July 03, 2005
Trip to the NACR, Day 3
We had a good morning seeing Carlsbad Caverns.
I don’t know how to describe it other than amazing. I do find the Park Service's constant harping on peoples’ impact on things to be annoying. I don’t believe that humans are outside of nature and that our presence in caves is unnatural. We’re curious and with that of course comes some responsibility to not destroy things, but when it comes to being told that we impact the caverns simply by being there then the unsaid message is we don’t belong there. I’m waiting for the day when the Park Service bans people from entering the parks entirely because we impact it too much, merely by going there. Instead, we will pay tax dollars for the production of videos which we will then have to buy or something. In my mind, such a park in my mind is not worth having. I wish I had better photos of the cavern, but It's tough to take photos in darkness. As a soon to be former class association president I have some appreciation for this formation called "The Sword of Damocles"
See this article if you have no idea (like I did) what the sword of Damocles is
We continued on to Roswell, NM and stopped in to see what all the hoo-ha about the aliens is about. We went to a museum there and saw a poorly organized set of reproductions of news articles, affidavits, and other things including replicas of things supposedly found at the "crash site". There was an old guy there who was apparently the curator and was talking to someone about this whole thing the guy was asking critical questions and the guy was pretty much just sweeping the answers under the rug, and saying “But it happened! It happened!And there were the assorted odd balls walking around making “beep-beep” noises. Not really, but there were some odd folks hanging around. Folks who I suspect consider “The X-Files” to be a documentary TV show, not fiction.
So, having stood enough of it, we left and drove to Socorro. We drove acros some very lovely country and passed through Capitan, NM where Smokey Bear is buried. Having grown up as a forest service brat, I was constantly exposed ot Smokey Bear, and to my betterment. If I had known he was buried there at the time we would have stopped to pay our respects. Lovely country, it was.
We when we arrived at the hotel in Socorro, K. said “We have a problem, the grease cap is gone. “ I thought she meant the little plastic cap on the bearing buddy that covers the grease fitting and was about to say it was no big deal when I saw that the right hub was bare. The entire bearing buddy was gone. I was really unhappy about it, and thought that there was no way we would find replacements in Socorro, NM. My first solution was to find a regular dust cap and replace it with a bearing buddy somewhere in Arizona or California where boats seem to be more common.
Dinner was depressing. Nothing was open in Socorro on a Sunday night. We finally tried going to the Taco Bell, but there were out of – get this – Taco meat. There comes a time when I just wish people who don’t want to serve you would just come out and say it instead of quoting outrageous prices or saying “Sorry, we’re out of the one thing we use in almost all our products. We ended up going to an Arby's and taking it back to the room. Which in and of itself was pleasant enough.
