Mesilla Valley Habitat for Humanity, Week Two

Las Cruces (the crosses in Spanish) has been an interesting place to live for a couple weeks.  We have enjoyed seeing the desert, Southwestern style homes, and especially the Organ Mountains looming over the east side of the city. 

Mesilla Valley Habitat is building six houses right now, and one family of new home-owners-to-be worked with us all last week.  She explained how her family emigrated from Mexico to make a better life here since everything is so poor where they lived.  They tried a number of times to buy a house, but with no down payment and an only moderate income, they did not qualify for a mortgage.  She said she prayed and prayed, and God answered their prayers through Habitat for Humanity.  She even brought her own homemade red enchiladas one day for all of us for lunch.  What a treat!

This week Don and I installed windows, did some interior bracing, cleaned up a bit, and kind of helped install a door. The leaders trained as we went along and made us feel valued and productive.   As we always have, we signed the house asking for blessings for all who live there. 

 Ron and Jean Gratz were the team leaders for this build.

Everyone on this build really connected.  We feel like we have a whole group of new friends.  They came from all over the country from a wide variety of professions, and all worked together beautifully.  I was also impressed with the strong women on this build and how women were valued as builders just as the men are.  No wimpy, girly behavior is allowed.  The women all identified with Mary Jo’s T-shirt that said, “I fought like a girl and won.”   One grandmother was a bit unsure of her construction skills and her strength with the hammer.  By the last day of the build she helped install sheetrock and was declared the “supreme screwer” of the build to everyone’s delight.

Being God's servants with a hammer is evident from everyone.  It feels good to do physical work as service.  No job is too lowly for a servant of God.  It always feels like a blessing to us to be able to help put a family into a house of their own. 

Saturday we attended the Mesilla Valley Balloon Rally and the wonderful downtown market.

Habitat for Humanity, Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 2011

     We have arrived in Las Cruces to a very different place for us to build houses.  Most of our Habitat work has been on the Gulf Coast doing hurricane relief builds.  This is the desert—dry and cold, with cactus and gravel in the front yards instead of grass, stucco instead of the vinyl siding we like to do, and jagged mountains ringing the city.  Don raised an eyebrow or two when he backed the trailer into our camping spot and then went into the opening potluck dinner with his blind cane.  That’s how retinitis pigmentosa works.

We have 13 rigs on this build, many of them full-time RVers in big motorhomes who have worked many Habitat builds.  Nearly every place we have built, someone here has also worked there.  What fun to talk about places like Galliano and Slidell, Louisiana and Gautier, Mississippi and about wonderful people from former builds like Harry Fritts and Diane and George Gravlee.  Happy hour in the RV lot after work every day is a lovely way to relax after pounding nails all day.

With a week in and another to go, we have found the Mesilla Valley Habitat affiliate a great one to work with.  Don and I have worked together at a number of tasks involving most of the big power tools, which Don said he wouldn’t use, but he does.  Everyone is friendly and supportive.  Like with most Habitat builds, there is an emphasis on learning to build a house properly, not just keep busy.  Don has not dropped a 2 x 4 on me, so no black eyes like in Slidell on our first build.

 Here is lunch at the Riviera Las Cruces at the back of the worksite.

On Saturday we drove up to White Sands National Monument.  The dunes look like snow drifts, and people were even trying to slide down on snow disks (rather unsuccessfully), but it is really white gypsum sand from eroded deposits in the surrounding mountains.  With no river outlet, water simply evaporates in this desert leaving dry lakes of gypsum which then blows into dunes.

The soaptree yucca grows stretches upward to keep its leaves above the encroaching dunes.

An aquifer below the area provides enough moisture for a few cottonwoods, but they get buried by dunes as this one did.  Those are the top branches of a big tree.

Some plants have such extensive root systems that when the dune moves on, a hillock remains under the bush.   

We walked all the trails but took a shortcut on the longest one, circling back.  I told Don the truck was just over that dune over there.  It wasn’t.  He was beginning to worry, but we did get back.   This is a surreal, beautiful place.

 

Sunday we enjoyed a small, very friendly church with a dynamic service.  Lunch was at old town Mesilla, the first settlement here on El Camino Real before Las Cruces was founded. Billy the Kid was tried on the square, just one of many colorful events when Mesilla was a wild frontier town.  La Posta was a fabulous Mexican restaurant that we want to visit again before we leave.

Big Bend National Park, Texas, New Year’s, 2011

Big Bend National Park, Texas, New Year’s, 2011

Big Bend has widely different terrain and ecosystems.  We camped near the Rio Grande where we hiked a bit on the bluffs, caught sunset over the river, and soaked our feet in the hot springs.  In the valley are trees, bamboo and bushes along the river.

 We drove through the desert hills marveling at the ancient volcanic “dikes” of rock that poke out of the hills like stone walls holding up the hill.  The differences in how the various rock erodes was fascinating.

