| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Well, good hunting to her.
Several of the caves had ladders to them. Unlike Walnut Canyon, these were not rock overhangs; you genuinely were inside an enclosure. You could sit inside the cave and look out onto the valley. Inside the caves you could see petroglyphs--wall decorations. Some really dated back to the Indians.
There were also places you could see petroglyphs on the outside. There was also a long section of cave, perhaps fifty feet, that made a long building that was subdivided (as the guidebook says) 'condominium style.'
There was a walk in the woods back to the Visitors Center. We watched for animals but saw only squirrels and birds. We rarely see much impressive, though on the way to the monument we'd passed three young mule deer still not really skillful at this walking thing. (And, of course, we did see a genuine wild tarantula.)
From there it was not a long way to Los Alamos (even making a wrong turn).
Los Alamos is Science City, USA. That is just about the only profession or industry in the town. As one of the residents told us proudly, it is a town where the library is a lot more popular than the bar. (Sounds like my kind of town!) The town does seem to have a campus-like feel--something about the size of the buildings and the ages of the people. You could almost believe you were at a graduate school. A lot of people have colored identification cards, indicating levels of security, I guess.
I said earlier that I did not like science museums that talk down to the visitor. I also get tired of the same exhibits at every science museum. By those standards, the Bradbury Science Museum may be the best science museum I have seen. They had one minor part of an exhibit where you lift equal volumes of oxygen, copper, and uranium to feel the weight. I'd seen that before. Other than that minor exception, the museum had totally new exhibits.
Actually a fair piece of the museum is given over to a history of the Manhattan Project. That's fine: it is an interesting story.
We started with a twenty-minute documentary called 'The Town That Never Was.' It starts by flashing back and forth between footage of Nazis on the march and placid scenes of Indian life. It basically tells how something called 'The Ranch School' was operating in Los Alamos. This was somebody's idea for how to teach boys the virtues of a healthy outdoor life while they were engaged in a classical education. The footage of the Ranch School eerily echoes Nazi propaganda films of the healthy lifestyle of the Hitler Youth.
They show how scientists fled the racial laws of the Nazis, showing passports stamped with a 'J.' They knew that Hitler was engaged in an atomic program and prompted Einstein to write Roosevelt the famous letter. It follows events through the bombing of Nagasaki and the ending of the war.
If you want more information, they have a 'history wall' that also tells the full story. It includes two stations where you can choose any of seven films each, each film about ten minutes, that tell the Los Alamos story in more detail. Titles include 'ENIAC and MANIAC,' 'Hiroshima,' and 'Trinity.' I was impressed to see something similar at the Winslow Meteor Crater, but this was better.
The science stuff is intended to educate about the sort of research done at Los Alamos. And I mean educate. Lots more videotapes, lots of hands-on exhibits in subject like accelerators, reactor technology, fusion, safeguards, computers, verification, etc. Maybe the glove box (handling blocks the way radioactive materials are handled) or a program in the computer section that allowed you to put your name on a certificate were there to keep younger people occupied.
One booth shows a collection of recent news items from television news programs about research Los Alamos is doing on AIDS, the human genome, and waste disposal. This is not a big museum, but there is a lot to see.
After the museum, we drove through town. We stopped at the Fuller Lodge which supposedly had maps of the town with information on who had lived where.
The woman at the desk kept us waiting while she talked on the phone to someone who was obviously a personal friend. When she finally would talk to us, she said they were out of maps, but that the museum next door was good.
This was the Museum of Los Alamos County. For the most part only the post-1943 stuff was of real interest. They had a couple of rooms devoted to the Manhattan Project. There were things like the newspaper account of Hiroshima. There was a case devoted to censorship of letters.
There was an interesting exchange of letters with Oppenheimer and the management. Oppenheimer wanted a nail in the wall so he could hang his hat. They gave him a coat rack. He thanked them but said he wanted a nail. He got it.
