23.) The Mystery of Legitimacy..... Majority Rule........

     I plunge 44 miles up and down Route 15. Both mountainous and serpentine through thick pine forest and passed panoramic views of the valley below.  Every street sign pockmarked with buckshot holes sparks a thought of bored, small town teenagers in a disintegrating pick up truck, slingshoting around hairpin turns.  One hangs out the passenger side window with a shotgun ‘borrowed’ from Dad’s collection. Empty cans of Natural Ice rattle around the truck’s bed while full ones are dispensed to each of the occupants from a cardboard case on the back floor.   The gunshots echo across the valley, followed loyally but hoots and hollers of elation or the boos and jeers when someone wastes a shell with an errant shot. 

At the end of The Trail of Mountain Spirits are the Gila Cliff Dwellings.  I saw the name on my map and thought it sounded cool so here I am. I’ve crossed the Continental divide and am officially in The West.  
Through a persistent drizzle I follow a tiny creek whose babbling I can hear the entire way, a mile or two back into a sheltered canyon. From the canyon floor I can see the the caves in the wall above me and my first thought is of the natives hundreds of years ago.  Who knows how long they'd been wandering around the rugged terrain nearby?  They had to be pretty stoked when they stumbled upon these caves. A dry place to sit!? Hell yeah!  Shelter? Protection? It had to be the find of a lifetime.  And rightfully so, they exploited it to the fullest. Six of the seven caves show signs of human inhabitants.  The seventh is unreachable with out climbing gear.  A total of 42 rooms were constructed of handmade bricks throughout the system of caves.  The ceiling is black with soot from hundreds of fires for heating and cooking.  It’s known that the rooms were built and inhabited sometime around the 1200’s but the different uses of each room are more difficult to identify due to explorers and vandals over the years.  No matter what exactly took place in these rooms it’s still eye opening to wander through them and think that this was once a place someone called home.  

Back on the road a sign points me toward Gila Hot Springs and I turn onto a dirt track down a steep hill and through fields of sheep, goats, and what were either lamas or alpacas, I don’t really know the difference. Maybe both are in there.  Five dollars get me a site for my tent, the ability to have my very first camp fire of the trip, (due to dry conditions there’s been a burn ban through the whole of Texas and into parts of New Mexico) and access to more hot springs.  The campground is no more than an area in the woods thats dirt instead of undergrowth. When I pay my fee the owner shows me pictures of how the place used to look.  A massive flood a few years before drowned what appears to be a lush, deep green, Eden-like grove. Each of 3 hot spring pools secluded by tall grasses and moss covered rocks.  Just out of frame I imagine pixies dropping sparkles on the waters surface. It’s gorgeous.  I look from the old man’s photos into the reality of today. Dry, hard, compacted dirt. Sad, decrepit tiki structures cover the hot spring pools.  Looks be damned I say. Each pool was naturally a different temperature so I Goldilocks my way through them until i find the one that's  Just Right. I lounge for the better part of  two hours by myself in a hot tub in the middle the of the New Mexico wilderness while reading Mississippi Solo.         

After I’m sufficiently prune-y I stumble back to my campsite, engage in some fireside note jotting, and I sew up a hole in one of my gloves. I do a pretty kick ass job, Pam Melik would have been pround.  It’s the first time in a while I haven't slept in the jeep. While the extra room is kinda nice the jeep is far from uncomfortable.  There's a lot to be said about sleeping up off the ground, no matter the situation, that’s soothing.  I lay awake in my tent and think, What am I trying to prove with this trip? Theres no real purpose to it.  The purpose IS in the process.  I’ve said it before, or something close to that and I want it to be that so bad but it’s hard sometimes.  The point of going is supposed to be just to Go. To show myself that an alternative life style is possible.  That you don’t have to nest somewhere.  But sometimes just going for the sake of going feels like just killing time.  But that's what were all really doing anyways…just killing time. Might as well have fun along the way…right?  Explore the world outside your door and the one inside your head and heart.   And what makes going to a job you hate everyday any more legitimate than what I’m doing?  And whose to say whats legitimate and whats not. Majority opinion is not synonymous with right, or correct or anything really.  Except for that a lot of time it is.  Even if you’re completely right, if everyone around you thinks you’re wrong, you may still be completely right, but you're still completely fucked.  Majority doesn’t mean reality.