Out Here on the Edge of the Desert # 28



And there was big Ed throwing iron into the gusting breezes. Both shoes, as if they were on predetermined routes, arced once and dutifully wrapped around the mark, stacking neatly one on top of another. Pig iron with the grace of gulls. He was the friendly giant type that grinned as he bumped up the low end of the heavy metal music on the blaster.

     Out Here on the Edge of the Desert--

     When I met them they were like comic book heroes. It was a pretty glorious setting. Up in the wind at the top of the juniper covered hill you could see five mountain ranges from the ranch land south of Santa Fe. Damn well Albuquerque one way, Los Alamos the other. Up the Rio Grande river valley, down the southern face of the Sangre de Cristos to the Gallisteo Wave.

     And there was big Ed throwing iron into the gusting breezes. Both shoes, as if they were on predetermined routes, arced once and dutifully wrapped around the mark, stacking neatly one on top of another. Pig iron with the grace of gulls. He was the friendly giant type that grinned as he bumped up the low end of the heavy metal music on the blaster. Mischievously lit up, "Dave's gonna hate this." So the bronzing glow of the sinking sun had a hits from the seventies cast to it. Clang, clang, the horseshoes rang intermittently like the slam of a jail house door.

     Chris, the snow skier, wore the pith helmet and showed up with a 3/2 beer in his hand. When he lofted them they floated weightlessly like little spaceships turning round and round instead of cart wheeling over and over. He lived next door beyond a driveway of excavating machinery at one end of the horseshoe pit. Occasionally he would snake between the trailers and disappear only to return with plastic bags stuffed with addictive munchie thingamabobs that tasted great, and had no recognizable flavor, or food value.

"No thanx, I'm on a diet."

     Other times he and his wife, Marie, would appear from the heavy machines with large trays of delectable fare that fed us all. Like the summer menu to a country club pool. Sometimes it was only appropriate to lose because you could sit next to the hors d'ourves on the VW seat in the shade and graze away while the others had to stand out in the hot sun and argue the points.

     David, who pulled up at the hilltop in an RV and a baseball cap, flung the iron off all four fingers and spun it high and fast. Like all the others on the hilltop music of one kind, or another, was the second language and his was the harmonica. David could fix any mechanism known to man, as I would come to learn. His shoes were painted white hot. Horseshoes, that is. After all that even motion sometimes his tosses would cup the pole in a cloud of dust without a sound save the head bashing rock.

     Somebody switched the channel to a hip hop beat. Invisibly someone else dialed up some reggae. I wouldn't have found this hilltop if not for Keith who wore the sombrero sized straw with large, drooping rolls in the wide brim. He changed the channel to British Invasion. The big hat pushed his ears out as it rimmed the tops of his bespeckled, wondering eyes. The foreshortening made him look like a newsreel cowboy from an angle, and honest like the day is long in the high desert. Of this bunch, two by two and facing each other from 40 feet, he looked like the law west of the Pecos.

     On day one, despite my best efforts to toss like I might have a couple of decades before, I throw like my sister. On day two, you know, it's like riding a bicycle. And I throw like my sister's twin. Day three arrives, and I'm on David's team in the horseshoe pitch at Waldo, NM. Waldo is an abandoned railroad town in the middle of the high desert south of Santa Fe by twenty miles. In horseshoes in New Mexico Waldo is the first stop on a several event tour run by Greg and Mary. It happens over a few warm season months and ends with a silver belt buckle for someone. I'll see several of these on the players that day.

     The road turns me back into a writer for a moment. Ed and I drive in on a dramatic scenery of cactus covered hills and ancient river canyon courses that yawn in all directions. There is seemingly no way out of this bleaching beauty beyond it's rocky peaks. Speechless eons were splayed out all around us like truths without tongues. The jumbled remains of the millennia had cactus growing through it and the sun devouring it.

     The rest is a bracing fifteen miles of dirt and rock track. The elevation varies greatly between an abandoned exit off the interstate and the town of Los Cerrillos, New Mexico on state road 14. From the interstate the horseshoe toss is way down at the bottom of the huge valley several miles away where the train still runs today.

     When we arrived in his pick up there were several people struggling with a tarpoline snapping in the hot sun and the dry desert wind. One of the nice ladies working for a charity was already getting a burner together on a table underneath. We all pitched in and wrestled that tarp from the pestering wind with bungee cords to shade some picnic tables.

     Above them were about a half dozen majestically tall trees gathered together along the railroad tracks. They once shaded around the foundation of an old building by the rails now long gone. The last of the town was a hip high remainder of a rock wall only. As in the ONLY thing left of the town. During the competition we sat on that low wall and drank beer in between games. It looked like nothing had ever been there. The severity of the solitude was like getting drunk on a pyramid, if you follow that. You could howl, but even the wolves wouldn't find you.

     Waldo was probably a busy town once upon a time. This high desert was, interestingly enough, the site of the first gold rush in this country. That was a hundred or so years ago and a half an hour down the Turqouise Trail at Golden. But today no hint of town. No buildings, no water, no outward signs of life now, or ever save the trees and the piece of wall. No weed eaters, no lawn mowers. No nothing for juniper dotted, rock shelved hillside miles in any direction.

     The train from Santa Fe to Lamy comes by, however. It appears like an indistinct gray/blue smudge on the horizon. Far away under the tall cliffs in the mystery of the canyons it starts out small and relentless. By the time it reaches us it's huge and the air around the throbbing diesel seems heavy. We excitedly wave like the thirsty at the passing windows evenly spaced along the one sleek, burnished steel railcar. The people in the train wave just as enthusiastically back, I'm sure, since the trees and we are the most alive things they have seen since they left Guadalupe street in Santa Fe. After seeing it's fill of us, but never quite stopping, it slowly thunders out the other end of the town that isn't there.

     This is one of those things from the other side of my brain. Three things, actually. In New Mexico everyone brings water everywhere because it's very dry. In New Mexico it doesn't rain, it floods. And since it doesn't rain in New Mexico the thing you wish for is shade.

     Back to cases. By now we've all got that tournament fever. And everyone has turned an eye from trains to the big chalk scoreboard next to the billowing tarp. This is where I shine. I'm lousy at rehearsal, but I'm a good money ball player. After a few rounds we've only lost one and I've thrown a fleet of ringers and pointed well for my partner, David. He's wearing one of those buckles. I threw more scoring iron that afternoon than I did in both days of rehearsal on the hilltop at Ed's, put together.

     Then the unthinkable occurs. After we drop one to the powerhouse team of Ed and another gentle giant, Phil, the newest member of my Fantastic Four from down on the Rio Grande, we win the second, eliminating go around. In the process we retire the biggest guns we brought to the contest to sitting in the shade. When the tournament ends for Dave and I we place third overall out of a field of ten, higher than anyone else from the homeboys

on the hilltop.
Vince.


Copyright ©2003 Vince Bell