Somebody wrote the security organization saying it took sixtythree days to clear someone for security work. Sixty-three days is also the gestation period of a dog. Could they get it down to a rabbit?
We finished with the museum and headed back to Santa Fe. When we got there we shipped some books home, then went to dinner, then went to the room to write.
On PBS we watched Mark Russell and an excellent documentary on the Donner Pass disaster.
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Today was our day to hit museums in the Santa Fe area. Breakfast was at JB's, then we drove in to the center of Santa Fe and walked around. It is not so new as the Taos downtown area but is trying to appear just as chic.
None of the museums were really memorable. I will cover them quickly.
The Palace of the Governors: This is a one-story but long adobe structure. In front there are Indians selling their wares: jewelry, etc. A controversial law says that only Indians can sell there. The building was constructed in 1610 as the home of the Spanish governors. We took a guided tour from a woman who was a bit flustered and had problems expressing herself.
Most memorable items: A stagecoach called a mud buggy. It was one of the first vehicles to have shock absorbers. Cost to take the stage from Missouri to Santa Fe was $200, very high considering the day. Also memorable, when a state seal hanging was needed, a local hardware store made it with materials at hand. Ruffles of feathers are the bottoms of spoons. Longer feathers are knives. Border done in keys. It looks fine from a distance until you look up close and see what it is really made of.
Also on display:
Spanish armor, which was still chain mail and crossbows, obsolete in Europe at the time but sufficient against Pueblo Indians.
A portable baptismal font.
A fish vertebrae necklace.
Matchlocks, flintlocks, and guns from many periods of Santa Fe's history.
Wooden stirrups when metal was expensive or scarce.
Spanish saddles and spurs.
A typical church.
The group kept accidentally setting off theft alarms. The guide did it herself twice. It was a new alarm system and just leaning on the metal fence around an exhibit set it off.
Santa Fe Fine Arts Museum: It was hard to tell how much of the museum was closed off to the public, but it was at least half. There was no warning of this when you start out and you still pay full admission. Most of the art you see is called 'modern art.' Each piece of modern art has a paragraph explaining it. I am reminded of the scene in THE RIGHT STUFF where Gus Grissom says, 'The issue is monkey,' and then the other astronauts chime in with their interpretations of what Gus said. Gus didn't express himself well and neither did these artists. The artists should be eloquent, no incoherent, in my opinion.
Most memorable piece: three horizontal pastel stripes on a white background. Now what does it mean? Well, the artist was in the hills and came down into an almost perfectly flat valley. She liked the valley so painted three horizontal stripes.
There are two photographs that the great Stieglitz considered his two best. They look like underexposed pictures of sky, but it is hard to tell what they are of. My opinion is that not everything must be obvious about a painting, but something should convey the meaning. Fail that and you don't have art because you aren't expressing yourself.
We started to go out in the sculpture garden and a couple out there shouted for us to leave the door open--if it closes, it locks you into the courtyard. I went to tell the management. 'That's right; if you close the door it locks. Leave it not quite closed,' they told me. It's a complaint they've gotten many times before but, heck, they are there in service of art, not convenience, I guess. They don't want to unlock the door or warn anyone. Art considerations aside, this strikes me as a singularly badly run museum.
Santa Fe Folk Art Museum: I am reminded of some of the London museums that take a semi-interesting collectible and show you a bewildering array of them. This place has a room full of what might be called toys, I guess. A lot of them are dolls or miniature villages. And then they have them from just about every culture imaginable. You have Indian figures and Arab figures and figures from South and Central America. They also have separate and more normal displays of Anglo, Mexican, and Turkish crafts. I am not sure why Turkish. I do know why they didn't have an Indian display. That was separate. They have used the computer creatively again here. They have a room that is a recreation of a room from pioneer times and a touchscreen showing you the room. You can touch an item in the room on the screen and get a lecture on just that item. In fact, you can get three lectures: one on how it was made, one on how it was used, and a third one I don't remember.
