The Cheap Seats

It costs about U.S. $75 to get into a high speed inflatable and go speeding across the bay for close-up views of the humpback whales that swim down from Alaska to spend their winters along the Pacific Coast around Puerto Vallarta.

I only paid about twice that for these oversized binoculars and tripod, but now I can stalk marine mammals and a good deal else for free from the comfort and safety of my living room.

I'll admit it's not really a substitute for getting up close and personal, where you can see the scars and barnacles on their shiny hides and hear the deep throaty gasps that accompany their expulsions of spray and mist.

In fact, if it weren't for the tourist barges I'd see far fewer of the creatures long distance, because nine times out of 10 the way I spot them is by noticing a cluster of boats heaved to in the bay. Focusing in on them, I see spouts, dorsal fins, and now and then the lifting of wide flukes that means the whale is diving to cruise the depths for as long as 15 or 20 minutes.

When there's not much haze, the binocs give me such glimpses almost to the horizon. But the ideal distance is close enough to see the action with the naked eye, in which case the glasses make a real show out of it.

That was the case a couple of days ago when I looked up from my book to see a couple of boats flanking some disturbed water in which a gout of spray suddenly appeared that was larger than either of them. A dark shape rose up, and then there was another huge splash.

I lunged for the lenses and got them aimed and focused just in time to see the entire length of that frisky adult whale, certainly a testosterone-driven male, thrust free of the water, then fall back in a cloud of spray that soaked everybody on the nearest boat and probably scared them to death.

It was the best look at a living whale I ever had from any vantage point, ashore or afloat, and for my money those binoculars paid for themselves in that one exciting moment.

Sharps and Flatulence

I'm already on the record as a heartfelt admirer of Las Peregrinaciones, Puerto Vallarta's 12 days of homage to the Virgin Mary as she appeared in a 16th Century vision to an Aztec convert to Christianity near what is now Mexico City. In this manifestation she's known here as Our Lady of Guadalupe, or La Guadalupana.

But notwithstanding my deep pleasure in watching them, I have to say I'm puzzled and bemused by the musical accompaniment. My Spanish will have to get much better before I've got the chops to interrogate someone who might be able to explain it to me.

"Peregrinaciones" translates roughly as pilgrimages. During the first 12 days of every December, Vallartans assemble in groups, usually consisting of colleagues from their workplaces, to march at all hours along Juarez Street two blocks below our place to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which greets them with extravagant pealing from its many bells. They are ringing as I write this.

Each group has its own personality, but a typical one includes the following elements:

1. At the front, a banner identifying the pilgrims by the government agency, grocery store, hotel or restaurant where they work, thanking the Virgin for the blessings of the preceding year and asking that she look with favor on their lives and their work in 2013.

2. Pilgrims carrying boxes or baskets of flowers, food or other goods to be left in Mary's honor at the church.

3. A drum and bugle corps.

4. One or more groups of dancers, sometimes wearing traditional Mexican folk costumes but more often dressed as Aztecs, most of whom cheerfully perform and march on the rounded cobblestones in their bare feet.

5. An oom-pah band, which is the main part I don't get.

6. The main body of pilgrims singing "La Guadalupana," a ballad that recounts the legend of the vision and celebrates its place at the heart of Mexican culture. Their massed voices are lovely and even after nearly two repetitive weeks the carol has not lost its appeal.

It's a very rich mixture and emotionally powerful, even for lookers-on like us who only dimly grasp what the processions mean to the actual participants. Even Elizabeth is riveted and has asked several times to be taken down the hill for a closer look.

What's so odd about it all is the horns. The buglers sound like halftime at a high school football game. Oom-pah music is absurd even when it's played well. When the band members are the rankest sort of amateurs who probably haven't played together since last December, the result is a musical pratfall. I can't make sense of it as theme music for such a sacramental occasion.

Yet the processions go by, one after another, and virtually all of them have somehow come to the conclusion that off-key Souza and rusty tubas are just the right touch. The Virgin keeps coming back year after year, so she must like it too.

Mexico, Land of Contracts

I'm not an economist, but I think it would be hard to beat this as a model of how spasmodic interplays of human idiosyncrasy can spawn a market on which an alert entrepreneur can then feed for as long as it lasts.

That's our Christmas tree above, and it's alive, although I doubt it's very happy in our 85 degree days. But we're watering it daily and sweeping up the needles it's dropping in protest.

In fact, it's not really "our" tree at all. We're only renting it from an outfit that delivered it to us with its ball of dirt and plastic pot and will come pick it up later when we're done with it.

I don't know where they'll take it. But their pitch is that killing fir trees by the million every December is evil, so they swear they will put it back in the ground somewhere to go on with its life.

Will it be somewhere the tree can really put all this behind itself and keep growing? Well, I think such places may exist within a day's drive from here, maybe two days. But gasoline is expensive and the roads into the mountains aren't that great, so the promise is a serious one. I hope they really intend to keep it.

You can buy dead Christmas trees here for less than the rent we're paying. That would be just as effective in nourishing our nostalgia, salving our homesickness and helping us construct the tissue of white lies otherwise known as the "magic of Christmas" for little Elizabeth.

But it would crush our aspiration to be eco-friendly and life affirming, which seems to intensify with age.

So here in aging expat-rich Mexico, one of Mitt Romney's "job creator" types has sniffed us out. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Discontent of our Winter

This is part of the wall on which we had to fill in a large picture window, formerly a source of sunlight and wildly romantic vistas and now blocked by a new building as I'm sure I've mentioned.

We hired a contractor recommended by knowledgeable friends of friends to come in and do the job. I suppose there was no way we were going to be pleased with the results, but not being pleased is not being pleased whether you expected to be or not.

The guys took out our lovely wood-framed window, built an aluminum frame inside the opening and covered it with a sheet of waterproof wall board. Aside from a plaster ramp on the exterior window sill to deflect any drips that get between the two buildings during the rainy season, the board itself is directly exposed to the narrow space outside.

Since there was no room for access to that outside wall, our workers next applied a heavy layer of cement to the inside, laced with some kind of sealant that supposedly will keep moisture from seeping through the wall and spoiling our paint job. On top of that they put a layer of ordinary plaster and a coat of white paint. We followed that with two coats of the pale blue we wanted.

But when we stood back from the finished job, we saw to our dismay that the outline of the old window was faintly but clearly visible, mocking our grief over the loss of the view. If you stare long enough at the picture above, you might detect the lower lefthand corner of it.

When we complained, we were told there was nothing to be done. The wall board is absolutely flat, they said, whereas the rest of the wall is like all masonry surfaces in Mexico, which is to say uneven at best and crudely pocked and off-plumb at worst. No reasonable amount of human effort, they claimed, could duplicate what casual haste created with conspicuous lack of effort.

As I wrote a while back, I'm actually a fan of the overall look that mediocre workmanship and materials  produce around here. So in addition to my unhappiness over the phantom window frame, I'm also caught up in some cognitive dissonance over why it's there.

If you're thinking that I've reached a place in life where I have to reach for a pretty high shelf to locate something to be unhappy about, no need to say so.

Accion de Gracias

Fast forward. We're in Mexico, where even though it's now past Thanksgiving it's still too hot to blog. But it's been too long since I did.

Puerto Vallarta and its neighboring communities that ring the sprawling Bahia de Banderas are home to roughly 350,000 people of whom I've read that 40,000 or more are from the U.S. or Canada.

