Our Nest on Wheels

by Steve

It's the end of December, and we've been in Tucson since late October. But we're still playing "catch-up" with blog posts about our travels this fall. So if it looks like we're still in the middle of New Mexico, that's why.

When you cross New Mexico in Interstate-10, you see a lot of desert. But if you look closely . . . well, you'll see a lot of desert close up. But just off the beaten path are some interesting oddities, one of which is just north of Deming, NM, and is called "City of Rocks." This collection of house-sized boulders in the middle of the desert is said to be the handiwork of some ancient volcano that dumped the rocks in a pattern that sometimes seems to resemble city streets with intersecting avenues.

City of Rocks is a New Mexico state park. The state has done a great job of creating an interesting campground, using various nooks and crannies for campsites in and among the rocks. We didn't stay there, but it looked really cool, though probably better suited for smaller rigs.

Modern man is not the first to camp among these rocks. If you look closely enough in the right places, you can find where ancient people ground their corn in the rocks.

I would imagine that corn ground with rocks is a bit crunchy, and probably hard on the teeth, but you make do with what you have. I could describe this place a bit more, but I'd rather let the pictures do the "talking" so you can get a better sense of this other-worldly place.

The year was 1939. The SS Columbus was a large (775 ft) luxury liner of the German fleet, carrying passengers on cruises to the Caribbean. She was the first German cruise ship with an onboard swimming pool, and it had large dance floors, dining halls, and plenty of amenities to make her a popular ship. She left New York City on August 19, 1939, for her fourth cruise of the season to the Caribbean.

The world, however, was about to change. On August 27, the captain received orders to take the ship to Germany or, failing that, to a neutral port. On September 1, as Germany invaded Poland and World War II began, the ship off-loaded all her passengers in Havana, Cuba, and headed to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Once war had broken out, all German merchant and cruise ships were subject to seizure by the UK and i's allies, and a return trip to Germany across the Atlantic would be highly risky. German ships all over the world were all in the same predicament, something I (Steve) had not known before. 

For the next four months, the German government tried to work out a diplomatic solution to bring their civilian fleet home, but to no avail, and on December 14, the German high command gave the SS Columbus approval to attempt a run home across the Atlantic. The US, while neutral at this point in the war, tailed the ship as she made her way through Florida waters and headed out to open sea. The SS Columbus was intercepted by a British destroyer just 300 miles east of Virginia. Rather than let the ship fall into enemy hands, the crew of the Columbus opened the sea valves in the engine room and set fires on the ship to prevent anyone from boarding, and she slipped beneath the surface around midnight on December 20. The US Navy rescued the crew and transported them back to New York, where they had begun their voyage four months earlier.

The US put the crew onto Ellis Island while they tried to figure out what to do with this German crew. While the British government would not allow any men of military age to be returned to Germany, they did allow 58 older members of the crew to return. After a month of negotiations, all parties agreed that the crew could be returned to Germany via a Pacific route, thus avoiding a neutrality violation of the Atlantic blockage. So 513 crew members were loaded onto a train bound for San Francisco, where they were housed on Angel Island. After months of failed attempts to return the crew to Germany via the Pacific, and with growing anti-German sentiment in the US, it was decided that the crew could no longer stay in San Francisco, and so a more remote location was needed. A recently abandoned Civilian Conservation Corp camp at Fort Stanton was chosen. (This is the fort whose desirable supply contracts had earlier provided fuel for the Lincoln County War, which made Billy the Kid famous.)

The first group of German sailors arrive at Fort Stanton at the end of January, 1941, and began rehabbing buildings to house the entire group. By mid-March, the rest of the crew had arrived, and they had rehabbed or built barracks, a kitchen, laundry, and washrooms. During 1941, they built an entire community, including a bakery, library, general store, and even a swimming pool. The captain kept his crew active as they used their various skills to improve life around the camp. Carpenters, cooks, blacksmiths, and mechanics all continued to practice their trades and teach others as well. The captain even bought two Model-Ts and taught the crew how to drive. Money for the renovations was provided by the US government, the German government, and the NDL cruise line.

With the US entry into WWII at the end of 1941, things changed a bit for the crew. They were now classified as Enemy Aliens rather than Distressed Seamen, and there were more restrictions on their movements outside the camp. But otherwise life remained much the same for their four years in New Mexico, as they kept active and participated in hiking, concerts, swimming, boxing, tennis, and learning to drive.

