THE PECOS PIG - Epilogue: When Pigs Fly

“What color was the cake?” demanded Ray when I picked up my cell phone. I was 900 miles into nonstop driving from where I had left his and Ann’s home in Bullhead City, Arizona, early that morning. And 140 miles from getting my poor car with its new radiator, condenser, battery and engine home to Cottage Grove, Oregon, where we had left six weeks ago to the day.

Ray was asking about the wedding cake from Tim and Mary’s wedding reception yesterday in the Fiesta Room of Bullhead City’s El Palacio restaurant. Tim is a long-time Bullhead City architect. Ray and I worked together as land developers years ago and Tim had been our colleague and friend. Passing through Bullhead City on the weekend of Tim’s wedding was happy serendipity.

At the reception Ray had casually told the bride that her cake “looks like a Halloween cake.” Ann, of course, was mortified. It must have still been a topic of their conversation, which explained Ray’s call to me on the road.
Mary, who already was a nervous wreck, having flown from her home in Washington, DC, to marry Tim among his coterie of oddball friends, had taken it fairly well and still smiled for the cameras as she and her Guam childhood flame had cut the white cake covered with orange and green flowers.

“Ray, I don’t know what color it was,” I answered him a bit too shortly. I really didn’t remember.

“Well, why did I call it a Halloween cake?" he said.

“I don’t know,” I guessed. “The cake was orange?”

On our way to the reception Sunday morning, Ray, Ann and I had stopped to buy a wedding card. A desert fire was burning in the wind, down near the Colorado River. All weekend the blue sky and mountain vistas had been blurred in heavy smog from L.A. and Las Vegas. Over in Laughlin amid the casinos the annual biker festivities were winding down. (“Though marred in 2002 for a fight between the Hells Angels and the Mongols that resulted in three deaths, Laughlin River Run continues to draw a bigger…”)

Ray was telling us what to expect at the reception. We weren’t sure if Tim and Mary were going to get married before coming to the restaurant. We only knew that they were being married by “Reverend” Gary, a retired realtor (now living the high life in Flagstaff) who had his ordination from the online Universal Life Church (“We are all children of the same universe”). Gary wore a black short-sleeved t-shirt stenciled with a minister’s outfit.

Tim, though a brilliant architect, is notoriously casual. I have never seen him in anything but Hawaiian shirts, shorts and sandals; his wedding day proved no exception. Recently Tim moved to live with Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, and had taken a job at a real architectural firm. He had withered under regular office hours, boring work and typically-DC-competitive colleagues. So he quit. He said his headaches were starting to go away. After the reception Mary was going to fly back to DC. Tim was riding his Harley to the East by way of Ft. Myers, Florida.

“One thing I can tell you about this wedding for absolute sure,” Ray said to us as we pulled into the pharmacy parking lot. “It is impossible to make a faux pas,” he laughed, apparently proud of his conclusion that he was soon to conclusively disprove with his Halloween cake crack.

A few days earlier I had flown back to El Paso to retrieve my car. One more cheesy motel – this time the Airport Microtel – $78, plus the $50 cab ride to the Honda dealer. Ka‑ching, ka‑ching! I had to pay Rudolph Honda the $5,060 bill myself, since they still hadn’t gotten the insurance check. Rick had been driving my car home at night, just to be sure it was running well. When he pulled it up for my departure we both noticed that the exhaust still slightly smelled like it did when the head gasket blew – it had reminded one of the car guys of burnt brisket. I talked to the mechanic, however, and believed he and Rick had done everything possible to fix it right. “It will get you home,” the mechanic assured me, with genuine (and, as it turned out, well-placed) confidence. Rick gave me his cell phone number and made me promise to call as soon as I got home.

About 20 miles west of El Paso a pickup truck in front of me lost its load of aluminum siding. Big sheets caught the desert wind and one-by-one flew into the air and across I‑10. I slowed and missed them all. And then I was free of Texas.

