I took Monday off from the job hunt and headed out for the Badlands. I was there last fall and fell in love with the place. If you’re in to sheer desolate beauty, you won’t find a better place to spend a day. The Bisti Wilderness area is about 30 miles south of Farmington, New Mexico or 60 miles north of I-40 out of Thoreau, New Mexico, along Route 371. Either way you choose to get there, you need to keep your eyes peeled for the turnoff as the sign is small and faded. Bisti is not what you might call a huge tourist attraction. I spent about 5 hours wandering this time around and at least that much my last trip and saw not another human being. Or much of anything else on 2 or 4 legs.

Between the Bisti and the De-Na-Zin Wilderness to the east, the Badlands (Bisti means Badlands in Navajo) occupy 38,381 acres of some of the most bizarre country you can imagine. Sloping hills of red, gray and black, windswept passages, hoodoos and weird rock formation abound. Once the bed of an ancient sea, when the water receded, prehistoric animals made Bisti their home. When the last of the water disappeared, a 1,400-foot-thick layer of jumbled sandstone, mudstone, shale, and coal lay undisturbed for 50 million years. The receding of the last ice age left behind exposed fossils and eroded the rock into fantastic hoodoos. Today, the ground is soft and yielding, covered in multi-colored rocks, petrified wood and the bone and tooth fragments of the enormous beasts that once roamed this land.

Here is something you don’t see too often, or for too long, in the Badlands: Water.

Precipitation in the Bisti area averages a mere eight inches a year, and usually comes in July and August when temperatures rise to melting highs. When a downpour does occur, the soil, typically baked to ceramic hardness by the sun, softens into a slippery, yielding substance. The last time I was here in late fall, the ground was as hard and dry as the bones you find scattered about. New Mexico saw some heavy spring rain the week before I made this latest trip and the water had cut deep channels and turned the ground into shoe sucking mush.

If you’re not into serious quiet, the Bisti might get on your nerves. There ain’t a whole lot of life here beyond some plants and a handful of lizards, snakes, tarantulas, and scorpions. There aren’t even birds flying overhead most time. About the only tracks you ever see are those of other humans and the occasional dog or horse.

The wind blows almost constantly across the Badlands resulting in some bizarre twisting of plants and strange rock formations.

Sometimes the wind can get quite creative.

And, after a long day of hiking, there’s nothing like a comfy chair to relax in.

I’m a guy type person so you’d think I’d understand most guy things, right?

So what is it about guys and a broken down car?

If you live anywhere on the planet where there is at least one automobile you’ve no doubt encountered this phenomena, and I’m sure it’s been the subject of more than a few words already. A suddenly disabled four-wheeled beast rolls to the side of the road like an over-sized, brightly colored Armadillo recently side-swiped by an eighteen wheeler.

A guy jumps out and slams the door. If he has guy buddies, they jump out, likewise slamming their doors. Sometimes guys not directly connected to the situation will show up having spotted the injured vehicle in much the same way a buzzard might spot a carcass from the glint off the wings of a carrion fly.

Once gathered, the hood goes up and they all congregate around the engine compartment, intently peering into the gloom beneath the hood as if their collective gaze will somehow rearrange the molecular structure of whatever mysterious part mysteriously went awry. One of them, usually the driver or owner of the vehicle, might actually reach in and wiggle a spark plug wire or check the tightness of the air filter wing nut. They will then discuss this amongst themselves for some period of time and then resume peering into the darkness of the engine compartment for a second go-round.

I have witnessed such an event numerous times in my life and have yet to understand what they hope to accomplish by this action. It seems to me it would be time better spent to just walk on down to the nearest form of civilization to make a call or, in this day and age, simply reach into ones pocket, pull out a cell phone and call the nearest towing service.

And what about those engine gunners?

There’s been one of those in the neighborhood all morning long and I can’t decide if I want to lock and load or close the window and hope that filters out the noise of an internal combustion engine on the red-line edge of total decomposition.

It started early, right around the time I was trying to edit a short story I plan to submit. Guy gets into his car, slips in the key, turns it. The engine cranks and cranks and cranks but no internal explosion occurs. Guy releases the key, waits a minute, goes at it again. The engine cranks and cranks and cranks, there’s a sputter or two but no cigar. He gives it another moments rest and resumes cranking. Finally the engine gets the idea and starts.

Now, as starting was the original intention one would think this would be the end of it. Slap that puppy into Drive and head off into the day. But no. One must now gun the engine to ear-splitting, bolt rattling RPMs. And not just once. Oh no, that would never do. It must be gunned again and again and again until the windowpanes in nearby houses begin to shatter and the smoke billowing out of the tailpipe resembles an oil field fire.

Now, as one of the many professions I’ve had in life includes a stint as an automobile mechanic, I can understand, maybe, letting the poor thing idle at a slightly higher than usual RPM for a minute or two while it warms up but is there a point to seeing if you can break the pistons loose from the crankshaft? And if you do back off before blowing the heads off the engine or twisting the valves into bizarre pretzel shapes, do you have any idea of how much gas you’ve dumped into the crankcase? Gasoline, in case you’re not aware of it, kind of ruins the lubricating properties of oil.

Not to mention gas is kind of volatile and if you get enough of it mixed in with the oil you could do serious damage to the roadway when your engine explodes.

And then there’s sports.

But that’s another guy topic altogether.

There are moments, many moments, when I wish my cats had opposable thumbs. Of course if they did, there wouldn’t be an unopened can of cat food in the house. And each and every opened can would have, at most, a nibble of food missing. The word finicky doesn’t come close to doing my felines justice. What they loved at 10am they turn their nose up to at 10:05. Luckily there’s an old Tom who hangs around the house and gets all of what the other cats won’t eat. Let me tell ya, that Tom is getting fat and sassy.

No, if they had opposable thumbs, I’d have to store the food behind locked doors and hide the key well. What I wouldn’t have to do is play doorman.

When I owned my house, I installed several cat doors for the felines to come and go as they pleased. I never realized how much of a joy those little passageways were until I moved into a rental. No cat doors and, as the house isn’t mine to structurally rearrange, no possibility of cat doors. Hence, I became the doorman.

I suppose the role of doorman wouldn’t be so bad if the felines simply went outside after their morning repast and absorbed sunlight or weeded out the avian gene pool all day. But no, not my cats. They want out. They want in. They want out again. Ignoring them is impossible.

If they are in and want out, they congregate around my chair where I am trying hard to concentrate on my writing. They begin clawing at it, or my legs, or jump into my lap, or walk across the keyboard. Or worst of all, sit on the table, tail wrapped about their legs and stoically stare at me. Ever have a cat stare at you when you’re trying to come up with the perfect paragraph? It’s not a comfortable feeling and doesn’t bode well for the acme alignment of words.

If they are out and want in, they will jump up on the planters near the door and scratch at the window. Or sit by the door and emit pitiful yowls. Try writing through that. Or ignoring them when they have their little kitty faces pressed against the glass, staring in at you like hungry orphans peering through a restaurant window.

Opposable thumbs would eliminate that and maybe I could get some writing done. Or not. With my luck, they’d learn to use the laptop and all of them would start blogs of their own. Or figure out where I hid the key to the food storage locker, snatch it and start opening all the cans.