Visiting Hillerman country

Shiprock, on the Navajo reservation. The region features in much of Tony Hillerman’s work.

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June is hot here in Las Cruces, with too many days of 100-plus heat to please us. Our plan was to head north to Santa Fe and beyond in our RV, and damn the price of gasoline. So last Sunday, we decided to load it up for a Monday morning departure. We plugged it in to run the A/C, but the rig draws too many amps, and we kept losing juice. Inside the RV, the air was stifling, which made us both ugly—and then we noticed the blinking red light on the carbon monoxide alarm.

So the next morning, after sleeping off our foul moods, we arranged for someone to care for the cats and then drove north in our car. That was much, much better. Our cats hate to travel anyway. We made no specific plans beyond looking at a map of northwest New Mexico and looking for routes designated as scenic. Our first stop was Santa Fe, our tiny and beautiful state capital. We ate dinner at The Blue Corn Café, where I ate chalupas, described on the menu as “Two yellow corn shells filled with black beans and choice of chicken, ground beef or calabacitas then topped with cheese, chile, lettuce, tomato, sour cream and guacamole.” Muy bien.

At the right is one of the more interesting storefronts. We also stopped in a small shop on 109 East Palace Street that turns out to have been the clearing house for nuclear scientists working in nearby Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project in World War II. A woman told us that each day, scientists would be gathered there, blindfolded, and put on a bus so even they wouldn’t know where they would be working. Monitors watched them closely when they went into Santa Fe in their free time to make sure that no one spoke about the project.

The sign at the right reads in part, “All men and women who made the first atomic bomb passed through this portal to their secret mission at Los Alamos....” The decoration above the plaque prompted the photo.

As lovely as Santa Fe is, we wanted to get out into the countryside, so we skipped out on all the museums we had planned to visit, rationalizing that we aren't big on museums anyway. Not far out of town, we visited Bandelier National Monument, with interesting and accessible Indian ruins.

We didn’t plan to visit Taos, which we had seen once before, but I took a wrong turn and wound up there anyway. In a Burger King parking lot, an elk head caught my attention; it was all trussed and riding on a flat-bed truck. We couldn’t tell if it was a real animal or not. I hope not.

A few miles outside of Taos, we noticed a small neighborhood of strange-looking (to us) homes. We stopped in front of one, and I asked for permission to walk around the yard and photograph it. The owner, a 30-something fellow, said he built it himself out of old tires, baled hay, and other recycled materials. Much of the living space is below ground, and some of the other houses have large banks of dirt around them for insulation. He said his heating costs run about $100 per year for propane. No one can blame this fellow for the energy crisis.

We also found the Rio Grande Gorge, where the river looks mighty compared to its peaceful flow through Las Cruces. I stood on the bridge and took a photo of the breathtaking view hundreds of feet below. That evening at the motel, we turned on the news to learn that a man had just leaped off the bridge; originally, he had been thought to be wearing a parachute that failed to open, but instead he had a backpack and a suicide note.

The Carson National Forest was a delight, with the road taking us up to 11,000 feet above sea level and through a vast range of evergreens and snow-dappled mountains. It was June 18, and there were still patches of snow alongside the road.

Our travels took us through several Indian reservations, such as Zia and Pueblo, but the Navajo reservation is the largest in the area. All seem sparsely populated and characterized by casinos, pawn shops, and mobile homes. I wish I could report better news. There is a lot of oil drilling in the region of Shiprock and Farmington, and Halliburton has a presence. Perhaps the various tribes will in time share in whatever wealth the oil fields generate. Perhaps.


Our specific goal in driving to the far northwest was to see Shiprock—the rock, not the town. It is a sacred Navajo site, and truly is a site to behold. That's the picture at the beginning of this post.



We hadn't planned to visit Four Corners until we realized how close we were. It's in the middle of the Navajo Nation, and we paid $3 per person to see a circular marker with an “X” in the middle, marking the exact intersection of four states. People stood in line, waiting their turn to stand on the spot, but we were content to watch and to visit a few of the Navajo vendors whose booths surrounded the spot. At the right, this fellow’s left hand is in Utah, his right hand in Arizona; his left foot is in Colorado, and his right foot is in New Mexico.



We drove up into Colorado and had lunch at the Cyprus Cafe in Durango, a great way to celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary. The gyro was the best I've ever had.

I don’t mean to end this post on a downbeat, but I must comment on the dozens of roadside memorials we saw. Usually they consist of crosses decorated with flowers, names, dates, and pictures. Sometimes they appeared at dangerous-looking curves, but more often I saw them on straight, wide and benign stretches of highway. This cross, with a painting of a girl in a graduation gown, was one of a pair.