Between 1942 and 1945, a number of changes happened at Fort Stanton. The INS transferred other German civilian crew members to Fort Stanton and relocated some of the SS Columbus crew to other interment camps or back to Germany via a parole program. In 1944, the US Government constructed an isolation camp at Fort Stanton to house American Nazis, which was very unpopular with the other internees. Following Germany's surrender in May 1945, the remaining German internees were all returned to Germany by the end of August. This was not the end of the camp, however, as the US government used it to house 17 Japanese Americans for 2 months until deporting them to Japan. That's right, we deported American citizens simply because they were of Japanese ancestry and were considered trouble makers.

This was not the end of Fort Stanton, as it continued to serve as a TB sanitarium until 1953. It's now a New Mexico State Historic Park and is slowly undergoing repairs and renovations, as time and limited budgets allow. I think if they really want to get it fixed up and looking good again, they're going to have to bring in a crew of German sailors!

We spent the first 3 weeks of October in Ruidoso, New Mexico. We didn't know too much about the place before we went there, but we did know a few things. It's up in the mountains, so it's much cooler than the desert regions of New Mexico, and it's on the way to Tucson, where we would be spending the winter. We needed a place where Jane could work (yes, you heard right...) and where there would be enough to do to keep me (Steve) interested (and out of the house) and not too much to tempt Jane away from her writing assignment.

From Ruidoso, I was able to make a day trip to the Trinity Site, place of the first nuclear bomb test. You can read that post here. Today's post is about another day trip, this one to Lincoln, NM, dubbed the "most dangerous street in America" by president Rutherford B Hayes. This street in this tiny town doesn't look dangerous now, but at one time there was open warfare here.

Old Lincoln, as it's called now, sat in the middle of Lincoln county. which at the time covered the entire southeast quarter of the state of New Mexico.  Lincoln county had one law enforcement officer, which meant that getting caught for a crime was not too likely. A corrupt local government was controlled by the group that ran the only store in the county and enjoyed their monopoly on selling supplies to the nearby army fort, as well as buying cattle cheaply from rustlers and then selling at inflated prices. When a stranger came to town to establish a competing store, the war for control of Lincoln began.

I don't intend to retell the whole Lincoln County War, but it's a fascinating bit of history that I never knew about, and I'm sure you'll find it interesting. Read the full details here. You probably won't recognize the names of most of the characters in this story except for one, Billy the Kid.

By Steve

Earlier this year, we wrote a piece called "It all started here," which highlighted the various competing versions of when and where European immigrants began to colonize the part of North America that eventually became the United States. Whether it be Plymouth, Jamestown, Roanoke, or St. Augustine, every place has its own logic and interest in claiming to be the first site of European settlement. We thought that we had it all figured out . . . and then we visited Santa Fe.

We spent a week in Santa Fe in September. After spending most of the summer in Colorado, we had begun working out way southwest to Tucson, our winter home this year. Neither of us had ever been to Santa Fe, and we were both looking forward to it. We had to fit our visit in before the craziness of the Albuquerque Balloon Festival began (and prices went up), so we had only seven days there. But we found that we really liked the place, although we can't figure out exactly why. It certainly wasn't due to the weather, which gave us rain on five of our seven days. It might be partly due to the Santa Fe style of architecture, seen clearly in the Museum of Art.

Santa Fe was established in 1607, making it the second oldest city in the US, after St. Augustine, which was founded in 1565. But the Spanish were exploring in the New Mexico area, including Santa Fe, much earlier, as early at 1528. That puts them 37 years ahead of St. Augustine and a full 80 years ahead of Jamestown. Typical of a Spanish city of that era, the center of Santa Fe has an open square (plaza). Along one side is the Palace of the Governors, which was the seat of government during the early 17th century, when Spain ruled the place. It wasn't much of a palace, with dirt floors and livestock roaming in and out. But it still stands, and this is what it looks like today.

The people sitting under the long porch are street vendors, each with wares for sale spread out on a blanket. It may be coincidence, or possibly by convention, but it seems that the shady area under the porch was reserved for street vendors with Native American ancestry, while street vendors who are more recent immigrants were selling elsewhere around the square.

Santa Fe is the capitol of New Mexico. The government is not housed in the old Palace of the Governors, but rather has more modern and spacious digs a few blocks away.

