Roswell encounters turn out to be strange Earthings Special

I was outside on a brisk February morning this year pondering as I unhooked the Magic Bus from the Roswell, New Mexico RV park we stayed in near Bottomless Lakes State Park.

Perhaps it wasn’t a dream last night; perhaps I really did board an alien spaceship to Venus on a selfless universal mission to seek knowledge for better understanding women, particularly the Navigator whom I traveled with all the way across the USA in a 31’ motor-home without hot water in the middle of winter. You think you got problems? My miraculous feat of survival is not recommended for the average, run-of-the-mill or faint-hearted American male. You laugh, but after 30 or 40 days living with a (sweet, angelic) woman in a 250 sq. foot motor-home in an entirely alien environment, you ‘d be bawling like a geek in a no-holds-barred, bad-man fighting competition. You know I’m right . . . Anyway, by the time I toted a tiny, perfumed trash bag 6,643 yards to the nearest park dumpster, my beloved Navigator Leigh had finished walking the dogs and we were ready to depart. It was never lost on me how much resemblance there is between our Boston terrier named Buster and some of the alien depictions in Roswell museums. Roswell, New Mexico produced a spectrum of alien encounters, but all were strange life forms from Earth as far as I could tell. Like the mirror-shades-guy with his body tatoos and oily grey hair in a pony-tail that dangled below his belt line. Then there was the young lady sporting tangled green hair and dual pierced nose rings that resembled crashed flying saucers with a little alien figure on her tongue-ring that seemed to alternately jump up and lay down as she talked. Roswell draws an interesting crowd that represent a wide spectrum of human behavior. On the other hand, and the other side of town, are young men and women attending officer candidate classes at the New Mexico Military Institute. These young people are as straight-as-howitzer barrels and seeing them on day-passes mingling with aging, deluded hippies that root around Roswell deserts during the day in search of E.T.s grandmother’s bones can be surreal. Nevertheless, New Mexico is the epitome of the Old West. We took Highway 70 West through the San Augustin Pass, a nearly 6,000 foot elevation of enormous stacked boulders that seemed poised to topple across the roadway at any moment. I entertained a childhood notion to grab my shotgun and track down some Comanche varmints in the rocky badlands, but thought better of it when we passed a sign warning of mountain lions. The fact that there are only a dozen people living in southwestern New Mexico did little to dampen the magnificent experience of viewing New Mexico’s high basin mountainous landscape. Granted, if you are the Oak Alley type, New Mexico presents a different panorama of splendor. New Mexico is the epicenter of western badlands, complete with canyons; deserts; mountains; cactus, and boulders the size of small planets. However, with spiders the size of monkeys and fierce mountain lions and cougars prowling the deserts conceivably looking for human snacks, you may not want to take your cub scout pack to the New Mexico badlands to sing around a campfire.