Peace, beauty in the west

Nothing to do, and enjoying it

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 23, 1998

Page: M13

Section: Travel

A small river comes down through the valley here, the Rio Ruidoso, the Noisy River. It's pretty quiet actually, but this is so far south and east in New Mexico that any running water is rare. A river strong enough to make a noise you can hear from a distance would be very ruidoso indeed, and a pleasant sound, after you crossed the dry plains that stretch away toward Roswell and off to the Gulf of Mexico. The Rio Ruidoso doesn't get even to Roswell before it sinks into the desert and disappears forever.

Naturally, if there's a river, there's a mountain to make it, and the headwaters of the Ruidoso are up in the Mescalero Apache Reservation on El Capitan mountain. (Most Southwest ranges have an El Capitan, if there's one peak clearly higher and more authoritative than any other.) They come up from Texas to Ruidoso for cold air, horse races, and skiing in the winter. It is natural air conditioning for the people of the plains.

The Hurd Ranch (home base of the extended family of Hurds married to Wyeths) has just gone into the guesthouse business, having a few extra homes on the spread that they could make available to the traveler. Two are down in the valley, set in orchards and horse pastures along the Ruidoso, the third is halfway up the hill with a fine view of absolutely nothing but rangeland, cottonwoods along the river, and buzzards.

Actually, the most exciting thing that happens in San Patricio on a regular basis is the convention of buzzards that return every evening from scavenging on the plains down river. They come silently, first one, then another, and suddenly, on a clear, fair, evening, a turning gyre, a conical spiral, of wheeling buzzards that doesn't literally fill the air but does punctuate the sky with black chevrons of descending birds.

How odd that Hinckley, Ohio, has a buzzard festival, and San Patricio doesn't. Of course, there isn't much to do in Hinckley, and the buzzards do arrive on schedule every year on April 19, St. Joseph's Day. Still, the buzzard roost in Hinckley is just a bunch of trees a ways off in the distance across some farm fields. Why do we admire the punctual wild thing, and ignore the more casual buzzards of San Patricio, who hang around all year? They do return to roost every day, but not by the clock. They come back when it gets late enough to make them think about getting home before dark and before the loss of daylight's sun-heated updrafts of air would make them flap home instead of soar home.

Plan for the day at the Hurd Ranch: Make breakfast, take a ride down the highway, come back, crack a beer, light the barbecue, watch the buzzards, eat dinner, go to bed when it gets dark. You could live a long life with a Hurd Ranch schedule.

Or, you could drive to Roswell, less than an hour away, and visit the UFO Museum and Research Center. It's recently opened in a new star base on Main Street that's a former movie theater with an Art Deco canopy that much predates, but eerily resembles, the flying saucers that brought us the alien beings just after World War II.

They had the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident last summer. A simple incident: A saucer crashed. Alien bodies were examined and buried in secret. The government covered it up. You can believe in flying saucers or you can believe in physics.

Many years ago, shortly after the Roswell Incident, I had a memorable high school science teacher whose motto was ``Faith in Physics.'' He was fond of illustrating simple concepts in dramatic ways. His best demonstration was of the principle of inertia. He had a 20-pound lead weight hung on a strand of wire from the center of the lecture room ceiling. One by one, we would sit in a chair on one side of the room, the 20 pound weight would be brought to us, we would press it against our foreheads and let it swing. Those who could sit still in their chair as the weight returned from the far wall toward our foreheads would get a passing mark, at minimum, because we had faith in physics.

Still, the UFO Museum does center a small array of Alien Being gift shops. I particularly liked Star Child, where they had T-shirts with more humor and less preaching. The newest T-shirt admonishes you to: ``Fly Alien Airlines, Only One Crash in Fifty Years.'' I'll stick with Qantas.

Besides Alien Beings, you can visit more plausible historical sites within a few miles of the Hurd Ranch. Just around the corner is Lincoln, brief and final home of Billy the Kid. The Lincoln County Wars were all about cattle -- buying them, stealing them, selling them to the Army post and the Apache Reservation. Billy the Kid was a bit player who probably killed a few less people than he boasted about, but enough to get him killed in the long run.

Lincoln is a particularly sedate little town, now, with art galleries and a gourmet restaurant in the old Wortley Hotel. The Wortley, once owned by Sheriff Pat Garrett (``The dirty little coward,'' as the old song goes, ``who shot Mr. Howard, and laid our poor Billy in his grave''), has the ultimate in amenities if you are tired of the 20th century. Nothing in the rooms but period furniture. No TV. No phone. Certainly no computer work station and data line. You could have a good rest in the Wortley, which only lacks a serious buzzard roost in the neighborhood.

On the other hand, they haven't had a good gunfight in Lincoln for almost a hundred years, which tends to disinterest the buzzards.