Day 96 September 22

Good morning ya'll. Click on this link to see where we were today.

Day 96 September 22 Map of Places Traveled.

 

Leaving the Valley of Fires

Left the magnificent Valley of Fires this morning and headed back to Carrizozo. We take route 54 N. through Robsart (population 6 ghosts), Coyote (population 10 ghosts), Gallinas (population 12 ghosts), Corona (population 165 live people). In Corona a couple of Mescalero Apaches said they were dead, but you know, you can’t believe a thing those Apaches say.  We go through Duran (population 35), Vaughn (population 446), Pastura (population 23) and finally pull into Santa Rosa (population 2,850) where we have a tolerable meal at Joseph’s Bar and Grill.

This is not much of a picture day.

Away we go to Cuervo (population 10 ghosts), Montoya (population 8 ghosts and 3 living souls) and finally into Tucumcari (population 5,365 living people, 12 ghosts and 100 Little Feat fans, which are not necessarily living people). 

I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty don't ya know, and I'm still, oh I'm still willin’
Out on the road late at night, I seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice

I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Now I driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'

Now I smuggled some smokes and folks from Mexico
baked by the sun, every time I go to Mexico, and I'm still willin’
And I've been kicked be the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in and I'm still on my feet and I'm willin', oh I'm willin'

And I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and then you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin' 

On to Logan (population 1,100) and Nara Vista (population 112 including a few stoned Little Feat fans) 

We came to a fork in the road, so we took it and rode through Amistad (population 40 ghosts) where in 1906, Henry S. Wannamaker, a lonely Congregational minister, put adds in church newspapers back east to encourage nubile farm girls to homestead near him. To his dismay, very few nubile farm girls responded, but forty ministers did, and they headed west to escape disillusioned parishioners back east. If you needed to hear a sermon in 1915 this would have been the place to be. To this day, Little Feat fans avoid Amistad like the plague, terrified of dead ministers.

On to Stead (population 0) and then Clayton (population 3,000) where we gas up and buy whiskey, which is lucky for me, because, as the next few hours unfold, it becomes apparent that we are going to need it, lots of it.

We head for the Rita Blanca National Grassland and the town of Felt, OK (population 93). Yes, that’s Oklahoma. Our run through New Mexico is over. The Forest Service maintains a campground of sorts in Felt where wayward travelers like us have been known to pull in to catch a night’s sleep. We arrive in Felt tired and hungry. Nobody else at the campground and nobody else in Felt either. Emily decides to check out the restrooms and comes back with a horrified look on her face. “Let’s get out of here”, she cried. “The floor of the outhouse and the commode cover is covered in blood”. Arriving at a campground and finding the facilities bloodied is not good. We left out quickly. Never saw another person around town. This is the only time on our entire trip we had serious misgivings about staying in a place. 

In our travels this summer we visited regions in the Great Plains and Midwest that used to have extensive short and tall grassland prairies, each sporting unique flora and fauna.   Short grass prairies, with blue grama and buffalo grass as dominant species, once covered most of the Great Plains, from the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and as far east as Nebraska and north into Saskatchewan and large parts of Alberta, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas and the high plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Lots of hot, dry country. Now existing short grass prairies are a mere shadow of their former selves, isolated remnants, islands in a vast dry sea given over to modern industrial agriculture. 

Tallgrass prairie covered much of the Midwest; grasses like big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass dominate here. These grasses can grow up to ten feet tall. Long roots, reaching as much as twelve feet deep, allows them to drink long and deep from subterranean water sources. Today less than one percent of those stands exist in America.

Before Anglo influence, somewhere between thirty and sixty million American Bison freely roamed throughout these prairie grass regions. The impact of that many bison on the landscape must have been enormous, but the bison evolved here, along with the landscape and its unique ecology. That co-evolution built in ‘prairie recovery time’. When the bison got a little too overzealous and chowed down too severely in a given place they moved on. Grazing and recovery were cyclic.