The Confederate War Bonnet

I wrote this for the Midwest Book Review. Since MBR permits re-use, I am posting it here as well.

The Confederate War Bonnet:
A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory
By Jack Shakely
264 pp. iUniverse $17.95

Civil War buffs and historical fiction fans will enjoy this novel with its authentic and unusual take on the conflict. Based on historical incidents and real people, first-time author Jack Shakely brings us a view of the war from the point of view of Jack Gaston, a member of the Creek Nation who serves the Confederate cause. Gaston, one of two college-educated Creeks, leaves his studies at Harvard University in 1863 to serve his people, who have allied themselves with the South. For the many tribes that appear in this story—including Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek—the main issue is not slavery or keeping the Union together—it’s survival. They must do what they can to preserve their own interests in the face of ever-increasing white encroachment.

Gaston’s odyssey takes him through many of the Civil War’s major conflicts. In one of his imaginative contributions, he writes a news column providing breathless accounts of one “Captain War Bonnet,” who strikes terror into Yankee forces. As intended, Yankee forces read the detailed accounts that included his whereabouts, which proves to be a great waste of their time and resources.

Himself of Creek ancestry, Shakely presents a good story with a decent plot and sympathetic characters. His research helps readers understand some of the differences and conflicts among the various Indian cultures, and certainly between Indians and whites. The Confederate War Bonnet seems at times like a mix between a novel and a non-fiction history, because of Shakely’s shifting point of view and the often reportorial style. It’s obviously Jack Gaston’s story, yet we occasionally hear from another narrator (the author) about what happens many decades later, for example:

...Maxey wrote to all the soldiers, “Your action has been glorious. You have made yourself a name in history.”

This of course was true. To borrow a phrase from Franklin Roosevelt it was a name made in the history of infamy.

And on rare occasions, the author editorializes:

Nothing in American musical history is quite so cringingly, wincingly embarrassing as the mistrel show. But this phenomenon of white men in blackface was a theater tradition for more than a hundred years in this country, lasting well into the twentieth century. The vicious racist stereotyping...

Yes indeed, but passages like this can make the reader wonder whose story this is. Shakely also refers to “this Chautauqua,” in the sense of the adult education movement, although the first such event didn’t occur until almost a decade after the Civil War.

These are not major flaws; I take them as minor liberties that don’t hurt the underlying story. Shakely states that most of the characters were real people, and the events historically accurate. The Confederate War Bonnet is a readable and well-told tale that Shakely fills with color, sensitivity, humor, and plenty of research..

Apparently, the war bonnet really existed, with its Confederate stars and bars woven in. Too bad the author didn’t have a photo of the headdress—it would have made a fine cover for a thoughtful book.

Note: Here is the Amazon link.

Memories of Germany

This article just appeared in Southwest Senior here in Las Cruces, and is reprinted with their permission.

I Remember…

By Bob Sanchez

It was 1985, and my 13-year stint in customer service had mercifully ended. I was determined to change my career to technical writing, but every potential employer wanted applicants to show both academic credentials and a writing portfolio. So I enrolled in a technical communications program at the University of Massachusetts, and took on all the freelance writing assignments I could find—for free when necessary, as long as I garnered at least a byline.

In those days, personal computers were new, and The Boston Computer Society (BCS) had taken on the task of educating the area’s public about their use. They published a slick magazine that printed some of my work, though they didn’t pay; those clips formed the rudiments of my portfolio, but the work was not technical.

Then at a BCS meeting, I traded business cards with a professional translator named Lee who said he needed someone to provide him with publicity. He was thrilled with the newspaper profile I wrote for him (gratis, of course), which he reprinted and distributed endlessly.


One day, Lee called me. He had a German client named Gunther who had written a computer manual in English and wanted help in editing it. When I looked at the draft, I thought—to paraphrase Truman Capote—it didn’t need an edit so much as a trip to Lourdes. “It needs a complete rewrite,” I said. Their answer surprised me: “Come to Germany and work on it here.” They offered a good wage plus expenses, and said my utter inability to speak German was no problem.

In July, I kissed my family goodbye and boarded an Iceland Air flight to Luxembourg, where Gunther himself picked me up and drove us across Germany’s heartland at about 110 miles per hour on the darkened Autobahn. My obvious terror amused him. At a restaurant stop, a waitress complimented me on my German, though I had stumbled through all three or four words in my vocabulary. In a highway rest room, a woman sold toilet paper by the sheet.