It is now home to a gift shop, with an odd layout and low ceilings. But it is 371 years old, and housing styles have changed a bit since then. This house was built and standing for 10 years before the Spanish began to lay out the street plan for St. Augustine. So maybe it all really started here.

by Steve

One thing we've learned by spending extended time in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico is that the southwest has lots and lots of cliff dwellings. Pretty much everyone knows about the ones at Mesa Verde, but in our travels we've visited many other sites, including Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff, Chimney Rock near Pagosa Springs, and others like the ones near Manitou Springs, Colorado.

In New Mexico, we recently visited Bandelier National Monument. This monument, in a narrow canyon north of Santa Fe and near Los Alamos, was the site of human habitation for over 11,000 years.  You might say "it all started here." The cliff dwellings, however, are not that old. Like many others throughout the area they are around 1000 years old.

So, enter we did.  Here's Jane going into one of the cave-like dwellings. And below you can see how it looks from the inside.

This largest dwelling was the only one built under an overhang. There's actually quite a lot of room up there.

As with most of the other cliff dwellings, no one really knows why the people decided to build on the cliffs when they had been living on the flat areas for hundreds of years. Nor do we know why they left, other than that "it was time to go." Speculation is that there were hostile enemies that made easily defended cliff dwellings desirable, although there's no indications of fighting. And possibly an extended drought caused them to move on. There's a similar story at many other sites across the southwest. It's a mystery that we'll probably never solve, and it's pretty amazing that an entire civilization could live in an area for thousands of years, and then just vanish.

If you go, you should know that you can't drive your car to the monument. You need to park at the visitor center in the nearby town of White Rock and take a free bus from there. It's about 9 miles away, but as the canyon where Bandelier is located is narrow and subject to flash flooding, they don't have room for or want a lot of cars in it. At least not during the monsoon months. Expect to spend about 4 hours or so, depending on your level of interest.

July 16, 1945. This is a date that everyone should know, because it marks the dawn of a new era in human history. This is the date of the detonation of the first nuclear device, which ushered in the nuclear age. Man had learned how to harness the power of the atom, and it would be used either for good, like unlimited energy or medical imaging, or evil, like destroying the entire planet. Or a bit of both. Scientists at Los Alamos had been working on the Manhattan project in secrecy trying to determine how to create a bomb that would use nuclear fission. There were huge technical challenges, and they were in a race with Germany. It was believed that whoever solved the problem first, would win the war. World War II.

I won't retell the history of the Manhattan project. You can read more about it here, if you like. The scientists were working on two different bomb types, a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. It had been determined that you could trigger a nuclear reaction with enriched uranium by using explosives to force one mass of uranium into another, like a bullet going down the barrel of a gun into a target.  This was the design of the "Little Boy" bomb that was exploded over Hiroshima. They were so confident in it that it was not even tested prior to use. 

Part of the problem was that it was extremely difficult to get significant amounts of enriched uranium, so there was very little material available for testing. For this reason, they were also working on a plutonium bomb. But research had determined that the method of triggering nuclear fission in uranium would not work for plutonium, and a new method needed to be found. The design for the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, the one dropped on Nagasaki, required a sphere of plutonium surrounded by explosives that would force it to compress on itself in an implosion that would trigger the nuclear reaction. This required incredibly precise timing and had never been done before. They were not sure if it would work, so they tested in the New Mexico desert.

The Trinity Site is where that test was conducted. Miles away from any towns, in what is now a vast missile test range, it was the ideal location. The White Sands Missile Range is an active site for our nation's military to conduct missile tests, so it is closed to the public except for two days a year, when you can visit the Trinity Site, the ground zero of the nuclear age. The days are the first Saturday in April and in October. We happened to be staying in Ruidoso, NM, not too far away in early October, so I decided to go.

I knew in advance that there would not be a lot to see. A nuclear explosion tends to obliterate everything nearby, and of course 72 years have passed. But the semi-annual public access to the site is wildly popular, and people come from all over for this and begin lining up hours before opening. I arrived mid-morning, after driving across miles and miles of uninhabited desert. From the entrance of the missile range, it's still another 22 miles to the actual site. At ground zero there is an obelisk marking the spot directly below where the bomb was detonated. The tower that held the bomb 100 feet high was vaporized and only a small part of one leg remains visible in a lump of molten concrete.

