Thursday, July 31, 2014

Talk about Ghost Towns

Cliff Ruins and Bandelier
National Monument, NMex 
Last week’s post on E-Town, one of New Mexico’s ghost towns, ended with the photo at the left of a cliff dwelling at Bandelier National Monument. This and the many other along-abandoned aboriginal settlements are truly the state’s “ghost towns.” Many are a thousand years old and housed a hardy and enterprising population of Anasazi and Pueblo Native Americans for hundreds of years. After perusing a List of Ancient Dwellings of Pueblo People in New Mexico, I quit counting at 100 with many yet to toll. Some sources estimate there are 15,000 known archaeological sites in San Juan County alone, and that’s likely only a small fraction of what actually exists.

To say that our state is rich in ancient history is an understatement. We are awash in it.

Most of us know about the better known, more famous places like Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins and Coronado State Monument. Maybe even Abó and Gran Quivira…or Bandolier and Pueblo Bonita (the biggest house at Chaco Canyon). But how about Kua-Kay (Arroyo Honda) or Burnt Corn near Galisteo, Kin Yaa (Tall House Ruins) near Crownpoint? I could go on, but you get the point.
 
Aztec Ruins, Aztec, NMex
So what’s the big deal? Why make a blog out of a list of old ruins where no one has lived for hundreds of years? It’s the history, folks. The history of ten thousand years of human occupation of the area. Some of the identifiable ruins where an individual can sit and absorb the “echoing silence” actually date to circa 1500 BCE. Think of the stories lived out in these places. Tales of great good and tremendous evil. Of love and hate. Of life and death. Of rearing babies and building families. Of greed and generosity. Of salvation and murder. Sit among the ancient ruins and absorb them. Let them infect your mind.
 
Gran Quivera Pueblo & Mission
Ruins, NM
Unchain yourself from the “now” and whirl backward in time to identify with these aboriginal peoples and gain some understanding of them. Then go write what the wraiths of these “ghost towns” share with you. Write beautiful stories, horrible stories, but give voice to what you feel.

Share that understanding with others by giving these long-vanished people flesh and blood through your writing. You’ll likely find much of what you’re sensing will be remarkably similar to the current events of today. That thought is both reassuring … and devastating.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and let me hear from you.

Don


New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

A Challenge to All Those Creative Writers Out There

When I decided to post a blog about New Mexico’s ghost towns, I didn’t realize just how involved that would be. There are dozens of ghost towns or nearly ghost towns scattered throughout the state. On sober reflection, this is not surprising. I imagine every state in the Union has its dead towns around which local myths (and perhaps eerie spirits) swirl.

There are a number of good websites dedicated to the subject of New Mexico’s towns, one of which is www.vivanewmexico.com/ghosts. In fact, I would like to open the subject with a rather poignant epitaph cited by Viva. It was taken from a gravestone in a cemetery in Alma, New Mexico:

Elsworth H. Tipton
B. 1926, D. 1932, 5 yrs. 7 mos. 22 days
Our little treasure
Budded on Earth
To Bloom in Heaven

That could be the story of every dead and dying community in our great state. Of course, some of them likely bloomed in some place other than Heaven. Take for instance, Elizabethtown, New Mexico, or as it is commonly known, E-Town.

Elizabethtown, New Mexico
The following is what Wickipedia has to say about the little community:

"Elizabethtown is a small unincorporated community in Colfax County, New Mexico, United States. It is located just off New Mexico State Road 38, between the communities of Eagle Nest and Red River. It is just east of the Carson National Forest. The community is a former mining town, and lies northeast of Scully Mountain, and west of Baldy Mountain.
History
"Mostly a ghost town now, Elizabethtown began in 1866 with the founding of area gold mines and the Mystic Copper Mine. It was New Mexico's first incorporated town. Founded by the commander of Fort Union (north of Las Vegas, New Mexico), Captain William H. Moore, and named for his daughter, Elizabeth Catherine Moore. Nicknamed E-Town, the town grew to over 7000 residents at its height of prosperity in 1870, and it was designated the first seat of the newly formed Colfax County. In 1872 there were only about 100 residents left as the mines dwindled, and the county seat was moved to Cimarron. The town revived somewhat when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad passed nearby in the early 1890s, making mining feasible once again. The village was also part of the Colfax County War. A fire took most of the town in 1903, and the town mostly died out by 1917 with the decline in the mines.
"Serial killer Charles Kennedy lived between Elizabethtown and Taos, luring weary travelers to dine and stay with him at his cabin; he may have killed 14 or more people. Kennedy was killed by a group of angry vigilantes, led by the notorious Clay Allison."

