Silver City Blues Festival

Crowds are large but not as thick as last year, high winds most likely keeping them away. A boy walks by holding a Styrofoam plate of fresh hot salty potato chips. The wind flips it out of his hands and it sails, chips flying in all directions onto a group of gray haired ladies dressed in the tie-dye shirts and hippie dresses they just bought at the corner booth. The poor boy is horrified, and still hungry.

The sun by late afternoon is relentless but made easier to bare by the wind which keeps the air cool. People have stayed out without sunscreen longer than they should. Every now and then a hat sails up over the crowd.

The bands are amplified to uncomfortable levels unless one wears ear plugs or wadded up napkin balls soaked in spit. Some enterprising vendor has sold bubbles to children. Often, without seeing them coming, a cold bubble lands on the skin in a chilly pop. A man in cowboy hat and thick luscious beard wanders around with Mardi Gras beads, doling them out to little girls and a few boys, some women too. He looks a kind soul, maybe a wifeless man who would have adored to be a father but is now perhaps too old.

Those who staked out a spot under the shade trees are the smart ones by late afternoon. The bands will quit at 6:30 today. The Pleasure Pilots just finished with a blues tune after playing several Van Morrison’s.

The couple sitting next to me look like people I’ve heard about from Arkansas. Both of them are missing some front teeth and have grubby looking hair in dire need of conditioner. But they talk like they’re from California. Turns out they are really down on their luck, homeless and living in a tent in the woods near by. They’ve been here in Silver City for 2 years. Friends let them shower and do laundry. They eat free lunches at the Baptist church during the week, and get some food from the food bank. But they have no way to cook. You can’t build a fire in these tinder dry woods – so I gave them my gas stove and a gallon of white gas.

The last act of the day was a sitar-blues-guitar fusion act. Harry Manx (only one person) had a drum at his feet, a harmonica at his lips, a mic for voice and a specially made instrument that resembled a guitar with more strings than I could see in that late afternoon sun. It sometimes sounded like a guitar with sitar undertones, sometimes like a sitar alone. He tuned it for a long time and joked that when musicians tune a sitar you can’t tell where the tuning stops and the song begins. So it was as he moved into the tune.

Wonderful last act. Not dance tunes but then, we were all pretty well danced-out. I had spotted a woman in a yellow “Stand on the Side of Love” t-shirt. I knew immediately that she was Unitarian. Sure enough Maura and her friend Peggy had come down from Albuquerque. It was their third year. We met up after the last act and went to dinner at Isaac’s, a nice bar/restaurant downtown. They were delightful women, we drank and ate, chatted, and then they offered me their camping spot at Rose Valley. Maura has a Eurovan camper and there was plenty of room for both vehicles to fit into the long ‘slot’. So I had electricity all night, no need to park in front of the restrooms to recharge my batteries and run my computer!

Tent on Wheels

Silver City, NM

RV's lined up at the 'trough'.

I’m staying at the Rose Valley RV Ranch. They raise RV’s here. You should see them, all lined up at the troughs of electricity and water. The ranch is thickly decorated in a western theme. There are wooden fences with rusting machinery, dried up ropes, a horseshoe pit, ancient saddles artfully nailed over logs, even the stop sign says "Whoa".  In the center of the park there’s a building with 4 individual bathrooms and a laundro-mat. I’m currently parked in front of that building because it’s the only place I can get electricity. You see, I’m anathema to the place. I’m in a tent on wheels, also known as a dry camper.  I don’t have a bathroom or kitchen in my van, it is literally like a tent, no services whatsoever, except that I brought an extension cord. Most campgrounds have a place for tent campers, maybe some shade trees and a picnic table. But since this is an RV Ranch, they don’t take to kindly to tenters. It brings down the property values.

Western decor at the Ranch.

However, I have no tent, and look like a vehicle that just might be an RV so I passed muster last night when I showed up. They let me have the parking lot next to the barn (actually it’s a craft room that is built to look like a barn). There was no electricity on the outside of the barn, so I’m recharging my 12V battery using my own extension cord and the outlet on the laundry building. People pass by, walking their tiny RV pooches, and look at me funny. Now I know why Chihuahuas and toy Schnauzers were invented.

Old Mesilla Bookstore.

I spent Friday night in Las Cruces with a friend. We took pictures of the sunset casting pink light on the Organ Mountains, had a late dinner at a really good little Mexican restaurant that served about three times what one should eat for dinner and stayed up much of the night talking. Saturday I took all day to drive the 2 hours to Silver City. First I went to a grocery across from the University that was sort of a cross between Smiths and Whole Foods. They seemed to have a lot of ‘new age’ foods and organics, plus regular products at a 15% markup. On down University Blvd is the town of Mesilla. There I got wrapped up in a wonderful bookstore on the plaza that has been there for 50 years, still run by the woman who was a little girl when her mother owned it. It’s charming, old, dusty, and full of beautiful antique Navajo Rugs, old time western lamps, Zuni dolls and figurines, and books tumbling around on the shelves as if they were all read on a regular basis.

City of Rocks State Park, south of Silver City, NM.

It was a long dry, dusty drive to Deming once I figured out how to get onto I-10. Off in the distance, dust devils towered half a mile high, once in a while a gust would blow me to one side like a giant invisible bear paw.  I was tired from a lack of sleep, the sun was putting my eyes into sand-mode, and I was thirsty. I stopped at the tourist information center and they directed me to a park where I could take a nap in the shade, and eat my leftovers from dinner that I’d stuck in the cooler. Deming is an interesting small town. The streets are wide! Wide enough to park rows of cars head in and still have more than enough room for two broad lanes of traffic. Of course there is NO traffic, but whoever planned the place certainly thought ahead to a time when people might want to crowd up in a desert with no water, food growing ability, or industry. Nice road north up to Silver City too. I stopped at the City of Rocks state park and drove up to the overlook, took some 360 degree photos of the landscape, and then drove on to the Blue’s Festival. I thought it would be a good idea to find a place to park/camp for the night, so I tackled that project first. Good thing too, as all the campgrounds were full including the one where I’m staying.

The bands were set up in a gazebo in the middle of the park. This is my 3^rd year coming down for this, so I thought I might run into some people I recognize, perhaps Unitarians from my previous trips where I did home-stays as part of their fund-raising efforts. I saw the vendor who sells the best locally produced nuts, so I bought a bag of red-chile-honey pecans and ate those as a prelude to dinner. The BBQ guy whose brisket I so enjoyed last year was there too, so I bought dinner from him. It was pretty late, the dinner crowd was gone but the food was still good.  A lovely day of tripping around on my own.

In the back yard of the bookstore.

The church in Mesilla, beautiful, inside and out.

Such difference a little water makes. Above: a
cabbage field near Mesilla. Below: a single
flower blooms above the City of Rocks. 

Symmetry: a Pecan orchard in the Rio Grande Valley.