Speaking for this non-native group, our primary objective and main activity here is not being cold. Mission accomplished, but that leaves most of us with time on our hands.

One thing we're not spending much of it doing is thinking about that thing that happened with the police chief last month.

Our fellow expats have developed a fast-working formula for putting such occurrences quickly behind them. It's as easy as one, two three:

1. Bad things happen everywhere.
2. Your chances of being a crime victim are at least as great anywhere else.
3. These people won't bother you if you mind your own business and keep your nose out of theirs.

There's more than a little pixie dust in this way of looking at things, but we tried it and it worked. Look at my little friend in the photo above. What, her worry?

No, instead we all are focusing on problems we can actually solve, such as dispensing with diapers. They are now a thing of the past, and it happened almost overnight.

That cleared the way for a preschool. We wanted Elizabeth to have playmates, some early exposure to decent Spanish, not like ours, and some experience being away from home for a few hours a day. We had no idea where to look for the right one, but when we consulted some friends it turned out there were scads of them.

E now goes to La Casa Azul. No se habla ingles, except in the single English class each day for the older Mexican children. But E doesn't seem to mind. She spontaneously helped herself to a seat at a table with other kids on her first visit to check the place out, and she's gone cheerfully back each day since.

So far, we're using most of the free time this gives us attending classes to improve our own Spanish. This in turn will equip us to express in more idiomatic terms to assorted "technicos" the bad noise our washing machine is making, the apparent source of condensation from our AC units dripping on neighbors below, why we're unhappy with the plaster job on our new wall where the window overlooking the church used to be, our theory of where leaks in the ceiling during rainy season may be coming from etc.

Thus do we and our thousands of compatriots fill our days while keeping pesos circulating in the local economy, which exists to assist all of us in expanding the time and space available for gazing at the dazzling Pacific all the way out to where it meets the sky. We watch for flukes of the humpback whales, which are just now arriving.

For this life we gave thanks yesterday around a large and brilliantly decorated table with old and new friends, set alfresco on a colorful hillside terrace. Mexicans don't celebrate our holiday, of course, but they have a fine name for it nevertheless. El Dia de Accion de Gracias.

Dawn of Time

On a more cheerful note, we're in Truth or Consequences on the first day of a little touristing.

It's not much of a town, but we love it for its dusty little cluster of old auto courts huddled around several acres of hot mineral springs. The steamy water seeps up into concrete basins in faded bath houses where road-weary travelers refresh themselves as wanderers in this region have done for millennia.

During an earlier visit as I rectified my humors in the 107-degree water, it suddenly occurred to me that my bath had been warmed by heat that was absolutely primal, never cool since it got hot, however many billions of years ago that was.

My realization dazzled me and sent my mind reeling off into a series of even deeper thoughts about how vast the universe and how small a thing is man etc etc.

I was still wallowing in cosmic truths the next day when we visited the local museum and I browsed the gift shop for a book on geothermal heat. When I located one and found the page that described the phenomenon on which the town and its museum depend for their living, I drifted over to the counter to share my insights with the clerk.

"Doesn't it amaze you sometimes when you're sitting in the springs to realize that you're actually bathing in the original heat of The Big Bang," I asked him.

After a moment's reflection, he replied. "Um, yeah, are you gonna buy that?"

I was abashed and deflated, but I learned my lesson. On this trip I'm curbing my enthusiasm.

. . . But think of it, the original heat of The Big Bang!

Now What?

Well, isn't this sweet.

The trashed-out vehicle in the photo above used to be the armored Suburban of Puerto Vallarta's newly-appointed municipal police chief.

A couple of mornings ago at around 8 a.m., a pickup truck full of heavily armed barbarians tossed a grenade under it at the intersection of Basilio Badillo and Insurgentes, a place and time that might have found us at that very spot, strolling from breakfast at Freddy's Tucan toward the farmer's market where we get a lot of our produce. If we'd been in town.

The chief's SUV sailed flaming along Insurgentes for a couple of blocks before crashing into a taxi parked in front of a pharmacy where we often stop to buy a toothbrush, or nail clippers or diaper wipes.

The barbarians -- you all know the line of work they're in -- followed in their truck. They tossed another grenade or two and then peppered the chief's ride with military assault rifle rounds before fleeing. They abandoned their truck not far away, guns, grenades and all, and disappeared into the neighborhood.

Miraculously, the chief and his bodyguards walked away unhurt. But five bystanders, two of them children, were hurt by flying shrapnel.

We've always said we'd have to rethink our plans for making Vallarta our retirement home if the cartels started doing the kinds of things there that they've been doing for years in Acapulco, Michoacan, and along the border.

The loss of our south-facing view of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and our unexpectedly keen enjoyment of Ruidoso already had us wondering what we might decide for the future.

The future has sneaked up on us. We've reached out to a broker to find out what options we might have in the current market, which was starting to perk up before this, no telling now. We go down at the end of this month. Our plan was to spend the winter. We'll have to see.

Gettin' hitched

I'm so proud of my newly completed trailer hitch.

How could that be? I don't own a trailer, and I don't want to. It's been decades since I pulled one anywhere, let alone backed one into a tight spot like the narrow gravel pad specially prepared in our yard for me to do just that.

Yes, I have zero interest in trailers, yet I've paid for a truckload of high grade gravel for a trailer pad and gone to a lot of trouble to get a shiny chrome ball connected to the frame of my car. Makes no sense. You can guess who is actually driving, as usual. Starts with P.

For years Pam has admired and coveted Airstreams, those shiny aluminum travel trailers shaped like bread loaves, widely known as "silver bullets." Now that we've moved to the wide open spaces and at least theoretically have time for leisurely tours of scenic wonders, she's determined to have one.

Her pretext for really needing a silver bullet is that our new cabin is quite small, and its second bedroom is jammed with Elizabeth's toys, and of course her crib. We installed a clever bunk bed with a futon sofa below that folds out into a double and a twin mattress up top.

But the room would be a tight squeeze even for a single visitor. For a couple, well, they would need to be special. So Pam's argument is that a little trailer would not only help us answer the call of the open road, it would serve as guest quarters.

If this were litigation, I could produce expert witnesses who would demolish her case -- close friends who say if we put them in a trailer they'll either get a hotel or they won't come at all. It doesn't seem to matter to Pam, partly because I don't have a better idea.

The only reason that we didn't have the trailer on our property before the house was even built and live there on the job site all summer micro-managing the construction crew is that new Airstreams cost a small fortune.

Pam has reconciled herself to acquiring a used one by calling it "vintage." She tirelessly trolls the hundreds of websites devoted to the vigorous after-market for trailers, particularly the ones specializing in silver bullets.

Even here the prices are eye-opening. But she's located one we could stretch for with some gnashing of teeth, an 18-foot Caravel built in 1969, now living in Jefferson, Colorado. It cleaned up nice for its photo shoot, but it's "all original", i.e. unrestored, and you know what that could mean, though its current owners say it has lived its whole life clean and dry in the mountains and is good to go in every way. They call it "Streamie" and refer to it as "she."

Alas, we're going to go have a look at it in a couple of weeks. I have the hitch in case we decide to bring it -- okay, her -- home.

You're waiting to hear why I'm proud about the hitch and maybe wondering why I have any pride at all. But having told you this much, I'm too dispirited to go on right now, so that story will have to wait until next time.

