Land of Enchantment

When you’re staying at the Best Western in Deming, New Mexico, it only makes sense to eat at the Deming Truck Terminal, because it’s next door. Truck stops are interesting places (but probably only to the civilian non-truckers such as myself). I bought a New Mexico scratch ticket with little shiny cacti and geckos that I scraped off with my fingernail, revealing that fact that I had won nothing except for five seconds of amusement  - and I lost two bucks. (When my father bought me scratch tickets when I was younger, he’d give me a coin to scrape the thin silver coating off the tickets, but I figure if I’m standing in a truck stop at night next to the scratch ticket machine, I’ll use my fingernail. Seemed more appropriate somehow.) Truck stops also include tiny, individual showers; mysterious rooms behind doors numbered 1, 2, and 3 that opened into the dining area. We did have a decent enough meal there; steak and potatoes with cauliflower. (I am not a fan of vegetables. The first time I ever consumed cauliflower was less than a year ago, but I am making an effort with the vegetables, so I stuffed the albino broccoli into my mouth. Actually, here’s a fun fact for you: cauliflower is actually more closely related to cabbage than broccoli. Fascinating.) Our sweet, plump, orangish-haired waitress was wearing a camouflage apron that looked like real military-issue clothing, and when we commented on it she told us that her husband was in the army and her mother-in-law made her the apron out of some of his old clothing so that she could match him.

On February 21, Bill rode 61 miles (his biggest mileage day!) to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where we stayed at the Teakwood Inn. They had a very decent chlorine-vapor-scented indoor pool with a NO DIVING sign, so we dove in when nobody was looking. We had a room on the first floor with a sliding glass door that opened into a breathtaking asphalty view of the parking lot, I-10, and train tracks, which we didn’t notice until our ears were violently assaulted with the blasting horns of a train barreling down the tracks about…hmmm…fifty feet from our room. We tried to open the sliding door and COULD NOT open it; we toiled and pulled and pushed and swore and flipped the decrepit metal locks up and down. Then Sarah realized that the thing holding the doors so forcefully shut was…a screw. A single screw, about a quarter of an inch long, which allowed the doors to cruise open upon its removal. That made us feel very comfortable and safe: trains, interstate and parking lot on the other side of our sliding doors and nothing but a tiny embellished nail protecting us from possible abduction and death. Also, we certainly witnessed some sort of drug deal involving a Jeep and a man with hair longer than mine taking place over at the far end of the parking lot. (of course…we spy!) Fortunately, I write this as a testament to our triumphant survival.

The next day, Wednesday, February 22, we picked up spandexed Bill after 34 miles. We ended up deciding to bypass El Paso, Texas, and continue on a northeast course on US-180/US-62E towards Carlsbad, New Mexico. After El Paso, we soon realized that there was literally nowhere to stay between El Paso and Carlsbad! On the outskirts of El Paso I did see a series of the largest junkyards I have ever seen; metal gleaming in the sun off of rows and rows of dead cars, trucks, vans, buses and trailers stretching on for ACRES. (Maybe the 25-foot Jayco trailer I crashed now resides there. Maybe my first car, the white 1988 Subaru GL wagon, resides there. There were a real lot of vehicles lying dead in these junkyards.) Then, after miles and miles of desert, we passed through the Guadalupe Mountains, which were stunning monoliths of purple that came out of nowhere. US-180 wound its way up through them, and then after over 150 miles of driving, we arrived in Carlsbad and pulled our Suburban and our trailer through a cloud of dust into the dirt parking lot of the Days Inn. We always park in the ‘truck parking’ section of our motel/hotel, usually in dirt (and sometimes beside giant bees’ nests…that’s always fun) alongside all of the other nomads with trailers and truckers. 

The differences out here are profound. As far as roads go, there are a lot more semi trucks with black puffs of exhaust billowing, the higher speed limits, lonely shavings of tires lying on the side of the road, left behind and useless, and the occasional burned-out car lodged in the desert, usually upside down, and it’s impossible to tell if these cars have been there for days or years. Another thing that fascinates me is that when you’re in a restaurant here, you receive parmesan cheese in packets! Back east, parmesan cheese is located in a small, squat glass jar with holes in the top that perches on your table. Here’s something else that’s strange about this area of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas that we’ve been hanging around: the time zones. First of all, Arizona does not have daylight saving time. It’s the only state that doesn’t. Then there’s Mountain time, which is New Mexico and part of Texas, and then Central time in the rest of Texas. We keep resetting the clock on the dashboard of the Suburban and half the time it’s wrong. We were in our hotel room one evening and the computer clock said 4:00, our cell phones said 5:00, and the clock in the room said 6:00. I have no idea what time it is, so don’t ask me.

The Days Inn in Carlsbad also had a nice indoor pool and hot tub, which is always good. There was no restaurant in sight, so we ended up walking a while down the street in search of dinner. Our search for food brought us to the Ocotillo Lounge, which was a karaoke bar attacked to a motel. Our waitress came to our table and asked us what we wanted for dinner, and our choices were as follows: steak and fries for $4, or steak and onion rings for $4. I got the onion rings and used Heinz 57 sauce on my food, which wasn’t half bad. Never tried it before. We talked to some people at the bar, and it was mostly men and we realized that they all were staying in the area hotels because they were under contract working for Halliburton. I don’t know anyone who works for Halliburton, (no company locations in New England) but being down here I realize what a huge employer the company is, one of the largest oilfield companies in the world. When I first heard that all these men worked for Halliburton all I could think about was Dick Cheney and scandals, tax avoidance, and Iraq, and I associate a negative connotation with the company though the men who worked for them said they liked it well enough and it was decent pay. I suppose they do what they have to do just like the rest of us. That night at the Ocotillo Lounge ended with a slight, hilarious verbal dispute that I am choosing not to repeat, two good-natured security guards, and then the hike back to the Days Inn.