By 1884, after a few decades of Anglo influence, there were three hundred American bison left in America. THREE HUNDRED. In recent years dedicated natural resource managers partnered with farmers, conservation groups, various government agencies and nonprofits to increase their numbers. Thanks to them today there are about five hundred thousand American bison in North America, confined to certain national and state parks, private lands and a few preserves. No longer do the bison freely roam.

Cattlemen quickly replaced bison with cattle that they drove in the 1867s and 1870s from Texas to Kansas in massive herds. In America in the period from 1991 until 2016 there were between 87 and 105 million head of cattle. Those on the Great Plains and in the Midwest approximate the number of bison originally roaming free. But the cattle cause way more damage to the landscape. Cattle overgrazing removes many other prairie plants like prairie violet, pale purple coneflower, false sunflower, lead plant, white prairie clover, showy tick trefoil, prairie blazing star, round-headed bush clover, stiff goldenrod, heath aster, and countless others do as well. The nature of overgrazing means no recovery time for the grasslands.

Perpetually overgrazed lands exist in a state of perpetual ecologic decline. As the native grasses die out, shallow rooted plants like mesquite (not a native plant), thorny weeds, Russian thistle (tumbleweed) and other non-natives replace the native grasses. These plants do not hold the fragile soil in place like the native grasses. 

The overall affect is a degradation of habitat for birds, amphibians, reptiles, other mammals, insects, spiders and Little Feat fans. 

Settlers intent on farming started irrigating these regions, first by sinking wells then by building dams, canals and aqueducts to deliver water to the thirsty land. They plowed and cultivated large land tracts on which to grow all manner of water hungry crop plants. These days, from an airplane flying over the Midwest and Great Plains, one can see bands of thousands of perfect, 133-acre, green circles packed together on irrigated lands, growing corn, alfalfa, sorghum, wheat and cotton, lots of cotton. That’s one problem.

Because its more efficient to producing marketable beef quicker, cattle growers now confine their livestock in CAFOs (confined Animal Feeding Operations), ‘feed lots’ by another name. Some are as big as ten football stadiums, and often hold a hundred thousand animals or more. Driving by one of these behemoths insults all five senses. And when an infrequent, but severe Midwest summer thunder storm drops five inches of rain on one, it creates a molasses-thick, fetid runoff that would choke a maggot. That’s another problem.   

The hidden cost of a Big Mac.

The one hundred thousand-acre Rita Blanca National Grassland is a federally designated entity in Oklahoma and Texas. ‘National Grassland’ has a nice ring to it, but it a grassland in name only, like others we saw on this trip.  Today ‘grasslands’ are amalgams, patch works of private and public land, mostly private, on which farmers do large scale cattle and dry land and irrigated crop farming. If one looks hard enough one can find small natural grassland remnants and restored areas interspersed among the private holdings. That’s where the coyotes and dead Little Feat fans hang out.  

Speaking of irrigation, now we are driving through the featureless Rita Blanca, smack on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world, under 174,000 square miles of flat, treeless, hot, dry land in the Great Plains. It is a shallow aquifer, shallow meaning the water is easy to get. At one time it contained lots of water, mostly ‘fossil water’ from several Ice Ages of glacial runoff. Now sparse and paltry annual precipitation is the only recharge mechanism, which amounts to about a half inch gain in water depth a year.

Early settlers reached into it with windmill driver pumps.  No big deal. With the advent of the centrifugal pump people could do a hell of a lot more pumping. In short order, people put in thousands of wells throughout the Great Plains and begin drawing the water table down to support agricultural enterprises. Each year in the past two decades draw down rates increase dramatically in the region. Experts say at current withdrawal rates the Ogallala Aquifer might be dry by 2030. Meaning we are taking out more than is goin in, much more. The same experts say that it could take at least six thousand years to replenish the aquifer naturally from rainfall. This in a region that produces a substantial amount of the world’s food from ground water irrigation.   

A day of reckoning is coming.   

I apologize for going on, but I loving knowing this stuff, which might alert you to the possibility that I don’t have a life.

