Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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The first bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, January 20, 2008
My primary card that was compromised the other day and I'm happy to say I was able to use an older credit card I haven't used for a while and it is still acceptable. There was no real reason to think it wouldn't be but you never know; these big banks make me uneasy. As reward I treated myself to a nice lunch at Nature's Pantry Nutrition Center, a cafe and natural foods store on New York Avenue.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.