Family Legend Wounded But Still Breathing

Pam's dad, John Mauldin, kept this gun in his nightstand throughout the last decades of his life. It was for security against random evildoers, he said, although when Pam retrieved the weapon after he died she found the cylinder empty and no cartridges anywhere in the house.

She held onto it because of the exciting family folklore surrounding it. She understood that the revolver, a Smith and Wesson .44, was once carried by John's father, Homer Gene Mauldin Sr., when he was sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.

The story I heard her tell more than once was that Sheriff Mauldin was wearing this sidearm when he got a panicky phone call from the next county informing him that Pretty Boy Floyd was at large in Arizona and heading his way. The sheriff hit the road in search of the notorious bank robber and cop killer, presumably intending to shoot him with his enormous pistol if he had to.

As luck would have it, he didn't. But if things had turned out differently, it now seems quite clear that he'd have done any necessary shooting with an entirely different weapon. The one now hanging handsomely box-framed on our wall wasn't ever his.

Going through an old carton of previously unexamined papers just a few weeks ago, Pam came across a torn and faded document in the form of an amateurish and probably jocular 100-year lease under which John took possession of the gun from his uncle El Roy Mauldin when the two of them were both living in San Antonio in the 1960s.

There certainly was law enforcement work in the pistol's pedigree. In the lease, El Roy affirms that he was a deputy sheriff in Beaumont when he acquired it.

But regardless of which Mauldin peace officer owned our pearl handled memento, it never posed any danger to Pretty Boy Floyd. The lease says El Roy bought it factory fresh from Smith and Wesson "in 1938 or 1939". Pretty Boy was shot dead by other lawmen in an apple orchard in Ohio in October of 1934.

As for the rest of the oral history, the part in which Homer Gene spent an edgy night in the desert hunting America's Public Enemy Number One, I've been unable to find any confirmation that the pudgy cheeked miscreant ever wandered as far west as Arizona.

On purpose, however, I did not look very hard.

Old Growth Furniture

This is the last major embellishment to our living room, a coffee table which is actually an 18-inch section from the trunk of an ancient juniper that lived and died a couple of miles from here.

A guy named Mike Free out on Highway 70 near the racetrack had the trunk in the yard next to his workshop. He'd recently sold a section to somebody else who put a glass top on it for a dining room table, so he was willing to give us a discount on what was left.

We were already good customers. Mike made our fireplace mantle, a polished quarter-cut pine log. And we also bought one of his heavy pine benches, which now sits outside the mountain-facing end of the house with one of those metal fire pits in front of it.

But the table is one of a kind. You can see where Mike sprinkled some turquoise pellets into a flaw on the top before he applied the half dozen or so coats of urethane to protect the finish and make the thing shine. It weighs at least 300 pounds.

I asked him how long the tree had lived, and he told me that judging from the rings he thought it could be 1,000 years old.

Mike is proudly cajun, a lifelong outdoorsman and hunter who has always made his living with his hands. Between his manly simplicity and his straightforward way of talking, it's hard to doubt anything he says about anything having to do with nature.

We asked him where we could go to hear elk bugling the way they do on the Internet sites. He guaranteed that if we drove up the mountain to mile marker 6 at sunset, we'd hear a lot of them. We went up there just where he said and didn't hear anything.

So maybe the juniper that made our coffee table didn't live 1,000 years. But it was definitely very very old.

Arriving West

This is the view from our new kitchen window in Ruidoso. Also from Elizabeth's bedroom.

But as it turns out, you can also see it while seated at our small dining table. Or in one of the upholstered chairs that faces the fireplace. Or from the sofa, if you turn your head.

Even more surprising, you can see it through the kitchen window while standing at the other end of the house, and also while relaxing at the table on the deck outside, because the small trapezoidal clerestory near the vaulted ceiling just happens to frame it nicely from that perspective.

I am so pleased with our tiny little house -- less than 700 square feet of living space -- that I almost don't want to write about it for fear of somehow jinxing the joy of sitting inside it and looking out.

But I don't think I'm tempting fate, because as hard as we worked to make it turn out nice, a lot of what makes it wonderful was almost entirely unexpected and not our doing, starting with the many sight lines to Sierra Blanca, which is what the handsome peak in the photo above is called.

We did point the house at the mountain, of course. But we had no idea there would be so many ways to look at it from our finished home. Nor did we anticipate how perfectly the windows facing in other directions would capture the woods and hillsides that surround our place while almost entirely masking the street, neighboring houses, and the bits of our property that aren't exactly ugly but fall short of scenic.

One major contributor to the serendipity was an interior designer Pam brought in to help squeeze our stuff into the limited space. We were expecting to square off the sofa and chairs in front of the fireplace, but she pivoted the whole arrangement 45 degrees. It not only made the room suddenly feel twice its size but pointed each upholstered seat at an interesting outside vista. And it created a square space next to the kitchen area exactly right for a small desk and a couple of file cabinets.

We're in a subdivision of the Village of Ruidoso. We have city water, sewer, natural gas, cable with wireless, and Walmart. But seated inside our house or outside on the deck, it feels like we're off the grid. On the way to the bathroom in the middle of last night, I glanced toward the window and saw an elk. (Okay, I was able to see it because it was standing under the streetlight, but still, it was an elk.)

I give Pam all the credit for the many features of the house itself that are making it a pleasure to live in, now that the dust and chaos of the move-in are settled. It is a tiny masterpiece, a much more interesting and gracious place than any of the others we've inhabited, larger or smaller. It took a lot of research, creativity and contractor spinning to put it all together. She did nearly all of it, sometimes with help from me but also sometimes over my short-sighted or pinchpenny objections.

But what I am appreciating most right now is how much greater the whole is than the sum of the many parts we labored and obsessed over together for the past year. I'm amazed and astonished.

It is so fine that our long-standing plan to spend most of our time at the condo in Mexico -- also pretty sweet -- and use this place as a summer refuge from the tropical humidity is now getting a fresh hard look.

Stay tuned.

Land Rush

This is the surveyor's medallion that marks the northwest corner of the smallish lot across the street from the even smaller lot where we're now watching the finishing touches being put on our little cabin in Ruidoso NM.

We oriented our place along an east-west axis that points the west end of our place directly at Sierra Blanca, the stately mountain that looms over the village and is the object most worth looking at for many miles around.

The vacant lot sits directly between us and an inspirational view across Brady Canyon, the terrain rising steadily over some 10 miles of pine forest to the tree line where alpine meadow takes over the rest of the vista and caps the 12,000-foot peak.

For years we never thought of it as a "lot" at all, because it was so steep it didn't seem reasonable that anybody would try to build on it. It looked more like a cliff.

But then somebody did build a house on a lot just as difficult right next door. Extending that roof line in our minds' eyes across the space facing ours, we realized that the days of our unobstructed view of the mountain could be numbered.

We told ourselves we'd enjoy it while we could.

Then last year in Puerto Vallarta, somebody bought the small brick structure on the south side of our condo. As I write this, two additional floors are rising there. Last January we watched preparation for that construction begin from our bedroom window, which looks out on the iconic bell tower of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, framed by the Bahia de Banderas and the palm-forested Cabo de Corrientes in the distance. Within weeks, that romantic view will be gone forever.