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture: Near the Folk Art Museum is an Indian Museum. Pottery, blankets, kachinas, etc. Not a bad museum, but a lot of overlap with what we'd already seen. It was a good collection, but we were not anxious to spend a lot of time with it. There was a hands-on room and a guy running it who loved to talk to people. He was more interesting to us than the museum. His name was Al Baston (or something like that).
After that we set out over the Turquoise Trail to Albuquerque. This is an alternate route to the interstate that claims to be historic but is so only for the mining that was done in those parts. To me 'historic' means it had conflict and that area appears to have always been pretty peaceful. It is promoted because there are shops. I am not sure if we followed it right, but it led to about ten miles of very bad road going through the hills. We got to Albuquerque after dark, got a really nice room for under $40 a night, and went out for Mexican dinner.
We watched Ross Perot on CNN and wrote in our logs.
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My sleep pattern has been to wake up at about 5 AM, write for a while, then sleep again until 7 AM. This morning was no exception. Then we went for breakfast--beans and eggs--and on to the Natural History Museum. The walk to the door is flanked by two dinosaur statues.
Museums just seem a whole lot better in this part of the world than they seem on the East Coast. I would have gone crazy for a Natural History Museum like this when I was a kid. There is a lot of participation in what you are seeing. The center of the museum- -unless you count the Dynamax which has a separate admission--is the Evolator. This is more like an amusement park ride than something you'd find in a museum. It is a ride that takes you back in time to several eras in the geological past. You get into a room that from the outside looks like a very large elevator with one large and two small television screens. The floor also is on some sort of hydraulic or pneumatic control to make it jiggle and jounce. The machine 'stops' at points where New Mexico is covered by shallow water, twice in the age of dinosaurs, once in the age of early horses, and maybe one or two others. The pilot gets out once in the age of dinosaurs to interact with them. It's about a six-minute ride. The dinosaurs are done with models and stop-motion animation. The early horses are played rather convincingly by dogs. In any case it is clear the children love the Evolator and it is a good intro to everything else in the museum.
When I was growing up, the sole criteria for a museum (just about) was whether it had a good set of specimens. The American Museum of Natural History is a museum that is heavy on specimens. Case after case of them. And they are presented in a pretty undramatic manner. There are a few nice skeletons in the middle of the floor and the rest is just stuff flat on the walls.
The New Mexico Natural History Museum has a much more intelligent approach. I don't think they have a whole lot in the way of specimens. Yes, they have some, but not as much as a lot of museums. But they do present what they have in a tremendously engaging manner. Every exhibit gets the viewer involved. They have maybe three dinosaur skeletons, but they put them on a simulated landscape to make them seem much more lifelike. Or they will have an exhibit that lets you see what a dinosaur sees. They have a big dinosaur with lenses where the eyes are. You look through two eyepieces in the back and look out the lenses. This means your eyesight is weak looking ahead, but good looking at things on either side. This is entirely man-made, no specimen required, but tells you more about the dinosaurs than just another mounted specimen might.
Oh, so what else does the museum have? Well, one thing that doesn't quite work for me is a series of displays as you walk through (the displays are semi-chronological, starting with the origin of the Universe) showing where the continents were at some time within the exhibit. The dinosaur display has a globe showing where the continents sat in the age of the dinosaurs. That part is fine, but it will also have a changing picture showing what nature is like at that time. You take a polarized filter provided and turn it so you see two different scenes blend together. I would rather they just show you the two scenes. The polarization is a gimmick and not one that works all that well. They show you the origin of Earth. Then there is a dinosaur exhibit.
There is a nice piece, but one that does not quite work mechanically, that lets you start with a ball bearing on a tree of tracks. You guide it along and choose different paths for it based on questions like, 'Do you develop scales or feathers?' Eventually the ball rolls into a drum that rotates from the weight and shows you what you have evolved into. Nice idea but it doesn't quite work.
