It’s not just that we wanted to see White Sands National Park while we were vacationing in Ruidoso, New Mexico. It’s that we happened to be there when there would be a full moon, a “strawberry super moon” according to the lunar calendar, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the beauty of a moon like that over the white sands would be breathtaking.
We left Ruidoso about 3:30 p.m. under a light sprinkle. We would head for Cloudcroft first to get acquainted. Then we would go from there to the park. And that’s about as far as my imagined visit to White Sands would correspond to reality.
First, we managed to ignore the GPS and miss a crucial turn. The good news is that because of that little error, we ended up in a gas station with the cheapest gas we’d seen on the whole trip. One pump per aisle, one grade of gas. Needing a fillup, we saw our mistake as a blessing, then turned around to get back on track.
“Track” is a pretty good description of what we got back on. It was a little curious to me that the new GPS instructions routed us around a few dumpsters and a weedy gravel driveway. All too soon I asked Nora, “Is this the road we’re supposed to be on?” Gravel, barely two lanes, wandering into thick woods. It was scenic and suspicious. On a busy holiday weekend, we were in the only car we saw for half an hour. I was suddenly grateful for my Outback with all-wheel drive.
We did pass some high piles of cut logs, offering us hope that after the holidays, someone might come back for them and discover us sipping muddy water from the ditch and eating pine nuts. Still, in spite of the mystery surrounding how our GPS even knew about this route, it was a charming place to be, winding through evergreen-forested mountainsides and along bottom-land meadows. And no traffic, which we usually consider a blessing but sometimes isn’t.
At one point Nora observed that from where she was sitting, the edge of the cliff looked pretty close. I kind of thought that would offer her a better view, but nevertheless moved over a bit to the left, where I thought the mountainside looked pretty close.
It was somewhat unsettling to be relying on a GPS that we knew wasn’t connected to anything but our hopes and dreams. We both wished for our huge, nicely detailed trucker’s Rand McNally Spiral Bound Road Atlas I’d purchased just before the trip and we’d unhelpfully left on the kitchen table. But since the GPS said the miles back to civilization were going down instead of up, we never lost hope in it.
Cloudcroft is a cute little village with a downtown that is more down than town. The three-block strip of shops on both sides of the street is eclectic and fun. We went in one that was an amazing maze of outdoor gear. It was clearly laid out to give customers experience with the GPS on their phones while looking for water sandals and campfire cookpots.
The owner was both helpful and friendly, although it was hard to know if we could believe anything he said because he had a sign at the front of the store saying anyone who asked for a discount would be “pummeled about the head and shoulders.” So of course I asked for a discount. I didn’t get pummeled. Can you really trust a person like that?
We dove into the bowels of another store and enjoyed it a lot, but I left with this sad question that I’d been asking myself in a number of stores this trip: “What’s going on with our culture such that so many of the mugs, magnets, bumper stickers, T-shirts and other memorabilia are so crude?” Some are pretty funny, as in “Of course you can become anything you want. That’s how delusions work.” (I got it for my mom, for reasons I won’t go into) or “If a bear attacks, play dead. It will be good practice for when you die a few minutes later.”
But so many others, and maybe even the majority, are crude, rude, disparaging, insulting, or meanspirited in the name of humor. Are there really that many people who want those messages on display in their homes, on their cars, or all over their clothes? What does that say about them? Or us?
Since we got to Cloudcroft just before everything started closing, we didn’t stay too long. Instead, we headed down the mountain, dropping from 8,676 feet above sea level to 4,330 feet on a 6% grade that had the brakes on the rented Penske in front of us smoking like a 4th of July BBQ.
Dinner at Denny’s where the girl who seated us had approximately 20 bits of metal stuck to her face and a semi-bald head with a huge star tattoo on top. I didn’t have the nerve to ask if she had one of those super magnets accidentally stuck in her teeth, or if she did it all the metal intentionally.
So here’s what I imagined would come next: We’d drive to the park, which the website said would close at 9:00 PM. Since we’d be the only ones coming in that late in the day, I’d beg the ranger to let us stay until the moon came up at 9:10. I’d tell the ranger we’d driven all the way from Texas just to experience this experience, and we wouldn’t cause any trouble. I would promise to not fly my drone because I totally understood the stuff about being so close to the missile range.
Instead, here’s what came next: We drove to the entrance and there was a long line of cars looking like everyone from Alamagordo to Austin wanted to see the full moon shining on the white sand. At least half of them had Texas plates, so my pitiful plea about having driven all the way there would probably not have elicited much sympathy.
