clay found he had a taste for and a talent for leading vigilantes.
He had a successful outing on October 7, 1870, leading a mob to nearby
Elizabethtown, where they broke into the jail and lynched an alleged
murderer.  Allison decapitated the body and took the head back to
Cimarron, where he placed the head on a pole and used it for decoration.

     On January 4, 1874, gunfighter Chuck Colbert challenged Allison to
a horse race.  The result was called a tie and the two men went to
dinner together at a restaurant.  After dinner they had coffee.  Colbert
started to serve Allison coffee but Allison noticed Colbert picked up
the pot with one hand and his pistol with the other.  Allison wanted to
be served neither hot coffee nor hot lead.  Colbert's shot missed;
Allison's did not.












Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 51



     On October 30, 1875, Allison led another lynch mob to lynch
suspected murderer Cruz Vega.  Vega claimed another man was the killer,
but was lynched and shot in the back.  Allison took the lynch rope, tied
it to his saddle horn, and dragged the body over rocks and bushes.

     Cruz had a friend in town who was a dangerous pistolero.  This was
Pancho Griego.  On May 30 the same year Griego had been dealing three-
card monte with three enlisted men of the Sixth U.S. Cavalry.  They
accused Griego of cheating.  He threw the money on the floor. They knew
what was coming next and ran for the door.  Griego had his pistol out
and had killed two and injured the third before they could get out the
door.  Out of bullets, Griego leaped on the third man and finished the
job with his Bowie knife.  He was a dangerous man to cross.

     And Allison's treatment of Cruz was crossing Griego.  The lynching
was on Saturday, October 30.  Griego decided Allison would die.  On
Monday, November 1, Griego saw Allison in the street and invited him for
a drink and a talk at the St. James Saloon.  There was a clear tension
between the men.  After talking at the bar they decided for more privacy
they would repair to an empty corner of the saloon.  Nobody knows what
happened, but Allison suddenly had a gun in his hand.  There were three
shots and the lights went out.  When they came back on, Allison was gone
and Griego lay dead on the floor.

     There is more to the story.  The locals started deciding that Clay
Allison was not the kind of citizen that Cimarron needed.  The CIMARRON
NEWS AND PRESS wrote a scathing editorial against him, so before it hit
the streets he and some friends broke into the newspaper office, smashed
the press with sledge hammers, smashed up the furniture, and threw the
whole mess into the Colorado River.  Next morning he took the printed
copies of the newspaper and sold them himself for twenty-five cents a
piece.  When he passed by the newspaper office, the woman who owned the
paper and whom Allison had never met was standing there.  "Look what you
did.  You should be ashamed of yourself."  "I don't fight with women,"
Allison said, pulling $200 out of his pocket.  "Go buy yourself a new
press."

     Allison tried to steal a herd of Army mules but things went wrong.
While he was escaping he accidentally shot himself in his club foot and
needed a cane for the rest of his life.

     On December 21, 1876, Clay and his brother John were drunk in a
saloon.  A local deputy tried to get them to give up their firearms.
Ignored, he fired a shotgun.  He injured John but Clay killed him.  Clay
spent time in jail for this one.

     One of the stories of Allison was that once a dentist he went to
was working on the wrong tooth.  Clay left and went to another dentist.
Then he returned to the first dentist and used the dentist's own pliers
to extract one of the dentist's front teeth.  He would have done the
other but people came to hear what the screaming was.











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 52



     On July 7, 1887, Clay very anti-climatically fell off a wagon and
fractured his skull.  An hour later he was dead.

     Headed back to Taos you pass through the Red River Valley.  I sort
of doubt it is the same one as the song.  I sort of associated that with
Texas, but I could be wrong.

     Also you go over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.  This was at one time
the second tallest bridge in the U.S. highway system.  As you walk the
bridge you cross a gorge 685 feet deep.  It makes you feel a little
nervous as you walk it.  Even worse, it sways in the wind.  When heavy
trucks go over, the whole bridge just sort of shakes under you.  Makes
you a bit nervous.

     We finished the Enchanted Circle and returned to Taos.  Our last
stop in Taos was the Kit Carson Home and Museum.  Christopher "Kit"
Carson seems to have lucked out in the history books.  He is known as an
Indian fighter, yet he is also remembered positively by Indians today.
He executed orders fighting Apaches and marching Navajos to Bosque
Redondo where they were victimized by raids of other tribes and where
there was not enough land usable for crops.  However, he fought Indians
only after the bitterest of protests to his commanders.  At his first
opportunity he resigned and instead worked for Indian rights in
Washington and elsewhere.