There is a nice piece that has you walk through a volcanic cavern and learn about it. You see lava flowing under your feet. You see steam coming from the walls. Another piece takes you through a limestone cavern showing you limestone formations and bats. It shows you how caverns are formed. The rock formations even feel about right, based on the 'touch-me' samples at Carlsbad. I won't go through everything.
We also saw the Dynamax film 'Niagara: Miracles, Myths & Magic.' I am not sure how Dynamax differs from IMAX. Both are flat-screen projection onto a very large screen. The film is about forty-five minutes long and is a history of the Falls showing lots of people in danger but nobody getting killed. It's a big production with historic costumes and a lush score by Bill Conti.
After the museum we were going to go to the University of New Mexico campus and go to some museums. However, they seemed not all that interesting and it would have been really tough to find parking, so we sort of decided to play hooky and go to a movie. We wanted to see 1492: THE CONQUEST OF PARADISE. That didn't start until 3:45 PM, so we had a couple of hours to kill. We did that by going to a big new discount bookstore called Bookstar. I am almost certain it is just Barnes & Noble using another name out here. We also walked through a mall.
The movie itself was a disappointment. While it starts well in its biography of Columbus, the story really gets muddled and I am pretty sure it also has some serious historical accuracy problems.
After that it was to the recommended Mr. Powdrell's Barbecue. That was a disappointment also. The beef ribs (which should be the best thing at a barbecue) had a funny flavor and were not very good.
Back at the room we listened to Bush on LARRY KING LIVE and that made three things not up to snuff.
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This is our last day. For our last breakfast we sort of shared having waffles and potato pancakes. I'd been up a little late last night watching a horror film for Halloween. This one is called IT! and is about a golem. It is, to my knowledge, the only English-language film about a golem. So I have a special interest. Unfortunately, it is not very good. Well, the phrase 'sucks pond water' comes to mind.
As something of a novelty for me, I am pretty much caught up in my log. Usually I am at least a week behind at the end of a threeweek trip. Last night I even have a chance to read one of the books I brought, an anthology. This morning the choice was Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be King.' Just as good on a second reading as it was on the first. If you haven't read it, do so as soon as you put down this log. Or at least see the Michael Caine, Sean Connery film directed by John Huston. That's the only film I can think of that I would recommend to anybody over age seven.
Our first visitation of the day is the Albuquerque Museum. This museum is split between local history and local art. We were not seeing it at its best. One wing was closed and a slide show of Albuquerque's past was gone south for the winter.
The museum starts with the inevitable Indian pottery. I have to say that somewhere I missed the boat on Indian pottery. They will have a museum with fifty very similar pieces of pottery. The difference will be in the abstract patterns on the pottery. But even they are not different enough to be intriguing. I'd like to find out when people look at fifty different pieces of Indian pottery what they are looking for.
After the Indian things you have Spanish artifacts. There was a leather pouch and a later writing box with the initials 'IHS.' What's IHS? Historians are not real sure. There are three different Latin phrases it might be, all religious. I am not sure how much consideration they have given to it being the owner's initials.
Then there were examples of crossbows. An interesting fact they have in the description was that in 1139 the Pope decided that the crossbow was too nasty a weapon. It could be used against nonCatholics, but never against Catholics. Catholics deserved to be safe from the ravages of the deadly weapon. The Pope was, of course, ignored.
There were examples of Spanish pikes, including one with a crescent head whose purpose is unknown.
When showing suits of Spanish armor, they point out that the custom of saluting probably came out of the days of wearing suits of armor, when you'd lift your faceplate to show a commander who you were. Then he would lift to show who he was. The commanders liked the mark of respect and kept it in the act even when there was no armor.
There was a board that showed how some cowboy words came from the Spanish. The Spanish word ('la reata') for rope became 'lariat.' 'Buckaroo' is a corruption of 'vaquero,' or cowboy.
