“…the fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings…” William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar
A predawn start saw me on the road in a fiery sunrise for a little New Mexico Historic Route 66 roadtrip recently. I’ll never get tired of being in a twilight landscape under a luminosity of sky at daybreak.
It’s not really a good time for me to be away. I should be a printing stock for South West Print Fiesta in early October but the weather, though cooling, is not yet too cold for sleeping outside.
There was a full moon and a partial lunar eclipse promised. The big dark skies of the Albuquerque to Texas border section of New Mexico Route 66 beckoned. Of course the bathtub toy, the red Emotion spitfire kayak, was riding shotgun again. There are at least three state parks with great campgrounds and lakes as yet unpaddled by me, near that route through east central New Mexico.
My first stop was for breakfast at Annapurna’s World Vegetarian Cafe in Albuquerque. I chose masala fries and a dosa portobello spinach wrap with masala chai to drink. The food, prepared according to Ayurvedic principles, is always delicious at this restaurant where I know I can eat everything on the menu.
Trouble was my audiobook for the drive to Albuquerque was The Indifferent Stars Above - the Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown. The Donner Party was a group of American pioneer emigrants from the Midwest who got caught in winter weather while trying to get to California (which, incidentally was not part of USA at that point)in 1846. They ran out of food. Facing starvation, first they ate their draught oxen, then they ate their dogs, then they ate their fellow human members of the expedition. Amazingly about half of the original emigrants made it out alive, most of those being children and women. But yes: once they had eaten the dogs, they ate humans. They committed anthropophagy (cannibalism) to survive.
The book is excellent. It is thoroughly researched and the tragic story told with sensitivity and empathy. It is just that, if the current national “conversation”, news headlines and specifically lies about culinary practices of certain maligned people in the USA haven’t already taken your appetite away, listening to the Donner Party story will.
With my thoughts still in the snowy mountains with the starving Donner party making tough decisions about butchering humans for the pot, I found myself reading the invocation on the Annapurna’s order number. I thought about food choices worldwide and what being vegetarian means; and found myself pondering the question: if one is going to be carnivorous and choose to eat the flesh of mammals, what exactly is the difference between bovine, equine, canine, feline or human flesh? Considering the statement from the restaurant that food is the visible form of the deity Annapurna and not ignoring that every time a practicing Christian takes communion they symbolically eat the body, drink the blood of Christ.
Having now neither appetite nor answers, I asked for a box and packed up that lovely dosa, masala fries and chipotle sauce for somewhere down the road. Maybe.
I later enjoyed that Annapurna’s meal at a picnic table amongst juniper and piñon, overlooking the lake in Santa Rosa Lake State Park. That was after I took a few hours break from the audiobook to navigate a very sad and derelict section of Albuquerque’s Historic Route 66 along Central Avenue which has truly broken bad. I’m not often afraid roaming around the USA, but I did not feel safe for a few miles there in ‘Burque. Also after chancing upon the Musical Road, a Route 66 treasure where, if one goes 45 miles per hour over some rumblestrips, the tyres play America the Beautiful on the road, and also after not getting to swim in The Blue Hole.
New Mexico does blue well. The sky is almost always impossibly, beautifully, wrap around enamel tin drum blue. Turquoise gemstone jewellery is everywhere. I was a Blue Hole skeptic. It’s so easy to manipulate pictures digitally, I thought. Yeah. Water is blue. Sometimes, at certain times of day, in certain light.
Until I saw this natural artesian well for myself, that is. Late morning the water is stunningly clear and so intensely, unbelievably blue. It’s dive in and drown in bottomlessness blue.
Apparently the water in this lake (cenote) renews itself every six hours and remains a constant 62 degrees (f). Another random factoid: it is reputed to be one of the most popular places for scuba diving in the USA. Move over Great Barrier Reef.
I read all the informational signs. I gave myself heebie jeebies imagining diving into underwater passages that deep. I really don’t like deep water. There was a chain link fence blocking access to most of this stunning natural phenomenon, the bathing change rooms were assertively closed for construction and several signs indicated that the Blue Hole itself was closed.
And yet there were at least two scuba divers and a whole lot of floating apparatus in the water?Just as I was thinking to ignore the signs and wrestle myself somehow into a swimsuit in my car, a huge tour bus pulled up to disgorge wave after wave of young people toting swimming gear. A 60 foot pool was not going to be big enough for all of us.
Without seeing what happened when that wave of hopeful young swimmers washed up against the construction site which was once, and no doubt will one day be again, the change rooms, I headed out to Santa Rosa Lake State Park
There was almost nobody at the park. The lake was an indifferent muddy grey with hint of green: you know, normal colour for a body of water at midday, my least favorite light or time of day.
While I ate my breakfast become lunch, I wondered how Santa Rosa Lake, which is a man made reservoir, constructed in the 1970s by damming the Pecos river, feels about it’s oh! so stunning natural beauty of a sibling getting all the attention a scant seven miles away.
Does Santa Rosa lake sometimes want to tell the Blue Hole that she is just a glorified pothole?
It was a peaceful picnic. One day I will return to paddle this part of the Pecos River which has become Santa Rosa Lake. The day was getting on. I had a date with a full moon, a lunar eclipse, and a campsite at Conchas lake a little further along Route 66 .
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