     The Carson house was found much abandoned the first decade of this
century and it was restored.  Where possible it has been stocked with
actual artifacts of Carson's life.  Carson could neither read nor write,
but he did dictate his memoirs to a friend who wrote them down.  He then
sent them to a publisher where they were edited by a Mr. Peters.  Rather
than editing them down, they were edited up to five times their original
length.  Carson had his memoirs as published read to him and responded,
"Mr. Peters laid it on a leetle thick."

     The museum shows many of the firearms of Carson's time and shows
what was involved in just loading them.  There are examples of military
uniforms of the period.  Other artifacts include a NEW YORK HERALD from
April 15, 1865, announcing the assassination of Lincoln.  Another case
had a metal bathtub of the period.  The last three rooms were a typical
bedroom, kitchen, and living room.  There is actually just about nothing
in the Carson house that old Kit would recognize, but as he was a hard-
drinking mountain man, that situation may also have occurred during his
life.

     On the way to Santa Fe, we stopped at the Santuario de Chimayo'.
This is a Catholic shrine where there are supposedly cures that take
place and there are crutches and asthma inhalers and the like left
abandoned there.  Illusionist The Amazing Randi investigated the cures.
What happens to the people who leave crutches there?  "The answer is
that they simply fall down."  I have had a cough this week.  I visited
the shrine.  I still have a cough.











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 53



     We continued to Santa Fe, got a room, had a mediocre Mexican dinner
at Tortilla Flats, and returned to the room.  And that pretty much was
our Tuesday.

     October 28, 1992:  Breakfast at the local JB's.

     Our first destination of the day is Bandelier National Monument.

     On the way we listened to the radio.  When we travel in the United
States we listen a *lot* to National Public radio.  Wherever the NPR
affiliate is, it usually has the music we most want to hear.  Also, I
like their "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" news programs
each day.  We have had miserable luck with them this trip.  Either by
design or coincidence every public station in Arizona and New Mexico
seems to be having their fund drives at the same time.  They are all
asking for money.  It makes them a real pain to listen to and that has
been most of the trip.

     I have to admit by this point in the trip I am just a bit pueblo-ed
out.  Only so many times can you climb a hill to see a bunch of adobe
bricks laid out in a rectangle.  The sort of thing that was at, say,
Pueblo Grande in Phoenix is worth going to only if you are going to less
than three archaeological sites in all.  So it was with a certain
measure of reluctance I set out in Frijoles Canyon.

     I don't know how or why a canyon came to be named for beans.  Like
a lot of scenery around these parts, the canyon is just beautiful.  It
is a nice forested walk at the bottom with pine trees all around.
Squirrels are plentiful (as they used to say) with a sort of black color
and tall tufted ears.  (Speaking of animals, a while back I noticed a
spectacular bird flying.  It was bright white, dark black, and had
touches of blue.  Spectacular bird it seemed to me.  It turns out on
asking that it is a rather common and little-respected bird.  It's a
magpie.  I think it's considered something of a pest to people grown too
used to its beauty to care.  Alfred Dreyfus admired the beautiful and
graceful birds that glided through the skies over Devil's Island.  Years
later he found out what kind of birds they were ... seagulls.  I can
tell you that West Coast seagulls are beautiful.  In New Jersey the
seagulls are nice but just don't have the long beautiful wings that the
California gulls have.  Maybe Dreyfus was seeing the California breed of
gulls.)

     Anyway, on either side of the canyon are cliffs with an odd look as
if the cliff has rotted or eroded under the surface, leaving the surface
mostly intact except for holes.  Actually the cliffs are really rock
spewed out by a volcano about one million B.C.  There were gas bubbles
in the rock that made the rock weak except for on the surface where it
cooled first.  The weak inner rock eroded under the surface and you got
large caves behind a Swiss-cheese-like surface.













Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 54



     There was a large kiva but what impressed me the most at the kiva
was that there was a tarantula minding her own business walking around
it.  It wasn't big like Mexican Tarantulas.  This little spider,
standing still, would have just fit into a circle two inches in
diameter.  We stood back at about two feet and watched her with
binoculars.  (Our binoculars will focus on fairly near objects and with
eight-power, we were getting a view like we were six inches away.)  She
must have been aware we were following her, but she just went about her
business.  Well, good hunting to her.