Then you see more house furnishings of the period and a room of serapes. Next there came a kids' participation room. This is becoming fairly common in museums out here apparently. Kids could try on old clothing, look through an old stereoscope, read old ads. One ad suggests that in summer kids have less appetite, but you can increase your child's appetite with Ovaltine, the Swiss food discovery. Your child may even eat his vegetables. Children on Ovaltine gain as much as a pound a week! I think they no longer make that claim.
Upstairs the museum turns into an art museum. They have a lot by a fairly creative artist Luis Tapia. I'll describe one piece by him. You are looking at a full-size dashboard of a car in three dimensions. Through the windshield you see a road stretching before you. On the dash are two foot-high religious statues. The steering wheel is actually a crown of thorns. There was a similar piece in the Heard Museum. There is also a fair amount of cowboy sculpture and art. Lots of nature scenes. The only art that is abstract and has no surface meaning is from a local high school. On the whole I'd say this is a better art museum than the Santa Fe Fine Arts Museum.
Our final visit of the trip is Kirtland Air Force Base and the National Atomic Museum. I asked Evelyn why the Atomic Museum is here. 'Everything got to be someplace.' Somehow this is not a satisfying answer. Later I see a reference that we are in the Sandia Mountains. Is Sandia National Laboratories anywhere around this area? 'I think it is on Kirtland,' she says. 'That is why the National Atomic Museum is here!' Sandia does nuclear weapons work.
They start the tour with a fifty-minute film about the full project to build the Bomb taken to the end of World War II. This is one of the David L. Wolper documentaries. Then you see a photographic retelling of the same story. One interesting anecdote: The scientists who designed and built the bomb had a pool going on how much energy they expected would be liberated by the Trinity test. They were swamped at the low end. Most people were pretty sure it would be an insignificant energy output. I wonder how many people were betting the high end. There were, of course, those who thought that the whole atmosphere of the Earth would be pulled into the chain reaction and the one event would destroy the world. My suspicion is that nobody bet that way due to the difficulty and pointlessness of collecting.
Another fact I didn't know was that Leslie Groves got the assignment of leading the Manhattan Project based on a previous giant project. He was in charge of building the Pentagon.
Just the plutonium for the test was worth a billion dollars. If it just went off like a firecracker, that plutonium would be lost. A huge lead casing was built to surround the bomb that would collect all the plutonium and make it easy to recover. Then Oppenheimer started to worry. If the bomb really worked, that casing would be a real danger. Just to be on the safe side, they decided to risk losing a billion dollars worth of plutonium.
Well, it went off and the low-bettors on energy yield lost their money. Of course, when it was successful Oppenheimer had very mixed feeling. 'I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
You also saw casings of nuclear weapons as they advanced. You can walk outside and see nuclear missiles including Snark, Bomarc, Redstone, and Honest John. You also see a B-52, nicknamed 'The Buff.' They have a twenty-minute film telling you the features of the Buff and telling you why they enjoy flying in the Buff.
They have an exhibit in which you use pilot controls to fly a model plane (broken so you could turn neither left nor right).
While we were waiting for the first film, an older Japanese couple came in and the husband was telling the wife about Old Bridge, New Jersey. It had to be more than a coincidence that we were there and someone was talking about someplace called Old Bridge. He had seen our address in the registry and worked with someone who lived in Old Bridge. His name was something like Sakura. He was from Teaneck and had a company that makes museum exhibits. He was visiting this museum as part of his job. His company had also supplied exhibits for the New Mexico Natural History Museum.
Mrs. Sakura's family had lived in Hiroshima and survived the events of the film we'd seen only because there was a hill between them and the target. I wish I could have talked to her more, but it is probably an unhappy subject.
There is also a small (almost tiny) science section of which the main focal point is a ping-pong ball chain reaction. The outer lobby is a biography of Stanislaw Ulam. It is very unusual to see any tribute to someone who is predominantly a mathematician (Einstein was more physicist than mathematician). I was pleased to see it.
