MACHINA ENCANTADA

Something very strange is going on with my PowerMac. . .

It all started after I reinstalled the scanner software. Sometimes the pull-down menu appears and sometimes it doesn't. Rebuilding the desktop sometimes helps, but not always. And the other night, the background colors in my Netscape browser started changing back and forth for no apparent reason. Yesterday I started to print a letter and got an error message that said I had to choose a printer in the Chooser (again!).

Sure, these are little things, the kind of minor glitches we all encounter from time to time. But this time it's more than that, I can feel it. It's the spells, you see. The weirdness. I just can't get over the intuition that something is testing me! This is really difficult to explain, but I'll do my best. And yes, it just might have something to do with New Mexico and the giant jackrabbit.

We first saw it when we walked down the gravel road to the little post office to sign up for general delivery: it looked like a jackrabbit, all right, and I spent some formative years in West Texas, so I know from jackrabbits. But this thing was huge -- the size of a German Shepherd or a small pony, I swear! Just for a moment we saw it, then it bounded off into the junipers and piñons. "Did you see THAT?" On our way back we met our landlady and mentioned the encounter.

"A jackrabbit? Up here??"

Several days later my wife walked to the post office all by herself, carrying the big walking stick I insisted she have with her in case she ran into bad dogs or God knows what. She returned in a state of some excitement: "You'll never guess what I saw!" Yup. El conejo grande, once again. Stranger and stranger! But then, everything is strange here.

A few miles away is a spectacular high hill, "Garrapata Ridge," overlooking a deep scary canyon of the same name. But so what, you say? Well, garrapata means "tick"! (If that's not weird, I don't know what is.) I'm certainly not anxious to hike down the canyon to the gorge: there could be ticks the size of blimps down there and no one would know! "Garrapata Canyon," indeed. . .

And speaking of scary landscapes, we took a long walk the other day farther up the dirt road that creeps up the slope of Lobo Peak. The sun was setting, spectacularly as usual, and the dry breeze blowing through our sweaty T-shirts produced an evaporative chill that raised goosebumps. We kept walking, glancing back over our shoulders every once in a while to check on the progress of the sun's descent, until it dawned on us that we hadn't seen any ranch gates or houses for quite a while. The sun had dropped below the distant horizon. Humongous shadows crept rapidly across the valley. All of a sudden it was 15, 20 degrees colder. There was nothing ahead or on either side but mountains, trees, and rocks, no sound except our boots crunching on gravel and the wind whistling softly through the pines. . ."This reminds me of Montana," my wife declared. We looked at each other and turned around, quickly, heading for home! (Coming from the crowded East, I had had an urge to get away, to move to the ends of the earth, but now I understood why people gathered in villages or stacked their dwellings up in pueblos. Oh, yes.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we have Internet weirdness! The utility lines are buried, so I thought "Great! Steady, consistent service from my ISP." Uh-huh. Sometimes I connect at 26Kbps, sometimes at 30. (Sometimes the PPP window says "Connecting at less than 24,000 bps" and I hit the Cancel button!) The other night I connected at 40Kbps and thought I had died and gone to heaven. You never know.

Dying is easier here too, apparently. You can fall off a cliff. You can freeze to death. You can die from a virus spread by mouse poop. You can be run off the road by local vatos* playing "chicken" with out-of-state drivers (change those plates!). You can deal bad drugs and get your throat slit (happened last week in Chimayo -- in Baltimore they'd just shoot you while you sat in your car, but bullets are expensive here.) You can probably even die from happiness: we sat for an hour after dinner the other night, watching magenta and orange madness spread across the Western horizon, turned to each other and realized we could die right then and not feel we'd missed a thing!

Or, you could die from terminal bizarreness: here I sit in the wilderness with 128 MB of iBook SDRAM and no iBook. (That's weird!) We went to town the other day and encountered Ladies Who Wear Jewelry, from Santa Fe, of course. They made an interesting counterpoint to the Formaldehyde Hippies backpacking barefoot along the road. . . We stopped for lunch at a delightful roadside café with fabulous food, a recommended establishment no less, whose only fault was that it was a roadside café: a steady, 150-decibel torrent of 4-wheel drive vehicles thundered past just a few feet away! (And everything is 4-wheel drive: SUVs, delivery vans, jalopies, VWs, school buses, old Renaults, Buicks, you name it.) At least we got to eat outdoors and be entertained by a Socially Correct California Mother playing "eat-the-gravel" with her giggling offspring and another patron's kid! (Mustn't scar the child, you know. If the drooling two-year-old poet is sucking rocks that dogs and rats and hobos have pissed and shat on for months on end, better make a game of it.)

Ah, but there's more! What do you do in a laundromat in a new place while you're waiting for the dryers to stop turning? Well, you read the bulletin board, while keeping an eye on your laundry, of course. (Clothes are expensive here.) And what did I see but a handwritten notice from an enterprising person advertising a skunk removal service! Not only would the de-skunker remove the little stinkers, but he or she would even show you how to do it yourself! (A good thing, too, because skunk removal is, uh, expensive here: "First skunk $100, each skunk thereafter $60 each.")

But back to the subject (?) at hand: my haunted PowerMac 8600. By now you surely understand that disappearing menus, flashing browsers, and crazy connection speeds are no coincidence! Remember where we are. Remember the "testing" hypothesis. And do you know what a brujo is?? Well. . .

If all this is new to you, then you probably think that conejo gigante was a giant jackrabbit! There are ravens here, too. Not crows, mind you, but ravens: very, very big black birds, soaring over the llanos and canyons. Sometimes you'll see one where you least expect it: "Oh look, honey, a raven!"

(Some of us know better. . .)

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives have links to all past columns and occasional snippets of biographical info.

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*No problemo! They're just having fun. . .

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January 08, 2009