In six hours I was in Tucson, where I was to stay with Ben and Jay, the bachelor brothers. Ben grilled baby-back pork ribs in honor of my big pig adventure. First, though, I went to the Sonora Desert Museum and hiked around in the cactus for several hours. I lingered at the exhibit of a herd of javelinas. In the midday heat they were flopped in the shade of a stone bridge over their habitat. So close, they appeared twice as large as I remembered the size of that dead pig rolling down the highway behind my car. No wonder it had done so much damage. Lucky the whole family hadn’t shown up.

A nice-looking couple was standing on the bridge, also enjoying the pig show. “I hit one of those five weeks ago,” I said to the woman standing next to me. “Just today I got my car back from the shop.”

“Did it last very long?” she asked.

I thought that an odd question about my car. “It was an extended, agonizing event,” I said smiling.

She didn’t ask me to elaborate and they walked away rather quickly, it seemed to me. I saw them again and recalled our brief exchange. Then it hit me. “Oh-h, now I get it,” I thought. She was asking about the pig, not my car. I considered correcting our miscommunication but decided I didn’t really care if they thought I was happy that the pig had suffered an “extended, agonizing” death.

As for the Bullhead City wedding cake, Ray and I never agreed on why he thought it reminded him of Halloween. Ray’s mind works in mysterious ways. Like the universe we share.

I called Rick at the Honda shop in El Paso the morning after I got home. “Be sure to look me up if you get back to Texas,” he said.

“When pigs fly,” I laughed.

“Well, you did make one pig fly.”

- the end -

"Revenge of the Pecos Pig"

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THE PECOS PIG - Part 5. The Evil Pig, Texas or God

“Does it show Rick’s third eye?” the mechanic asked me this morning. I had just taken Rick’s picture next to my Honda, my rental car and my newly reorganized bags on the floor of the repair shop. The mechanics all think that Rick is cursed. I assured Rick that it’s not him. Blame it on that evil pig. Or Texas. Or God.

Now I’m spending the day, Tuesday, here in the El Paso airport waiting for my flight home to Oregon. Eight days is enough. Rick still marvels at my ability to keep smiling, but last night, when it became clear that my car’s overheating problems are more serious than just a blown head gasket, I confessed that I was running perilously low. “I can’t imagine,” Rick said. “I can’t stand to be away from home even three days. You know, I get home from a tough day at work, my wife’s upset, the kids are fighting – that’s where I belong.” I think my travails have re-enforced priorities for Rick.

And mine. My lifeline has been my cell phone connection to my wife. Yesterday morning when it still appeared my car was going to be fixed, I said to her, “Meet Rick,” and handed Rick the phone. “That was mean,” he said after he had promised her to get me home. “I thought you needed more pressure,” I explained.

I really thought my luck had changed. Saturday, driving south across New Mexico, where “only the curvature of the Earth limits your view,” a warning light came on my rental car about 50 miles north of Roswell. Despite my initial panic, it turned out to be just a faulty sensor – probably from the dust.

Then on Sunday hiking eight miles up a canyon in Guadalupe Mountains National Park with Mark from El Paso who I met at the trailhead, he told me that it was good luck to rub the “smooth-as-a-baby’s-butt” bark of the Texas madrone tree. You can bet I rubbed hell out of every damned one I saw. For good measure, Mark told me he would “say an extra prayer for me” that night.

Before I left the park for the Super 8 Motel in El Paso, I stopped at the Frijole Ranch and met Jo Ann, a retired park volunteer who took care of the little museum in the desert homestead. She stayed past her 4:30 closing so I could study the pictures of Mescalero Apaches, soldiers and ranch families – all whom had called home this remote canyon with its precious springs. The Smith family had grown apples, peaches, apricots, plums, pears, figs, pecans, blackberries, strawberries and corn in the early 1900s, hauling their produce 65 miles over rocky roads to sell in Van Horn, covering their wagon’s cargo with wet rags and paper and traveling by night to keep it fresh.

A tiny red building next to the house, no larger than a big closet, had served as a one-room schoolhouse for up to eight local students. “Can you imagine going to school in such a place,” I asked Jo Ann. “Yes,” she said, “I did.” Jo Ann showed me more fuzzy pictures of the Kincaid family, who followed the Smiths’ residency there. They looked a lot like the pictures of my own great-grandparents and their families. “I guess life was hard for everyone in those days,” we agreed.