So when a "for sale" sign sprouted on that empty lot in Ruidoso not long ago, we called the number. This week we signed a purchase agreement.

When we were placing our cabin, local people who know informed us that our mountain view would add value to our home in an amount roughly $10,000 higher than what we paid for our new hillside property. But that's not why we now feel we've enriched ourselves and our children and grandchildren.

Thank you, Pam.

Back to School

I'm submitting columns now and then to the local semi-weekly newspaper. Here's the latest:

Our youngest daughter is 32 years old, so it’s been a while since we worried much about the quality of our local public schools. But we just adopted our granddaughter and moved to Ruidoso to raise her, so now we’re worrying a lot.

We’ve been keeping up with the ongoing coverage of the dysfunctional school board and its superintendent-in-exile, sent home on paid leave for reasons that vary depending on who you ask.

We’ve also come into random social contact with a large number of people who say they have insider information and strong feelings about how the school district leadership may have gotten itself into its present fix. 

Some blame the board, especially recall targets Devin Marshall and Curt Temple. Others blame Superintendent Bea Harris.

I’m not yet sure where the lion’s share of the fault lies. But regardless, there are two things that are painfully obvious to anybody trying in spite of everything to feel good about sending their children to back to classes in Ruidoso schools this week.

The first is that the real reasons behind the controversy haven’t been publicly disclosed. Ruidoso taxpayers, including yours truly, don’t have more than a few clues that would help us understand what the fuss is actually about.

When Ms. Marshall and Mr. Temple first announced they were suspending Ms. Harris, they gave no grounds at all. They said only that her performance was under investigation. Newspaper readers like me were left to wonder what sort of terrible misconduct might have prompted such a drastic decision. It sounded as if it might lead to lawsuits or even criminal charges.

When the two board members finally made public statements to defend themselves against the widespread outrage from Ms. Harris’s supporters, the mystery only deepened. 

There were vague claims about violations of board policy, questionable personnel decisions, errors in handling of certain business matters. But there weren’t many facts, and what facts there were seemed to have been been spun to Ms. Harris’s disadvantage. 

Most puzzling of all, it appeared the board wasn’t investigating anything, that it had already concluded that Ms. Harris had done things that warranted removal. If that was the case, why was she still getting paid? She was their employee but no longer had their confidence. When would they just fire her? 

For her part, Ms. Harris hasn’t said a word. Silence may be the smart play for her personally. But it has helped keep the public in the dark about a corrosive dispute that has divided the community and left its school administration in serious disarray just when teachers need decisions and support as they prepare for the new school year.

The second and far more important obvious truth, one of the few things that all parties and their supporters agree on, is that the state of public education in Ruidoso is deplorable, and in the present impasse little is being done to fix it.

In the latest state reports, Ruidoso schools are among the lowest ranked in New Mexico, and of course New Mexico is near the bottom of the national heap. You can quibble over how fair or accurate such ranking systems are, but it would take a margin of error the size of Sierra Blanca for any reasonable person to believe Ruidoso schools might really not be that bad.

Reading between the lines, it’s starting to look as if this situation really boils down to a personal grudge between Ms. Harris and one or more board members, which none of them can talk about in public because Ms. Harris has a contract with the school district.

A board majority appears to want to fire Ms. Harris but may be afraid to because they can’t satisfy the contract requirements for termination. Ms. Harris can’t defend herself either because she still wants to try to save her job, Lord knows why, or at least to preserve her severance rights under her contract.

All of this is more than a little heartbreaking for us. We love Ruidoso, but we love our granddaughter more. Fortunately she’s just two years old, so we have a couple of years to decide whether we need to spend our school years somewhere else. 

I hope that’s enough time for real leaders to emerge at RMSD.

Too Much On My Plate

I nearly cried when the clerk at the local DMV handed over this plate and my freshly printed New Mexico title, and not because the package cost me nearly 500 bucks.

It was at least my sixth visit to the little office with its waiting room full of dispirited and grumbling patrons and the nonstop food channel everyone was apparently afraid to change.

None of this will surprise anyone who's had to license a car in a new state lately, but it's been many years since I owned a car in this country at all, and I was appalled at what government cutbacks and passive aggressive clerical behavior have done to the process.

We bought our car from a dealer in Alamogordo, about 45 miles from here. The salesman said the dealership would charge me a service fee of about $350 to title and register, and I'd be smart to just do it myself. Okay, I shouldn't have said, but did.

When I got to the DMV the clerk informed me on inspecting the dealer documents that I didn't have the car's former title. I had to return to Alamogordo and ask for it. It turned out the car's last owner was in Alaska.

Back at the DMV, I learned that a newly arrived taxpayer with an out-of-state car needs to prove his own identity and his New Mexico residency before anybody will even look at his vehicle particulars.

Identity wasn't a problem, but I had to go home to look for my Medicare and Social Security cards, and also a birth certificate. I needed Pam's papers too. Residency was tougher, because as Ruidoso newbies we haven't got much documentation with both our names on it, addressed to us in New Mexico.

I failed again at the DMV because the rental contract on our temporary residence didn't match with our actual new mailing address, and yet again when I arrived with an electric bill on which only Pam's name appeared. (Each take-a-number visit required at least an hour's wait, sometimes more.)

Once the identity and residency hurdles were behind me, I encountered VIN issues. An out-of-state car requires a physical inspection of the vehicle to verify that its ID number matches the paperwork. The number on the dash did indeed match, but when the clerk looked for the "nader sticker" on the driver's door she found it had been ripped off.

The number is also embossed above the radiator, first thing you see when you lift the hood. But the clerk maintained it was above her pay grade to look at it. Only a state trooper would do for that.

There's a Highway Patrol office here, but the guy who does VIN inspections only shows up by appointment once a month, and oops we had just missed his July date. But my temp registration was about to expire, so that meant another trip to Alamogordo to shame the dealer into issuing me a new one.

My VIN appointment finally came on Wednesday, and after making sure my vehicle wasn't stolen and shaking his head over the fecklessness of DMV clerks, the trooper gave me an affidavit stating that he had located the VIN number in two places.

I went back to the DMV the next day, but the line was so long I gave up. Yesterday, with my second temp expiration date looming, I went back determined to finish the job. But when I got to the window, the clerk shook her head mournfully and informed me that the trooper had transcribed an "L" in my VIN number with a bare vertical line that could also have been an "I" or a "1". It was above her pay grade to speculate as to what he meant, she said with ersatz regret. Only the trooper himself could clarify this.

Seething, I crumpled my take-a-number slip and left the office, considering whether to go home and modify the affidavit myself. But we did the right thing and drove back to Patrol office, where a different trooper had the time and humanity to inscribe the short horizontal line that removed all doubt.

So yes, I nearly cried when we returned to the office, waited another hour, and got our plate. I paid extra for a two-year registration so I don't have to darken DMV's door again any time soon.

This New House

This is a picture of a kitchen cabinet knob, and if you peer closely at it you'll see that it's imprinted with the miniature paw print of a bear.

It's a cute accessory for the little house we hope to move into soon in a neighborhood where a real bear makes an appearance from time to time.

Bears have it all going on. They're endearing but also menacing if they get too close, and thanks to these qualities they've been fetishized in our mountain community, subject of hundreds of crude chainsaw sculptures all over town.