Cold, impersonal facts, right? The article hints at flesh and blood, mayhem and murder, the passions of seven thousand beating hearts, but it is merely a recitation of dry data. But think of how many stories are hidden there. VivaNewMexico.com breathes some life into the subject with the following opening:

“A funny thing happened to travelers between Elizabethtown and Taos - they never returned. At least not those who stayed at Charles Kennedy's resting place between the two cities. It wasn't until Mrs. Kennedy arrived in Elizabethtown one day and announced that her husband had killed their baby, that officials began searching Kennedy's house. They found bones and later unearthed skeletal remains under the floorboards.”

Definitely a story there for a writer. Go ahead, guys and gals. I challenge you to glean exciting story lines from the above and the details that follow, and turn them into flash fiction (500 words or less) to be posted on your own sites (you have one don't you?). Let me know when you've accepted the challenge so I can direct our readers to them.

Elizabethtown facts: 
·       First incorporated town in New Mexico
·       Set in beautiful Moreno Valley with Mount Baldy in the distance
·       Began as a tent city in the 1860s during Mount Baldy gold rush
·       At its height, boasted 7 saloons and three dance halls
·       Once county seat of Colfax County
·       Mining operations began to fail and a fire in 1903 sealed the doom of the town
·       A museum run by descendants of one of E-Town’s citizens survives today

Take up the challenge, guys and gals...and write! 

Before we close, I’d like to show you a picture of a real New Mexico ghost town where the silence resounds today, as it has for centuries. Photo credits to Pixabay.com, a great source of free photos on a wide variety of subjects.
Cliff Dwelling at Bandelier National Monument
New Mexico
By the way, can anyone hazard a guess about what appears to be an old Roman chariot in the foreground of the photo of Elizabethtown?

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and let me hear from you.


Don

Thursday, July 17, 2014

A Little More from THE BISTI BUSINESS

Today, we’ll take a look at some of the action in THE BISTI BUSINESS. In the following scene, our intrepid PI, BJ Vinson, accompanies the authorities from Farmington on the trail of things owned by BJ’s client’s son pawned in the little town of Shiprock by Crispido Hernandez and One-Eye Begay, both elderly Navajos living on the reservation.

The other players in the scene beside BJ are Gaines, the FBI agent, Plainer, a BLM agent, and a man named Atcitty, a Navajo translator. The scene starts in Chapter 21, page 175.

