| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 14 February 2005 |
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As you enter you see the 'tail end' of the dunes, which are moving north at a rate of about thirty feet a year. (The Visitors Center explains all this.) Here there is a fair amount of vegetation. As you drive deeper into the dunes, the vegetation thins out, with only the hardiest plants remaining--plants that can put down roots fast, and grow fast and high to stay above the rising dunes. The road in is eight miles each way, but about four miles in changes from pavement to packed gypsum. This is necessary because of the ever-shifting dunes--they can move the road easily enough.
In the center all you can see are the whole dunes and the mountains in the far distance--a truly alien landscape. Mark claims it looks like snow, but the air temperature belies that. In spite of the heat, though, the sands themselves are very cool--the white reflects all the heat back. Maybe that's why the air is so hot. Walking barefoot on them is surprisingly refreshing, and the sands provide a better footing than one might expect. Climbing the dunes is remarkably easy.
Many of the books recommend coming to the dunes at sunset, because the sun is less harsh then. This means an easier time looking at the dunes and plant life (no sunglasses!) and also a better chance of taking good pictures. So about 4 PM we decided to leave, eat dinner, and return about 6 PM (sunset was at 6:35 PM).
On the way to dinner we stopped for gas. While we were filling up two groups of youths got into an altercation which resulted in one of them smashing the rear window of the other ones' truck with a tire iron and several other tire irons being thrown about (all fifty feet from us, I should add). So much for low crime rates. The ones in the undamaged truck raced off and the others were going to follow, but the police arrived before they had a chance.
Dinner was at Western Sizzlin, a Sizzler clone. 'Nuff said.
We returned to White Sands National Monument about 6 PM. It was much better. Besides the light being softer, the temperature was cooler and the place was much quieter. During the day there were a lot of cars and people and children playing and yelling--and sound really carries here. At sunset, you have hardly any people and they've come either to take pictures or to enjoy the sunset in solitude and quiet. We watched the sun set in almost absolute silence, and then the full moon rise over the mountains. We stayed a while longer, held by the beauty of the place, but eventually had to leave (the Monument closes one hour after sunset).
We returned to the motel, watched an instant replay of the first Presidential debate (which ran 5 PM to 6:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time), and wrote in our logs a bit. I fell asleep around 8 PM; Mark lasted a bit longer.
Mileage today: 348 miles.
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Still on Eastern Time, we were up early again. At 7 AM, we checked out and made reservations at the Motel 6 in Carlsbad. We also asked what time the bat flight was at Carlsbad and were told 5 PM. I had figured it to be much closer to sunset, and we were not at all sure we could do everything we had planned and still make it there on time, but we decided to play it by ear and not rush through the earlier stuff. (Stay tuned for more details!)
We had breakfast at Denny's. To the tourist, Alamogordo seems to be one long strip of motels, fast food places, and restaurants along the highway. When we had driven down 1st Street, at right angles to the highway, looking for a barbecue place mentioned in one of our guidebooks (and couldn't find it, I might add), we drove only about six blocks before we ran out of town and were in emptiness again.
Although the International Space Hall of Fame didn't open until 9 AM, we got there at 8 AM. It's about two miles off the main road and the last stretch of road to it, all of about two blocks' worth, is designated New Mexico state route 2001. Cute.
The Omnimax theater at the museum was showing 'Ring of Fire' (about volcanos on the Pacific Rim). As we had seen this is Las Vegas we decided to skip it and save some time. While waiting for the building to open we walked around the 'rocket garden' outside. All space museums seem to have them: five or ten or more (depending on the size of the museum) rockets, capsules, and other over-sized paraphernalia too large to fit in the building. (I should point out that most space museums are in the south, where the climate is kinder to outside exhibits.) This one had a mock-up of a Mercury capsule that you could actually sit in, although without all the equipment inside to give you the authentic cramped feeling the astronauts had. There was also the remains of part of a V-2 engine--the V-2 program was continued at White Sands Missile Range after the war. (The docent inside later said that there was some sort of V-2 anniversary program planned, and we did see a special case or two of exhibits on it, but they're keeping it somewhat low-key. Considering all the protests over Germany's plans to have a big 50th anniversary celebration, this is probably wise.)
The unique exhibit in the rocket garden was Sonic Wind No. 1, a rocket sled on which Dr. John Stapp achieved a speed of 632 miles per hour and became 'the fastest man on earth' (and may still be--most speed records these days are set in planes or spacecraft).
When the museum opened at 9 AM, we were the first ones in. We paid our $2.50 each (oh, for the museum prices from the Dominican Republic!) and took the elevator up to the fourth floor, since the story starts up there and progresses as you walk down the ramps. For some reason they had several photographs of Scott Crossfield, but none of Chuck Yeager. The two were in constant competition to be 'the fastest man alive,' but Yeager was usually ahead and was also the first person to break the sound barrier. (See THE RIGHT STUFF for more details.)