I keep playing the blues line in my head, “if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” But I don’t think that’s right. In the lows of this bi-polar journey it would be easy to attribute direction or malevolence – to the pig. To Texas. To God. But like the stringing together of happenchance, perception and wishful thinking at the “International UFO Museum and Research Center” in Roswell, that would be a fool’s errand.

My real errand? I’ve got a plane to catch. Going home. At least for now.

Tomorrow: "Epilogue: When Pig's Fly"

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THE PECOS PIG - Part 4. The Cost Per Bird

OK, so it’s not on the scale of a blown head gasket but it did strike me as a bit odd that every motel in Socorro, New Mexico, was full tonight. Something about a science fair, the Motel 6 woman told me. Same for the Comfort Inn in Belen. As for two places in Los Lunas, well I got caught by a slow-moving train while trying to find them and gave up. Eighty miles north of Socorro I finally found a Motel 6 near the Albuquerque airport – $57 (senior discount). Monica had all kinds of trouble getting me checked in, having to change room assignments three times. “I’ve never had this happen,” she apologized. “It’s perfectly understandable,” I said, and let it go at that.

Rick the Honda guy called me on my cell phone yesterday with the bad news. “I failed you,” he said. So there I was trying to make him feel better. “I really thought I was going to get you out of here today,” he kept saying.

Rick is surprised at my mellow acceptance. Like I told him, am I supposed to get mad at some anonymous kid in a parts assembly warehouse somewhere in Ohio who missed putting the head gasket in the nicely sealed box sent to El Paso for my Honda? First, no plug. Now, no gasket.

But wait. There’s more. There’s always fucking more!

The “overnight” shipping of the new box of gaskets isn’t really overnight. Something about this having to be “cross-shipped.” I wanted to ask if that meant it was being delivered by a transvestite on a bicycle but thought better of it. The upshot: delivery Monday instead of Friday.

Rick didn’t call me today as soon as he learned the bad news because he “didn’t want to ruin my morning.” And it would have. Instead, I paid my third visit to this burlap-covered bird blind in the Franklin Mountain State Park. I was surprised to find one very large man already inside with a camera.

“Come in. Have a seat,” whispered Richard, the man who had built this bird blind, put out bird seed every week and kept the watering hole working by carrying in water by hand to a 55-gallon drum. Richard was a former rodeo photographer who got hurt and now had trouble even walking. But he had convinced the park bureaucracy to let him build and maintain this blind. He had only gotten interested in birds four or five years ago, but had marvelous enthusiasm about the sparrows and towhees he watched every few days. Now, he said, the park wanted him to create a butterfly garden. Richard was stalled because of the drought and because they wouldn’t let him plant any wildflowers: “‘No way,’ they told me. That would have to be approved by Austin.”

I did have a nice stay camping alone last night in the park. Poor-wills surrounded my camp at dark, making their “poor-will” calls with a little hiccup at the end. New life bird #27 for the trip. When I was at bird #25 I had told my friend, John, on the phone how much the trip was costing me, but bragged about my list of new life birds. “A hundred dollars a bird,” he noted dryly. At the time of the Poor-will, #27, I figured I had brought the cost down to maybe $90 a bird. That was before I knew I had the weekend to kill.

That’s what has sent me north into New Mexico, trying to fill two and one-half days. Rick was nice enough to call late today and confirm that the gasket would not arrive tomorrow, Saturday, but should be there Monday, 10:00 am. “So enjoy your weekend,” he said in his message, with absolutely no irony in his voice.

Tomorrow: "Part 5. The Evil Pig, Texas or God"

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THE PECOS PIG - Part 3. The Pig's Revenge

The birding in South Texas was excellent. But when I left Pecos three days ago in my supposedly fixed car, I had one goal: Get the hell out of Texas. Twelve miles shy of the New Mexico border a head gasket blew. At least there’s this: El Paso beats Pecos as a place to be stranded.