Gunther had arranged for me to stay with a young family who lived across from his business in a tiny farm town, so for a month, my commute was a 30-second walk to a vintage 1923 schoolhouse that Gunther and his two sons used for their business. After a breakfast of coffee, bread, and jam, I would cross the road, greet the sons (who’d gone to college in California and spoke excellent English), and go to the second floor. There I was typically alone with my computer station and my work, the window open to the smell of manure and the lowing of cows from the barnyard next door.

There were no restaurants nearby, and I had no car during the week, so Gunther’s wife served substantial evening meals. The nearest city was Fulda, a lovely city about the size of Las Cruces. I’d read about the “Fulda gap” in Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising—it was the invasion route for Soviet armies. On Saturday mornings, one of Gunther’s sons drove me to a car rental shop where I rented a vehicle and headed out on my own for the weekend.

My automotive jaunts took me through beautiful, rustic villages to the barbed-wire border where signs warned of unexploded land mines. Few of the locals outside of my work spoke any English, yet I generally conveyed what I needed by smiling and pointing—and occasionally looking desperate. Trucks with names on their sides like Mengele and Krupp reminded me that this beautiful country and friendly people had a dark past.

One weekend I drove to the Rhine River and boarded a tourist boat. We passed postcard-worthy towns, bucolic vineyards, and three dozen castles before turning around at the base of a massive cliff named Lorelei’s Rock.

Another weekend took me to Berlin, which meant driving through communist East Germany. At one point I pulled to the side of the highway, thinking I could help a stranded motorist. After many gestures, he conveyed that he wanted me to tow his car somewhere. I pictured this destroying my rental car, so I gave him a ride to the nearest telephone instead. I was only willing to go so far for world peace.

West Berlin was inexpensive, because I slept in the car. My weekly pay was thick in my wallet, making me constantly self-conscious. Most of this money had to come home with me to Massachusetts to pay bills. I stood at the edge of a crowd, watching a Middle-Eastern con artist run a shell game. He was good. I always thought I knew which shell the pea was under, and I was always wrong. A lot of people lost money, but I held tightly onto my wallet, fearing I’d be scammed or robbed.

The Berlin Wall near Checkpoint Charlie was a mass of grafitti, colorful and chaotic; I stood on a platform and looked into East Berlin, which seemed gray and sterile. Later that day, I inadvertently cut off a motorcyclist in traffic. Oops. He was a police officer, and he pulled me over. Since I couldn’t appear in court, I had to pay my 30 Deutschmark fine directly to him. Then on my way back, of course I had to drive through East Germany again, where another police officer flagged me down and ticketed me for speeding. Unlike in the decadent West, the East Germans had strict speed limits on their autobahn—and they had speed traps. For my part, I had receipts for traffic fines from both countries. The receipts became souvenirs.

My first technical writing assignment was completed in a month, and I missed my family considerably. My wife and eleven-year-old son Jeff greeted me on my arrival back in Boston, and they told me they had recently seen Back to the Future at a theater. “Well, we’ll have to see it again,” I said. “The three of us.”

The silver is gone, but the tourists are gold

As the story goes, prospector Ed Schiefflen came to southern Arizona looking for silver, and folks warned him that all he’d find was his own tombstone. Well, he found silver, and he founded the town of Tombstone. The town bustled for as long as the silver held out, drawing honest workers as well as no small number of criminals. Around 1900 or so, Tombstone was said to have a higher rate of homicide than New York City.

It’s under 300 miles from our home in Las Cruces, so we finally packed our cats, George and Gracie, into the RV to check it out. G & G were underwhelmed by the whole experience, homebodies that they are, but Nancy and I quite enjoyed the trip. We stayed in an RV park within sight of the O.K. Corral, where lawmen shot it out with malefactors and sent them off to Boot Hill Cemetery to rest in graves like this:

It’s a small graveyard with freshly painted epitaphs on wood markers. Like almost everything in town, it is maintained for the benefit of the tourists who keep the town alive. Now, folks can tour the town in horse-drawn wagons.

—and when they’re through, they can whet their whistles at Big Nose Kate’s, a saloon named after the girlfriend of Doc Holliday:

—or they can check out what is billed as the world’s largest rosebush, a century-old Lady Banksia that is large enough to walk under and covers about 8,000 square feet:

Above is the view from a specially-built stand that provides a better sense of the breadth of this amazing bush. Here is the trunk:

You can also pay to see fake shootouts at the O.K. Corral, but Nancy and I spent our cash on ice creams instead.

