My Page: Carol Mell
Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
When Writing Turns to Whac-A-Mole
Writing comes harder in summertime but this year is the worst. Before I can go on vacation I have to take care of a bit of business with a medical bill.
Just then the phone rings.
"Paco?" an abrupt male voice asks.
"There's no Paco here," I answer.
"Where'd Paco go?"
Between my health insurance, the medical lab and the search for Paco I feel like a kid at the carnival playing an infuriating round of Whac-a-Mole. I've been trying to take care of this bill for nine months. To protect my health I’ll have to do the lab test again in just three months unless the stress of dealing with the paperwork aftermath from the last test kills me first.
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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul To Humbug Mountain
Keep Manhattan, I’d Rather Be a Taos Cow
I admire the cow. She lives in her own long time, chewing her cud, meditating on nothing, crowding around the solitary tree with her friends when it rains. Abandoned cattle chutes found way out nowhere make me nostalgic for the days when cowboys worked hard to move their stock to market, then sat before a fire, whittling all winter.
Dairy cows suggest maternal ease. If I forget about diapers, I recall my own milk-giving days as slow and rewarding.
Even God esteems the noble cow. In the Book of Genesis, while creating beasts of all kinds, only cattle are mentioned by breed which means, I guess, if you have some cows standing around you live a little closer to Paradise.
Where have all the milk cows gone, long time passing? The question pursued me as I took my twin daughters to college, first in Santa Fe then New York.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
This Empty Nest Stuff is for Birds Only
After 17 years of work and worry I finally got the peace and quiet I wished for when my twins left home.
The house is unnerving as a tomb. Though I rue the day my sweet, innocent girls were introduced to “Iron Maiden,” the silence boiling up from the basement is deafening. Over the roaring silence, I can still hear that the pretzels, normally consumed within one half hour of touchdown, are restless in their cellophane bag.
My dog, not much brighter than a pretzel, wanders from room to room looking for something she lost, she can’t remember what. Master Splinter, the pet rat, lies listless in his hammock. No one fixes him peeled grapes and carrots. He hasn’t had an unauthorized pretzel all week, poor thing, and his eyes are clouding over with depression and lethargy.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Growing Grasshoppers for Fun and Profit
Though I sometimes fancy myself a farmer, grasshoppers are my most abundant crop.
I was complimented on my produce just the other day. If I’d been dressed in sales attire, I could have showed the nice lady my mandarin orange grasshoppers or my khaki camel grasshoppers with the "Iraqi Storm" tank build. The way they are chomping down on my petunias I wouldn’t be surprised to discover the first white grasshopper with pink pinwheels.
Even casual observers can quickly recognize that grasshopper growing is my vocation; my hollyhocks have that Swiss cheese look that indicates contented grasshoppers. And you know what they say about contented grasshoppers.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
One For the Road
This is my idea of fast food—in late summer you slow down at a wide spot in the road by the Rio Grande called Rinconada, New Mexico and pull in to Sopyn’s Fruit Stand. For a couple of bucks you get a paper bag full of ripe and ripening-by-the-minute peaches fresh from the trees out back by the river.
Then, because you don’t want to get peach juice in your car but you can’t wait until you get home you stand there by the biggest spool table you’ve ever seen, the one covered with drying gourds, and using your front teeth you pull the blush-colored peel back exposing the ambrosial pulp.
Coming to New Mexico was the hardest time of her life, Sopyn says, even harder than being sent by force from Kiev to labor in Germany during the war.
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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Rattlesnakes Under Glass
What smells with its tongue, has an endless supply of fangs and announces someone's at the door with a rattle rather than a bell?
If you guessed a rattlesnake you’d be right but I’ll bet there’s a lot about these slithering, but not slimy, creatures you don’t know. Visiting the American International Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque helped me separate fact from fiction.
Owner Bob Myers claims he has the largest collection of different species of rattlesnakes in the world.
"I used to be a biology teacher," he said. "I tell people I wanted to get into something safer so I opened a rattlesnake museum."
The best way to deal with a snake is to ignore it and keep on moving. The only time Myers was ever bitten was when he had the snakes outdoors for a National Geographic photo shoot.
"I let my guard down and I guess the snakes were upset. I learned my lesson, not to do what National Geographic tells me."
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
The Man In Nambé Who Loves Horses
I went looking in Nambe for an old-fashioned cowboy, but on that score George Arrietta admitted to more hat than cattle. Not that he is a show-off, he just doesn't have any cows.
"I guess you'd say I'm more of a horseman than a cow-boy," said Arrietta, at home in the beautiful house where he has lived as a caretaker for Cindy Ewing and five horses since 1991. "I don't really care much for cows."
"I love horses, working with them," he said. "There's a saying I like that goes, 'The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.' ''
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Shall We Have Bees or Cell Phones?
Chavez hopes his little valley is protected from pests, disease and cell phones but that doesn’t stop him from worrying. Could cell phones be wiping out our bees?
New Mexico Extension Entomologist Carol Sutherland gave me something to ponder—a variation on that other rumor, Einstein’s theory that without bees humans would only last four years—bees supply one out of every three bites we take.
Since Colony Collapse Disorder is a mystery who can resist stirring up the rumor pot? I decided to start my own hearsay on the subject.
We’ll need all our brain cells we have left to fashion the ark that can carry us out of the mess we’ve made.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
New Mexico’s Top Gymnasts Train in Tiny Eagle Nest
At the base of Touch-Me-Not Mountain sits the tiny town of Eagle Nest. Best known for hunting and fishing, I traveled there to watch some of New Mexico’s top gymnasts. Residents here have to work harder to breath at more than 8,300 feet but the altitude doesn’t bother three members of the Moreno Valley Gymnastics team, Molly Weber, 17, Maddie Bannon, 15, and Kiowa Montoya, 11. Gravity doesn’t seem to hold them back either as they crisscross the floor flying through amazing stunts.
To warm up Weber, a senior at Taos High School, climbs onto the trampoline, takes a few jumps to reach dizzying heights and practices a double back tuck.
"That’s just to get me going," she said.
Weber was preparing for the upcoming USA Gymnastics Regional Championships in Texas. A few weeks later she placed tenth overall in the seven-state regional competition in Texas. This year, her first year at the tenth and highest level, she is an alternate for the national competition. She has competed nationally twice.
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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Don Imus RememberedWith the flap over Don Imus and his unflappable mouth, I got to talking with my father-in-law, Dean Mell. Dad was the national news broadcaster for NBC at Rockefeller Plaza in New York when Imus began his career there.
"There was nothing like him on the air," Dad remembered. "We never knew if he’d show up to work. He was completely irresponsible. He usually wore overalls, sometimes an American flag shirt. I’d go back upstairs (to the news office) and I’d be laughing. That didn’t go over well with my superiors."
Imus, Dad is sure, was unaware he’d crossed a line with his ill-fated comment about the Rutgers College Women's Basketball players. As for the advertisers, everybody knew what they were getting into when they bought Imus.
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