Oddly enough, I have Edel to thank for not breaking down on I-10. I was impressed with Edel’s radar detector in his monster truck on our high-speed radiator odyssey. So I had my eye out for a Best Buy to get me one before I left El Paso. I was getting off the freeway for that purpose when the engine blew in a cloud of white smoke – at a near-perfect spot, if there is such a thing for a break down in Texas. Four miles from Rudolph Honda (“El Paso’s only Honda Presidential Award dealer”).

Back in Pecos, after Gary had met me waiting at his fence gate 8:00 Monday morning, he explained that he had gotten another new radiator, installed it, charged up the A/C and all appeared fine. We had settled up and I asked him how things were going with Emlyn. Not so good, it seemed. She was bored and missing her family. And, I learned, Emlyn had never been taught any domestic skills, including cooking or cleaning. Gary was slowly teaching her the basics, like cracking an egg, dusting, running a vacuum. While he and Emlyn had been getting acquainted via their Web cam, he had often seen her pushing a vacuum and being domestic. She finally confessed that it was just an act: “You never heard the vacuum running, did you?” Gary, however, was genuinely OK with all that. His real complaint: “She won’t talk to me about her feelings. Even if I can’t fix things, I can at least comfort her and sympathize. Like when I have a bad day at work.” I told Gary he was one smart guy.

We had talked for about an hour when Edel showed up and we changed the subject. Edel told us about how many jack rabbits he had hit with his truck in the past week (four or five every day). Gary asked Edel if he had ever seen one of the big ones with antlers. We thought Gary was kidding and I made some crack about “jackalopes.” He became indignant and said that three times they had come right by the shop. “With horns?” Edel asked. “No, not horns – antlers,” Gary fumed. He promised to get a picture next time and email it to me. And off I drove to my next interruption 220 miles later here in El Paso.

Rick, the service manager at Rudolph Honda, is working hard to get me out of here. “But you couldn’t have picked a worse week since we’ve got a spring break overload,” he told me. “Rick, I know you didn’t mean it that way but of course I didn’t ‘pick’ anything here,” I replied. It’s clear that Rick feels my pain. When Rick told me he was sharing the story of my pig plight with his wife, I knew he was for real. Imagine that. Genuine empathy from a car guy. Of course, Rick is fixing cars, not selling them.

Rick is an average-looking family man, 40ish, glasses, still with most of his own hair, including a short goatee and mustache. One afternoon he pointed to this gorgeous black and chrome Harley Davidson next to the shop. “That’s my wife’s,” he said. “Only has 200 miles on it so I rode it to work to use up the gas before it goes bad. I have a fat boy.”

I told him about my first trip to Texas in 1968 riding a Harley. Looking for a place to camp I buried the bike in a giant mud hole. Hours later, covered in water and mud, I escaped by piling branches in the mud and inching the 450-pound motorcycle out by flopping it from side to side in the water. Later, it broke down completely in Meridian, Mississippi, and I hitchhiked home to get a trailer to haul it back. That Texas mud hole may have been where I got the hernia that helped keep me out of Viet Nam, but that’s another story.

Even Rick with all his empathy can’t control the pace of the machine shop, which is where my engine heads went today for machining flat the warped surfaces from being overheated. Rick’s hoping to get me out of here by Friday but I’m not real optimistic.

Monday I dealt with the insurance company and that is not a pretty picture. I faxed them eight pages of make-shift receipts of my costs to date ($828.41, not counting motels and rental cars).

I’ve seen a fair bit of El Paso now. I’ve met Border Patrol guys, park rangers, car guys, museum staff and Tony. Yesterday I watched nesting peregrines on a cliff where I hiked high in the nearby Franklin Mountains. That’s where I met Tony, dressed in desert camo, and carrying a lot of water in his pack. Young Tony was an expert, having just come back from Iraq where 140 degrees is common. “The gear adds another 20 degrees,” he told me. Tony was with infantry kicking in doors and shooting bad guys, a challenging definition, I would think. Drinking water nearly non-stop was what you did, he said.