###

Gaines, who apparently knew nothing about Navajo etiquette, parked, got out of the vehicle, and marched up to the hogan. If he’d read Tony Hillerman’s popular Leaphorn-Chee mystery series, he would have known to wait in the vehicle until the occupant signaled he was ready to receive visitors. The agent banged on the door aggressively, announcing in a loud voice he was a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Hernandez demonstrated his opinion of the mighty FBI by taking his own sweet time answering the call.
A stocky, mahogany-hued man who must have been in his sixties, yet looked in the prime of life, eventually stepped outside. His broad, heavy-featured face showed neither surprise nor curiosity. The small, sharp eyes moved restlessly over the three of us and settled on our Navajo guide.
Yah-ta-heh,” Hernandez said in a deep voice.
Heh.” Our guide was considerably younger and less formal than his elder. After an awkward pause, Atcitty spoke to Hernandez a full minute in his native tongue. By the end of the monologue, I suspected Hernandez had known our mission all along. Then Atcitty turned to Gaines. “Okay. You ask, and I’ll put it to him.”
Plainer frowned. “He doesn’t speak English?”
“Not much. Better if you ask me.”
Under these circumstances, the interview was something less than ideal. The old man eventually invited us inside to search for other articles that might have belonged to Lando Alfano. We found nothing. Hernandez agreed to take us to where he had picked up the leather kit, but he refused to get into the car. Instead, the old man threw a blanket over a bony pinto in a brush corral at the side of the hogan and set off horseback across the desert hardpan. Atcitty elected to remain in the brush shelter as the rest of us piled into the SUV. It wasn’t long before we came to a long, narrow ditch which rendered the SUV incapable of proceeding any further—as I suspected both this old curmudgeon and Atcitty had known would happen. Reluctantly, we got out and plodded along in the heat. The sun had an extra bite in the high plateau country.
Hernandez, who had pulled up while we got out of the car, wheeled his mount, leaving us to scramble along afoot in his wake, dodging fist-sized rocks and the pinto’s horse apples. He led us over the lip of an arroyo that ran in a generally east-west direction and turned his pony up the sandy bottom. After about a mile, he halted and dismounted.
“Here,” he announced. I was pretty sure a smile hid behind those dark eyes as he watched the three of us struggle up the bottom of the dry wash.
“Was there any sign of whoever left it?” Gaines asked.
The old man paused but finally admitted he understood English by answering. “No. No sign. Nobody. Wasn’t no man.”
Plainer had had his fill of the games. “If it wasn’t a man, what was it?”
I am absolutely certain the corners of the man’s thick lips curled as he answered. “Witch. They was green lightning night before.” The thick shoulders rose and fell. “Witch.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Plainer demanded.
“How long have you been out here in the Four Corners area, agent?” I asked.
“About six months.”
“Let me guess. Your last assignment was back east somewhere.”
“New Jersey.”
“That figures. There’s a Southwestern phenomenon known as green ball lightning. Nobody’s quite sure what it is, but the best guess is it’s a small meteorite containing copper, which burns green. Some of the Native Americans believe that’s not the case at all. They figure it’s the way witches travel around.”
The old man grunted at my explanation.
“Mr. Hernandez, were there any footprints? Anything at all?” Gaines asked.
“Here,” he stopped before a scraggly piñon, “maybe where somebody set down to rest.”
         “Did you look for anything else he…uh….” Gaines tripped over his tongue in an effort to avoid offending the old man again. “I mean anything it might have left behind?”
The Indian hesitated a minute before waving a broad hand up and down the wash. “Nothing else. Look maybe a mile.”
I was unable to remain on the sidelines as an observer any longer. “Have any strangers been hanging around, Mr. Hernandez?” Gaines gave me a look, but didn’t say anything.
“Old One-Eye’s shape-shifter.”
“Did you see him, too?” I asked.
“Uh-uh.”
There was little more to see, although we split up and walked the arroyo for a distance in either direction. All Plainer and I turned up was a cranky little sidewinder, which we gave a wide berth. They are aggressive little creatures; more so than the larger rattlers.
As we reassembled to begin the trek back to the hogan, Plainer looked at the steep sides of the arroyo and groaned aloud. I knew how he felt; my knees were already complaining. The old gunshot wound in my right thigh throbbed from the exertion. Street shoes are not made for soft sand or loose rocks or steep, crumbling clay walls. The pinto, with Hernandez aboard, had little trouble getting out of the gulch and was almost out of sight by the time we topped the gully. Sweat-drenched, we recovered the car and paused at the hogan long enough to pick up our guide. Gaines cranked up the air conditioning, and we were all thoroughly chilled by the time we arrived at the Begay hogan.
That interview was a virtual rerun of the previous, except One-Eye spoke not a word of English and dwelt a great deal more on shape-shifters—talk that made Atcitty noticeably nervous—without coming up with a good reason why a witch would have any use for a costly nylon bag with dirty laundry—albeit expensive dirty laundry.
        The only real surprise was that One-Eye wasn’t one-eyed at all. He merely talked with a habitual squint, which made his right eye virtually disappear behind folds of chestnut colored flesh.

###

It seems to me that the Navajos were getting a little payback for their years of suffering under the white man’s thumb. What do you think?

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and let me hear from you.

Don


New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

The Guardian – Short Fiction

How about a little short fiction this week. Let me know what you think.