The fireball, estimated to be one million degrees hot, vaporized tons of desert sand. As it cooled, the vaporized sand turned to liquid, and the sky rained boiling sand. Further cooling turned the sand back to solid, yielding a new mineral called Trinitite. While the site had been covered in this green glassy like substance, they have since removed it all so that visitors don't try to run off with it. They had samples on site for us to see and handle. It's still radioactive, although after 72 years it's a pretty low level. They do say that after you visit the site 10 times you get a free chest X-ray.

After visiting ground zero, I boarded a bus to see the small farmhouse where the bomb was assembled. I was struck by the ordinariness of it all. You kind of expect to see something a little more high-tech, but in 1945, this kind of science was pretty crude. They did seal the windows of the bomb-assembly room with plastic to keep the dust out.

the assembly room

In "The Big Idea" post, I (Steve) wrote about how one of the goals of this journey is to figure out where we want to live in retirement. So far in the 13 months that we've been on the road, we have not found that location. We have found a lot of places where we don't want to live, and a few where we might want to live, but only for certain months of the year. And so the quest continues. 

People choose different places to live, sometimes for reasons that are indiscernible to others. Here's a group of people who did find their niche.

Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado contains some of the most famous cliff dwellings on earth. Mesa Verde is a World Heritage site, and unlike the Everglades (see earlier post), this one is well maintained. Of the literally hundreds of sites at Mesa Verde, there are four that are the most visited: Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Long House. But you can't just walk into them; you need to be part of a ranger-led tour, which means getting tickets in advance. 

We had been to Mesa Verde many years ago—probably around 2003. At that time, our children were fairly young, so we did not visit all four main sites. [Jane's note: after seeing families with young children who did three tours in one day, my advice to parents is: Don't.] On our return visit this year, we decided to visit all the sites and see as much as we possibly could. We've got the time, after all. As it turns out, it takes a bit of planning to accomplish this. Spruce Tree House, the only one of the four that visitors can tour on their own, is closed indefinitely. More on this later. The other three require tickets. Each tour lasts about an hour, and the park requires at least one hour between tours. Since Long House is on a different mesa from the others, at the end of a long, hilly, windy road that can require 90 minutes to drive, fitting in all three tours on one day is a logistical challenge. But we were able to do it, with the help of an enthusiastic ticket agent who said, "All three in one day? Oh this ought to be fun!"

This is Spruce Tree House. Once one of the most visited cliff dwelling, it is now closed to tourists because the natural sandstone arch under which it is built is starting to come apart and cause rock falls. Battered tourists are bad for business, so Spruce Tree House is now off limits. The Park Service has completed a study of the rock instability at the site. (You can read more details here.) As one ranger told us, "We now know how to stabilize the site if there were no cliff dwelling built under it. The challenge is how to stabilize it with a 1500-year-old archaeological site in the way. Given the costs and budget available, it will be years before it can be reopened, if ever." Until then visitors have to content themselves with views from overlooks across the canyon. 

We managed to tour Balcony House (which includes a couple of long ladder climbs), Cliff Palace, and the remote and much-less-visited Long House. And we did all in one day, although it was a tiring and fairly hot day. My advice, if you're planning a Mesa Verde trip, is to tour Balcony House and Cliff Palace one day and Long House on another. Try to do them all in the cool of the day, before the sun starts baking things. And be sure to check the park's website for information on getting tickets; as of this writing, you must buy tour tickets before the day of your tour, you can do it only in person, not online or by phone, and they sell out early. We got to the ticket office around opening time, got our tickets, then spent the rest of the day seeing the parts of the park that don't require tickets.

As these cliff dwellings all look somewhat similar, I'll just include a few pictures of each here, so you can get an idea.

Here's a pic of Long House.

The people who built these cliff dwellings did not always live on cliffs under rock arches. For some hundreds of years they had lived on the mesas above the cliffs. Then they moved into the cliffs. No one really knows why, although there is much speculation about it. (Since this is all prehistory [meaning before anyone wrote it down], we know only what we can discern from the archaeological record.) And then, after living on the cliffs for a while, they all left. Again, nobody really knows why, but similar things happened at other cliff sites across the southwest, all at roughly the same time.

The people who lived here, although they did not write down their own history, were not without some forms of writing. There are magnificent petroglyphs that can be found on a relatively short hike on a trail called, appropriately, Petroglyph Point.