[ Friday, August 08, 2003 ]
Day 161 to Day 166
Farmington, NM. After 6 days of camping outside of Durango, I pack up and go south. I take a 50 mile detour off the obvious route in order to drive down U.S. Hwy. 666 into New Mexico and through the northeastern edge of the Navajo Nation. I am surprised to learn that the route has just been re-numbered, and is now “U.S. Hwy. 491.” The local bible-thumpers finally got their say, I suppose. It’s an issue, perhaps, as the road into and out of Shiprock, NM (and then another highway east to Farmington) are lined with Christian ministries, missionary outposts, Christian social service offices, tent revivals, and the like. Everywhere on the periphery of Indian Country you see it, but here it seems especially pronounced.
Farmington itself (sitting on the NE boundary of the Navajo Nation) is a long, sad, highway concourse of a town comprised of these Christian outposts, pawn shops, adult xxx stores, fast food joints, and the typical assortment of federal, tribal, and religious social service/welfare agencies and chemical dependency treatment centers.
Every few miles or so driving through the Rez and near it, there’s a different “drinking and driving” billboard. “Operation D.U.I.: Checkpoints everywhere.” Little roadside crosses with plastic flowers appear on the shoulder throughout the area, attesting to the problem.
Any way you depart the massive Navajo Nation (it’s the size of the State of West Virginia) – North South East West – you know you’ve left it when you see the first massive fortress-like liquor store. The sale or possession of alcohol is illegal within the Navajo Nation, so enterprising businesses sell it at every major route “border crossing” into the Nation. The timeless beauty of the free market, evidently.
And here on the periphery of Navajoland, the social pathology is visceral. Not so (or quite so much so) in the interior, where things seem a little less desperate, and the natural beauty is overwhelming. But at the borderlands, where Navajoland meets white colonizer, white welfare-giver, white oppressor, white savior, white Jesus, white silicone centerfold, white New Age soul-searcher, the true violence of the interaction is laid bare.
From an interview with a Native American Artist in THE magazine (Santa Fe), paraphrased to the best of my recollection:
"Don't come to Indians looking for medicine men, for environmental wisdom, for spirituality. Look at your own culture, look at your own history. Look at where YOU came from if you want to understand who you are."
More than 450 years from first contact in the SW (early 16th century for most tribes) to the present – Conquistadores first, then the Anglos and the white army – and every day they’ve got a different way to kill Indians. The Navajo Nation stills hangs on to . . . something. But it’s astonishing, really, after all this time post-Columbus post-conquest, that there are any Indians alive here at all.
Santa Fe, NM. I roll into the Carson National Forest late at night, find free camping, and finish off the Tecate supply in the cooler. The next morning I begin touring Santa Fe. To my surprise, there’s a lot more to this town than wealthy tourists buying overpriced “southwestern” art.
I spend the afternoon at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum. There’s a fine exhibition called “Contemporary Indigenous Arts,” as well as an equally good IAIA student show.
Santa Fe, in fact, is home to many fine museums, and I may return in a few days to see the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, a Crafts Museum, and a show at SITE Santa Fe.
Los Alamos, NM. The next day I drive the short distance from Santa Fe up to Los Alamos to visit the Bradbury Science Museum at the home of the scientific sun. The museum is run by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and, as I expect, it is mostly a hawkish self-congratulatory advertisement for nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear everything. There’s a mock-up of Fat Boy (The Nagasaki bomb), as well as newer generations of our nuclear arsenal.
In the back there’s a small display offering “equal access to differing viewpoints” concerning dropping the two bombs on Japan. I’m impressed. After all, the government owns the place, and they don’t really have to provide equal access to anyone’s viewpoint but their own. Anyway, visitors are encouraged to write their own opinions in a book by the display, and I take full advantage if this, with:
”Admiral Leahy was right – dropping the A-bombs on Japan was not necessary to end the war. Incinerating 140,000 Japanese – mostly civilians – was not an act of warfare. It was an act of terrorism. 9-11 pales in comparison to this brutal event.”
The death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (around 70,000 instantaneous deaths in each city) were actually much higher, as another 100,000 or so of the injured and exposed slowly died of radiation sickness and various cancers. Some of them are still dying.
I’m not a pacifist, and I believe that the United States had every right to fight and win a military campaign against Imperial Japanese aggression. But the mass murder of civilians is not warfare. Terrorizing civilian population centers – the Germans did it to London, the British did it back to the Germans, the Japanese (among their many other war crimes) did it to the Chinese, and then we joined the spectacle, at Dresden, and with the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and finally with the two A-bombs. “Two wrongs don’t make a right – but three do.”
In any event, there is significant evidence that we dropped the bombs primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union, and not the “end the war.” Ok, this is rapidly digressing off-travelogue topic now, so that’s that, about that.
