Just deserts

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Even the cacti are hunting shade.

“Just put a chair underneath the swamp cooler and deal with it all like a pro.” — “When Everything Goes Wrong,” Ken Layne, Desert Oracle Radio

Gonna be a hot one — or two, or three, or four, or more — throughout the desert Southwest.

Especially out there in Desert Oracle country, where Ken Layne chats with author Claire Nelson about the time when her day hike suddenly got too hot to handle.

Here in the Duke City I’ve finally bowed to the elements and switched the Honeywells from “heat” to “cool,” because we’ve been having too much of the one and not nearly enough of the other.

And it will only get hotter. The National Weather Service predicts high temperatures of 5 to 15 degrees above normal for about a week (!) as a strong high-pressure system blisters New Mexico like a chile on the grill.

We didn’t need no steekeeng air conditioning back in Bibleburg. Nobody made us move to the upper edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. We knew it was wrong, but we did it anyway.

And whaddaya wanna bet one or both of us goes out onto the sunbaked trails to get the ol’ heart rate up for a while? No brain, no pain. If you don’t hear from me for a couple days call the Duke City trash collectors. I’ll be that bag of bones under the prickly pear somewhere in the Sandia Foothills Open Space.

Bloody hell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Jordan Alexander Barson. | Photo courtesy Mohave County Sheriff’s Office

Remember this fine fellow? Charged with taking out a group ride on U.S. 95 in Nevada, killing five, injuring four?

If Jordan Alexander Barson is a good boy — that means no more running over cyclists while crazed on meth, mister! — he can be paroled after serving just 10 years of the 40-year sentence he received on Wednesday.

So says defense attorney Damian Sheets, anyway. District Attorney Steven B. Wolfson claims Barson will have to do at least 16 years in the Graybar Hotel.

But Wolfson and Sheets agree that the Nevada Highway Patrol intercoursed the penguin on the blood draw; the DA described it as “less than perfect investigative work,” while the defense called it a violation of Barson’s rights.

The upshot was a deal that saw Barson cop to just two counts of DUI resulting in death.

Donna Trauger, whose husband, Tom, was among the dead, got right down to cases. She accused the stateys of “embarrassing negligence” and “victim-blaming,” and said that “justice was not served.”

The NHP had no comment. Hell, I’m nearly speechless myself. There was a retired cop on this ride — Michael Anderson, who did 22 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department — and you’d think that if the system worked for anyone it would work for an ex-cop and his friends.

“We got it, Mike. This guy is gonna gonna do a century over this.”

Nope. Sixteen years. Unless he runs over a trusty with a laundry cart or something.

A wee misinterpretation

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
“Oopsie.”

Well, it sure is shaping up to be an interesting summer.

Lake Foul is a couple quarts away from becoming a pump track. Lake Merde, a skatepark. And we have to boil the air before we can breathe it.

Good times. Maybe not.

It seems we took God literally when She said: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Now I can envision Her muttering: “You write ’em books and all they do is chew on the covers. You see anything in there about Phoenix, Las Vegas, or California? You do not. Because I was writing the Bible, not ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’

“I send you my kid and Ed Abbey and this is the thanks I get? I hope you meshuggeners like drinking your wee-wee. Straight, no chaser.”

Cat got your lung?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
Looking down toward town from the top of Comanche.

Bad air. Bad, bad, air! Now go pool down there along the Rio and think about what you’ve done.

The smoke makes it to the Sandias.

Actually, by 8:30, this bad, bad air had found its way up to El Rancho Pendejo, after traveling all the way from just outside Globe, Ariz., where about 121,000 acres of nicely cured fuels are burning with a vengeance.

InciWeb counts a dozen fires in Arizona at the moment, and a half-dozen here in New Mexico. The air is liable to remain a tad crunchy for the foreseeable future, according to the people who know about such things, and the vigorous outdoor exercise may be contraindicated for the nonce.

We got it all, man. Your coarse particulates, your fine particulates, your chenopodiaceae.

Breathing this mess feels like waking up after a three-day drunk surrounded by empties and full ashtrays, under a table holding a dusty mirror, a razor blade, and a rolled-up dollar bill. Someone has painted your toenails an appalling shade of pink, and you may be wearing this someone’s underwear as a party hat. Your face, of course, is in the catbox.

The voice of the Wet Mountain Valley?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
The Wet Mountain Valley with the Sangre de Cristos for backdrop.
| Photo: Hal Walter

I’ve gotten in the habit of listening to Desert Oracle Radio on Saturday mornings, while I inhale a few cups of java with one bleary eye half-focused on whatever news broke while I was bagging Zs.

So naturally I thought it was an acid flashback this morning when Ken Layne mentioned Westcliffe while running down a long list of places recommended to him for a Western hideout come August, when even the most hardened Mojave Desert rat starts to feel painted in not enough sauce but laid out on the grill anyway, working up a nice blackened crust.

He got a hundred or so suggestions, and Westcliffe, a.k.a. Weirdcliffe, was right there in the mix, rubbing shoulders with Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Salida, and any number of other places with better PR.

Someone even shilled for Albuquerque. Probably some flack at USA Cycling, which will be bringing its 2021 Masters Road National Championships to the vicinity Aug. 5-8. I don’t think any of their geezers will be zipping up the jerseys and fretting about frostbite when the road race tackles Heartbreak Hill.