GOING NATIVE

Dust, the universal equalizer. . .

My PowerMac 8600 looks clean, but yesterday (fool that I am) I wiped the top and sides with a damp tissue. The resulting wad of cat hair and dust, enough to stuff a small pillow, only made me wonder what the damn thing might be sucking in. If I had just left well enough alone, the 8600 would still look like a stack of adobe bricks, but I wouldn't care, so long as it kept running. Yes, I know, worry-worry, boo-hoo, there's a herd of dust bunnies inside my Mac. Well, the next time I crack the case, I'll rent a pressure washer and hose the bastard out. Until then, however, I'm taking it easy. My computer is well on the way to becoming part of the landscape and so am I.

Speaking of which, if dust and local color are your game, you only need to drop in at the "Paloma Blanca," a clean but funky espresso bar/cafe and pastry shop cum laundromat a few miles north of here. That description hardly does it justice, but the place does have a laundromat, as well as a long covered porch where you can sit outside and eat your breakfast burrito like I did. My wife and I had gone there for Saturday morning coffee and pastries but ended up having a good, solid meal. I don't know what was in the thing besides eggs, potatoes (?), sausage, and green chile peppers, but I hardly wanted anything else to eat all day. Katy Jane had one too, only without any meat, incomprehensibly (wimmen!). Fortunately we had both finished our meals before the talk at the next table turned to the subject of real estate and the latest cattle mutilation! Observing our interest, our neighbors expanded the circle of conversation to include us and we were regaled with:

"It was something, all right! Cored out the rectum and all the rest. Man, that was one messed-up cow. They had one of those 'investigators' come out, too. I dunno..." [shaking head in wonderment]

This latest alien atrocity had taken place in a valley a few miles north where we had just been advised to look for cheap land. The area in question is scenic, all right, an open treeless wilderness covered with sagebrush and tumbleweeds where water supposedly runs only 10 feet below the surface. Our informant swore he had recently hand-dug a well somewhere in the vicinity and struck water at 8 feet! To look at the landscape, you would find this assertion as plausible as surgically-precise alien dissections of local bovines, but I have been here 9 months now and have little trouble believing either. The scene of the alleged crime is a place where at least half a dozen glowing Manhattan-sized spaceships could gang up on a stray cow without raising a fuss, hard as that may be for most of you to imagine. "The Land That Condos Forgot," I call it (condos, gas stations, people). . . If I were piloting a UFO, that's where I'd land, no doubt about it.

We also talked about the dust, about how nobody washes their cars because they just get dirty right away, etc. . . Well, guess what? I haven't washed ours since we rolled into town 9 months ago. You can tell I'm a newcomer, though, because I still try to keep the windshield clean. This is mostly due to habit (just ask my wife) and also because I just can't believe the dust is as fine as it is. It's a frickin'* milagro, I tell you. You can wipe most of it off, but then the teensy particles that remain form a greasy smear that subsequent Windexing and toweling only seem to spread around in different patterns. I really need to stop meddling in the natural order of things and just let the windshield do what it wants to do, build up a nice, natural protective coating of automotive melanin.

My own protective suntan is coming along nicely, thank you. One of the good things about living here is that you gradually acquire a tan whether you want to or not! With a proper year-round tan, you look like a native, which means you can dress any way you want and nobody will mind. I just attended a classical music concert wearing a red aloha shirt, baggy khakis, a Mexican skull necklace, and moccasins with no socks (I may have been overdressed). Tourists, on the other hand, known to yours truly as "white-legs," seem to pick up on this right away and always dress like, well, tourists. Seeing a gaggle of them coming at you all at once is like confronting the aftermath of an explosion in the poultry section of your local supermarket.

There were however no tourists at the Paloma Blanca that Saturday morning, and my protective coloration and bizarre mode of dress (the same as above, only with shorts instead of khakis) assured everyone that local intelligence could be safely shared. This pleased me greatly, but I was waiting for the conversation to move from real estate, aliens, and dusty cars to rocks, because I had a monologue to deliver on the subject. In our recent drive around this end of the state, you see, we had several times come upon a remarkable road sign I've never seen anywhere else: "ROCK SLIDE IN PROGRESS." (The related variant, "Watch For Rocks," is insignificant by comparison.)

There is nothing like rounding a curve at high speed and coming across "ROCK SLIDE IN PROGRESS." What would you think after seeing such a sign? Me, I expected tumbling boulders, clouds of dust, and a din like a thousand bowling alleys (yee-haw)! In fact, I never noticed anything out of the ordinary except for corrogated metal fencing along the uphill side of the road. Hmmm. It was soon apparent that "Rock Slide in Progress" was a decent metaphor for "Mac OS X Arriving" or "New Apple Hardware Coming to Macworld," an insight I would have shared with my Paloma Blanca associates if I had gotten the chance, or if anyone had noticed my "Think Different" cap. . .

But things are different enough out here. People already "think different." Why, if you're turning left into heavy traffic, drivers will actually stop to let you out! (The first time this happened, my paranoid Eastern sensibilities told me they were only trying to lure me into the middle lane so they could smash me to bits: "DIE, Yankee gringo scum!") Who cares about the pathetic petty frustrations of a Mac Web editor? I'm not sure I want anyone to know, anyway. I'm getting tan, weird, and dusty, and nobody will ever think I escaped from a locker at Colonel Sanders. I'll just keep the process going, the cultural equivalent of our cat rolling in the dust every chance he gets. Besides, we don't want to break the spell, do we?

At one point in the breakfast discussion on the front porch of the Paloma Blanca, a friendly fellow from Idaho who said he was a builder allowed as how he hadn't been "anywhere near a big city!" since coming here 3 years ago. But as refreshing as this was, it couldn't top the response of the twenty-something proprietress upon hearing another man mention that "Ted Turner is the biggest landholder in the state". . . Without a trace of guile, she spoke right up and said:

"Who's Ted Turner? Is he an actor??"

(Ahhhh. . .life is good.)

John H. Farr edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM.

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* I have no idea where the term "frickin'" originated, but the the first time I ever saw it in print was in a column by Rodney O. Lain, my colleague in crime both here and at MacAddict.com. It is in any case a very fine word indeed and perfectly conveys the necessary blend of awe, hyperbole, and implied profanity.

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January 08, 2009