At the museum book store and gift shop they sell an impressive variety of books on the Bomb and the Cold War and so on. No postcards of mushroom clouds, however. “Greetings from Hiroshima.”
I recall the time I spent touring some Nazi death camps in Poland, Auschwitz and Birkenwald, in particular. The camps were packed full of German tourists on bus tours. And they did sell postcards at the Auschwitz gift shop. What can one write on such a postcard? “Hey, having a great time in Auchswitz – wish you were here!”
I want to buy the new Alain de Botton book on the philosophy/psychology of traveling, but it’s still only in hard cover and I haven’t (thus far) violated my austerity-measure rule on not spending money on hard covers.
Anyway, at the Los Alamos gift shop, they sell this little sticker (see above) with a drawing of the earth and the caption “HOME.” Truth is stranger than fiction.Speaking of stickers, I see lots of anti-war bumper stickers around Los Alamos (not tourist vehicles, either, but local-looking vehicles with NM plates). “No weapons in space,” “A space for peace.,” etc. This is curious, I think, as nearly everyone in and around Los Alamos either works for the Lab or has some connection to it, and the local economy depends on it.
In and around the Santa Fe and Taos areas, there are more anti-war stickers on average than in the parking lot at Rainbow co-op in SF.
Taos, NM. Former and current Pueblan homeland. Former Spanish outpost. Former hippie colony. Current tourist art gallery mecca. I arrive here and relax for a day, just swimming and reading, in a little BLM campground on the banks of the Rio Grande River. The sun sets over the river, and half a dozen bats flutter overhead in the dusk looking for dinner. Good. I am a friend of the bat. More bats=fewer insects.
Near Magdalena, NM. I’m in full tourist mode by now, so I drive south to see more “things” that interest me. First is the Very Large Array, a massive radio telescope in the middle of nowhere, and the largest, I believe, radio telescope in the world. It’s actually 27 separate telescopes electronically linked to function as a single telescope, or array. It’s called interferometry. There’s a visitor center and tour.
”Hey, can you guys help me do my chart?”
Jodie Foster wasn’t there, but there were photos of her all over the Visitor Center. If you’ve seen the film “Contact” you know what I’m talking about.
The displays in the Visitor Center pointed out that the VLA has never actually been used to search for extraterrestrial life. Also, it is not a Defense Department project, although the VLA is owned by the federal government. I think they just use it to do people’s charts, or something like that.
near the Trinity Site, NM. I drive about as close as I can to the Trinity Site (the place where the boys from Los Alamos detonated their “gadget” in July, 1945). The site itself is within the White Sands Testing Range, and therefore off-limits to the public. Evidently, though, there are 2 days every year when they allow visitors to go to the site. You can pick up pieces of glass that used to be sand. I heard some gossip that they’ll be moving Burning Man out here soon.
Roswell, NM. Of course, now that I’m this far south, I have to go to Roswell to see the UFO Center and Research Library.
There was allegedly a UFO crash near here in 1947, and the military recovered the craft and 4 aliens – one still alive, - so the story goes. The UFO stuff is the main source of tourism for this otherwise sort of nondescript and run-down looking County Seat in Southwest NM. Even the Wal-Mart outside of town has a big UFO painted on the store.
There’s a free museum (started by a former army officer, who is one of the witnesses to the event), surrounded by a cluster of tourist shops selling alien-everything. Across the street are 2 different coffee shops: “Not of this World” and “Alien Resistance.” Both of them are run by hardcore anti-UFO Christians. At the former, the girl behind the counter tells me that she doesn’t like the UFO stuff and thinks that it’s “demonic.”
”Where are you from?”
“I’m from the Pleiades.”
“Oh, kewl.
“Um, . . . I’m not really from the Pleiades. I’m actually from San Francisco.”
“Oh, kewl.”
At Alien Resistance, the owner tells me that UFO sightings are really angels or chariots of fire from Heaven, or something like that. He reports that the people from the UFO museum won’t come to his coffee shop. He also says that people in Roswell don’t give a shit about whether any of it is true or not, they just know that UFOs are a great tourist industry for them. This seems about right.
In other news, I continue to receive late submissions to the Haiku Contest. Thanks, and feel free to send more Haiku, but the show's over on that, at least for now. Notably, there have been no complaints as to the judging of said contest, other than one statement pertaining to the apparent "whiff of nepotism." The correspondent, did, however, agree that my sibling's haiku was probably the best.
I also received an impressive collection of Haiku in the form of cut-up and recycled Homeland Drifter content, copyrighted, no less, which was amusing. Oh, well.
Bad F*cker Department of Tourism, over and out.
Soundtrack: Ollie Wisdom (Spacetribe), Shapeshifter
Reading List: Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Southwest, by Alex Shoumatoff
Website: www.votetoimpeach.org [8/8/2003]
PAY ATTENTION BLACK ROCK CITY
