CORONADO

When you go on a tour, you generally expect to see something, and you will on most of the tours Aura and Sine do. With this tour I've gotten stuck pointing out a lot of stuff you can’t really see, but that’s okay with me; I’m just glad Aura and Sine got in on the act.

Also, sight seeing tours are generally arranged geographically. We're sticking with that layout, although I'd say a tour arranged by day dreaming probably makes more sense to the mind, something more like the way our minds meandered that first night we met. Such flights of fancy have no need to take into account time and expense the way putt-putting around in your car does. Listen to that first conversation to get a handle on how the many different things we point to in our tours yield something more coherent than you get by just hitting places one after another down some road. But if your riding around in your car, the geographic approach is the way to go.

Like, Antelope Island does have several hundred head of bison, but if you just want to see bison, you’ll see far more on Ted Turner’s Vermejo Park Ranch that’s a little north east of Taos Ski Valley. Getting there involves taking not a whole lot of extra miles on your way between two sites on this tour: Dodge City, Kansas and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His bison is in the grocery store and is healthier to eat than beef, though Aura points out the healthiest thing to eat is veggies, which, by the way, are now being made to look and taste just like meat, a lucky thing for people who like meat. I’ve got to thank Aura for turning me on to this, because I do like my meat. But I also like the idea of not clogging up my blood vessels. Have a link on the house or, if you feel like having a taste on the fly, go to White Castle or Burger King for what they call their “Impossible Burger” that’s made of wheat and potato.

But you’ll have to use your imagination to see the vast herds that occupied wide swaths of the continent thanks to the lure of the prairie grasses they craved. The vast herds are gone, and so are the high prairie grasses. They probably would have been all over the desert southwest too except for the climate change Sine told us about that turned it into desert. At least they can’t pin that one on us (so far as I know). But the fact is the bison are mostly gone, thanks to the population explosion of people spurred on by the chance to lay claim to the lands the Indians roamed, for the chance to grow rich from hunting the Buffalo bison, and not least from the chance to amass gold like Coronado had meant to do. These factors are what led to Buffalo Bill’s fame and the Santa Fe trail getting as traffic jammed as any LA freeway, to the growth of Dodge City starting from just one guy’s ranch house on the Santa Fe trail to the advent of the railroad through Dodge City to points west, ultimately passing through Utah to San Francisco to the gold rush. All these things happened over just a few years. Even Horace Greeley’s commune setting up in Colorado probably wouldn’t have happened without his belief that the future of New York City’s unemployed lay in the mad dash west. This is what I get out of where Aura and Sine’s fascination has taken us. Aura admires Arcosanti and the deliberation that’s gone into starting it. And Chaco Canyon’s apartment house that seems like the same thing to the casual visitor.

Another thing on this tour that’s hard to experience because they don’t let you in now is in Colorado Springs where they keep track of all the debris we’ve shot into the wild blue yonder. Their job is to keep the many folks shooting space probes and space station delivery trucks into the air up to date on all the crap that’s already up there so their vehicles don’t collide with it, whether it be a paint chip or empty booster rocket. Who knows, maybe Sine’s Elon has a car flying around up there. For as much as you can get out of this attraction, you’ll have to settle for just what we can tell you about it. Same holds true for the Alamosa gold mine that spewed a crock of pollution into the Alamosa River between Santa Fe and Colorado Springs. We point it out even though you can’t see anything, because we think you should know about it.

But, even in this tour, we’ll hit some places you can actually touch and dwell in, like Dodge City and, by no means least, that little Kansas museum that inspired me to start this thing about Coronado.

Dodge City was a community as much as Chaco Canyon was a community despite there being the horse and wheel that could have allowed everybody to live far apart from each other like in ranch country, but you’ve got to have some kind of center somewhere for trading and such. Sine should like Dodge City, since that’s as close to cowboys and Indians as he’s likely to get. It’s even got some Santa Fe Trail ruts, and then there’s the Santa Fe Trail with the Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop. Of course horse-drawn wagons were just a forerunner of the railroad. One of Buffalo Bill’s excuses for killing as many bison as he did was to feed the guys building the railroad, but it also helped eliminate Indian opposition to the railroad. The Indians could see it would just make the invader stronger, and the invader meant to weaken the Indian by rubbing out the livelihood they’d found in hunting the bison.

So much for the preface to this tour. Now on to stuff you can’t see, and some that you can.