13 June 2019
“We didn’t have tornadoes here until we started putting in the traffic circles….When people go round and round in circles, it causes disturbance in the atmosphere, and causes tornadoes.”
Clayton, NM to Dalhart, TX (413 km)
I wasn’t able to sleep after six, and with the orientation at ten, I was able to sort my photos, go for a walk, have breakfast and watch the very first episode of Colombo. I said hello to some dinosaurs on my walk.
We met up for our briefing at ten and the storms looked to be coming off the Raton Mesa, so we didn’t need to drive anywhere. They had gotten the tires rotated earlier in the morning (not enough rotation to produce an updraft though) and we visited the Herzstein’s Memorial Museum.
Albert Herzstein was a self-made entrepreneur who went on to be involved in one of the companies that would eventually become Air Liquide, among other ventures.
The curator came out and gave us an interesting tour of the place. Like this quilt in the centre.
It’s a native American quilt that was over three hundred years old. They symbols are meant to represent stages of life and nature, like the four seasons and four stages of life, both of which meet in the middle.
He showed us a side saddle.
And a photo of a woman on side saddle…on a bucking bronco!
He said we couldn’t pay him enough.
Then he showed us newspaper clippings about an outlaw called Black Jack.
Apparently, he wasn’t very bright and after his gang was killed off, he tried to rob the same train twice and was caught. He was sentenced to hang, but the town hadn’t had a lot of experience hanging people. They hadn’t weighed him and he had gained a lot of weight in prison. And they experimented with a two hundred pound sack the day before but left it hanging all night so there was no elasticity left in the rope.
The result?
The rope took his head clean off.
It left those in charge pretty traumatized as you can especially see in the eyes of the man in behind.
The curator said a friend of his father’s had sneaked down to the courthouse to watch the hanging through an open knot in the fence. When he asked what he had thought, his father’s friend said he never peeked through a fence anywhere ever again.
Then he showed us a room with donated furnishings from the Herzstein family. They had travelled the world and had something from everywhere, including this art from Japan made with butterfly wings.
And this inlaid wood table from Italy.
The top would come off to show game boards like checkers and chess, but remove that and open the layer below, and you had a gambling setup.
He also showed us donations from the Dyche family that included Lincoln’s paperweight and John Wayne’s putter.
The Smithsonian wanted the collection, the Dyche family wanted it to remain in the town where they came from.
The curator’s father-in-law’s birth announcement was also there.
She liked to tease him saying he was only worth five dollars.
The doctor that delivered him had been diagnosed with TB out east and they recommended the family move to the dry air of the west if they wanted him to live to eighteen.
He lived to ninety-four.
When we were done, we went to lunch at the Rabbit Ear Café, a New Mexican restaurant.
I had a taco salad and we were done by two. By then, they were getting a better look at the developing storms and we headed north, stopping at an abandoned house near Moses, New Mexico, for a half hour.
This one had a lot of work put into it, including the decorative eaves.
By now, the storms were showing up on the horizon and we continued north, stopping just outside Kenton for a bush bathroom break. They pulled up to a quonset hut and told the women to go to the other side, saying there was some tall grass for privacy.
We turn the corner, and what’s there?
Yeah. A porta-pottie.
It was clean and even had toilet paper.
When we went back with smiles on our faces, we told them but they didn’t believe us. Then I looked back and there was a line of guys going around the corner to check.
We went a little farther north towards Colorado and pulled over to watch this system build.
It produced a little lightning.
By now, they had a choice between two systems and we picked the closer northern one, driving the back roads to Campo and then turning south.
We made a couple more stops.
And had time to do some time-lapses.
The systems started to sputter, so we headed south towards another, but the storm behind us regained some strength, so we watched it for awhile as the sun set.
It put out some lightning.
At one stop, there were a lot of crawlers, but my time-lapse was facing the wrong direction.
It started to rain and we loaded up for the night and headed to Dalhart for the night. Most of the hotels were booked, but they got rooms at the Rodeway Inn.
It had a decent rating and called itself an unfussy place to stay. That was exactly what it was.
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