     Several of the caves had ladders to them.  Unlike Walnut Canyon,
these were not rock overhangs; you genuinely were inside an enclosure.
You could sit inside the cave and look out onto the valley.  Inside the
caves you could see petroglyphs--wall decorations.  Some really dated
back to the Indians.

     There were also places you could see petroglyphs on the outside.
There was also a long section of cave, perhaps fifty feet, that made a
long building that was subdivided (as the guidebook says) "condominium
style."

     There was a walk in the woods back to the Visitors Center.  We
watched for animals but saw only squirrels and birds.  We rarely see
much impressive, though on the way to the monument we'd passed three
young mule deer still not really skillful at this walking thing.  (And,
of course, we did see a genuine wild tarantula.)

     From there it was not a long way to Los Alamos (even making a wrong
turn).

     Los Alamos is Science City, USA.  That is just about the only
profession or industry in the town.  As one of the residents told us
proudly, it is a town where the library is a lot more popular than the
bar.  (Sounds like my kind of town!)  The town does seem to have a
campus-like feel--something about the size of the buildings and the ages
of the people.  You could almost believe you were at a graduate school.
A lot of people have colored identification cards, indicating levels of
security, I guess.

     I said earlier that I did not like science museums that talk down
to the visitor.  I also get tired of the same exhibits at every science
museum.  By those standards, the Bradbury Science Museum may be the best
science museum I have seen.  They had one minor part of an exhibit where
you lift equal volumes of oxygen, copper, and uranium to feel the
weight.  I'd seen that before.  Other than that minor exception, the
museum had totally new exhibits.

     Actually a fair piece of the museum is given over to a history of
the Manhattan Project.  That's fine: it is an interesting story.













Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 55



     We started with a twenty-minute documentary called "The Town That
Never Was."  It starts by flashing back and forth between footage of
Nazis on the march and placid scenes of Indian life.  It basically tells
how something called "The Ranch School" was operating in Los Alamos.
This was somebody's idea for how to teach boys the virtues of a healthy
outdoor life while they were engaged in a classical education.  The
footage of the Ranch School eerily echoes Nazi propaganda films of the
healthy lifestyle of the Hitler Youth.

     They show how scientists fled the racial laws of the Nazis, showing
passports stamped with a "J."  They knew that Hitler was engaged in an
atomic program and prompted Einstein to write Roosevelt the famous
letter.  It follows events through the bombing of Nagasaki and the
ending of the war.

     If you want more information, they have a "history wall" that also
tells the full story.  It includes two stations where you can choose any
of seven films each, each film about ten minutes, that tell the Los
Alamos story in more detail.  Titles include "ENIAC and MANIAC,"
"Hiroshima," and "Trinity."  I was impressed to see something similar at
the Winslow Meteor Crater, but this was better.

     The science stuff is intended to educate about the sort of research
done at Los Alamos.  And I mean educate.  Lots more videotapes, lots of
hands-on exhibits in subject like accelerators, reactor technology,
fusion, safeguards, computers, verification, etc.  Maybe the glove box
(handling blocks the way radioactive materials are handled) or a program
in the computer section that allowed you to put your name on a
certificate were there to keep younger people occupied.

     One booth shows a collection of recent news items from television
news programs about research Los Alamos is doing on AIDS, the human
genome, and waste disposal.  This is not a big museum, but there is a
lot to see.

     After the museum, we drove through town.  We stopped at the Fuller
Lodge which supposedly had maps of the town with information on who had
lived where.

     The woman at the desk kept us waiting while she talked on the phone
to someone who was obviously a personal friend.  When she finally would
talk to us, she said they were out of maps, but that the museum next
door was good.

     This was the Museum of Los Alamos County.  For the most part only
the post-1943 stuff was of real  interest.  They had a couple of rooms
devoted to the Manhattan Project.  There were things like the newspaper
account of Hiroshima.  There was a case devoted to censorship of
letters.













Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 56



     There was an interesting exchange of letters with Oppenheimer and
the management.  Oppenheimer wanted a nail in the wall so he could hang
his hat.  They gave him a coat rack.  He thanked them but said he wanted
a nail.  He got it.