###

THE GUARDIAN
     I regained my independence the day Bony came into my life. Bony—or more properly Bonaparte—was a black and tan German shepherd with a long, wet, inquisitive nose and sharply pointed, upright ears. Bony, you see, is my guide dog, my eyes.
     Let me explain. My name is Russell Gorden, and for twenty-two years I was your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden variety hunk, a golden-haired, violet-eyed, buffed, woman-chasing, over-achieving WASP. I had life by the stones and was squeezing hard when life got tired of it and squeezed back. Shoved me off the board, in fact.
     I came down with a rare exotic fever and damned near died. I recovered…except for my eyesight. Blind as the proverbial bat. Well, not quite. I see shades of gray with mysterious amorphous shapes now and then. But blind, all right, although nobody can tell until I blunder into a chair or something.
     My eyes, they tell me, look normal. I should probably wear dark glasses and carry a white cane so I won’t shock strangers when they tumble to my affliction. I can always tell the moment it happens because everything changes…speech, attitude, everything in an instant. And I hate it. I’m the same guy I always was, so dammit, don’t treat me differently!
     For two years I hid out in my house, a small adobe in the university neighborhood of Albuquerque, eating, sleeping, sulking, and constantly working out on my exercise machine, awaiting the day the middle tissues behind the sclera straightened up and gave me my sight back. When that happened, I didn't intend to return to society a flabby weakling. I would re-enter the sighted world the way I left it, a vital, vibrant, fit human being.
     The doctors warned me against such high expectations, but I stubbornly refused to accept reality. After twenty-four months, I ventured outside with a cane…and experienced a paralyzing mortification. The cane was a symbol of helplessness, at least to my eyes…no pun intended. I put the damned thing aside for good when one solid citizen—after apparently glaring into my perfect, sightless eyes-- admonished me for mimicking a blind man.
     Finally acknowledging my handicap, I contacted the Association for the Blind, who helped bring me out of denial into acceptance and sent me to New Jersey where Bony entered my life. When he was eighteen months old, the shepherd underwent sixteen weeks of rigorous training. After we were carefully paired by the Seeing Eye staff, we spent another twenty days training as a team. Those folks did a whale of a job on both of us. We were a perfect match.
     Within six months after returning home to New Mexico, I’d learned to trust his judgment and accept his friendship. No, his love and devotion. For some odd reason, venturing out into the real world with a guide dog is less humiliating than relying on a white cane. Not only do I have someone to guide me, I also have a constant, agreeable companion.
     This morning, as we got off the bus four blocks from my house on the way home from the library with some new audio books, I headed down my usual shortcut through the alley. But this time, Bony balked in his first act of “intelligent disobedience,” although I didn’t understand it at the moment. When I urged him on, he blocked me with his seventy-pound bulk.
     Unaccustomed to being thwarted by my new friend, I groused a little and stepped around him. He stubbornly held his ground, growling low in his throat. Impatiently, I tugged on his harness and ordered him forward. My friend accompanied me down that alley, albeit unwillingly. Within twenty-five steps, I caught the odor of marijuana and understood his reluctance.
     “Hey, bro!” a voice came from somewhere in front of me. “Neat dog. How come he’s got that harness thing on? You steal him from some poor, blind slob?”
     Giggles from the left and right. A growl from Bony.
     “Ought not rob our blind brothers,” a throaty rasp came from the left.
Bony snarled and shifted. I perceived a faint shadow step back hastily.
     “No, he’s mine,” I said. “I have this problem. I can’t see.”
     “You don’t look like no blind dude. Eyes look okay to me. Kinda pretty, ya know. Ain’t he got pretty eyes, fellas?”
     “Real purty,” someone agreed. “Say, purty boy, how about you loan us a few bills. We getting low on Mary Jane.”
     “Sorry, don’t carry money on me.” That much was true; it was safely zippered in one of Bony’s saddlebags.
     “You don’t mind if we check it out for ourselves. You know, you being blind and all, might be some on you that you don’t know about.”
     A hand fell on my pocket; I flinched. Bony snapped; the hand went away.
    “Better get that dog under control, else I’m gonna have to cut him,” a third voice threatened.
     I had no idea how my guardian would react in a physical situation, but I put up a front. “Better get yourself under control, or you’ll be the one needing stitches.”
     Suddenly, all hell broke loose. Bony lunged, jerking his halter from my grip. Someone cried out in pain. A hand grasped my waist and fumbled on my hip for a wallet. Blindly, I loosed a roundhouse at a shadow…and connected. Years of frustration and months of over-compensating physical exercise sent the thug sprawling on his butt. In moments, there was the sound of headlong, panicked flight with Bony hard on their heels. I yelled a command, and he abandoned the chase to return to my side, panting slightly.
     My heart skittering like a covey of frightened quail, I knelt and pulled him to me, singing his praises. I held him against my chest until my nerves settled. Bony took advantage of the moment to wash my face lavishly with wet kisses.
     We made it home safely, and I grabbed a beer for me and a Popsicle for Bony before collapsing into my recliner to analyze what happened. Prepared for new doubts about venturing into the sighted world again, I was surprised to find my confidence growing; I could hardly wait to try it again. Bony and I made a formidable pair. Bony was awesome. He loved me; he would fight for me.
     He was my guardian.

###

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and let me hear from you.

Don


New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

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