Think of it this way. Reading this will help you get to sleep, and quickly at that, thus solving your insomnia problem, so you can quit taking that extra slug of 101 Wild Turkey or those Ambien or Valium pills at bedtime.

The intrepid Flicka II sojourners go forth in search of camping accommodations in the Rita Blanca National Grassland but there is no room at the inn. There is no inn.

Its late, we are tired and hungry. The closest town now is Dalhart, Texas, so away we go to Dalhart, on the western edge of the Texas Panhandle in the flattest, featureless country yet.

Dalhart, TX (population 7,930), smack dab in the middle of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the ‘Dirty Thirties’ as people called it.

We come into Dalhart from the north on route 385 at night. 

We see the lights first. Then the lines of stainless steel tankers going in and an equally as lengthy line of tractor trailers coming out of a security fenced wrapped behemoth of a compound.

We creep by in amazement at the shear size of the place. The trucks coming and going reminds me of a scene in a 1978 remake of the classic movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which glassy-eyed, duplicate, alien-controlled humans fill tractor trucks with alien ‘pods’ and deliver them to cities and towns throughout the American hinterlands, where more glassy-eyed alien-controlled humans place them in close proximity to real human beings controlled by the liberal media. The pods hatch to reveal mucus covered, duplicate humans cloned to become Fox News followers. Donald Sutherland is not a good guy in this movie. He was a first, but an alien pod took him over and he becomes a duplicate Roger Ailes.  

But, it’s not an alien pod plant, it is only a billion-dollar cheese processing plant, owned by the California based Hilmar Cheese Company. The Dalhart plant receives over one million gallons of milk daily from a half million cows and daily processes it into hundreds and hundreds of 640-pound blocks of Cheddar, Monterey Jack, Pepper Jack, Colby, Colby Jack and Mozzarella cheese.

Sounding pretty good right now to a couple of hungry wayfarers.

Besides the cheese farm, farming, ranching, feedlot operations, large-scale pig farms, the largest being a 21,000-acre Cargill owned hog processing facility. Hot dogs anyone?

The plant uses the milk and lots and lots of water to make the cheese. Guess where the water comes from. That’s right. The Ogallala Aquifer. In fairness the plant returns about 2.2 million gallons of wastewater per day by either injecting it into another aquifer (where ever that is) or for irrigation on adjacent agricultural lands, where, once applied, it picks up pesticides and fertilizer and percolates back into the Ogallala.   

We drive deep into the guts of Dalhart, TX and cruise Liberal Street searching for a motel. There has not been a liberal in Texas since Donald Southerland converted all to alien-controlled Fox News followers, so the name of that street is an enigma.

First, we try La Quinta where they want $180 a night. Being the cheap bastard that I am I put my foot down and say no way. Big mistake. 

We move down the line to the 3-star Rodeway Inn where a stout, curry coated Eastern Indian woman rented us a dingy cubicle for ninety dollars. By now I really needed a drink, so I went looking for the icemaker. Up on discovering that it was not working I went to the office to lodge a complaint. The curry coated Eastern Indian woman offered a cryptic apology and then cajoled me into following her to the utility room where she implored me to help her fix the wiring that supplied the icemaker and half the window mounted air conditioners in the place. The 1940s fuse box was a medusa of trembling, burnt wires that reminded me of the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts, in which Jason and his stoned-out friends search for the Golden Fleece, fighting all manner of fantastical beasts along the way; including the Hydra, a monster with nine Donald Trump orange-haired heads attached to writhing snake bodies; the whole affair looking vaguely like the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner.
According to legend, the Hydra grew two more heads when a reckless Argonaut loped off one. Two more Donald Trump orange-haired heads. That is what this fuse box looked like. A bunch of Trump heads writhing on snake bodies attached to burnt, undersized fuses with pennies behind them.

No thanks.

I respectfully declined the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner’s request and returned to our room to do my yoga exercises and drink warm 86 proof Black Label Evan Williams bourbon. More than I should have.



All is good. Tomorrow is a new day.