     Somebody wrote the security organization saying it took sixty-three
days to clear someone for security work.  Sixty-three days is also the
gestation period of a dog.  Could they get it down to a rabbit?

     We finished with the museum and headed back to Santa Fe.  When we
got there we shipped some books home, then went to dinner, then went to
the room to write.

     On PBS we watched Mark Russell and an excellent documentary on the
Donner Pass disaster.

     October 29, 1992:  Today was our day to hit museums in the Santa Fe
area.  Breakfast was at JB's, then we drove in to the center of Santa Fe
and walked around.  It is not so new as the Taos downtown area but is
trying to appear just as chic.

     None of the museums were really memorable.  I will cover them
quickly.

     The Palace of the Governors: This is a one-story but long adobe
structure.  In front there are Indians selling their wares: jewelry,
etc.  A controversial law says that only Indians can sell there.  The
building was constructed in 1610 as the home of the Spanish governors.
We took a guided tour from a woman who was a bit flustered and had
problems expressing herself.

     Most memorable items:  A stagecoach called a mud buggy.  It was one
of the first vehicles to have shock absorbers.  Cost to take the stage
from Missouri to Santa Fe was $200, very high considering the day.  Also
memorable, when a state seal hanging was needed, a local hardware store
made it with materials at hand.  Ruffles of feathers are the bottoms of
spoons.  Longer feathers are knives.  Border done in keys.  It looks
fine from a distance until you look up close and see what it is really
made of.

     Also on display:

- Spanish armor, which was still chain mail and crossbows, obsolete in
 Europe at the time but sufficient against Pueblo Indians.

- A portable baptismal font.

- A fish vertebrae necklace.

- Matchlocks, flintlocks, and guns from many periods of Santa Fe's
 history.











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 57



- Wooden stirrups when metal was expensive or scarce.

- Spanish saddles and spurs.

- A typical church.

     The group kept accidentally setting off theft alarms.  The guide
did it herself twice.  It was a new alarm system and just leaning on the
metal fence around an exhibit set it off.

     Santa Fe Fine Arts Museum: It was hard to tell how much of the
museum was closed off to the public, but it was at least half.  There
was no warning of this when you start out and you still pay full
admission.  Most of the art you see is called "modern art." Each piece
of modern art has a paragraph explaining it.  I am reminded of the scene
in THE RIGHT STUFF where Gus Grissom says, "The issue is monkey," and
then the other astronauts chime in with their interpretations of what
Gus said.  Gus didn't express himself well and neither did these
artists.  The artists should be eloquent, no incoherent, in my opinion.

     Most memorable piece: three horizontal pastel stripes on a white
background.  Now what does it mean?  Well, the artist was in the hills
and came down into an almost perfectly flat valley.  She liked the
valley so painted three horizontal stripes.

     There are two photographs that the great Stieglitz considered his
two best.  They look like underexposed pictures of sky, but it is hard
to tell what they are of.  My opinion is that not everything must be
obvious about a painting, but something should convey the meaning.  Fail
that and you don't have art because you aren't expressing yourself.

     We started to go out in the sculpture garden and a couple out there
shouted for us to leave the door open--if it closes, it locks you into
the courtyard.  I went to tell the management.  "That's right; if you
close the door it locks.  Leave it not quite closed," they told me.
It's a complaint they've gotten many times before but, heck, they are
there in service of art, not convenience, I guess.  They don't want to
unlock the door or warn anyone.  Art considerations aside, this strikes
me as a singularly badly run museum.

     Santa Fe Folk Art Museum:  I am reminded of some of the London
museums that take a semi-interesting collectible and show you a
bewildering array of them.  This place has a room full of what might be
called toys, I guess.  A lot of them are dolls or miniature villages.
And then they have them from just about every culture imaginable.  You
have Indian figures and Arab figures and figures from South and Central
America.  They also have separate and more normal displays of Anglo,
Mexican, and Turkish crafts.  I am not sure why Turkish.  I do know why
they didn't have an Indian display.  That was separate. They have used
the computer creatively again here.  They have a room that is a
recreation of a room from pioneer times and a touchscreen showing you











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 58



the room.  You can touch an item in the room on the screen and get a
lecture on just that item.  In fact, you can get three lectures: one on
how it was made, one on how it was used, and a third one I don't
remember.