There were several displays about Ham (Holloman Aero Med), the first 'chimpanaut' (their term--I prefer astrochimp). Ham was born in 1957 in Cameroun; flew on January 31, 1961; and lived until 1983. He is buried under a plaque in a little garden at the entrance of the museum. The docent had a lot of stories to tell about Ham and Enoch (the second astrochimp), including that the really awful papier mache model of Ham in one of the cases was done by the curator's wife, which was why it was there.
There was also a small section on New Mexico's astronauts (Harrison Schmidt and others) and other exhibits stressing New Mexico's role in space exploration and development. Is it purely accidental that their Mars mockup looks like New Mexico?
One criticism I would have is that the models are to all different scales, so the lunar module is the same size as the lunar rover next to it and Mir is made to seem much smaller than it is relative to the planned United States space station because Mir is shown 1:20 scale while the United States space station is shown 1:15.
We finished the museum about 10:20 AM and drove east 70 miles on US 70, then west 10 miles on US 380. The last was tricky, as the turnoff sign for the Lincoln Historic Site seemed to point down a dirt road that turned out to be someone's driveway. We eventually found the correct road and got to Lincoln about 12:15 PM.
Lincoln was not where Billy the Kid was born (that was New York). Lincoln was not where Billy the Kid died (that was Fort Sumner). But Lincoln is the town most associated with Billy the Kid, including his daring jailbreak from the Lincoln County Courthouse. I will not recount the entire story of Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War, since I'm sure Mark will do so.
There are four museum buildings in Lincoln. This being Monday and Columbus Day, all but the Courthouse were closed, so the admission was only $2 each (normally there's a combination ticket). In addition to the Courthouse Museum, there were a lot of historic markers along the main street describing the buildings and the events associated with them. (New Mexico in general is very good about historic markers and gives drivers advance warning of them and a place to pull over and read them. But then, they have the space to do it. Fred Saberhagen points out that they once exploded an atomic bomb in New Mexico--and hardly anyone noticed.)
The Courthouse, in addition to the usual displays of Western history, also had a Masonic Hall with displays and explanations of the Masons. It seemed oddly out of sync with the rest of the exhibits, sort of like an exhibit on the Boy Scouts would be in Thoreau's house on Walden Pond.
We finished in Lincoln about 1:30 PM. Returning to the main road (US 70 and US 380) we traveled another 60 miles east to Roswell. The landscape changed from the heavy forests we had been passing through (in fact, part of it was the Lincoln National Forest) to a more barren scene. There were still plants, to be sure, but they were mostly desert plants and grasses that were the same color as the dirt. (Oh, the earlier forested area was also a part of the Apache Mescalero Reservation. Do I count reservations as separate areas of the country that I've visited, or are they part of the state they're in? It's an ambiguous situation.)
One bit of color we did pass was an enormous pile of red chiles and broken boxes. Apparently the load slid off the truck carrying them as it rounded a curve.
We arrived in Roswell about 2:30 PM and found the Roswell Museum and Art Center with no trouble, as the streets all had good street signs and were all very regular. (This may not sound like much, but our recent trip to Puerto Rico gave us a new appreciation for rectilinear, well-labeled, two-way streets.) Remember how I said the Lincoln County Courthouse was about Billy the Kid and the Masons? Well, the Roswell Museum is about Southwestern artists and Robert Godard's rocket experiments.
The books had mentioned that Georgia O'Keeffe and Peter Hurd were 'among the artists represented here,' which led me to expect more than one O'Keeffe they had ('Ram's Skull and Brown Leaves'). I like her work, which has both an almost photographic quality while at the same time a basic simplicity, and had hoped for more. There were about a half dozen Hurds, and there were a lot of paintings, prints, etc., by other, lesser-known artists.
The art section also contained Indian pottery and kachinas. This is to some extent a political statement. The museum, as I stated, was a sort of multi-purpose museum, so it had an art section, a science section, and a Western history section. The latter contained clothing, weapons, and other objects representing the history of the area, and had Spanish, Indian, and Anglo objects displayed. But the pottery and the kachinas were not in this section, but in with the art. In many areas this is a major battle now, as Indians say their art should be displayed in art museums rather than natural history museums. They point out (with some justification, I might add) that if art museums are going to display 'decorative arts' such as plates, snuff boxes, and other everyday items of European and Asian origin, then they should display Indian (Native American) art as well instead of putting it in a museum of zoology and geology and calling it ethnology.
The art section also had several recent works. Some, like 'Oddy Nocky' by William Goodman (a surreal mural) didn't seem to show a lot of Southwestern influence; others such as 'Pow Wow' by Willard Midgette or 'The Last Emperor' by Tim Pythero (a multimedia work of a mobile home surrounded by an accumulation of objects) did reflect the area.
The Godard section was primarily a reconstruction of the laboratory that he had in Roswell. It included a 1936 wall calendar--sort of. The pages were from 1936, but the backing was not. |
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