A good day to be Indigenous

I woke up this morning and realized it must be October when I saw an ad for pumpkin-spice something or other. It may have been a pumpkin-spice Covid shot, but I’m a little fuzzy on that.

Maybe a pumpkin-spice flu shot?

All joking aside, there is a new, updated Covid vaccine coming out, so I guess I’ll be baring up my pin-cushioned arm before long. I’ve never had any qualms about being poked in that manner, having had gobs of vaccine cocktails running through my system dating back to military service for yellow fever, typhoid, typhus, diphtheria, the plague, malaria, and lord knows what all.

Otherwise, autumn’s kicking in, and the aroma of chile roasting is wafting in the air.

Although Socorro has sort of the basic four seasons that are pretty much divided equally, autumn is not like most of the rest of the country. In this little corner of New Mexico, fall is quite different from those scenes we see in the media of falling leaves in those places that have all those deciduous trees. We have none of that nonsense of spending an entire Saturday raking leaves up into a huge pile that kids and dogs love to jump into, spreading them all over again. Instead of red, green, gold and brown, our “color season” is pretty straightforward. Green to brown.

The ever-watchful weather forecasters at the Old Famers Almanac are predicting a cooler and drier fall but a “calmer and gentler” winter. Weathermen, er, weatherpersons, always bandy about terms like El Niño and La Niña but, as personal experience bears out, when you get down to actual weather in Socorro County, a coin flip is as good as any meteorological calculation.

Better yet, just look out the window.

Moving on …

If I may, to quote Native poet John Trudell as DJ Randy Peone in the movie Smoke Signals, “It’s a good day to be Indigenous,” the annual two-day celebration of being Indigenous and from Alamo is this weekend. Indian Days is always scheduled around the Columbus Day federal holiday, which I find interesting. Back in school, we grew up learning that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America (and bad poetry). Then, everybody else came to America to learn to smoke tobacco and plant corn and spend all their money at Pueblo casinos. OK, that last part came later.

It was on October 12 that Columbus discovered the new world, which was actually not new. Millions of people were here legally, but it was the first time Columbus had seen it, so to him, it was a big deal.

We’re talking about something that happened 532 years ago, so I can see why some people wonder if Columbus Day should still be a thing. Since Columbus hadn’t discovered anything that wasn’t already here, someone suggested something like Colonization Day. Well, that didn’t go over too well, and considering that 26 stars on Old Glory represent states named after native tribes, Indigenous Peoples Day started catching on.

But I digress. The best time to experience Alamo is during Indian Days. There’s mutton bustin’, men’s and women’s chainsaw contests, a frybread-making contest, Navajo tacos, dancing, and lots of other stuff, but for me, the best part is Saturday morning when the big parade winds down Highway 169 from the campground to Walter’s Park (where all the food is). The theme this time is Solidarity With Missing and Murdered Indigenous Men and Women.

While you’re in the Magdalena area, the village is sponsoring its annual car show on Saturday. In these days of driverless cars and so forth, it’s hard not to romanticize many of those old automobiles, from hand-cranked Model As to tail fins on a ‘57 Chevy.

Growing up, the radio was rife with car songs, like the Beach Boys’ 409, Wilson Pickett’s Mustang Sally, Jan and Dean singing about a GTO and XKE on Dead Man’s Curve, Chuck Berry in his V-8 Ford chasing Maybelline in her Cadillac, and so on. There were even songs about a Nash Rambler and a Hot Rod Lincoln.

In those days, every kid wanted to jazz up their ride with things like fender skirts, curb feelers and steering wheel knobs. But way before the automobile was invented, I wondered if there were people who wanted to pimp out their horse and buggy. How would one do that?

I got an answer to that when I was in Ruidoso one time and went to the Hubbard Museum of the American West, where there’s a collection of some the fanciest, gussied-up buggies, wagons, stagecoaches, and surreys you’ll ever see. Kind of like an old west car show with horse-drawn carriages instead of automobiles.

Back when the last thing you wanted to meet on the road was a driverless wagon.