By the way, G & G would be upset with me if I didn’t show them in the RV. Here’s George:

And here is his sister Gracie:

Taking the RV to Big Bend National Park

The Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park

Our friends didn't think we’d go on Monday, because the weather had been so bad here in New Mexico. But we had already left Las Cruces for Big Bend in Texas before the weather soured, and were clueless until our return today. Passing through El Paso, we could hardly see the nearby Franklin Mountains, which were a ghostly outline through the swirling sand. The wind whipped across the border from Juarez, occasionally limiting the visibility to a few hundred feet.

So by virtue of our RV trip, we missed most of a big howler. Good thing. We had headed east on I-10 to Van Horn, and then south through Valentine, Marfa, Alpine, and Marathon, with gorgeous weather nearly the whole time. We saw a family of javelinas by the roadside, but by the time I could stop and grab my camera, they had escaped deep into the chaparral. Same luck with the antelope we saw. There were lots of free-range cattle, and Nancy had to hit the brakes to avoid hitting a bull that had wandered onto the highway. He had trouble with his footing on the asphalt, but he found his way to safety. As we started back this morning, we saw five vultures perched on a wire fence and looking at a dead animal—like personal-injury lawyers checking out a potential client, I thought.

We met interesting people at the RV park in Marathon. A retired couple, for example—she a former prosecutor, he a former police detective. Back in the 1990s, they had just been back from their honeymoon about a week when she saw him on live television in a shootout with a man who had just murdered his girlfriend. Our companions were both fascinating; we could have listened to them reminisce all night.

Ocotillo in bloom

Our RV in Marathon, Texas

Cholla with nest (cactus wren, I think)

RV park grounds, Marathon, Texas

Big Bend National Park

Maiden voyage to the Gila Cliff Dwellings

This week, we drove our new (to us) RV up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings in south central New Mexico. Technically, it can be a day trip, but we have friends who left Las Cruces at 6 a.m. and returned at 10 p.m. Much of the trip is on narrow, winding roads with occasional steep drops. We had to avoid a stretch of Highway 15, because it is closed to vehicles over 20 feet long, and our vehicle is 25.

Both elevation and latitude increase on the trip, and the vegetation changes gradually from sere desert with dried-up arroyos, creosote bushes, and prickly pear cactus to ponderosa pines and streams with honest-to-goodness water in them. The cacti never completely disappear, but they become much less prevalent in the upper elevations.

I will hold back on many of the details, because I have an assignment to write an article about it for Southwest Senior. But the dwellings were briefly the home of the Mogollon Indians about 700 years ago, and were abandoned for reasons unknown. The area was the home of the Chiricahua Apache, whose most famous member was Geronimo.

An Amazon plot?

On my favorite writing list, The Internet Writing Workshop, there’s been discussion about what Amazon is supposedly doing to self-publishing outfits such as iUniverse and PublishAmerica. Angela Hoy wrote a lengthy story outlining Amazon's supposed malfeasance. As the story goes, bad boy Bezos (see mug shot) is protecting his own BookSurge by removing the “Buy” buttons on listings for competitors’ books. In a variation of the tale, competitive listings themselves are being removed. I read that “all 1500” PublishAmerica authors have been affected. When I expressed skepticism, saying that my iUniverse offering, When Pigs Fly, is still available for purchase on Amazon, a correspondent said I would pay for my smug refusal to read the whole Hoy piece, and my day of reckoning would come.

Yeah, well. Allow me to quote my favorite B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. In the small sampling of PublishAmerica, iUniverse, and BookSurge listings I checked on Amazon, all were treated the same.

Maybe there is something to the claims, but I don't see it. If you want to scare me, do it with easily verifiable evidence. At least do some minimal fact-checking before you pass along a rumor.

A trip to Arizona

Last week I finally met my friend Kate Reynolds after corresponding with her for years by email. She and her husband were gracious hosts to my wife and me when we went to Arizona to pick up our RV. Kate is a fine writer who has contributed to The Insider’s Guide to Phoenix and The Insider’s Guide to Tucson.

The timing of the trip was great, as poppies and bluebonnets are abloom in abundance. This is a photo taken at the Tonto National Monument, said to be the last stronghold of Cochise. Note the blanket of poppies on the mountainside:


Roadside bluebonnets, my mom’s favorite flower:

Poppies and saguaro on a hillside:

Bergaalwyn blooming in Tohono Chul Park, Tucson:

And bougainvillea at the Holiday Inn, Mesa: