Endless Drivel

Five minutes ago I was checking my normal list of blogs for the day when I ran across this entry from Molly:

I'm going to do it! I'm going to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I don't have an idea for a plot or any characters yet, but the lovely thing about NaNoWriMo is that it places importance on quantity not quality. Starting November 1st, I will be writing a 50,000 word manuscript for a crappy (or brilliant--either works) novel. On average, that's about 5-6 pages a day. I'm excited to try out a new kind of writing for me and I hope that it helps improve my professional writing--or at least is just fun.

Here's the link if you want to find out more: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

To all this, I have just one thing to say:

Oh HELL yes.

Molly (I didn't link to her blog because I feel awkward linking to people's personal blogs without prior permission) was a classmate of mine at BU, and if there's one thing we were taught at BU, it was how to write. Copious amounts. About sometimes seemingly dull topics. So a novel? Piece of cake, right?

For all you journalists or otherwise slacker-types who may read this, I think you should also get involved. It's a fantastic excuse to procrastinate on other stuff, like work that pays the bills, hanging out with friends, and having a life.

So. Yes. I like to think I'll write faithfully with some sort of schedule, but what is more probably is I'll do one of those madcap things where I try to write the entire novel in the last week, the way I wrote all my honors thesis papers in college that were supposed to be done all semester. If anyone has any ideas--topics, characters, genres, etc--leave it in the comments. Seeing as how this will be nonsense at best, I'm sure I can fit all the suggestions in.

I'd make some punny joke about "Write on, man!" but it just feels too easy.

And of course I'm going to post this piece of shit on the internet. I even created a brand-new blog to put it all on. Few things make me as happy as creating blogs I am devoted to for a short time period and then let fall by the wayside, and on this one I can automatically forget about it by Nov. 30. Brilliant! No entries until Nov. 1, naturally, but then check back and we'll see if I've already forgotten about this.

Looking Up

I know it's taking me forever to post all this stuff about New Mexico, but it seems ever since I got back that things have been busier than they've been in a very long time. Work stuff, coordinating with Dan's schedule, the barn, the parents--all of it has come together and I was grateful tonight to spent two and a half hours in a laundromat, just reading.

The biggest reason I chose to go to Albuquerque over the dates I went is because of the Balloon Fiesta, the most crowd-drawing thing the city has to offer. Every year, people from around the world bring their balloons to show off, compete in challenges, race, and all sorts of other things, and a ridiculous number of people show up. Every day starts off before dawn, when a small contingency of balloons light up in the darkness like luminarias and go up to test the weather conditions. Thanks to the Sandias on the east, the Three Sisters volcanos on the west and some funky air currents, Albuquerque is a great place to fly a kite--wait, a balloon. Probably a kite, too.





We wanted to show up for the mass ascension, the very first event of the festival every year. Showing up before dawn means pulling on many, many layers of clothes, fighting traffic jams at 4 a.m. (or doing park and ride, which we did), and buying cinnamon rolls and breakfast tacos and coffee at the park. People get so excited when the balloons start going up, and slowly dawn reaches Albuquerque. It takes a while, since the sun has to come up over the mountains, but the balloons grow up like technicolor bread dough rising in the giant park.





To get the balloons up, the material is spread out across the ground and the basket is tipped on the side. Fans are used to initially puff up the fabric, and sometimes a person will go inside the balloon to help it along. Once the balloon is upright and the basket is tipped the right way, noisy burners are set off. Needless to say, no smoking is allowed anywhere in the park, but crowds always try to gather around the balloons. It's cool to see that kind of fire close up--fire that can be harnessed to put people into the air--but the warmth is also a big draw. Balloons of all colors and shapes went up--there are much better photographs out there by others, I'm sure, but at the end of the morning there was a huge swarm above us, gently bumping into each other as they took off and then floating away to the northwest, like paper boats sent down a slow stream.















Later in the day, my companions--Amy, my second host and her friend, who was a middle school science teacher--went back to the park for a second round of balloons. (Why did we go back? Well, I'm a science journalist, Amy's an audiologist, the teacher is a science teacher . . . there were extreme dork levels, and we gave in.) Late that afternoon gas balloons--not heated, but filled with gases like helium--were supposed to take off for a race, and we kept waiting for the start. The sun started to set, we amused ourselves by drawing mustaches on our fingers and talking in funny voices. We gave an 8-year-old a mustache when he asked for one (with his parents' permission, since it was permanent marker. And yes, it was the journalist walking around with a giant bag of pens and markers in her purse.) The wind got bad, the balloons ducked and bobbed and partially collapsed. Nothing took off. The moon came up. They set off the fireworks, so no one got a weather refund. We packed it in, went to a bar and did karaoke. I butchered Steve Miller Band and the White Stripes.











Sunday I spent some time out wandering around off the Cottonwood Springs Trail at the western foot of the Sandias. Later that day I would drive around the streets of the city, revisiting various childhood places, but I'd never been on these trails. It was pretty, peaceful, quiet broken by lizards scuttling in dead leaves and mountain bikers skidding down narrow trails in the distance. I got off the trail and wandered through a dried creek bed, looking for fossils. I think I saw petrified wood sticking out of a giant rock, but I don't know. Quartz is abundant out there. I tried to remember not to walk around always looking at the ground, checking for ways I'd trip and hurt myself, but to look up every once in a while.

Childish Things

The second time we lived in New Mexico was from 1990 until 1993. We briefly lived in Albuquerque in the mid-80s for about four months before we moved to England while my dad finished some special ops flight training stuff (or something). I was really young and don't remember much about the first time. Here's what I do remember:

We lived in the pink apartments (but then, everything's pink and adobe in N.M.)

I almost drowned in the complex pool (my mom told me not to go in, but I did)

I refused to eat the green eggs and ham (made with a touch of food dye when reading Dr. Seuss at playschool)

And I was terrified of this place:



This is an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, a place that would become one of my favorite spots on the face of the planet (besides the barn and the Rio Grande Nature Reserve) when we moved back to Albuquerque after being in England.

This volcano exhibit scared the shit out of me because the floor was of thick plastic with red "lava" running underneath. When I was little, the first time in Albuquerque, I was about four and my dad had to carry me through this room because I was afraid the floor would collapse and we'd sink into the whooshing lava below. This is probably why today, if I ever lay down on a tanning bed, I can't stop thinking about what would happen if the plastic cracked and I fell onto the light bulbs.



There were other great things about the museum, though, including the dinosaurs and the exhibit about the start of life on earth. I loved the tiny colored diodes that came together to form DNA; even as a little kid, I was a dork. When I was in elementary school, after we moved back from England, I'd generally gotten over my volcano fear, but I still didn't particularly like that room. When I went back this year, I saw they'd opened a new dark and dramatic room about the end of the dinosaurs, filled with strobe lights and crashing sounds and shaking floors, and they feature a nice warning for parents. There's still no warning on the volcano room. The new room also features this awesome photo of tiny rat-like creatures eating a T-rex carcass. That's mammals FTW, for those of you keeping track at home.





I did the science museum on the first full day in Albuquerque. That day I woke up, hiked around one of the canyons that is part of the Petrogylph National Monument (more on that later), went to the museum, dinked around Old Town (which is like the Stock Yards in Fort Worth, filled with tourists), and then went through the nature reserve (more on this in a later post, too). My last full day in Albuquerque, Sunday, was again partially spent looking at my elementary school years in New Mexico.

We moved from a tiny community in England, a fishing village, to Albuquerque, where I got ridiculed for my accent and the administration at the school tried to put my sister and I into speech therapy. It was a confusing time for me, that first year (second grade). Third grade got better, and fourth grade was one of my best years of school, period. It may have been THE best year of school for me before graduating from high school. Those three years were spent at Kirtland Elementary School, right outside Kirtland Air Force Base (where my dad was stationed) and within walking distance from the base housing. I'd walk to school every day with some other kids from base housing, and after a while, I loved that school.

There are new murals on some of the walls, now, and the playground looks infinitely smaller than it seemed when I was little. I remember buying popsicles after lunch for a quarter, trying to eat them before they melted into the sand, and catching lizards on the playground. All the play equipment is new, shaded, covered in brightly-colored poly. There are still portables where some of the classrooms are, and there's one tree in the back playground. There's still a carefully cultivated green quad that's shaded with big, handsome trees where I studied Van Gogh for the first time.





Tooling around the perimeter of the base in my car with the windows down was strange. Very little had changed, except now what was one of the centers of my life--everything within the borders of that base fence--was now off limits, gone. That's something I can't go back and visit again, like so much of my past. Well, I guess I could if my parents escorted me on base as a visitor, but that doesn't do much for my personal love of revisiting the past on my own.

There were three blue-tiled pieces of public art near the base that I took a lot of delight in as a kid. One was a giant car, up on an arch, that actually had a hole all the way through it. I always thought it was a real car they somehow gutted and holed out, but now I think I was probably wrong. The other was this odd, slanted table coming out of a wall. The third piece, a blue armchair that appeared to be sinking into the ground, is gone. I found the piece of land it used to be on, but now it's flat and empty, pink concrete that no longer has a quick-sand appearance due to the disappearing chair.







