coming up out of el paso, about three or four hundred years ago, you might stop in this area because the river would be reasonable, off to your left, and the caves of the organ mountains would be cool and welcoming, off to your right. and you might have heard, that straight north of las cruces, ninety miles at least of total nothing, jornada de los muertos, no water to kill for, nothing. down before el paso, which is really el paso del rio, the place you can cross the river, before el paso was this huge sand dunes that catch wagon wheels and which people would go hundreds of miles just to go around.

so when the catholic missionaries came up this way they figured they could be rather absolute, like their superiors, or they could actually incorporate some of the indian beliefs into their ritual, thus ensuring that they would have some indian allies in a very hostile environment and maybe live to see another day. near the south part of las cruces in the village of tortuga they made a church to the virgen de guadalupe and the local people, by custom, would walk east all the way up to tortuga mountain, some barefoot, and they would do this for the virgen, and had been doing it anyway for quite some time. and this kind of mixed religion, part catholic, part local custom, took root and survived.

these days the whole southern part of las cruces has been taken over by the university, which is new mexico state university, a land grant college that got the land between what is now interstates 10 and 25, and the development it brought overtook the town of tortuga, and all along what is now university avenue, at least halfway up the mountain, which now has a large "a" on it and is known to the locals as "a mountain". so the locals go up there and look back down at the valley, and light up the "a" at times when the "aggies" need some school spirit.

it so happened that my parents lived near university avenue, and that on the first night i walked down toward the university, almost all the way to the old town of tortuga, which i knew nothing about. and on the second night i turned the other way on university avenue, and this time walked eastward until the streetlights died out, stars took over, and the road took a steady rise toward "a mountain." at that point it always looks like the mountain is directly in front of you, yet you walk and walk and it doesn't appear to be much closer. at one point i stopped, and sat on a gravel kind of hill where sagebrush and chapparal and cactus and grasses dominated the land, and just watched the stars for a minute before i turned back. i still then didn't know about the people who marched. i was just going for a walk out in the desert.

people come from as far as california to march up the mountain during the festival of the virgen de guadalupe which is around the tenth of december and which is celebrated with days of free food down in the church hall in the town of tortuga. if you asked god for any favor during the year, say your relative was sick, then you promised to march up the mountain and you are expected to deliver. if you march barefoot then you are really showing your devotion, your suffering, for the virgen. fires are burned on the mountain, prayers are said. there's a mass. the local tv stations come and take pictures; one made an excellent documentary which i am using even now as i write this, otherwise how would i know? "tortuga" is a turtle, & i have no idea where the mountain, or the town, got that name, but i can tell you that tortuga images were popular with the mimbres who were the people in the area around the time cahokia was big, around 1100. the mimbres are long gone, but their pottery figures remain as a kind of symbol in the area, and i don't know whether there are turtles or anything like them.

the cacti took it in the chin in about february when there was a deep freeze and it lasted almost two days, wiping out agave, barrel cacti, palm trees, all kinds of things. somehow my parents got out of the habit of walking around the little cactus park as there was a lot of dieback there and it wasn't pretty; even now, though some of it has returned, some of it clearly hasn't. they say it only gets that cold every thirty years ago, but that's assuming there isn't some catastrophic weather change, and that could be assuming too much. but right now it's cool and clear in the mesilla valley, it's at the peak of the fall season with bright oranges and reds everywhere, and some of the cacti are flowering even now.

my parents did the walk around the block with me; my dad took his camera but didn't take many pictures, perhaps thinking flowering cacti were old news. i wished i had my camera, but instead have been filching cactus pictures and posting them just for image's sake. you have to get out there, i told my dad; the place is beautiful, and you need to let that desert air lift your spirit. at one point he said he hadn't seen a sky full of stars in a while, but i wondered: he's got a wheelchair, and he could...if it was my job to remind them of the magic character of their place to live, i hope i was up to the task; in any case, my time has almost run out, as i'm leaving for illinois again tomorrow.

we told lots of stories, of how my parents took us down as far as cars could go in mexico, in 1957, of the crystal caves in chihuahua, and the tarahumara indians, who run barefoot 120 miles or more, routinely, in the mountains of northern chihuahua, and of a friend in the town of guanajuato, a truly memorable place deep in the heart of mexico, and of their travels throughout southern new mexico and up and down the highway where the jornada has been replaced by highway 25. up there is a spaceport these days, but it's off the road a ways, and it's private, and who knows if and when anybody could get to space from there, it's the new tourist item though and it appears in the local paper. they don't get out much, though, and it's all i can do to get them around the block, though mom gets into town quite a bit and still knows her way around the streets. the town has grown, and it's busy, she no longer drives, and it's a hassle getting around and doing errands. we did get a cell phone though and that will at least make them feel a little more connected to the modern world and certainly a little more able to reach a caller when they ring. a lot of its benefits, alarm clock, mobile photos, using it when traveling, etc. are of almost no use to them. they were just unable to answer the cord-phone in their living room, half the time.

a lot of the cacti have come back, and with flowers; i tend to see them in bleached and saturated colors, made into posters. a kind of romanticized view of a land in which these prickly things have to pick up every inch of rainfall, and hold onto it for an entire year, and if you drop a cigarette or something on the red-gravel clay soil it's likely to stay there forever, or until the next rain, which is about the same. camping is not an issue; there's miles and miles of desert, and lots of stars out at night, and though you might want a tent, you'd more likely not want one, so as to dream better, and take in the mountain air. this was not an issue for me this time, since, in my parents' care, i slept like a rock, every night, on a foldaway or not, and had all these wild dreams that connected to every aspect of my childhood. and woke up, completely, and absolutely, refreshed.