Well, that was it for the attractions we saw. We had some spare time, so we went to see the movie BOB ROBERTS, which had gotten good reviews for some reason not totally obvious.
The film is a fictional pseudo-documentary about a yuppie right-wing folk-singer and demagogue. The idea had genuine possibilities, but I thought they were mostly wasted. If you are going to portray a demagogue on the screen you should make him plausibly charismatic. At some level, you should be saying, 'Oh, yeah!' when you see him and then realize how bad he is. A very good example of this is 'Lonesome' Rhodes in Bud Schulberg's A FACE IN THE CROWD. Another good example is ALL THE KING'S MEN. Tim Robbins's portrayal has not one note of charisma. He sings off-key and the lyrics of his songs are exaggerations of what such a character really would be saying. The script tells you he has a following rather than shows you why. The film maker doesn't want to risk your not getting the message so presents it artlessly and bluntly. Often it is presented stupidly. The liberals who made the film want people to vote so assume that their opposite numbers on the conservative numbers don't want people to vote and there are reference to Robbins's song 'Don't Vote.' Of course, real conservatives don't have a message of 'don't vote.' They want their followers to vote also. It is a stupid and not very well-thoughtout touch to have Roberts's tell people not to vote, but the film maker just wants to create a character who thinks the opposite of what the film maker does. There was the germ of a good idea here (and a rather nice lambasting of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE), but the execution is more sincere than it is competent.
We wanted to go someplace nice for dinner and being unaccustomed to going places nice for dinner we did it entirely wrong. I looked in the AAA book and picked a place that had a three-diamonds rating. The place had two dollar signs and three diamonds and I figure any place that had more diamonds than dollar signs was my sort of place. An alarm should have gone off in my head when I saw the name of the place: the Monte Vista Firehouse. Now I actually had a good meal once in a firehouse. A friend was getting married and that was the cheapest place she could find to have the reception. Now if this place really was an unpretentious firehouse turned into an unpretentious restaurant, that is the kind of place to look for. The kind of place to avoid is only that is only pseudo-unpretentious. A place called Rufus F. Bilgewater's or maybe The Significant Pickle is bound to have a cutesy menu and prices way too expensive for what you get. A place called Garcia's Mexican Food could be good in New Mexico. In New York it sounds too New Mexican and I'd probably skip it. Tony's Pizza is probably good; Don Corleone's Pizza is probably bad. Never pick a restaurant with a funny name.
But I broke my own rule hoping that the Monte Vista Firehouse might be really what it said, a reconditioned firehouse with good, fair-priced food. Who knows in Albuquerque? Well, as soon as we got in and saw the crystal on the tables and everything colorcoordinated in a sort of pastel pinkish-beige, I knew I was in the spider's web. 'Oh, boy!'
Then I got the menu and discovered prices were not all that bad. In fact, it seems that in spite of the decor they had managed to keep the prices reasonable. I recommended a dish to Evelyn. 'That's an appetizer,' she said. 'Oh, boy!' Looking further down the menu, I saw the prices really were as big as my fears. I got a duck dish at roughly twice the price I had expected to pay. When it came it had some nice garnish, but it turned out to be eight little strips of duck. Seven of them I ate and one accidentally got lodged between two of my teeth. At least it was a meal that really stayed with me. I didn't really finish my meal until I got back to the motel and to some dental floss. Only one thing I liked about the restaurant. If Evelyn was predestined to drink down $5.50 worth of wine, they made sure it was only one glass.
Back to the room and some reading. I watched a little bit of IN HARM'S WAY. My guess is that director Otto Preminger must have been someplace else in 1941. He certainly had no idea of what women's fashions were at that time.
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Well, we got a little lost on the way to the airport, but eventually got there. We had put 4423 miles on the car that had 10 miles when we got it.
Well, that's pretty much it. The flights back were uneventful. No big conclusions about the future of Arizona and New Mexico. No big generalizations about the trip. It came. It went. It's over. Now, back to work.
THE END
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