We're not interested in those, much as we like bears. To our way of thinking, the embossed kitchen knobs is a more nuanced homage. It's only one example of the countless items I've been asked to consider lately that I never would have expected to.

I've never paid a nanosecond's attention to any kitchen knob that didn't come off in my hand, so it was a revelation to me to learn that there are many different styles to choose from. That's actually an understatement. There are many thousands, and when you're done with style you still have size and color to deal with. You're not done yet. You need to decide where to place the knob on the cabinet door.

Once you graduate from knobs, you move along to drawer pulls. You're not overwhelmed by all this decision making because by now you have already chosen the cabinets and drawers themselves and have long since mastered the art of producing opinions out of thin air.

It's better to have a round toilet than one of those long oval ones. Or is it? Glass on a shower door should be clear, not beaded or misted. Or should it? A pine ceiling looks tacky and cliched with anything more than a clear coat of varnish over it. Or does it?

I've moved in and out of dozens of dwelling places without knowing or caring how this sort of thing got decided. The rooms and their appurtenances were what they were, which for the most part was just fine, or at least serviceable.

But the day we started our little house from scratch, acceptance became a luxury I could no longer afford.

Resting in Peace

Last month as the forest fire blazed and we were fleeing east to Dallas, we found ourselves in little Brownfield, Texas. Pam suddenly realized we were just a few miles south of even tinier Meadow, Texas, where her mother's family farmed for several generations.

Some of those ancestors lie buried in Terry County Memorial Cemetery just outside Brownfield. Pam decided we should pause and pay respects.

So we fired up the iPad and Mapquested our way to the place, which proved easy to find because it was one of the few substantial stands of trees anywhere in or near the town, or for that matter between us and the horizon in any direction.

Pam had been to at least one funeral there many years ago, but she had no recollection of where in the park it had taken place. So we began cruising the quiet lanes and scanning the markers for the family name, which was Waters.

After a few minutes I realized a curious thing. All the names on the headstones were Hispanic. At first we thought we might have blundered into the Catholic cemetery. But then I had the idea that since we had turned left from the center road to start our search, we might find Anglo names if we went back and turned right instead.

Sure enough, we found that the other half of the cemetery was populated with Osborns, Baggetts, Haywoods, Paddacks, Andresses, and, presently, several Waters.

Otherwise, the two halves of the burial ground were indistinguishable. Same good perpetual care. Same handsome stones. Same lovingly placed flowers here and there. Just across the county road to the south was Zion Cemetery, just as well groomed. We didn't go in to see what sort of folks lay there, but we didn't really have to.

Every soul in all three parcels lived and died in what was and remains for the most part a segregated community. But there they all are, peaceably sharing the only shade for miles around, separate but indisputably equal at last.

You Can't Go Home Again

Is there anybody left out there who still doesn't think the Tomlins are dodging hostile thunderbolts from somewhere on high? Well, get a load of this.

The photo above was shot yesterday outside our former Manhattan home at East 56th and Lexington. An underground transformer overheated and exploded, blowing its cast iron manhole cover into the air.

Under normal circumstances, they say if New Yorkers notice these flipping disks at all they only interrupt their sidewalk conversations long enough to call heads or tails.

But in this case there were flames, and they were hot enough to ignite a minivan parked at the curb. The minivan burned long enough to spark a second explosion in its gas tank, which set off some construction scaffolding overhead.

The blaze gutted the corner salon where I used to get my hair trimmed, along with the 2nd and 3rd floor condos above it, and blackened the 16-story building facade all the way to the roof.

Elizabeth's best buddy Parker fled the building in the arms of his daddy. His mommy was just ahead of them. They all plunged around a wall of fire and smoke across the building entrance and spent the night in a hotel.

Our dear friend and next door neighbor Mignon wisely chose not to trust the elevators and wasn't prepared to trust her knees either for 14 flights of stairs. On the doorman's advice she stayed where she was and monitored the situation on the news channels.

One of the elevators did fail, trapping a less prudent resident between floors for the better part of an hour. Smoke rolled into the basement, forcing another to barricade herself in the laundry room until FDNY cleared the air.

Well, we're sorry our former neighbors were frightened and inconvenienced. But I'm quite sure that once again this was all about us and our recent string of mini-calamities and brushes with disaster. We were just there LAST WEEK! I almost got a haircut!

Wild Kingdom

No need any more to sit wondering what that pretty bird in the tree is, not in the age of wifi and Google. Here's Steller's Jay, a common site around the place we're living these days.

The real thing is prettier, if anything, than its close-up. The tail, back and wing tips are flashing lapis lazuli, fading to charcoal around the head and shoulders, or whatever birds call them.

With help from our visiting friend Doreen, who likes birds more than we do, we've also become familiar with the Western Peewee, which seems to have a nest under our eaves and sits staring in at us from wires in front of our picture windows.

We've seen a couple of varieties of woodpecker, including the Acorn with its little scarlet beanie. And the hummingbird feeder is back up outside the kitchen window. They feed and harass each other like fighter pilots almost full time, and one bird actually flew into the house. It took a five minute game of gentle broom badminton to send him back outside.

But maybe you're wondering about our bear. We left town for New York the day after the Game and Fish guy put the trap trailer out for him. The trap was gone when we got back last week, so we emailed to see if it worked.

"I did not catch the bear," Ranger Mark replied. "Call me if you have any other problems with it."

There's a responsive public servant for you. But knowing now that Game and Fish runs a gas chamber, we decided we'd lose that phone number and consider taking our Albuquerque friends' advise to get a pellet gun and plink Smokey in his fat butt if he bothers us.

But we didn't see the bear again. Until yesterday, when he wandered back into the neighborhood, looking as untroubled and saucy as ever. We immediately checked our locks and latches and discovered that the french doors from the deck to our bedroom no longer lock or even latch. A gentle nose bump is all a bear or even a raccoon would need to pay us a midnight visit.

The carpenter is supposed to be on his way this morning. We slept restlessly last night behind a stack of patio furniture.

But our most satisfying wildlife event in the past week was an elk sighting. Actually there were four of them, browsing in the woods about 100 yards up the steep slope behind the house. They are majestic creatures at this time of year, much larger than deer and heavily muscled, with their enormous antler racks extending half the length of their bodies.

Elizabeth is as interested in the fauna as we are. But whenever we see a wild thing near the house, her first move is to get Baby off the deck.

More Heat Than Light

The blackened hillsides north and west of our new home are cooling off, but local tempers not so much. Something terrible happened, and it must be somebody's fault. More particularly, it must be somebody else's fault.

When the fire was still expanding out of control, the story took hold that when a lightning strike ignited the Little Bear blaze, dimwitted Forest Service bureaucrats safe at their desks in Alamogordo decided to treat it as a "prescribed burn," an opportunity to clear away brush and deadfall the way nature intended.

Outrage spread faster than the flames. Only a moron would prescribe a hot weather burn in a forest parched by drought and pocked with stands of brown trees infested by bark beetles.

This narrative got a powerful boost when the local congressman, Steve Pearce, parachuted in to repeat it in a confrontation with Forest Service officials during a public meeting that was supposed to be about helping residents understand where flames were advancing and what was being done about it. The officials declined to engage Pearce beyond observing mildly that his accusations weren't helping to fight the fire.

That was probably a mistake. Politicians love being mouthpieces for the righteous indignation of their constituents, and of course sometimes that's their job. In this case, though, the story appears to be wrong.