     Museum of Indian Arts and Culture:  Near the Folk Art Museum is an
Indian Museum.  Pottery, blankets, kachinas, etc.  Not a bad museum, but
a lot of overlap with what we'd already seen.  It was a good collection,
but we were not anxious to spend a lot of time with it.  There was a
hands-on room and a guy running it who loved to talk to people.  He was
more interesting to us than the museum.  His name was Al Baston (or
something like that).

     After that we set out over the Turquoise Trail to Albuquerque.
This is an alternate route to the interstate that claims to be historic
but is so only for the mining that was done in those parts.  To me
"historic" means it had conflict and that area appears to have always
been pretty peaceful.  It is promoted because there are shops.  I am not
sure if we followed it right, but it led to about ten miles of very bad
road going through the hills.  We got to Albuquerque after dark, got a
really nice room for under $40 a night, and went out for Mexican dinner.

     We watched Ross Perot on CNN and wrote in our logs.

     October 30, 1992:  My sleep pattern has been to wake up at about 5
AM, write for a while, then sleep again until 7 AM.  This morning was no
exception.  Then we went for breakfast--beans and eggs--and on to the
Natural History Museum.  The walk to the door is flanked by two dinosaur
statues.

     Museums just seem a whole lot better in this part of the world than
they seem on the East Coast.  I would have gone crazy for a Natural
History Museum like this when I was a kid.  There is a lot of
participation in what you are seeing.  The center of the museum--unless
you count the Dynamax which has a separate admission--is the Evolator.
This is more like an amusement park ride than something you'd find in a
museum.  It is a ride that takes you back in time to several eras in the
geological past.  You get into a room that from the outside looks like a
very large elevator with one large and two small television screens.
The floor also is on some sort of hydraulic or pneumatic control to make
it jiggle and jounce.  The machine "stops" at points where New Mexico is
covered by shallow water, twice in the age of dinosaurs, once in the age
of early horses, and maybe one or two others.  The pilot gets out once
in the age of dinosaurs to interact with them.  It's about a six-minute
ride.  The dinosaurs are done with models and stop-motion animation.
The early horses are played rather convincingly by dogs.  In any case it
is clear the children *love* the Evolator and it is a good intro to
everything else in the museum.

     When I was growing up, the sole criteria for a museum (just about)
was whether it had a good set of specimens.  The American Museum of











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 59



Natural History *is* a museum that is heavy on specimens.  Case after
case of them.  And they are presented in a pretty undramatic manner.
There are a few nice skeletons in the middle of the floor and the rest
is just stuff flat on the walls.

     The New Mexico Natural History Museum has a much more intelligent
approach.  I don't think they have a whole lot in the way of specimens.
Yes, they have some, but not as much as a lot of museums.  But they do
present what they have in a tremendously engaging manner.  Every exhibit
gets the viewer involved.  They have maybe three dinosaur skeletons, but
they put them on a simulated landscape to make them seem much more
lifelike.  Or they will have an exhibit that lets you see what a
dinosaur sees.  They have a big dinosaur with lenses where the eyes are.
You look through two eyepieces in the back and look out the lenses.
This means your eyesight is weak looking ahead, but good looking at
things on either side.  This is entirely man-made, no specimen required,
but tells you more about the dinosaurs than just another mounted
specimen might.

     Oh, so what else does the museum have?  Well, one thing that
doesn't quite work for me is a series of displays as you walk through
(the displays are semi-chronological, starting with the origin of the
Universe) showing where the continents were at some time within the
exhibit.  The dinosaur display has a globe showing where the continents
sat in the age of the dinosaurs.  That part is fine, but it will also
have a changing picture showing what nature is like at that time.  You
take a polarized filter provided and turn it so you see two different
scenes blend together.  I would rather they just show you the two
scenes.  The polarization is a gimmick and not one that works all that
well.  They show you the origin of Earth.  Then there is a dinosaur
exhibit.

     There is a nice piece, but one that does not quite work
mechanically, that lets you start with a ball bearing on a tree of
tracks.  You guide it along and choose different paths for it based on
questions like, "Do you develop scales or feathers?" Eventually the ball
rolls into a drum that rotates from the weight and shows you what you
have evolved into.  Nice idea but it doesn't quite work.

