Deming, New Mexico

Part 68 of the Cycle-Across-America series. (Read from the start in Boston or see the full index)

In a zigzag fashion I am eating my way west across the breathtaking scenery of southern New Mexico’s mountains and deserts, while Bill Clinton and Bob Dole near the end of their election campaigns.

These excerpts are from the audio-taped sections of the journal, so the usual apologies apply about my lack of structure and rambling etc.

Sunday morning, November the 3rd. Another day forecast with rain and snow at higher elevations – which is pertinent today because although, I’m at 4,000, I’m going up to about 6,000. Or am I going even higher?

I’m going to Silver City today. With a bit of luck the snow won’t come down this far south, but there’s supposed to be showers actually, pretty much all over New Mexico today.

Worry about that a little bit later on. If the forecast I saw yesterday was okay and accurate I might well have a wind on my back – which I did yesterday, making yesterday perhaps the easiest day of all.

I had 8 miles of – you can’t really call it rolly-polly hills, they were all hills but they were like steps. You’d go up and then you’d level. Up and level. And so on. Then there was 7 miles of a very straight road leading into hills and mountains.

I woke up yesterday at eight o’clock so my host was up and gone to work so I cycled down to the garage, which is only 300 yards away and I went up and said goodbye. Just shook his hand really and he gave me his card and that was that.

So I hadn’t really talked to him an awful lot. I did at first when we got in, at the bar in his house and he showed me an ashtray to tell me he wasn’t a smoker – he’s an ex-smoker. 15 years ago he gave it up. But he wasn’t on any crusade.

He’d had three wives, but he called himself a bachelor and I was kinda wondering would someone who had 3 wives lose track of which one was which. And he did when he tried to remember which one he was with when he had given up smoking.

[The rest of this post is continued below the fold]

Read: Cycling Across America #68 »

Things are relatively quiet on this part of Irish KC at the moment, because things are changing again.

After the misadventure that was the short life in an Irish Cottage I am now living in Dublin and will be for the forseeable future (I can see at least one year into the future).

Since returning to Dublin from the cottage I have concentrated on finding somewhere to paint. That quest has been successful but I’ve decided not to talk about the studio I now have until I start producing paintings. Call it a legacy of the cottage experience.

I’m still moving things into there, but I’m only days away from painting again, and in a dedicated space.

The plan is to have another big art sale next month, with paintings of all sizes at very affordable prices, and to be able to offer them in time to ship them anywhere for Christmas. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’m a great man for the plans.

Before all that I’m hoping to share pictures and words of what I think is a wonderful space in Dublin to paint, and how the new paintings are going.

You’ll be the first to know.

See Also:
   • Painting for Sale: Donegal Standing Stone I
   • My Favourite Paintings
   • Things People Say (When They See You Painting)
   • Kinsale: From a Sketch to a Painting
   • Prints of Paintings

Read: Studio »

A carpeted cavernous space full of pint drinkers, men and women, most in their 40s or 50s. My local pub in Dublin is a typical big suburban Dublin pub.

There’s nothing Victorian, Edwardian, or Georgian about it (nobody ever says Regency). So it’s not the Irish Pub you’re going to see reproduced in Hong Kong, Paris, or North America.

The music is standard fare, arms and hips swinging to covers of Sweet Caroline and Wonderwall half the time. And the other half, like last night, it’s traditional. Over-miked and played to non-existant saluting fists, but traditional nonetheless.

Guitar, flute, and bodhrán, the 3 lads were like a loud version of the Furey Brothers without a banjo. The Lonesome Boatman, that sort of thing. But it’s the end that catches me out every time. I always forget we do this.

It was a bit of jaunty version of Amhrán na bhFiann, probably to loosen the pints from our hands.

Give or take the odd gentle sway of inebriation, everybody was standing up motionless. And as I watched the foreign lounge girls continue to busy themselves in their slaloms between non-drinking living statues, I couldn’t help but think that our national anthem was the original flashmob.

More on the Drink:
   • A Bad Pint
   • The History of the Irish Pub
   • Pub Crawl Memories
   • A Table in a Prague Tavern
   • Christmas: A Drinking Story

Read: Flashmob na bhFiann »

Old Mesilla

Part 67 of the Cycle-Across-America series. (Read from the start in Boston or see the full index)

In the heart of southern New Mexico a relatively easy day sees me touring in the vicinity of Las Cruces absorbing its historical markers, before heading north.

These excerpts are from a handwritten journal entry, so they should be a bit more coherent than the entries from the audio tapes.

