Dentist

I went to the dentist today. I hate going to the dentist. Let me say that again - I hate going to the dentist. Today was just a normal scheduled checkup and cleaning, but I hate it just the same. People looking into my mouth and talking over my head like I'm not there; the scraping noise; the poking under the gums; feeling like I'm being water-boarded because that little vacuum tube never sucks up all of the water they spray; and always the dentist coming in after the hygienist is finished torturing me to poke around with his little pick and sagely murmur, "Hmm. Umm hmm" like all of my teeth are on the verge of crumbling just one hour from now and I'm damn lucky to have come in so he can save me.

Today, when the hygienist retrieved me from the waiting room for the dead man walking to her torture chamber, I couldn't help but notice how cute she was; a veritable piece of female art. Hey, I'm a man, I notice these things. My morose thoughts immediately perked up. But after a few perfunctory questions; do I have AIDS (for her safety), have I had a heart attack (for my safety presumably), she slipped on a mask and with her chosen implement of destruction, a metal, silver-colored, sharp-pointed pick thingy in hand, said those words that will cause the strongest of men to shake - "Open wide."

My mouth was assaulted; it was attacked; it was brutalized. I have no doubt, in that girl's mind, plaque is the scourge of the world and she was born to eradicate every trace of it. I lost track of time. Every minute was an hour. She enjoyed her work - a lot. I freely gave my name, rank, and serial number. I gave my banking information, my social security number, credit card numbers and any other information she wanted until finally and oh so mercifully, it was over. With a tight little smile, she leaned back from my prone quivering body and pronounced, "There. All clean now." They should turn her loose on those demented terrorist. They'd be screaming for mercy and we'd be bringing our troops home the next day.

I left with another appointment in six months. I didn't want to, but I was afraid not to. Between now and then, I'll be brushing 3 or 4 times every day; I'll floss every morning and night; I'll walk around with a mouthful of plaque fighting mouthwash. When I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, I think I'll brush my teeth again on the way back to the bed. Stay away from my mouth you plaque-fighting super hero. No plaque here, no ma'am.
 

Postcard From Big Bend National Park, Texas

Big Bend is one of my very favorite national parks. Rugged, sparse, unforgiving land, but in it's way, very beautiful. And if you want isolation, this is where you should head. Located in the far southwest corner of Texas, there are relatively few people, no big cities, no interstate highways and no airports, but lots of clean air and solitude. It takes a while to get there on the 2-lane blacktop roads and in the off-season, you can drive for an hour without seeing another car. Its 801,000 acres is the least visited of all the national parks.

A former Texas state park, it became a national park in 1944 and was designated an International Biosphere Reserve in 1972. It is a place that merges natural environments, from desert to mountains. The Indians said that after making the Earth, the Great Spirit simply dumped all the leftover rocks on the Big Bend. Spanish explorers dubbed this "the uninhabited land."

To really enjoy your visit, I suggest you get off the paved roads and onto the dirt roads that criss-cross the park. Better yet, hike the trails and even venture off a ways from them. If you do though, take plenty of water, food, proper clothing, and, perhaps most important, a portable GPS so you can find your way back. Don't count on your cell phone as there most likely will be no service. Don't forget your camera; you will find beauty and a bounty of unexpected photo opportunities.

118 miles of The Rio Grand River form the
southern boundary.

On the western side of the park are the former ghost towns of Terlingua and Study Butte. The towns began to be repopulated by loners and hard rock miners, then hippies, and finally artists, poets, musicians, and then folks who just plain wanted to get away from the big cities started to arrive and rebuild the abandoned adobe and rock structures. There are now several motels, a few eateries, several gas stations, internet service and a lot of real-life characters.

To be honest, I selfishly hesitated to say anything about this park. I didn't want to help spread the word and increase the flow of tourist. But it's not as if I have hundreds of thousands of people reading this so I think there is little chance of my words having any kind of impact. If you do make it to "my" special park, do me and yourself a favor - slow way down, take your time, get off the roads followed by the tourist who only stop along the way long enough to take a snapshot or two so they can say they've been there. They haven't. To do that with this park is the same as looking at a picture of a beautiful girl and claiming you know her.

Just a short distance from the road, it's a
different world.

 

 

Postcard From Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde

I'm a huge fan of the national park system and visit them every chance I get. If you haven't taken the opportunity to visit them whenever possible, I think you are missing out on one of the best things about America. For more information, go to http://www.nps.gov/.

About 1,450 years ago, a group of people living in the Four Corners region chose Mesa Verde (in the southwest corner of Colorado) for their home. For more than 700 years they and their descendants lived and flourished, eventually building elaborate stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of the canyon walls. Then, in the late A.D. 1200s, in the span of a generation or two, they left their homes and moved away, disappearing from history. Mesa Verde National Park preserves a spectacular reminder of this ancient culture.

Mesa Verde cliff dwellings

The first Ancestral Puebloans settled in Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) about A.D. 550. Formerly nomadic, they were beginning to lead a more settled way of life. Farming replaced hunting and gathering as their main livelihood. They lived in pithouses clustered into small villages usually built on mesa tops but sometimes in cliff recesses. By A.D. 1000 the people of Mesa Verde had advanced from pole-and-adobe construction to skillful stone masonry. Walls of thick stone often rose two or three stories high and were joined together into units of 50 rooms or more. Farming accounted for more of their diet than before, and much mesa-top land was cleared for agriculture.

About A.D. 1200, another major population shift saw the people move from the mesa tops back into the cliff alcoves that sheltered their ancestors centuries before. Why did they make this move? We don’t know. Perhaps it was for defense; perhaps it was for religious or psychological reasons; perhaps alcoves offered better protection from the elements. Whatever the reason or reasons, it gave rise to the cliff dwellings for which Mesa Verde is most famous. Ancestral Puebloans lived in the cliff dwellings for less than 100 years. By about A.D. 1300, Mesa Verde was deserted.

Ever since local cowboys first reported the cliff dwellings in the 1880s, archeologists have sought to understand these people’s lives. But despite decades of excavation, analysis, classification, and comparison, scientific knowledge remains sketchy. We will never know the whole story: they left no written records and much that was important in their lives has perished. Yet for all their silence, these structures speak with a certain eloquence. They tell of a people adept at building, artistic in their crafts, and skillful at making a living from a difficult land. The structures are evidence of a society that, over centuries, accumulated skills and traditions and passed them on from generation to generation. So what happened to them? Why, in such a short period of time, did they leave the home they had known for 700 years? Perhaps we'll never know.