Observers with more facts at hand are now saying firefighters got to the blaze quickly and did all they could to put it out. The real culprits were difficult terrain, bad conditions for water drops from the helicopters and tankers that were promptly deployed but couldn't get water directly on the flames, and the tinderbox state of the forest.

Fortunately for everyone looking for scapegoats, there are still plenty available. The most appealing are:

1. The Forest Service, for caving to decades of public pressure to suppress every fire that could remotely threaten homes and businesses as development expands ever deeper into former wilderness areas, allowing buildup of dry fuel that would otherwise be burned in smaller natural fires.

2. "Tree hugging" environmentalists whose misguided efforts to protect habitats of endangered species have thwarted rational forest management practices.

3. Congress, for cutting Forest Service budgets and depriving the agency of the resources it would need to practice controlled burning and other fuel clearing techniques, and to fight catastrophic fires more effectively.

It's a tough bundle of issues for any community located near forests, even more so for one just starting to deal with the damage and trauma of a worst-case fire.

A strong local newspaper could help a lot. So far, the semi-weekly Ruidoso News hasn't offered much more than a forum for the partially informed and the self serving.

I hope this is not where all civic conversations everywhere are heading now in the twilight of print journalism.

Oh Please

At the southeast corner of Central Park, they finally took down that confounding tornado of truck tires I posted about last year.

In its place, a worthy successor. It's a Piper Seneca hoisted by the wingtips between two pylons, motorized so the plane twirls slowly around its pitch axis.

As always, there's some explanatory text on a placard nearby to give passersby a clue as to what they're looking at.

"Airborne but flightless, its steady circular movement is mesmerizing," the curatorial spiel says. "The shift of context from airport runway to New York City plaza is equally dramatic. It creates the striking but surreal experience of a familiar object seen in an unexpected place doing a very unfamiliar thing."

Maybe I'm missing an art chromosome, but I can't see what makes this different from sneaking out at night to put the dean's Volkswagen upside down on his front lawn.

And am I the only one thinking that if ever there was a city that didn't need a replay of the not-so-amazing idea that it's startling to see an airplane in a high-rise neighborhood, it's New York.

Day One, Rest of Our Lives

The smile above is for the New York Family Court, which granted our petition yesterday to adopt Elizabeth.

We never had much doubt we could make this happen eventually. But courts often seem more interested in their own procedures than in the merits of the case at hand, and we've been working on this for a year and a half.

Even yesterday, with all the pleadings and supporting documentation finally lined up as neatly as our lawyer could make them, the expert witness standing by, and reassuring signals emanating in advance from the judge's own clerk, we entered the courtroom with our hearts in our throats.

When I'm feeling troubled over how much damage a dysfunctional judicial branch can inflict on ordinary citizens, I naturally think first of the current U.S. Supreme Court. But the view changes when you stand before a judge with the power to decide something you care deeply and personally about. You realize that courts of original jurisdiction are the ones that really have to work right.

Fortunately, on this day, this one did. The judge wore a permanent scowl and brought a harsh, disapproving tone to almost everything she said. And she practically leaped off the bench and down all our throats when the muted iPhone our daughter Laurel was using to keep E distracted suddenly interjected a short fragment of the Dora the Explorer theme.

But in the end the court found that Elizabeth's mother can't take care of Elizabeth, that we can, and that it's in E's best interest that her future be placed in our hands.

We both shed a few tears of gratitude and relief as everyone in the courtroom, almost all of them strangers, applauded. The judge excused us, and as we rose to leave, E looked up brightly and contributed her first and last word to the proceedings.

"Bye!," she said.

Bear Bust

When the Game and Fish truck rolled up on our house, the neighbors wanted to know who dropped the dime on the bear.

Well, it was me, I admit it.

The day after he ran Elizabeth and me off our deck, he came back to see us again. It was about lunchtime, and I was away picking E up from her part time playschool. Pam was home alone and heard scrabbling at the kitchen window.

She got up from the table where she was doing some Home Depot research and there he was, knocking the screen from the open window and getting ready to do whatever it took to lever himself up and inside.

Pam slammed the window shut, then flashed me a text. "The Bear is Back!" I never saw it, since I don't text and drive . . . at least not when I'm trying to organize the presets on my new car radio. But when I got back to the house, Pam was waiting at the door to warn us we needed to get inside pronto.

The conventional local wisdom about bears is that if you feed them, you turn them into potentially dangerous nuisances. They may hurt somebody, on the way to getting themselves killed.

So I called Game and Fish and told them we apparently were dealing with exactly that kind of bear. The officer was at our door a few hours later, and less than an hour after that he hauled the trailer above to our little street. It's a bear trap, baited with day-old pie and some fruit. Pam added a cup of sugar water from our hummingbird feeder.

We left town for New York the next day, so we don't know yet if they've caught him. We've got mixed feelings about it too. On the one hand, we'd like to use our deck without feeling like prey. On the other, the officer told us bears often don't adjust well when they're moved, and in some cases the department decides instead to put them down.

If I'd known all that, I might have kept my dime and looked for a better way to secure the deck. Would that have been smarter or fairer? I don't know.

We drove away from Ruidoso on roads that had been closed for days while the Little Bear fire raged last week. It was easy to see why. Vast stretches of blackened forest still smoldered on both sides of the highway, and we passed many of the more than 200 houses that were destroyed, reduced to circles of ashy debris with here and there a stone fireplace and chimney for a monument.

In a few cases, a morose cluster of former homeowners and what looked like insurance claims adjusters surveyed one of the devastated sites. Overhead, a vast towering column of smoke still rose thousands of feet into the air as firefighters continued to back burn dead trees, brush and other dry fuel inside the containment boundaries.

We're in New York until next week, when we attend a court proceeding connected with finalizing our adoption of Elizabeth. We hope it will be the last one. Our lawyers say it might be. Keep your fingers crossed.

It'd Be Funny If It Weren't Omnivorous

We're starting to think everybody wants a piece of us. This guy certainly seemed to. Pam's theory is that he was interested in the hummingbird feeder hanging just above the frame of this photo. But to me it felt personal.

He had just taken me and Elizabeth by surprise, shuffling onto our deck while I was watching E play with her Water Table toys.

You can see the opening he came through in the background behind the table and chairs. This photo was taken an hour or so before the bear arrived, but E was still playing in about the same spot, and I was sitting about where Pam was when she snapped this.

I didn't notice him until he was halfway across the deck. Fortunately, the door was just to my right, so I was able to snatch E and get through it before he got much closer. 

I'm not sure what attracted him. We were planning to have steak for dinner, but we hadn't even fired up the gas grill, which I think we'll start parking in front of that open gate.

But once we were inside the house fluttering nervously from one window to another, he turned his attention to the Water Table. He knocked off the accessories, took a drink or two, then began trying to climb into it.

I never thought he'd fit and was pretty sure that if he did the three blow-molded plastic legs would collapse. But he wedged himself in and sat there soaking contentedly for quite a while before moving along. 

Fisher Price will be proud to hear about this. Of course, we will have to give the whole table a good wash before E uses it again. We don't really know what he was doing in there and there's no telling where he'd been.

Elizabeth became agitated as we watched the bear playing with her toys. She has never liked sharing her things that much.

But what really dismayed her was that in the rush from the deck, we had left her doll outside to face the bear alone. "Baby, Baby," she cried over and over as we checked the locks and latches all around. 

