White Prints
Note: Photo captions are time and place of WiFi connectivity.

May 21st, Part 1
How hot is it…?  Around mid afternoon, there I am, driving along minding my own business, when the overpowering smell of oranges permeates the fetid air of Lucy (I’ve given the electric blue PT Cruiser a name - hey, it’s lonely out here!)

I have two oranges left from the dozen I bought on Wednesday.  Well, as it turns out I have only ONE left - the other exploded!  Luckily it was still in the plastic bag, otherwise it would be me that would have some ’splainin’ to do, not Lucy.  A mess nonetheless.  Never had that happen before.  Good thing I hadn’t abducted that redhead I saw earlier and stuffed her in the trunk like I was considering.  But I digress…

You wanna know why White Sands is called White Sands…?  Check out a couple of the pictures.

Looks like snow!  They actually bring out graters when there’s a dust storm which is about every other week, so they tell me.

Did a little ghost town hunting again today… by myself.  Fuck, man, no one’s here!  Either that or everyone’s done the ghost town thing.

Actually, I think what it is is this… most of the stuff like this that I’ve planned to do isn’t on the regular tourist brochures - I’ve looked.  The only ghost town ‘tour’ I’ve come across is this place that’s been tarted up to LOOK like a ghost town.  Tombstone-style, no doubt.  So, when I show up at these places, which for the most part are completely off the beaten track, there’s no one around.  Most are on private property and have big signs on fences admonishing everyone that they are proceeding at their own risk.  And so I do.

Been pulled over twice by Border Patrol dudes, but when they find out I’m Canadian, they let me go without further questioning, and it’s always the first question!

“American citizen…?”

“No, Canadian.”

“Bye bye for you.”

It’s true what they say about Clear Channel.  I opted not to bring the XM, which I haven’t regretted.  I’m diggin’ on the Mexican radio a lot.  But I’m finding that the Golden Oldies station I got in Kingman, Arizona is the same fuckin’ station I’m getting in the Chihuahua Desert, some 800 miles away.  And that ain’t no ionospheric bounce, and it ain’t no 500kw transmitter either - different spots on the dial.  Strangely, FM is much stronger here than AM - almost NO AM at all, in fact.  One spot, just the other side of Nogales, had only ONE AM station when I put the radio into SEEK mode, and more than twenty on FM.  Tells you a lot.

By the way, a freak of nature took me completely by surprise the other day.

You see a lot of these mini tornadoes - dust devils they call them.  Some are small, spinning around no higher than a few feet.  Others you can see out in the desert are a hundred feet or more high.  Not all of them dissipate when they hit the road, as I found out.

I was driving along at a fair clip and noticed this one dust devil swirling at the side of the road looking like it couldn’t make up its mind as to whether it should cross the street, or go into the field.  About 5 seconds before I came up along side it, it jumped on to the road and started to cross.  Fuck me!  Tumble weed, dirt, the odd can and a bird — I swear to god — were being jerked around inside this tornado.  The whole thing wasn’t much more than 8 feet high.  I slowed to a crawl literally right in front of it.  The car started rock side to side and I could feel the pressure in my ears change rapidly.  Then, BOOM!  I don’t know what it was — bird, can, rock — smacked into the windscreen just behind the rear view mirror.  No crack thankfully.  Then, I could feel the whole car levitate.  Not much, maybe two inches or so, but enough for at least two of the four wheels to leave the ground.  Then it was over.  The car shook back to the roadway, and the dust devil took off for the field.  Last time I drive through a fuckin’ tornado without Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton!

Well, the motel alarm clock says it’s 5:20PM here. Or is it…?!  Bwa ha ha!

Anyway, off to find some decent food.  Been here almost a week (tomorrow!) and still haven’t had much in the way of decent food, other than that Mexican stuff in Nogales.

Four or five abandoned Atlas Missile sites to invade tomorrow, then I should be in Roswell for a couple of days at least.

More later, WiFi willing.

Reporting tonight from near Holloman Air Force Base in Alamagordo, New Mexico