November 1st
The sun, the wind and the sand have my lips very hard, dry and sore. I keep imagining somebody kissing them. Nobody in particular, it’s the actual act I’m thinking of. I know I’d like it but I wonder what it’d be like for the other person. I can always lick them myself but it’s not the same, and anyway that just makes them stick together.

Me nose isn’t a whole lot better. Permanently dried and cracked in the sun, I keep losing skin. Maybe if I didn’t play with it so much it wouldn’t be stinging me now.

I’m in the home of a retired naval man, ex-Chief of Police, elected representative, and car salesman. His boss owns the car lot and the motel, and the boss’s son is responsible for running the motel. There was nobody at the office, the note on the door saying he’d be back at 5.

After a visit to the Dairy Queen the lights in the motel were still out. My host called someone to find an alternative key but none was available. Proclaiming himself a bachelor he offered me his home for the night. In the cold darkness it was easy to accept.

Made it out of my room this morning 4 minutes before 11 and then took more time to avail of the free breakfast. A muffin, English as ever, with grape jelly and tea and water and an amount of orange juice that risked hives.

Across the road from the motel was a wonderful shot of the Organ Mountains. The plan for the day was simple. 40 minutes for the 8 miles south west to Old Mesilla, an hour there which would take me to 1 o’clock, and then 4 hours into the north wind for the 40 miles to Hatch. My plans for the day rarely work out. This was no exception.

[The rest of this long post is continued below the fold]

Read: Cycling Across America #67 »

I never go past it any more.

Because it isn’t there any more. Yet it looks like it is.

Twice last week I cycled through the Park. Through the acres. Past the cross. Deerfield. The Phoenix Monument. Áras an Uachtaráin. Ashtown Castle. Cabra Gate.

It would have been nothing to turn the bike and have a peek. A peek at what isn’t there.

They still call it a racecourse. An authentic name for hundreds of houses and apartments.

When I was very young I used to walk alone, the mile down to chapelizod and its stile and then up through the deer and through Oldtown Wood, past the ponds, until I got to Ashtown gate, and I’d look across at the lodge before walking the miles home.

That way, if I was asked, I had only gone to the Park, a trip far enough to raise eyebrows. It wouldn’t occur to people that I had walked to the far side of the park.

To friends it was the place I disappeared into that time U2 played in the racecourse. In the front door, out the back door, and I could watch the boys for free. And Simple Minds, Big Country and the Eurythmics. And more.

But to me it was a gateway to a different world. Like anybody’s grandparents. A world of trees transformed into houses, of Victorian stands littered with exotic betting cards, of a million bottle tops that all became badges.

With the wisdom of age the lodge becomes like the tardis. How did so many of us sit in front of the fire, and drink tea and eat sandwiches? In one room?

Race days were my favourite. Because so many of us worked all over the racecourse, and at the end of the day an impossible number of us retreated to the lodge.

My friends who didn’t really know the Phoenix Park used to tell me the lodge was in the Park, but I knew you walked out a park gate and crossed a road to get to it. It was the same road road I’d grown up standing in the dark by the fence of railway sleepers waiting for the bus home as Nana stood with us holding the bus timetable. She was the only person I knew who believed in the timetable.

And it was the same road that our cars all stopped on, outside the lodge and its blooming roses, on our way to lay Nana to rest. She always loved the roses. That night I slept in the bed she passed in, so Grandad wouldn’t be alone in the lodge. Nana & Grandad had over 3 dozen grandchildren; I felt very special.

The next year Grandad followed and I painted this 2 years later. In 4 days that blurred into one. Not stopping for sleep much does that. It was one of those paintings that just poured out.

A few years later my mother took The Lodge from my collection and said it was now my parents’. It’s the only painting I’ve ever let be taken from me.

The night before I moved to America was the next time I saw it. It had been framed, and was hanging over the fireplace in my childhood home.

2 years later, at the moment my son’s newest cousin was being born, I got a phone call that told me the lodge had been bulldozed. There was a tradition in Ireland, not gone yet, to bulldoze buildings that were legally protected and then claim it’s a fait accompli.

Those responsible for the bulldozing were made to re-erect it. And like imperfect memories what they put up wasn’t quite in the right place. And the windows were wrong.

It looked like a pretend house. I only ever looked at it once. Because you can’t re-erect memories. But then you can’t bulldoze them either.

And I’ll always have the sound of feet on gravel.

This painting is now available for purchase as a print - from a far superior photograph than that pictured here.

More Irish Nostalgia:
   • Traveling by Train in Ireland
   • Songs They Taught us in School
   • Watching Ireland Play Maradona in 1979
   • Radio in Dublin, January 1993
   • U2: Dublin 1979 and 1987

Read: Phoenix Park Racecourse: The Lodge »