Tony told me about the huge camel spiders that they would catch in Iraq. He spread out a hand to show its size. Then the other hand came up as he described the spider fights they would orchestrate. Like cock fights. But with giant arachnids. Tony was climbing the mountain at a brisk pace, day one of his personal training regime before going to Army Ranger school. Tony had been stationed in upstate New York so we traded stories about our respective experiences there. “Small world,” he said when I told him I had been engaged to a girl in Watertown, where he had lived.

Tony loves his work (and, it seemed to me, his life). He had foregone a $75,000/year job offer in Houston oil to stay in the Army. He wanted to go back to Iraq. He was envisioning a possible future with military contractors, like Blackwater. I told him that having a job that you love, especially at his age, is rare. “If you get up in the morning and you don’t hate the thought of going to work, you are real lucky. Don’t give that up,” I told him.

I took Tony’s picture on our shared mountain ridge, got his email address and promised to send him a copy. Now, sitting here in the lovely little Chihuahuan desert garden on the University of Texas El Paso campus, I’m doing my best not to let that damned pig get me down again. After all, I could be watching spider fights in Iraq.

Tomorrow: "Part 4. The Cost Per Bird"

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THE PECOS PIG - Part 2. Easter in Pecos

Fast forward 48 hours – Easter Sunday noon. Forty-three degrees and raining, sitting here in my still-dead car in the Eagle Automotive Repair junkyard in Pecos, Texas. I am being rescued soon by Craig in his rented Prius. He’s driving it 400 miles from San Antonio. Then he turns around and we drive back 400 miles to San Antonio, then 200 miles south. After a week of birding in South Texas, I will be back to pick up my hopefully un-pig-damaged car. That is the plan. Assuming no more pigs, real or metaphysical.

I picked up my new radiator yesterday just fine. Edel drove me to Midland where we met Frank at Leo’s Radiator Shop (“Serving the Permian Basin for 21 years”). The Permian Basin is the local oil field. Edel told me all about pumping oil from 4,000 feet and getting it to refineries. While the rest of the country is in recession, here business is booming. With oil at $100 a barrel they are pumping like crazy. Lots of jobs. No housing left. I asked Edel what guys who move here to work do when they aren’t working. About all he could come up with was the local video rental.

Edel dropped me and my radiator off in the early afternoon. I sat in the junkyard all day, waiting for Gary to get started. Gary had promised to install an engine in a little Isuzu truck for another stranded traveler from Amarillo. I rode over to AutoZone with the guy to get new plugs. An odd fellow, a young Hispanic home boy (“fucking going to fucking Odessa tonight for some fine fucking bitches”) who loved to ride a mountain bike and visit parks (“I can never find anyone to go with me”), and was in a panic to get back to work tomorrow (“or get fired”). In the end something was wrong with his new-used engine and it never got fixed. The last thing the guy said to me was, “Well, at least you will have a story to tell when you are old.”

Around 7:00 pm Edel stopped by again just to see what was going on. Sat and watched Gary work on my car. It was not going well. Gary finally did get the new radiator in and hammered out the bent frame where the pig had hit. Then the surprise. Unfortunately, he broke the A/C condenser in his hammering; Freon hissed out for ten minutes. Gary assured me that the car would run just fine without the condenser and A/C. OK. That wasn’t the surprise.

When Gary started to fill the new radiator with antifreeze – surprise! It drained straight to the floor. What he hadn’t noticed was that the new radiator had a plug hole in the bottom (unlike the old radiator) but not a plug for it. No plug! After 30 minutes of trying everything in his shop to plug it, Gary conceded defeat and I called Craig to rescue me.

Gary’s been by three times this morning trying to get out of town for Easter with his new wife, Emlyn. I commented that he looked more white than black today. I didn’t mean it the way it may have sounded but Gary took no notice. The last time he stopped, Emlyn was in his truck so I walked over and chatted with her, a lovely woman of around 30. During her frequent calls to Gary yesterday, I learned that they call each other “baby.”

So now I’m sitting here alone on this goddamned cold, rainy Easter Sunday in goddamned Pecos, Texas. Goddamn that pig.