The doll was in her bed right outside the door, sleeping through the whole thing. I thought I could crack the door open and make a quick grab for her, but Pam said "Don't even," and to be candid I didn't really mind letting Baby fend for herself. 

But E saw and heard all of this, and I think in her eyes some bloom is now off the grandparent rose.

             

Travelers' Rest

Some people say that digital devices are getting in the way of interpersonal relations, but I'm inclined to doubt it. Neither E nor I is a great multi-tasker, but we're both up to the modest challenge of enjoying each other's company while looking at a flat panel.

We're just as relaxed as we look, having arrived back in Ruidoso yesterday to smokeless skies and optimistic fire containment reports. The Little Bear blaze is finally living down to its name.

We did have an anxious moment or two on the road into town as we logged onto the nmfireinfo site for the latest. One of the few unchecked items on the doomsday scenario scavenger hunt list we've been working for the past couple of weeks was flood, and it looked like we might get to check that one off yesterday.

There were thunderstorms in the area, which authorities warned could mean flash flooding driven by runoff from the burned areas, now denuded of vegetation. People living in low lying areas along streams below the blackened zones, such as ourselves, were advised they might need to evacuate.

The rains did come, but not in hazardous amounts. The warnings were withdrawn before nightfall, so we unpacked.

Today our worst problem is that we're far enough up the canyon from town that our AT&T wireless phone service doesn't reach. Our landlords didn't bother to provide a router, and it will take us at least a couple of weeks to get the cable company to bring us a box. Helpful neighbors gave us the passwords to theirs, but although our devices claim to connect, the Internet still stiff-arms us.

So we're off the grid except for a feeble pair of Verizon bars on Pam's iPad, unless we come into the village to a coffee shop like I'm doing right now.

In the photo above, E is watching videos of herself on Pam's iPhone, and I'm reading an e-book. I'm not complaining. That's about as much excitement as any of us needs for a while.

Missed Us

We're still on the road, trying to stay ahead of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and just barely managing.

Pam and our Dallas friend Doreen decided Wednesday to visit the drought-stricken city's arboretum, where Dale Chihuly's touring collection of frizzy glass art is currently on display. Only hours after they finished looking, a front rolled in and directed a surgically aimed hailstorm at the fragile exhibition, shattering one of the works they had admired most, a set of big crystal lily pads mounted in a pond.

Some of the hailstones were as big as baseballs and spiked like geodes. When they stopped falling on the fancy glassware, the storm moved over to the city's Lakewood district, home of Pam's other longtime Dallas friend Betsy. It smashed roof tiles, car windows and shrubbery everywhere.

This morning, we stopped by for a visit and paused at the local Starbucks for a latte on the way. As you see above, the storm had made flappuccino out of the awnings, and inside the only topic of conversation was heavily caffeinated one-upping over whose next door neighbor had gotten the worst of it.

Betsy, preoccupied and grim, was patrolling her densely planted front yard doing damage assessment as we rolled up. When we came through her gate, she said, "If you're roofers, get off my property."

Apparently it had taken only hours after the hail stopped falling for a predatory army in tool belts and pickup trucks to descend on Lakewood trolling for payment in advance. The Morning News ran a story warning of contractor scams. Betsy had turned away dozens and her courtesy cupboard was bare.

We're on our way back to Ruidoso now. The Little Bear fire is well on the way to being contained, and if the wind continues to blow from the southwest we shouldn't have trouble with smoke in the Upper Canyon.

Tomorrow, we'll have just a few hundred more miles of two-lane blacktop across the frying pan flatness of West Texas, where by the way we have encountered a plague of grasshoppers crossing our path in mating pairs, trios and now and then a frenzied cluster of four or more.

Some of the calamities Nature sends our way are more entertaining than others.

Smoke Follows a Bad Camper

We're planning to live in Mexico most of the year. But one of the reasons we went ahead with our small getaway place in Ruidoso was that it would give us a safe haven to bolt to in case the drug wars suddenly made Puerto Vallarta seem too dangerous for retirees with a toddler in the house.

So imagine our disappointment yesterday to log onto nytimes.com and see the photo above on the home page. It's a guy named Jose Trevino Morales celebrating his horse's victory in the American Futurity a couple of years ago at our very own Ruidoso Downs.

Morales' brother is said to be second in command and top enforcer of the dreaded Zetas cartel, and it turns out these two led a group that has built a major quarter horse breeding and racing business based in Ruidoso as a convenient and entertaining way to launder some of their drug billions.

On the very day we were driving past the racetrack on our way out of town ahead of flames and smoke from the Little Bear fire, federal agents in unmarked vehicles were sweeping into the stable yards within view of our escape route to seize horses and make arrests.

Savvy locals are telling the Ruidoso News that for the past couple of years they had noticed these strangers rolling up to the Downs in their shiny black Escalades and the puzzling though welcome infusion of big money they were bringing to the New Mexico racing scene. They wondered what was up. So now they know.

And so do we. Safe and comfy for the moment in the bosom of our generous Dallas friends, we contemplate a future of fleeing seasonally from one of our retirement paradises to the other, hoping the cycle of forest fires and outbreaks of cartel barbarism match up well with Elizabeth's school year.

We're pretty sure they will. Despite all that's been happening, we're still optimists.

Fire on the Mountain, Run Boys Run

The song says "run" twice, so that's what we've now done.

The smoke from the Little Bear fire north and west of our new part-time home in Ruidoso NM drove us down the mountain to Alamogordo last Saturday night. But when we got up Sunday morning and looked north, the plume we could see the evening before stretching east from Sierra Blanca seemed to be gone. So we packed up and drove back to what passes for home these days.

When we arrived, the sky over the village and the Upper Canyon where we're renting was clear. We had a relaxing day on the deck playing with Elizabeth. The bear came back, but he just ambled around looking pudgy and comical, and he loped away when a bunch of neighbors came after him with cameras. You can throw rocks and he doesn't care, but apparently he wants no pictures.

Things looked much grimmer this morning, however. The advisories said the wind had diminished, but it had also shifted. The fire's perimeter now encompassed more than 35,000 acres and had advanced to as little as four miles from the top of our canyon. Evacuation prospects for our area had changed from "possible" to "probable." Worst of all, there was an acrid mist in the canyon that the smoke hazard websites warned could be dangerous for anyone with sensitive lungs.

We decided we should leave again and stay away for a while. But where to go?

After considering the options, we decided on a three-stage escape. First stop would be our place in Puerto Vallarta for ten days, then back to New York for an adoption hearing we all have to attend, then back to a hopefully safe and sound Ruidoso in time to replace the 30-day temporary license on our "new" car.

But of course like all our plans lately, this one quickly seemed doomed. Pam had her passport and Elizabeth's in her purse, but mine was stored in a box of papers and documents that I brought to Ruidoso in my rental moving truck and left in a mini-storage locker with our appliances for the new house.

The locker is in Alto, just a few hundred yards beyond where authorities have blocked the highway heading north from Ruidoso toward the burn area. We had also turned over our only key to our builder so he could fetch some of the appliances for installation before we arrived in town. The builder, an avid bow hunter, is in Maine trying to skewer a bear. (Yes, I know.)

