All Paved, you say??

Truth be told, I was thinking about the “all paved” status of US 70. It’s remarkable that the road is in such good shape, mile after mile. With about 700 miles of driving on US 70 for the past couple of days, I have not encountered a single significant defect in the road. This is a far cry from California’s track record. Most of the federal interstates and US highways in California are what I’d call “semi-paved,” as in they once had been paved, but damage from trucks and weather have created potholes, ruts, and crumbling roadbase.

But today’s topic is not the physical condition of US 70, as good as it is. Rather, we’re here to talk about aliens, Like the ones that abducted me this afternoon in Roswell.

But let’s start at the beginning. This morning I awoke in the town of Alamogordo, NM (population: 30,400). You may already know where this is going: since we’re talking about aliens, Alamogordo is important as the town where Atari officials buried between 10 and 20 semi -trailer loads of unsold game cartridges of their ET–The Extraterrestrial title. But what: That’s an urban legend, yes? I was here to find out.

The story goes that Atari was so humiliated by the savage critical reception of ET that it took all the unsold copies and buried them under the cover of darkness in a landfill in Alamogordo in 1983. So, after getting breakfast at the Super 8, I headed out to the landfill to see what I could see. Which was this:

The landfill didn’t appear to be active any longer, and there wasn’t a game cartridge in sight. It occurred to me that I didn’t really have a plan for how this visit was going to teach me anything, so I found a passerby and asked if this was the place Atari dumped the cartridges. I was answered in the affirmative, with the added information that a film crew came out here a few years ago and excavated the landfill to validate the urban legend. A little more research online confirmed the general points of the story. If you’re interested in the details, you can watch the documentary, with footage of the exhuming of the Atari games from the landfill where I was this morning.

So, that was the first encounter with aliens today. Then I made my way to Roswell (population: 47,800). Now, Roswell is exactly what you’d expect: a medium-sized town that’s capitalized on its association with alien sightings (starting with a supposed UFO crash in 1947). One of the locals (a bartender named Lindsey) told me that tourism is the major industry here, so the townspeople tolerate all the hokum because it brings in much-needed revenue. Here’s a few pictures to illustrate the point:

But the day was not exclusively filled with Aliens. Another recurring theme was Billy the Kid. You’ll recall that in Shakespeare I saw the building where Billy worked as a dishwasher, and in Las Cruces I visited the grave of Sheriff Pat Garrett, who killed The Kid in 1881. (On my US 60 road trip, I’d visited Billy’s gravesite in Fort Sumner, as well the the house where Garrett shot him.)

Today I found myself in the courthouse of Lincoln, NM, which is where Billy the Kid had been awaiting his execution for the murder of Sheriff Brady in 1881. The Kid managed to escape, though, by killing two deputies. The interior of the courthouse, which is largely unchanged from Billy the Kid’s time, still bears the bullet hole from Billy’s pistol shot that killed the first deputy.

The courthouse also had on the display the leg irons that Billy was wearing when he escaped. There’s a fascinating account of how he engaged in casual conversation with an assembled crowd while he worked to break the chain with an axe, and then galloped away on a horse.

My last Billy the Kid sighting today was at the Billy the Kid National Scenic Byway Visitors Center. Unfortunately, it was closed. But I got a picture of the man in question:

The “high point” of today’s trip, though, was this, in the Sierra Blanca mountains.

Finally, today had its share of folk art sightings. I’ve opined before that there’s something about the desert that gets people to create this stuff. Check out this sampling:

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(With a tip of the hat to the late, great Paul Harvey.)

You’ll recall that, in yesterday’s blog, we observed that the town of Shakespeare used to be called Ralston City. What I failed to note (and what was pointed out to by alert reader Peter D), is that the person who lent his name to Ralston City is also the person whom Modesto, California is named after. It’s true. William Chapman Ralston was a California businessman who financed part of Ralston’s mining operations (and, incidentally, founded the Bank of California). Later, Ralston would be asked to lend his name to a new town in California’s Central Valley. When Ralston demurred, the new town was named Modesto, a reference to the phrase “muy modesto” uttered by one of the Spanish-speaking gents at the naming ceremony.

Finally, I completely missed an opportunity to better justify my claim in yesterday’s blog that the previous day had a “binary” quality. For during the day’s travels I crossed the Continental Divide. The Divide is something that’s mystified me each of the dozen or so times I’ve crossed it, in different locations around the country (though largely in the West). As near as I can understand, it’s a roughly north-south line dividing our continent into one side where rainfall drains westward, and another side where rainfall drains eastward. That’s binary, right? At least a little bit?