     There is a nice piece that has you walk through a volcanic cavern
and learn about it.  You see lava flowing under your feet.  You see
steam coming from the walls.  Another piece takes you through a
limestone cavern showing you limestone formations and bats.  It shows
you how caverns are formed.  The rock formations even feel about right,
based on the "touch-me" samples at Carlsbad.  I won't go through
everything.

     We also saw the Dynamax film "Niagara: Miracles, Myths & Magic."  I
am not sure how Dynamax differs from IMAX.  Both are flat-screen
projection onto a very large screen.  The film is about forty-five
minutes long and is a history of the Falls showing lots of people in











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 60



danger but nobody getting killed.  It's a big production with historic
costumes and a lush score by Bill Conti.

     After the museum we were going to go to the University of New
Mexico campus and go to some museums.  However, they seemed not all that
interesting and it would have been really tough to find parking, so we
sort of decided to play hooky and go to a movie.  We wanted to see 1492:
THE CONQUEST OF PARADISE.  That didn't start until 3:45 PM, so we had a
couple of hours to kill.  We did that by going to a big new discount
bookstore called Bookstar.  I am almost certain it is just Barnes &
Noble using another name out here.  We also walked through a mall.

     The movie itself was a disappointment.  While it starts well in its
biography of Columbus, the story really gets muddled and I am pretty
sure it also has some serious historical accuracy problems.

     After that it was to the recommended Mr. Powdrell's Barbecue.  That
was a disappointment also.  The beef ribs (which should be the best
thing at a barbecue) had a funny flavor and were not very good.

     Back at the room we listened to Bush on LARRY KING LIVE and that
made three things not up to snuff.

     October 31, 1992:  This is our last day.  For our last breakfast we
sort of shared having waffles and potato pancakes.  I'd been up a little
late last night watching a horror film for Halloween.  This one is
called IT! and is about a golem.  It is, to my knowledge, the only
English-language film about a golem.  So I have a special interest.
Unfortunately, it is not very good.  Well, the phrase "sucks pond water"
comes to mind.

     As something of a novelty for me, I am pretty much caught up in my
log.  Usually I am at least a week behind at the end of a three-week
trip.  Last night I even have a chance to read one of the books I
brought, an anthology.  This morning the choice was Kipling's "The Man
Who Would Be King."  Just as good on a second reading as it was on the
first.  If you haven't read it, do so as soon as you put down this log.
Or at least see the Michael Caine, Sean Connery film directed by John
Huston.  That's the only film I can think of that I would recommend to
*anybody* over age seven.

     Our first visitation of the day is the Albuquerque Museum.  This
museum is split between local history and local art.  We were not seeing
it at its best.  One wing was closed and a slide show of Albuquerque's
past was gone south for the winter.

     The museum starts with the inevitable Indian pottery.  I have to
say that somewhere I missed the boat on Indian pottery.  They will have
a museum with fifty very similar pieces of pottery.  The difference will
be in the abstract patterns on the pottery.  But even they are not
different enough to be intriguing.  I'd like to find out when people











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 61



look at fifty different pieces of Indian pottery what they are looking
for.

     After the Indian things you have Spanish artifacts.  There was a
leather pouch and a later writing box with the initials "IHS."  What's
IHS?  Historians are not real sure.  There are three different Latin
phrases it might be, all religious.  I am not sure how much
consideration they have given to it being the owner's initials.

     Then there were examples of crossbows.  An interesting fact they
have in the description was that in 1139 the Pope decided that the
crossbow was too nasty a weapon.  It could be used against non-
Catholics, but never against Catholics.  Catholics deserved to be safe
from the ravages of the deadly weapon.  The Pope was, of course,
ignored.

     There were examples of Spanish pikes, including one with a crescent
head whose purpose is unknown.

     When showing suits of Spanish armor, they point out that the custom
of saluting probably came out of the days of wearing suits of armor,
when you'd lift your faceplate to show a commander who you were.  Then
he would lift to show who he was.  The commanders liked the mark of
respect and kept it in the act even when there was no armor.

     There was a board that showed how some cowboy words came from the
Spanish.  The Spanish word ("la reata") for rope became "lariat."
"Buckaroo" is a corruption of "vaquero," or cowboy.

