Truth or Consequences

May 18, 2008

Dear Friends,

We be in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, right back where we started after Xander was born in 2005. We stayed in this Cielo Vista RV Park for three weeks, wandering around, before we went to Bisbee, Arizona and wandered around. That summer we took the job with Southeast Publications, to pay for our wandering around. Hard to believe we’ve been mapping RV parks for three years.

Some of the luster is wearing thin. I called Ute Lake State Park over two weeks ago to remind them we will be there May 20th. Then I called them two days ago to confirm and they are very resistant about us coming with a holiday on the horizon. We met the same resistance mid-June last year. The park is 8 miles from town, no sewer, no computer or phone service, and the wind peels paint. I told them to forget it, we weren’t coming. They’ll run out of maps about August and will have to take whoever is in the area and wants to do it. It was a good money maker for us, but hard to work in the electronic isolation. And the park attitude just irritated me. That’s a clue to the lack of luster; I get a little bucky now and then.

We love Truth or Consequences. We actually talk about spending more time here someday. Dave likes a shady little RV park on the river; I visualize a cool old adobe apartment close to the hot springs downtown. If we had the money we would buy some property and establish a New Mexico residency, just to sit on it a few weeks a year and watch it appreciate.

Richard Branson’s Spaceport is here. And a new Motorplex is coming. They have purchased 30,000 acres to hold six race tracks, an R & D facility, an RV park and a huge retail outlet. They plan for it to be a NASCAR driver training facility. And the new Wal*Mart opens in November. Pft-tooie!

It’s sad to think of the changes all this will bring to the little town of T or C. It is now such a laid back, artist friendly, sprouts and yoga meet sheep and the VFW kind of town. It almost tickles us that word has it they can’t get the hiring done for Wal*Mart because no one can pass their drug test.

Last night we went to a community theater presentation. It was a goofy, gangster whodunit, and the audience (all six of us) sat at little tables, served coke by a skinny little flapper who couldn’t keep her headband up. At the late intermission, we were handed questions to help us guess clues and figure out the mystery. We had to talk to the cast, many of whom were outside having a smoke. We met a pretty blond woman, a former United Auto Worker, who at 68, looked like Jenny Smith at 30. She was very zany and fun and had such incredible breasts I just finally had to tell myself that she’s probably had some work done and let it go. (I don’t know what Dave told himself.) And what a surprise, the RV repair guy I sold an ad to was the FBI agent! It was a hoot. We got all the questions right and still couldn’t figure out the clues.

There is a new exhibit at Mo’s Gallery. It features old paint by number paintings that the artist has worked on to add alien life. They are cleverly titled and have attracted a lot of attention. The alien life added to Jesus at Gethsemane is not appreciated in a lot of Truth or Consequences, but in testimony to the tolerance of the town, it’s still up.

I’m attaching a picture of Ruth painting the south wall of a local health food store. (I hesitate to use any proper names ever since my comments about the wonderful elder artist I met in Bernalillo ended up on HER website.) Ruth apparently paints in dabs and over-dabs because one of the cast members of the play was noted to drive a Ruth-bespeckled pickup. Anyway, I spent some time talking to people who were standing around talking to people about the wall. Everybody talks to everybody in Truth or Consequences.

There are a lot of very strange appearing people in this little town. One lady walked by when I was looking at Ruth’s Wall, and said, “Don’t you just love the colors?” I said I did, yes, and then realized she was wearing an electric lime feather boa over a hot pink, orange and yellow shirt. I just couldn’t help but point at her and shout, “OF COURSE you love it!” She stopped and we both just howled.

I feel pretty fancy in a lot of towns we work in, loving color and jewelry the way I do. But I’m not even noticeable in Truth or Consequences. Today I saw a very attractive woman, beautiful silver hair, striding down Broadway dressed like a witch. Black pumps, black stockings, ragged black skirt and a CAPE! (black) She carried a purple purse and looked like she owned the world.

We drove out in the desert the other night to a little, very old town, and had an utterly awful, but perfectly authentic Mexican meal. The cafe hours were tacked on an old church bulletin board, so it read: Recitation of the Rosary, Friday 4 – 9 PM, Saturday and Sunday 2 – 9 PM.

We missed the Ralph Edwards Fiesta Days (and the Spam contest) by three days. I was crushed. The winner (Destiny Mitchell) had her picture in the paper, but no recipe. Destiny also won the T or C Idol contest at the Fiesta.

We were set to go to Brigham City to map the Golden Spike RV Park. We would just as soon not work Utah anymore, but the Golden Spike called us in January and asked us to do his park in June. When I called him last week he said he had a letter from me, right in front of him, confirming our plan to work his park in June. But, he said, “somehow I thought we were still discussing it.” That conversation caught me in the bucky wake of Ute Lake, so needless to say, we aren’t discussing it anymore.

May 20, 2008

So here we are in Bernalillo, New Mexico. We are stopping long enough to have our friends Ted and Marcia, and hopefully Charlie, their great, big poodle, over for supper, and finish follow up on the last two parks. We will pull out Thursday and head for Steamboat Rock State Park above Coulee Dam in Washington. We have picked up two other parks in Washington, in addition to Steamboat, one in Moses Lake and one at Sawyer Lake in Maple Valley. We are gradually streamlining our schedule so that we spend most of our time working parks in areas we enjoy and where we have family. With diesel over $4 per gallon the trip to Grand Coulee will cost about $1,000. But we will be in Washington and Oregon for over 5 months. We’re already trying to find a couple of South Carolina parks for spring, to be a little closer to the eastern seaboard kids.

The cacti is blooming everywhere; the desert has had enough rain in lots of places to provide a very colorful bloom. We love this little Coronado Campground we mapped last November. It has adobe shelters where we can be outdoors but out of the wind and sun. A curved beak thrasher is nesting in a yucca right outside our bedroom window; watching his attentiveness, it’s all I can do to keep from running right over to the bird store and getting a box of mealy worms!

Stay safe this Memorial Day, all of you. We will be on the road and possibly forced to boondock at one parking lot or another. We are finding sales harder than usual; folks are holding on to what money they have. In general, though, RVers are still traveling. They just are not going as far as usual, and they’re staying longer at parks to conserve fuel. We’ve been dusting the fruit for well over a month now, so are looking forward to being back in the Pacific Northwest.

Love to all,