In my many years of travel, I’ve often marveled at the relationship between scenery and music; a location’s potential to boost the impact of a song…and vice versa (as I wrote about here). I witnessed that effect in action yet again on my most recent road trip.
Back in October, as I camped in an exquisitely lonely spot in New Mexico, a song came up in rotation that hit me pretty hard, no doubt amplified by my surroundings. That song was the original 1959 Lefty Frizzell recording of “The Long Black Veil.”
She walks these hills in a long black veil She visits my grave when the night winds wail Nobody knows Nobody sees Nobody knows but me
(If you don’t see a video above, follow this link to my YouTube channel.)
Sitting there alone in the falling dark, it was easy to get lost in those lyrics and the cry of the steel guitar. And as I roamed from camp to camp across the mesas and canyons of New Mexico and Colorado that week, I kept coming back to this hauntingly sad song. It’s certainly a tune that stays with you.
I have a fondness for “story songs,” especially vintage Country & Western ballads, and there are several in my music library. Not surprisingly, these songs work so well when played under the big skies of the American West.
Click the photo below to hear Lefty sing “The Long Black Veil” (YouTube).
Open your Rand McNally Road Atlas to New Mexico and look for the largest tract of empty space on the map. You’ll find it in Lincoln County, south of Vaughn and northwest of Roswell—a big, white void bisected only by State Highway 247…
Saturday, October 14, 2023 brought an annular “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse to the American West. Perfect timing for my autumn road trip, and since I love visiting New Mexico in October, I decided to start my adventure there and find an isolated campsite where I could enjoy the spectacle. It was simply a matter of choosing just the right spot.
I knew Roswell would be overrun with viewers, as would all of the state parks and national forests in the path of the Moon’s shadow. (Evidence of the inbound crowd appeared in the form of RVs and Subarus with cargo boxes swarming the gas stations in Vaughn on Friday the 13th.) Well before leaving home, I consulted this detailed interactive eclipse map to find an out-of-the-way location in the eclipse zone. That led me to the wide-open spaces of Lincoln County seen above.
The next step was to visit one of my favorite sites—an indispensable tool if you’re searching for publicly-accessible government land—the Bureau of Land Management’s Online Atlas. The BLM site confirmed that there is plenty of federal acreage in Lincoln County. Working with these online maps, I spotted a piece of high ground (elevation 5,406′, if you care) close to the center of the eclipse track that appeared to be surrounded by open rangeland, and likely populated solely by grazing cattle. And while further studying the area with an online topographical map, I learned that the name of this high ground is Cowboy Mesa. How could I possibly pass up a location with a name like that?
As I slowly bumped along several miles of rocky and rarely used two-track “roads” that twisted their way to the summit—receiving several questioning stares from the cows along the way—I grew more hopeful that few skywatchers, if any, would be joining me atop the mesa; this path was much too rugged for RVs, trailers or 2WD vehicles.
Indeed, during my two days and nights camped there, I never saw or heard another human. Gotta say, it’s pretty cool to have an entire mesa all to yourself.
This video gives you a 360° view of the thousands of acres of nothingness surrounding Cowboy Mesa…
(If you don’t see a video displayed above, follow this link to my YouTube channel.)
Right on schedule, the show began that Saturday morning. Naturally, after several consecutive days of crystal blue skies, a cloud wedge glided in at the worst possible time. Fortunately, these clouds were of the high and thin variety, so they merely added a bit of filtering to the sunlight without blocking my view.
And speaking of filtering, I must add the obligatory disclaimer here: Never try to observe a solar eclipse without proper eye protection. Apply that caution to your digital camera as well. Since my telescope would have been overkill for this event, it stayed at home. But I did bring along its solar filter since it happens to fit perfectly on the lens hood of my 200mm lens; it allowed me to get the photos below without frying my camera’s sensor.
Unlike past eclipses I have witnessed, on this occasion the Moon made its transit in a nearly perfect vertical drop…
The stone cairn (about 84″ tall) that visitors to Cowboy Mesa have erected on the southwestern corner of the summit, with a view of the Capitan Mountains in the distance. This image was taken right after the one above, with much of the Sun still obscured. Though you have no additional photos for comparison, I can tell you that the scene below was substantially brighter an hour earlier and an hour later. Even more notable than the dimming of the daylight was the sudden chill in the air at the peak of the eclipse; it felt as though the temperature had rapidly dropped by about 15 degrees…
You can watch the daylight fade and then return by viewing the time-lapse video below. I set my phone’s camera to record for 15 minutes (7.5 minutes on each side of maximum obscuration), then accelerated that video into this 20-second clip…
(If you don’t see a video displayed above, follow this link to my YouTube channel.)
No long-haul travel is necessary for the total solar eclipse of April 2024, as the path of totality passes right through my home area code. But early April around here is a pretty safe bet for clouds and wet skies. Here’s hoping we’ll get lucky with a blast of Canadian high pressure on that date.