Tomorrow: "Part 3. The Pig's Revenge"

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THE PECOS PIG - Part 1. A Not-So-Good Friday

Lying here naked and drinking wine at 4:00 in the afternoon in a Motel 6 in Pecos, Texas, was definitely not in the plan. I was supposed to be driving east to San Antonio to pick up Craig for a week of birding in South Texas. Blame the pig.

Late yesterday after driving 60 miles out of my way to camp in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I found the campground full. So there I was flying down deserted TX 652, hoping to find a motel in Pecos. Turns out, all the motels were full. But that’s getting ahead of the pig. Which I didn’t.

As the sun set over the pancake landscape the pig (a javelina) came trotting across the highway, left-to-right, hesitating, then going. Bull’s-eye! Like hitting a bowling ball. In my mirror I watched him rolling down the road, a 60-pound sack of dead lard.

No damage to the car was apparent. But 30 miles later, it died too. I told AAA that I was 24.1 miles south of Orla and about 17 miles north of Pecos. AAA’s message to B&B Wrecker Service, however, was “south” of Pecos. It took two hours waiting in the dark with erratic cell phone service until we finally connected. “They screw everything up,” the guy said philosophically as he winched my poor car up on his flatbed truck. The best mechanic in Pecos is at Eagle Automotive Repair, he told me. So he dropped me and my dead Honda Pilot on a weedy side street next to a ramshackle steel building and junkyard. The place was dark and deserted, with no discernable entry door or sign, surrounded by a rusty, barbed wire-topped fence. One street light and a full moon gave everything creepy shadows and a Mad Max glow.

After a long night half-sleeping in the back of the car, listening to passing trains and very early-rising roosters, I met Gary opening up. Over his first-of-the-day coffee, he learned about the pig. I learned about Gary, who started the day with hands already dark from grease stains. The most amazing thing, which Gary told in his matter-of-fact way, was that six days ago he got married to a Filipino woman. And went back to work three hours later. “She was real mad,” he admitted. He had met her on the Internet two years ago. Gary, who has this unsettling way of pausing for a few seconds when he talks and staring blankly with his slightly mis-aligned eyes while he collects his thoughts, told me that it cost many thousands of dollars to bring her over. Now he needed even more to get her work papers and to bring over her young son. So it seems the boy is going to have that pig to thank, at least in part, for getting him to the USA.

I almost left the USA by accident earlier yesterday. On a whim, I tried to find this “wildlife sanctuary” I saw on a map of El Paso. Somehow, though, the highway I sought became the freeway to Juarez, Mexico. After passing numerous “no guns” signs (I have one), the big sign overhead proclaimed: “Leaving the United States of America.” Then, just before the border guards a little sign read “U-Turn OK, 350 feet.” By the way, I did finally find the “wildlife sanctuary,” a scruffy square of dry vegetation and ponds surrounded by chain link and No Trespassing signs. Some days whims pay off. Other days, not so much.

Tomorrow morning, Gary’s friend, Edel, and his monster Chevy truck will pick me up from the Motel 6 to go to Midland, thanks to Gary calling all over this part of Texas to find a replacement for the radiator that the pig destroyed. He used private numbers to reach guys who ran the parts and radiator shops; all were closed, as today is Good Friday. “I’ve got a customer here who broke down ‘cause he hit a pig and needs to get to San Anton’ tonight,” he explained to each of them. Finally, after many dead ends, Frank in Midland said he could get one by 10:00 tomorrow. $250.

Edel is charging me $120 for the 180-mile round trip to Midland. I told him I thought that was fair. Edel, a large, friendly 48-year-old Hispanic man, works the oil fields around Orla (near the dead pig’s home). Tomorrow is his day off and he’s free because his wife is having a Mary Kay cosmetics party at his house. Edel came by today and gave me a ride to the Motel 6 around noon. The woman at the check-in desk said, apologetically, “They raise the rates over spring break,” regarding the $57 price.

Room 120 is on a corner near the fetid-appearing pool. Outside an Asian man with a pick is digging in the baked dirt. I went for a hot, bleak run through this sad, desolate town. Then took a shower. Which is why I’m now naked. As for the wine at 4:00 in the afternoon, that should be obvious by now.

Tomorrow: "Part 2. Easter in Pecos"

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