Another Journey: Day 4

Day Four--Tuesday, May 13, 2008

An easy day, travel only. Mule and I just have to get to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a bookstore event tomorrow night. Heading back into New Mexico on 10W, I decide to stop in Las Cruces and try to look up my old friend Blair, one of the guys from school who was in the club with Rick and me.

The wind is up again today and Las Cruces is covered with a cloud of brown dust. I call Blair hoping to see him for an hour or so, but get a machine. I leave a message explaining that I'm just passing through and hope to catch him, then drive around the city for a bit in the hope he'll call back, eventually scouting out a health food store where I pick up lunch. After another call and still no Blair, we hightail it up Interstate 25 North toward Santa Fe where I'm invited to stay with Eugenie and Bobby, friends from Los Angeles who have a home north of town.

This is new territory for me, never having driven up through the center of New Mexico before, and I'd been warned by a woman in El Paso that it was "desolate." Sparsely populated, certainly, and flat as hell for a while, but the terrain is covered with scrub brush and doesn't seem any more "desolate" than the desert we've pushed through for the past few days. The wind keeps the dust flying and pushes Mule around a bit, but other than being attacked by the biggest tumbleweed I've ever seen there's nothing out of the ordinary. Mule behaves well as we climb gradually toward what look, through the dust, to be rolling hills.

Sean Hannity's nonsense helps pass the time as he exchanges what seems to be a new mantra with each caller: "You're a great American, Sean!" "You're a great American, Jack," or Bill, or Steve, or Zeke. (No, no Zekes.) The women callers seem to uniformly express how fearful they are at the possibility of an Obama presidency while the men, after assuring each other they are "great Americans," complain to Sean about McCain's apostasy. It seems he has betrayed the movement by admitting that there may be something after all to this global warming nonsense.

Between the "Stop Obama Express" and what now appears to be the "Get McCain Back on the Tracks" campaign, Sean's got a lot of work to do. But he's up to it, Great Americans. With righteousness in his heart and God on his side, he'll steer this country back to the legitimate Reagan-loving conservative cause. He's very strong in defense of the much-misunderstood George W. Bush, who will, "mark my words," be vindicated in the future; he'll go down in history as the president who protected us from terrorism, built up our defenses and put America back into a forward-leaning posture in the world.

Not only that, but in response to another Great American who described himself as a "charter member" of Rush's Operation Chaos, Hannity paid tribute to Limbaugh's genius (urging his dittoheads to cross over and vote for Hillary in the "Democrat" primaries to keep stirring the pot and create continuing havoc for them, maybe even to the point of causing "riots in the streets of Denver" during the "Democrat" convention), saying Chaos was the best thing he's ever done and claiming the strategy was responsible for Hillary Clinton's win in Indiana.

Having heard as much as I could stand, I hit the "off" button and paid attention to the alternating hills and arroyos we were crossing as we climbed, noting in particular the wind-and water-scoured cliff faces that lead up to the now-more-numerous New Mexican mesas. Not desolate at all, but rather majestic testimony to the forces of nature and the passage of time.

As I near Albuquerque, Blair calls. He's sorry we missed each other, but he's been with his wife, Sylvia, in the hospital where she's being treated for an intestinal problem. She'll be OK, he's been assured, so we catch up a bit and promise to connect next time--hopefully at the reunion in July.

Once in Santa Fe I connect with Eugenie and Bobby. He meets me at a turnoff north of the city and leads me down a steep, twisting dirt road into the "hollow" where I'm quickly sheltered in the embrace of their fabulous adobe home.

To read other entries in Mike Farrell's book tour diary click here.