I don’t even know if I had heard about Carlsbad Caverns before, or if I have ever thought for more than a second about any cavern. However, it’s too bad if people are as ignorant as I was about this amazing natural wonder. A cavern is just a biiiig underground cave. Some of them have ‘natural entrances’, which mean that there was an existing opening to the cavern somewhere above ground, and some caverns do not have natural entrances and are only found by accident or by connecting them to other underground rooms. We walked in through the natural entrance, which is a long downhill trail with tons of switchbacks. Native Americans did a bit of exploring in the caverns about a thousand years ago; they left some mysterious drawings on the cave walls near the natural entrance. There were bones of prehistoric creatures found inside the caverns and trilobite and plankton fossils found in the walls as well; the entire cavern area was once an underwater reef 400 million years ago. That’s some history for you.

All I could think about when we were inside the caverns were Dr. Seuss books, with rock formations that looked like landscapes of crazily skinny trees, some of which had formations on the tops that resembled giant upside-down onions. I think the statistic was that you could fit 14 Astrodomes inside of these enormous caverns. It is completely quiet inside; if you stand still and nobody makes noise, the only sound is the steady drip of water, entering the caverns one drop at a time. We had to whisper while we were inside, or else the echo would be offensively loud. There are stalactites (that come down from the ceiling) and stalagmites (that come up from the floor). The amazing thing is that all of these formations are created by water; a drop of rainwater (which takes eight months to get from the ground down into the cavern) will seep down through the dirt and somehow arrive at the ceiling of the cavern, and carbon dioxide from the water mixes with the limestone to create the mineral calcite – which is what all the rock formations are made of. When calcite formed on the ceiling, more water would drip down to create stalactites coming down from the ceiling in the form of icicles. When water dripped down onto the floor, stalagmites formed, being built from the ground up. Sometimes the two would meet in the middle, and then there is a column. Being down in the cavern was like being on the moon, or an a different planet; an environment that I had never conceived of. The caverns would be completely pitch black if they weren’t lit artificially, but the lighting is very dim, tasteful, and strategic and illuminates the caves’ shades of black, brown, white, orange, and a bit of green. 

The other thing that Carlsbad Caverns is famous for is their enormous colony of Mexican freetail bats and the ‘bat flights’. There are over a million bats that live in the ‘Bat Cave’, inside the cavern to the left of the natural entrance, from early spring until October. It is to my great disappointment that we were here while the bats were vacationing in Mexico for the winter, because at dusk when the bats are living in the cavern they all swarm in a huge cloud from the cavern to forage for food. There is an actual outdoor bat amphitheater, which is huge, built above the natural entrance where people sit to watch the bats. That’s actually how the caverns were discovered by the white man in the 1800s; they saw the black cloud of bats during their mass exodus at dusk and went to explore the bats’ home. It is a beautiful, slightly haunting place that I certainly recommend to any adventurer.

Bill rode 45 miles to Lea County, and we picked him up and drove into Hobbs, New Mexico, for our last night in the “Land of Enchantment”. This was the first day we saw the oil derricks, again bringing Halliburton to mind. The air is thick with the smell of oil; if you are a person who doesn’t enjoy the smell of gasoline when filling up your car I do not suggest a road trip through oil field country; it’s a bit nauseating after a little while. Acres and acres of nothing but road and dry fields and blue sky and oil derricks. I had definitely never seen these before and it is a very strange environment. The derricks pump slowly up and down, and they remind me of gigantic metal birds, dipping their beaks down to meticulously suck the lifeblood out of the earth. It’s kind of creepy. They are continuously moving machines, silhouettes of black, thousands of them. They reminded me of some kind of metallic Star Wars characters. The devices are named for Thomas Derrick, an English executioner from the Elizabethan era because early derricks resembled the frame from which a hangman’s noose hung. This is a landscape that has nothing in common with New England at all and not one I will ever rush to revisit!

Now, we only traveled across the southern border of New Mexico, so to be fair I do not feel that I can give any sort of accurate description of the state in general because we didn’t go to Santa Fe, or Albuquerque, and I am sure that those places are very fun. From the part of New Mexico that we did travel through, I must say that it is a vast nothingness and I am sticking to my story!

And onward to Texas…

-steph

Comments

[ally]

steph,
man deming is like the anal opening of new mexico, but i am so glad that you have had the chance to experience the land of enchantment. Did you purchase one of those glittery lucite belt buckles with the scorpions encased in it? I sure hope so, or at least that you ate a plate of green chile. I miss you and i am so proud of your experiences, and your writing. Please write us all a book in the near future. Guatemala is great and i will send more news soon.
love, ally

[Hobbs New Mexico]

Yup.

Stick to Albuquerque or Santa Fe.

That's where the people that don't know the difference between a derrick and a pump go. I understand that it will be kind of difficult pushing your car to Santa Fe because you don't want to disturb the Earth's "life blood", but keep at it and I'm sure you will make it.