     Then you see more house furnishings of the period and a room of
serapes.  Next there came a kids' participation room.  This is becoming
fairly common in museums out here apparently.  Kids could try on old
clothing, look through an old stereoscope, read old ads.  One ad
suggests that in summer kids have less appetite, but you can increase
your child's appetite with Ovaltine, the Swiss food discovery.  Your
child may even eat his vegetables.  Children on Ovaltine gain as much as
a pound a week!  I think they no longer make that claim.

     Upstairs the museum turns into an art museum.  They have a lot by a
fairly creative artist Luis Tapia.  I'll describe one piece by him.  You
are looking at a full-size dashboard of a car in three dimensions.
Through the windshield you see a road stretching before you.  On the
dash are two foot-high religious statues.  The steering wheel is
actually a crown of thorns.  There was a similar piece in the Heard
Museum.  There is also a fair amount of cowboy sculpture and art.  Lots
of nature scenes.  The only art that is abstract and has no surface
meaning is from a local high school.  On the whole I'd say this is a
better art museum than the Santa Fe Fine Arts Museum.

     Our final visit of the trip is Kirtland Air Force Base and the
National Atomic Museum.  I asked Evelyn why the Atomic Museum is here.











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 62



"Everything got to be someplace." Somehow this is *not* a satisfying
answer.  Later I see a reference that we are in the Sandia Mountains.
Is Sandia National Laboratories anywhere around this area?  "I think it
is on Kirtland," she says.  "That is why the National Atomic Museum is
here!" Sandia does nuclear weapons work.

     They start the tour with a fifty-minute film about the full project
to build the Bomb taken to the end of World War II.  This is one of the
David L. Wolper documentaries.  Then you see a photographic retelling of
the same story.  One interesting anecdote:  The scientists who designed
and built the bomb had a pool going on how much energy they expected
would be liberated by the Trinity test.  They were swamped at the low
end.  Most people were pretty sure it would be an insignificant energy
output.  I wonder how many people were betting the high end.  There
were, of course, those who thought that the whole atmosphere of the
Earth would be pulled into the chain reaction and the one event would
destroy the world.  My suspicion is that nobody bet that way due to the
difficulty and pointlessness of collecting.

     Another fact I didn't know was that Leslie Groves got the
assignment of leading the Manhattan Project based on a previous giant
project.  He was in charge of building the Pentagon.

     Just the plutonium for the test was worth a billion dollars.  If it
just went off like a firecracker, that plutonium would be lost.  A huge
lead casing was built to surround the bomb that would collect all the
plutonium and make it easy to recover.  Then Oppenheimer started to
worry.  If the bomb really worked, that casing would be a real danger.
Just to be on the safe side, they decided to risk losing a billion
dollars worth of plutonium.

     Well, it went off and the low-bettors on energy yield lost their
money.  Of course, when it was successful Oppenheimer had very mixed
feeling.  "I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

     You also saw casings of nuclear weapons as they advanced.  You can
walk outside and see nuclear missiles including Snark, Bomarc, Redstone,
and Honest John.  You also see a B-52, nicknamed "The Buff."  They have
a twenty-minute film telling you the features of the Buff and telling
you why they enjoy flying in the Buff.

     They have an exhibit in which you use pilot controls to fly a model
plane (broken so you could turn neither left nor right).

     While we were waiting for the first film, an older Japanese couple
came in and the husband was telling the wife about Old Bridge, New
Jersey.  It had to be more than a coincidence that we were there and
someone was talking about someplace called Old Bridge.  He had seen our
address in the registry and worked with someone who lived in Old Bridge.
His name was something like Sakura.  He was from Teaneck and had a
company that makes museum exhibits.  He was visiting this museum as part











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 63



of his job.  His company had also supplied exhibits for the New Mexico
Natural History Museum.

     Mrs. Sakura's family had lived in Hiroshima and survived the events
of the film we'd seen only because there was a hill between them and the
target.  I wish I could have talked to her more, but it is probably an
unhappy subject.

     There is also a small (almost tiny) science section of which the
main focal point is a ping-pong ball chain reaction.  The outer lobby is
a biography of Stanislaw Ulam.  It is very unusual to see any tribute to
someone who is predominantly a mathematician (Einstein was more
physicist than mathematician).  I was pleased to see it.

     Well, that was it for the attractions we saw.  We had some spare
time, so we went to see the movie BOB ROBERTS, which had gotten good
reviews for some reason not totally obvious.