I guess some things do change, after all.

The East Side

When you're driving west along I-40 toward New Mexico from Amarillo, the ground abruptly drops off from under you about 20 miles from the Texas/N.M. border. I got up early on Wednesday morning to make the drive to Albuquerque, unsure of how long it would take (turns out it took considerably less time than Google Maps and Mapquest and the GPS thought, thanks in part to the time zone change).

The drive was fairly uneventful, passing through occasional small towns that reminded me of the places I went to high school my junior and senior year. My junior year was at Moriarty High School in Moriarty, N.M., 20-odd miles east of Albuquerque and on the other side of the Sandia Mountains from the big city. When I was making the drive, I caught my breath momentarily with recognition when I saw the Sandias and I saw roadsigns for Moriarty and Edgewood, the next town over (and where we actually lived).

It's strange going back to places you've been. I discussed this with my mom when I got back, and it turns out she feels the same way I do--that there are certain large chunks of my life that feel like a dream and feel like they may never have really happened. Driving through Moriarty to the school, which I could still drive by instinct despite only spending one year there, affirmed my experience. I did go to school there. I hated a lot of it, but I really enjoyed other parts of it, and the school was largely the same. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and the only students were with the football team, so I waltzed myself into the school, wandered around, took photos, and no one ever questioned me.



I think every school has these big school year posters that show senior class photos of everybody from that year. When I was going down the main hall, I saw that poster for the 2000 kids--I had somehow ended up ahead in most of my classes, and so my junior year was spent surrounded by seniors. It was weird, looking at all the kids. There was the skater kid whose locker was next to mine, to pulled me into this weird waltz down the hallway one day; the one out gay guy, who caught a lot of flak but showed off his shaved legs in shorts regardless; the meathead who was a total jerk to me and once made me cry in the middle of civics class; the Army ROTC kid who sat next to me in civics class; the girl who was obsessed with comic books and introduced me to some really funny British comedy shows; the cowboy kid who worked at the supermarket we went to and was always really nice and polite and was always wearing shitkicker boots. The nametag on a nearby classroom was the same, too; it was my civics teacher, a liberal New York-state Democrat in a generally Republican town whose brother was a movie director.

After leaving the school, it was only a short drive to Edgewood, and I drove through town (it used to be just a supermarket and a few tiny restaurants; now it's a supermarket, a Super Wal-Mart and a few tiny restaurants) and headed north toward where our house used to be. It's easy enough to find, since there aren't a lot of streets and all of the houses have at least a few acres. It's easy for me to get turned around in a big subdivision, with houses crowded and lawns all the same; out there, most houses are adobe or have colorful metal roofs. The house we leased was still there, still looking largely the same, although our landlord had sold it and the people who lived there had a ton of broken-down vehicles on the edges of the property. The large hill--or is it a mountain? I need to find out some day--was still there to the north, and the sky was clear. I'd forgotten how it was so damn windy all the freaking time out there on that side of the mountain.





I still had time to kill before I met with my couchsurfing host, so I cut through back roads to Tijeras, another tiny town, and took the scenic Sandia Crest Highway up to the peak, slowly winding 14 miles up. Some of the trees were starting to turn; chipmunks and squirrels darted out of the way. At the top was a viewing area, a good 15 degrees or so colder than at the base of the mountain. Teenagers in T-shirts, tucking their arms inside, were up there. The inside of the bathroom doors are stenciled with a black bear, the New Mexico state animal, and with the words "Feed a bear, kill a bear." A fenced-off area full of radio towers was fascinating to me, almost more so than the view down to the west, over Albuquerque. The sun cast a glare over the city, so it was hard to distinguish anything, but the towers and wind combined to make a sound like a jet engine revving nearby.





With the sun sinking and making photos more difficult, I climbed down, got into my car, and drove down. I passes cyclists, huffing their way up the roads, and wondered what they would do when it turned dark; the sun sets earlier, and I'd be afraid of getting hit by a car (or wandering black bear?) out at night on a bike. When I cut back through Tijeras to the highway and then through the pass to Albuquerque, the sun was setting and the sky was dark orange. When I called my parents later that night to tell them I'd made it, my dad was disappointed I'd unplugged the GPS and put it in the back seat when I got into New Mexico. I was afraid I'd come back and everything would have been developed, that large, generic and faceless rows of strip malls and housing complexes would have taken over, but not much had changed. I didn't need directions.