You might have thought this meant the Mexico option was off the table, but not if you know Pam. She called the owner of the mini-storage, who agreed to meet us at our locker with a grinding wheel and a new lock.

On his advice, we drove north, turned right just before the National Guard's roadblock, left into a residential area and then left again onto a dirt road marked "Private, Trespassers will be Prosecuted." It let us out onto the highway about a half mile behind the roadblock in an area where unauthorized persons are subject to arrest. Pretending to be invisible, we scooted across the road and up the hill to our locker, watched Van destroy our lock, and retrieved my passport.

But tonight we're not on our way to Mexico. We're in yet another forgettable motel in Sweetwater, TX, on our way to stay with friends in Dallas. I'm not sure why we changed our minds. Probably because it would have been too luxurious and relaxing, and we can tell the universe doesn't think we deserve it.

What Next?

Looking at these two happy rusticators enjoying the peaceful babble of the Rio Ruidoso this morning, you'd never guess that just 15 miles north of where they sat a galloping forest fire was burning people out of their homes. Or that a few hours later, they and their photographer would be refugees themselves.

It's the latest and gaudiest episode in a "heading west" saga that keeps turning awkwardly and sometimes catastrophically away from the path that we planned for it.

Our rental truck wouldn't hold all our furniture. A sharp-eyed foot patrolman lurking near the Lincoln Tunnel cited us for a seatbelt violation just before we made our getaway. The high school graduation celebration we were supposed to attend in Iowa was cancelled for lack of a few credits. The friend's home where Pam was supposed to stay to keep her daughter company while the friend recovered from double knee replacement surgery proved uninhabitable due to cats and asthma.

Pam and Elizabeth flew from Iowa to San Antonio, where another friend was selling us her mom's SUV, ten years old but with low miles and therefore a great bargain. I dropped off our furniture in Ruidoso and turned in the truck in San Antonio where Pam met me with our new ride.

Our cabin won't be done until August, so we've rented a house in Ruidoso not far from the spot shown above. We headed toward it, but with a couple of weeks to kill before we could get into the rental, we decided to drive to the Big Bend on the way. On the long, desolate road that leads to the park, we hit a deer. Our car and that poor animal were probably the only two moving objects within ten miles, but somehow we both ended up trying to occupy the same point in all that space at the same time.

The impact sheered off the grill, smashed the right headlight assembly, crunched the right front quarter panel so the passenger side door wouldn't open, and shredded the bumper. I had to saw off the flapping excess with a Swiss Army knife before we could go on.

The car looked terrible but seemed fine for daytime driving. We reported the accident to our insurance company, cut our park visit to one day and drove straight to New Mexico counting our blessings. But when I got the vehicle to a body shop a few days later, the estimator clucked and murmured solemnly as he examined the damage, much of it invisible and some from prior accidents. Our car, which could still do 80 miles an hour uphill without breathing hard or a hint of wobble, was declared a total loss and impounded as unroadworthy.

Two days ago we bought another SUV at a real world price, only partly offset by the insurance settlement which we're not likely to see for a while anyway. Yesterday we moved into the rental house in Ruidoso's lovely Upper Canyon, where tall Ponderosa pines cover the steep slopes that lead down to the banks of the small stream above. We took a deep breath and figured we'd finally put the worst behind us.

The serene moment was a short one. A bear chased our neighbors out of their hot tub and browsed for edibles around their house, ignoring shouts, barking dogs and the large rocks they pitched at it. Bears are fairly common. But then I looked out our kitchen window and saw a large cougar sauntering down the slope just yards from the deck where Elizabeth and I had been playing with some new toys minutes earlier. Where do people come off thinking New York is dangerous?

Wild animals are one thing. Wild fires are another. We already knew one had been burning for weeks in the Gila National Forest far to the west of us. But as we came out of the Walmart parking lot late yesterday, we were shocked to see a vast plume of smoke rising from behind the summit of Ruidoso's iconic Sierra Blanca.

We monitored the state fire information website throughout the evening and went to bed on edge. By this morning, the blaze had expanded to 10,000 acres, closed the main highway north of town, knocked out the towers relaying all local cell phone and wireless Internet service, damaged three lifts at Ski Apache on which Ruidoso's winter economy depends, and burned at least 20 homes.

High winds were driving most of the smoke to the northeast, but by mid-morning some of it was drifting into Ruidoso and Pam was starting to feel it in her lungs. We re-packed the car and drove south to Alamogordo, where I'm writing this.

Since the fire seemed to be moving northeast and away from the village, we didn't think there was much danger we'd lose our home or our half-completed cabin. Yet shortly after we left, authorities issued a "pre-notification," a sort of heads up, that evacuation of the Upper Canyon might become necessary.

Now we sit in our motel room, catch glimpses of what's been dubbed the Little Bear fire on the national news, and wonder when we'll be able to go back to our new home or what we'll find when we get there.  Pam and I are getting a little weary of living out of suitcases. Only Elizabeth seems not to mind.

As we returned to the Best Western from a mediocre Chinese dinner, she smiled and sighed happily as we pulled in at the curb in front of room 102.

"Home," she chirped.

Heading West

So now we really are "heading west." That's the sun rising over Oklahoma in the mirror of my rental truck. I was not singing "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" as I snapped it.

Yesterday I drove 600 flat, mostly featureless miles across prairie nicely greened up from spring showers but otherwise not much to look at. I slept last night in nondescript and probably misnamed Liberal, Kansas, and by the time the sun arrived I had been back in the truck and driving at least an hour or so, with 400 more miles to go today.

It isn't the right truck, as things have turned out.

There isn't any place in the cab for a child's car seat, so Pam and little E had to fly separately, but family isn't the only thing that had to be thrown overboard.

The rule of thumb I picked up from the online moving websites is that you need 150 cubic feet of van space for each roomful of stuff you're moving. Our little apartment was one large room divided into living and sleeping areas, plus a big terrace patio. Call it four rooms to be safe, which is 600 cubic feet. So I picked a truck with 800 cubic feet, which the rental company said was designed to move three to four rooms.

Seemed reasonable, but the professional packers who loaded us up ran out of space before we got to the terrace things, which consist of a very nice table and chairs, some side tables, a big umbrella and a collection of very large planters. We're attached to all of it, and although the ship-or-replace economics are a close call, we're having it shipped.

I've had a lot of time to think about why the truck math didn't work the way the U-Move gurus said it would. I decided we probably aren't a typical up-and-coming family moving out of a small apartment. Our place was crammed with the residue of nearly 40 acquisitive years, condensed after two downsizings from much larger homes. When we started packing, the closets busted out like clown cars.

Come to think of it, I may not be the right driver either.

There was a mid-trip stop in Des Moines, where I met Pam and Elizabeth at the home of old friends with a child graduating from high school. When I took off yesterday morning, I left behind E's stroller and my bathing suit. This morning as I aimed my iPhone at the reflected sunrise, my gas cap was sitting on the ground next to the pump about 25 miles behind me. Senior moments are becoming senior hours, days, months.

But things could be worse. On the lumpy two-lane highway from Vaughn NM to Carrizozo, I saw the driver of a tractor trailer apparently fall asleep ahead of me and veer onto the slope toward a culvert. He broke several laws of physics getting his yawing rig back on the road, and I spent the next mile or two swallowing my digestive organs back into place.

Tonight I am in Ruidoso, exhausted but smelling the pine trees and trying to remember to feel lucky.