Thursday, December 30, 2010 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
< previous day | archives | next day >

Tracks Through Time, Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 1, 2010
I'm moved
By the fierce wind. By the dust blown in by the wind. By the cold weather predicted for the next few days. The combination sent me fleeing over to Site 8 for its electric hookups.
I've been boondocking fairly successfully for a few weeks now but this cold dust storm makes boondocking difficult with my setup. I have been heating with an unvented propane catalytic heater. It works quite well as long as I keep a couple of vents open to supply combustion air and exhaust the fumes. Now I've discovered I need to close the vents to keep the choking dust out. To do that I need to run my electric radiant heaters.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
Writing From the Inside Out
A young writer, if he is unknown, can be at a party and watch what everyone is doing. If he has a marveluos ear for dialog, he can wake up the next morning and remember all that was said and how it was said. He is a bird on a branch. Sees like a bird and writes books that are extraordinarily well observed. But once he is successful, especially if that happens quickly, it's as if the bird were now an emu. It cannot fly. It grows haunches and foreshoulders and a mane: lo and behold, it is a lion. And everyone is looking at the lion, including the birds. But it is a lion with the heart of a bird and the mind of a bird. So there is a terrible period when the transmogrified emu is trying to live like a lion and has little talent for it. Then the beast begins to experiment. When it runs, it now sees other animals scamper. It takes a while - often years - for the writer to get to appreaciate his effect on others, and even longer to begin to understand human beings again. In the old days, he could write about friends, enemies, and strangers by intuition, by induction; now he puts it together by deduction. Of course, he does have more material on which to work his deductions.