A temporary sign said the park would close at 11:00. The ranger in her shack stuck her arm out her window holding a folded umbrella she swung in circles to keep us moving. She didn’t even bother to look at us. I’m guessing she was calling for an appointment with her physical therapist to work on that arm after the holiday.
We had no idea where to go, so we used the time-honored strategy of following the crowd, a strategy that is not guaranteed to maximize enjoyment but seemed likely to get us somewhere we could watch the moonrise. The long drive deeper into the dunes passed parking lots filled to the brim and the top of each dune was decorated with folding chairs and people pointed toward the sunset like windsocks. Their clothes and other gear flapped in the wind.
It had the flavor of the great land rush in April, 1889, when 11,000 homesteads were claimed, except that I’m sure there were more than 11,000 of us rushing to claim our dunes. We found ours and rushed toward it with bare feet and collapsible camp chairs and two round discs I’d waxed to perfection so we could slide crazy fast down the dunes in the moonlight. Yeah, you already know that didn’t go so well.
Through no fault of my own, the timing was perfect. We just had time to take some lovely pictures of the sunset before the sun set, and lots of time in the afterglow to use our sleds once or twice. Once for Nora, twice for me because I refused to believe they wouldn’t work with all that expensive wax on them. It turns out that it takes a lot more than wax to get those things to slide. Like maybe about 100 pounds less weight on them. It was a fun thing to have tried, and most importantly we snagged some pictures. Other than that, I wished we could snag some unsuspecting kids and sell the discs to them. Unfortunately, from what we could see most of the kids already had discs that didn’t work.
We also had time to take stunning silhouettes of us against the colorful evening sky. I had Nora take one of me leaping into the air, and it was so beautiful she had to have one of her doing the same. I got the picture of her up in the air, but you know how impressive it is when a gymnast nails the landing? Nora didn’t. I missed the picture of her falling in a heap. “I didn’t think it would be so hard to land on,” she said, struggling to get up in the soft sand. Since she wasn’t hurt, we were both laughing. If she’d been hurt, I’d have been the only one laughing. I also got one of her with her arms around Venus. Yes, Venus is there. Squint.
When the sun had set and the sky was darkening in favor of moonrise, we turned our chairs 180 degrees and discovered that there was now a group of people in front of us with headlamps and joints. I don’t mean elbows and knees like we have. I mean the smoking kind.
The joints we could have ignored, but it was beyond us why someone would go to the dunes for moonrise and then shine headlamps in everyone’s faces, including ours. So we moved, walking carefully across the featureless landscape in the dark. It’s pretty interesting how white sand is black in the dark, but only interesting after you’ve picked yourself up after tripping over a mound of it. It felt like we were exploring a lunar surface with our bare feet and faces, working our way toward a summit that looked unoccupied.
And that’s where we were when the moon peeked over the distant mountains and the whole world filled with the sound of 11,000 people howling at the moon. There might have been a dog or two in the beginning, but they shut up pretty quickly as they realized how awful it sounds. I joined the howling tribe just because it felt right, which can only mean that at times, very weird things feel right. That loud howl had to have been right from the souls of the Neanderthals and everyone since them.
Apart from the howls, the whole world also lit up with a soft glow like we were inside a Chinese lantern. The glow brought back the color of the sand and the texture of the dunes. “Beautiful” doesn’t begin to convey it.
Since I am a recent graduate of an online iPhone photography course, I had to take some spectacular pictures. Most failed spectacularly because I might not have been paying attention at the right times in class, but there are a couple that I love. One shows Nora with her hand out and the moon sitting in it. Really. Another shows me with my hand out and the moon sitting in it. Really. Do you see a theme there? Finally, there is one with the moon in Nora’s mouth. I won’t say it’s spectacular, but it is impressive. I mean the moon, not Nora’s mouth. Although, when you think about it….
We sat and absorbed the beauty until the moon was high enough to cast precise shadows on the sand, then headed to the car in order to beat the thousands of other moon watchers out of the park. As far as we could tell, that group with the joints didn’t have a clue that the moon had come up.
As long as we remember things, we won’t forget the full moon rising over the white sand dunes. If you’re ever in the area, check the lunar calendar and go for it.
Oh. And I have two waxed discs for sale cheap. They work great. Slide like the wind. You won’t believe it! Text me.