Desert plants include lovely pink prickly pear cactus among the typical green ones, creosote bushes and others. 

Javelinas roam the park looking like ugly black hairy pigs. 

The Chisos Mountains are the southernmost mountains in the US, rising out of the desert at 5400 to 7800 feet altitude with twice the rainfall as the rest of the park gets.  Dramatic peaks and spires mountain trees such as juniper, oak and pinyon pine.  A stunningly beautiful drive.

The border with Mexico is closed here, but a few Mexicans cross anyway to sell hiking sticks and trinkets.  The Santa Elena Canyon cuts through a 1500 foot high rock wall.  The little river that is the mighty Rio Grande these days after serving to irrigate countless places upstream flows swiftly.

For a couple of Wisconsinites used to forests everywhere, we can’t imagine how people ranched here, living in this barren, desolate place.  After driving around for a while though, we began to appreciate the stark beauty of the rock formations and the desert plants.

Panama Canal Cruise

Panama Canal Cruise

October, 2010

How many trips of a lifetime is a person allowed?  This was another one.  The Panama Canal is perhaps the greatest feat of engineering in the world, ever.  To read about it and then go through it was amazing.  We did this as a family trip with my mom, my sister Carol, my brother Chuck, and his wife Tami. 

The trip had a few rough spots for me.  Mexicana Air folded and left me to search for two whole days for a replacement flight for the last leg from Mexico City to Acapulco.  I booked Interjet on a Spanish only website, not able to read a word of it.  Interjet did actually exist though, and we flew on it.  We stayed a day in Acapulco and saw the fearless cliff divers take their plunges.  I picked up something there—Montezuma’s Revenge—and was down in bed the first day and a half of the cruise and didn’t feel good the whole trip.

Being on a cruise ship is a strange experience—so luxurious and self-indulgent.  I wasn’t sure how I would avoid boredom on the days at sea, but the ship manufactures things for you to do—lectures about the shore stops, Spanish lessons, trivia, wine-tastings, pool and hot-tub, eating too much sometimes, dining elegantly most evenings.  Evening entertainment is great.  The piano man, Tom Franek is a good singer, great piano player and fabulous entertainer.  He gets everyone involved and laughing, simply wonderful.  Don is hooked on cruising; he loves the food, entertainment, pool and just the luxury of it all.  I see it as a means to get to the destinations.

The second shore stop (I missed the first) was Nicaragua where Don cruised about Lake Nicaragua and its volcanic islands.  I saw the Masaya volcano crater.  Buses and cars are required to park facing out in case of an eruption. Masaya is active, always smoking, but no big eruption in many years.  We all toured colonial Grenada where I was pick-pocketed by a 10 year old kid while buying something from his mother.  How is that for lessons to teach your child?

Costa Rica and the rain forest delighted all of us.  Don did an aerial tram and garden.  Chuck and I went zip-lining with my son Troy who arranged a business trip to Costa Rica to coincide with the day we were there.  That was wild, flying through the treetops in a harness on a cable.  Whoooeeee!!!  After a lunch on the seashore, we went looking for scarlet macaws.  We found them eventually, but thieves found my purse and Melissa’s (Troy’s friend).  I didn’t have much money since I had been robbed the day before, but replacing my favorite lipstick and sunglasses has been fruitless.  Melissa had credit cards and her passport in hers, so she had it rough.

The Panama Canal—the day we all waited for so long—did not disappoint.  I was glad I read David McCullough’s book, The Path Between the Seas to learn how extremely difficult the project was—tens of thousands of people died, more of yellow fever and malaria than anything else until they figured out how to control the mosquitoes.  The Culebra Cut through the continental divide kept sliding into the excavation.  They would dig it out and haul the mud and rock to the Pacific breakwater or to build the huge dam on the wild Chagres River to create a lake through the middle of the passageway.  The mountainside would slide into the cut; they would dig it out again; it would slide in; they would dig it out again—over and over and over.  There are three locks on each side to raise and lower ships 85 feet above sea level.  The Coral Princess was built specifically for the canal—we had one foot clearance on each side and just enough front and back for the gates to operate.  We paid $330,000 toll to transit the canal, taking ten hours for the 50 mile passage.

Jamaica was our last stop where we climbed up through the river in Dunn’s River Falls.  Great fun.

We took in the Everglades after disembarking at Fort Lauderdale and then headed to Orlando to visit Tara and her family.  I had a fender bender with my daughter’s car—not my fault, but nerve-wracking since I was driving without a license after the theft in Costa Rica.  I gave Levi his first haircut.  Time with the grandboys is always great; they are so much fun.  Traveling with a suitcase is harder than the camper. I never want to come home when we are out with the RV, but with suitcases and airplane travel we were glad to get home.

Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan

August 15-17, 2010

We entered the park at the western end at the Presque Isle River area and hiked around the waterfalls and rapids for a couple hours.  Simply fabulous.  There are three waterfalls, none terribly high, but just gorgeous.  The water is tinged with brown from tannin, so the water flies over the rocks caramel-colored.  There is a suspension bridge to an almost island near the mouth into Lake Superior.  There were a zillion or so steps, but it was worth the ups and downs.  Along the island the channel narrows, and the rapids swirl so fast that potholes have formed in the sides of the rock where the eddying water and debris cut round holes in the rock.  So cool.

We camped two nights in Union Bay campground on the eastern edge of the park.  Nice campground right on the red rocky shore.  The Porkies were set aside as a park to preserve the last big tract—35.000 acres—of virgin hardwood and hemlock forest in the Midwest.  Lake of the Clouds is lovely as reputed.  We wanted to hike more, but the trails—90 miles of them—tend to be rough with rocks and roots, something very difficult for Don.  So we did a number of shorter hikes including the Summit Peak with lots of stairs.  We also hiked into the Union Mine site, the Nonesuch Mine site, and the Overlooked Falls.  Don did amazingly well with the trails, rough as they are.  He used his support blind cane to double as a hiking stick which helped a lot.  This is a wonderfully relaxing place—so old with the remnants of the copper mining history, old growth forest, and Lake Superior relentlessly beating the red rock layers.

We did have one exciting moment.  On the Union mine trail, the path was getting rougher, so Don took advantage of a bench and told me to just go on without him.  A few hundred feet further I loudly read an interpretive sign to him and then continued on.  I hadn’t gone more than 25 or 30 feet when I heard a tremendous groan and crash.  A huge dead birch tree landed in front of the sign I had just left.  I would have been killed a minute earlier.  A near-death experience does make a person thank God and the guardian angels.

Big Top Chautauqua Oral History Project, Passport in Time

Big Top Chautauqua Oral History Project

Passport in Time

August 9-13, 2010

I have always wanted to see one of the original history musical shows the Big Top Chautauqua does in Bayfield, Wisconsin, but we have never been here when they were performing one.  Passport in Time is a program of the USDA Forest Service that gathers volunteers for historical and archeological projects.  When I saw a PIT Chatauqua project, we decided to join.    

The PIT project’s goal is to create an oral history of the Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield to be archived with the Wisconsin Historical Society and to provide material for a special exhibition next year commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Chautauqua.  We had two days of training in gathering of oral history led by Mary Rehwald, assisted by Susan Nelson of the US Forest Service and Linda Mittlestadt of the Wisconsin Historical Society.  Our headquarters was the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center outside of Ashland.

The project involved interviewing 35 people involved with the Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield from its inception by Warren Nelson with his partner Betty Ferris and others through the present after 24 years of operation.  Nelson and Ferris created a number of musical history shows over 30 years about the area using actual words from journals and writings of the time, original songs and some prose soliloquies all performed in front of a huge screen showing period pictures of the events being sung about.  They did shows for the centennials of Washburn (Souvenir Views), Bayfield (Riding the Wind) and other towns, for the sesquicentennials of Wisconsin (The 30^th Star) and Minnesota, and for the centennial of the National Park System (Centennial Green).  They also did other history shows about the area: Keepers of the Light about the lighthouses in the Apostle Islands, Wild River for the dedication of the St. Croix National Wild River and others. They have moved toward more big name concerts and fewer locally generated shows to stay financially viable.

When local philanthropist Mary Rice of the Anderson Windows fortune offered to help fund a theatre for this new drama company in Bayfield in 1985, Warren Nelson said he wanted a tent instead in the old time Chautauqua tradition.  And it was done.

We were scheduled for six interviews with the executive director, a long time volunteer, a singer and others.  We enjoyed it so much.  People’s stories of their lives and their involvement with the Chautauqua were fascinating.  Bayfield and the surrounding area feel strongly about “our Chautauqua.”  Residents volunteer; they attend shows; they love the artists; they support the Big Top as the jewel of Bayfield.  Bayfield needs the Chautauqua as a unique draw to set it apart from other tourist areas; the Chautauqua needs the local people to volunteer and support it.

 Phil Anich has been singing in the Blue Canvas Orchestra (the Chautauqua house band) almost since the beginning.  He works full-time for the Chautauqua doing the Big Top radio show on Public Radio, putting up the tent and supervising many aspects of the operation.  He played guitar and sang a private concert for our group at the boat bar at Good Thyme restaurant near Washburn.  That night was so special.  He sang about a shipwreck and then said, “As long as we are sinking ships, let’s have the Edmund.”  Susan mentioned that several Washburn and Ashland men were on the Edmund Fitzgerald.  Phil sang a long, haunting rendition of the song.  It sent chills—it’s a local thing here.  Phil can really sing.

We camped for the week at Thompson’s West End Park in Washburn, Wisconsin, a lovely open campground on Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay.  There is a great hiking trail along the lake and a not so nice beach and a great biking trail in Ashland..  We are both enamored of Bayfield and the Chautauqua now as never before.  We plan to return soon.  It is a very special place.