Friday, October 13, 2023: Parked high above the Canadian River in New Mexico’s Kiowa National Grassland, I watched this 1.48% sliver of a crescent Moon rising just ahead of the Sun. While this is not a huge leap over my previous record of a 1.53% crescent Moon (also captured in New Mexico), it does set the new mark for the slimmest crescent I’ve ever photographed.
Of course, this was just the opening act for the weekend’s sky show. On the following morning, the Moon would be “new” and obstructing most of the solar disk. Happily, after shooting the moonrise above, I drove a few hours south into central New Mexico and found a wonderfully isolated and lonely campsite directly in the path of Saturday’s annular “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse.
Four defective photos from the Pontiac’s epicroad trip in the autumn of 1990. The BAR-F Diamond Shamrock above is probably the one in Bloomfield, New Mexico. Funky name for a franchise, but I was even more intrigued by the gas stop in the photos below…somewhere in New Mexico’s rural interior. Any run-down old station that features lazy mongrels and disgruntled goats lounging around the gas pumps is definitely my kind of place.
These poor-quality photographs were shot on 110 film rather than 35mm. My Canon AE-1 died just three days into this 5-week journey. Once I reached my friend’s house in Austin, Texas, she generously gave me her old 110 pocket Instamatic camera, declaring, “I think it still works.” Well, I suppose it did, if you don’t mind overlapping frames and light leaks. Thanks for trying, dear.
After seeing these dismal results, I trashed the 110 and switched to disposable Kodak cameras for the rest of the trip…the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier, British Columbia, the Pacific Coast. It was my first experience with those single-use cameras, and I found that they performed surprisingly well.
When traveling in the West, you’ll often see that phrase stuck to the back of Subarus and campervans, as well as printed on many of the brochures and maps handed out at national parks, national grasslands and other hiking and camping destinations. While on the road in New Mexico back in May, I was revisiting an old book that I had brought along and I found a new appreciation for the following passage, which takes the concept of “Leave No Trace” to a higher level. The book is God’s Dog: Conversations with Coyoteby Webster Kitchell…
After breakfast we snooped around the ruins, and then we climbed
to the mesa top. We looked down on Pueblo Bonito. We were silent.
Then I spoke what I was feeling.
“It’s sort of sad and sort of moving to see the ruins people leave.
They worked so hard, and all that’s left are ruins. But because they
worked so hard and left ruins, we remember them. We know at least
they existed. They weren’t completely swept away by the sands of
the desert and the sands of time.”
“We don’t leave ruins.”
“And people don’t remember you a thousand years later.”
“So what? Who wants to be remembered?”
“We humans can’t imagine not existing. We want to exist at least in
someone’s memory. Or leave a monument that someone will find a
thousand years later and say, ‘Some clever folks lived here.’ ”
“So what? If you’re not alive to appreciate their wonder at the
monument you left for them, what good does the monument do?”
“It’s psychological, Coyote, an emotional thing. I admit it isn’t
reasonable. People want to be remembered, so they build monuments.
They have to make their mark on the earth, even if it’s only carving an
aspen. It’s part of being human; the persistence of being.”
“The point of being alive is to be alive! Why do people waste their
lives constructing a monument so people will remember them when
they’re dead? They could have put that energy into having a good time
or making life better for the human race. Or for coyotes, for that matter,
like you do.”
“It’s called ego, Coyote. I have been reading some heavy sociology
about the stages people go through. When they’re little, they are child-
like. They don’t have all this ego. They take life as it comes, as you say
they should. Then they get to a stage when they have to differentiate
between self and parents. They start to develop an ego. Which is fun!
It means I am I. I do not exist just as an extension of my mother or my
clan; I exist! And so I want to leave my mark on the earth; maybe on
the Universe.”
“Maybe ego is what is wrong with humans. Maybe that’s why you
were evicted from the garden way back there.”
“You could be right. Which may be why in later life, people become
aware that life and goodness and beauty transcend the human ego. In
later years, they get some child-likeness back, but at a more sophisti-
cated level. They see the whole thing and appreciate it and understand
it and don’t have the emotional need to carve their initials in it anymore.
They can just accept it as a wondrous happening, a gift.”
“Well said!”
A new personal record: About four years ago, I photographed a slim crescent Moon that had only 2.39% of the lunar disk illuminated. I always look for these super-thin crescents on either side of the New Moon’s arrival, but where I live in the Midwest, the air quality, light pollution and horizon clutter make them difficult to spot.
Last month, on the desolate plains of New Mexico, with a big clear sky and an unobstructed horizon, I was able to image this 1.53% waxing crescent just 34 minutes after sunset on the day following the New Moon. Venus appeared first, and I knew the Moon would be close by…I just had to wait for the sky to darken enough for her to pop.
(Want to track lunar phases and positioning in real time? Get the free app from MoonCalc.org)
Riding with Carl 