     The film is a fictional pseudo-documentary about a yuppie right-
wing folk-singer and demagogue.  The idea had genuine possibilities, but
I thought they were mostly wasted.  If you are going to portray a
demagogue on the screen you should make him plausibly charismatic.  At
some level, you should be saying, "Oh, yeah!" when you see him and then
realize how bad he is.  A very good example of this is "Lonesome" Rhodes
in Bud Schulberg's A FACE IN THE CROWD.  Another good example is ALL THE
KING'S MEN.  Tim Robbins's portrayal has not one note of charisma.  He
sings off-key and the lyrics of his songs are exaggerations of what such
a character really would be saying.  The script tells you he has a
following rather than shows you why.  The film maker doesn't want to
risk your not getting the message so presents it artlessly and bluntly.
Often it is presented stupidly.  The liberals who made the film want
people to vote so assume that their opposite numbers on the conservative
numbers don't want people to vote and there are reference to Robbins's
song "Don't Vote."  Of course, real conservatives don't have a message
of "don't vote."  They want their followers to vote also.  It is a
stupid and not very well-thought-out touch to have Roberts's tell people
not to vote, but the film maker just wants to create a character who
thinks the opposite of what the film maker does.  There was the germ of
a good idea here (and a rather nice lambasting of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE),
but the execution is more sincere than it is competent.

     We wanted to go someplace nice for dinner and being unaccustomed to
going places nice for dinner we did it entirely wrong.  I looked in the
AAA book and picked a place that had a three-diamonds rating.  The place
had two dollar signs and three diamonds and I figure any place that had
more diamonds than dollar signs was my sort of place.  An alarm should
have gone off in my head when I saw the name of the place: the Monte
Vista Firehouse.  Now I actually had a good meal once in a firehouse.  A
friend was getting married and that was the cheapest place she could
find to have the reception.  Now if this place really was an
unpretentious firehouse turned into an unpretentious restaurant, that is











Southwest U.S. Travel Log         1992                           Page 64



the kind of place to look for.  The kind of place to avoid is only that
is only pseudo-unpretentious.  A place called Rufus F. Bilgewater's or
maybe The Significant Pickle is bound to have a cutesy menu and prices
way too expensive for what you get.  A place called Garcia's Mexican
Food could be good in New Mexico.  In New York it sounds too New Mexican
and I'd probably skip it.  Tony's Pizza is probably good; Don Corleone's
Pizza is probably bad.  Never pick a restaurant with a funny name.

     But I broke my own rule hoping that the Monte Vista Firehouse might
be really what it said, a reconditioned firehouse with good, fair-priced
food.  Who knows in Albuquerque?  Well, as soon as we got in and saw the
crystal on the tables and everything color-coordinated in a sort of
pastel pinkish-beige, I knew I was in the spider's web.  "Oh, boy!"

     Then I got the menu and discovered prices were not all that bad.
In fact, it seems that in spite of the decor they had managed to keep
the prices reasonable.  I recommended a dish to Evelyn.  "That's an
appetizer," she said.  "Oh, boy!"  Looking further down the menu, I saw
the prices really were as big as my fears.  I got a duck dish at roughly
twice the price I had expected to pay.  When it came it had some nice
garnish, but it turned out to be eight little strips of duck.  Seven of
them I ate and one accidentally got lodged between two of my teeth.  At
least it was a meal that really stayed with me.  I didn't really finish
my meal until I got back to the motel and to some dental floss.  (Ok,
I am overstating things, but the pieces of duck were small.) Only
one thing I liked about the restaurant.  If Evelyn was predestined to
drink down $5.50 worth of wine, they made sure it was only one glass.

     Back to the room and some reading.  I watched a little bit of IN
HARM'S WAY.  My guess is that director Otto Preminger must have been
someplace else in 1941.  He certainly had no idea of what women's
fashions were at that time.

     November 1, 1992:  Well, we got a little lost on the way to the
airport, but eventually got there.  We had put 4423 miles on the car
that had 10 miles when we got it.

     Well, that's pretty much it.  The flights back were uneventful.  No
big conclusions about the future of Arizona and New Mexico.  No big
generalizations about the trip.  It came.  It went.  It's over.  Now,
back to work.


                             T H E    E N D


















            Mark Leeper
            ...att!mtgzy!leeper
            [phone]