Police in Albuquerque say a man wandered into a Bank of the West branch last month and verbally demanded a teller give him the money in her drawer.

What was distinguishing about him was that he was carrying a red gas can at the time he committed the crime.

Police, who have now dubbed the perp as the “Out of Gas Robber,” had not arrested him by the time this post was written. 

Given the price of gasoline these days, perhaps the suspect was actually hoping the bank would fill up his can in lieu of cash. 

I stumbled across a social media post recently in which New Mexicans’ passion for green chile was on clear display.

It seems a young woman and her boyfriend had broken up, and in the ensuing split, the subject of her frozen green chile stash became a point of contention.

“At one time I went through a breakup and that vato’s mom was trying to move my deep freezer full of green chile out the door,” she said. “I had to put my foot down.”

Responses to the post were pretty funny as well.

“That is sooooo New Mexico,” one person said.

“I can now die happy. That is all anyone needs to know about dating in NM. Green Chile over bros!” another responded.

“Always the chile,” said anaother.

With the early monsoon rains we’ve received in the last couple of weeks over most of New Mexico, the raging wildfires in the Gila and Santa Fe/Carson National Forests have likely been doused by enough rain to be controlled or extinguished.

When reading a blow-by-blow of the travesty of the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico — caused by inept forest management which called for a prescribed burn at exactly the wrong time of year — I found this gem of a statement.

It was from U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore.

He said that prescribed burns “must remain a tool in our toolbox to combat” catastrophic wildfires.

Maybe he meant to say “to cause” catastrophic wildfires.”

Sorry, Randy, but your agency created a catastrophic wildfire.

Another comment I read from Las Vegas, NM, mayor Louie Trujillo, caught my eye. He noted how the federal government had provided significant financial assistance to the residents of Los Alamos County following the Cerro Grande fire several years ago — also started by a bungled prescribed burn by the U.S. Forest Service. Los Alamos is arguably one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, given the high salaries paid to many employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Mayor Trujillo said the much poorer rural population in the area of the Hermit Peak/Calf Canyon fire deserved the same opportunity to recover from the disaster.

“We’re no different than the richest county in New Mexico,” he said. “We need to be indemnified fully for every single loss the people in northern New Mexico suffered.”

I hope so. Many of those who lost homes or livelihoods were not able to afford the property insurance that the more wealthy residents of Los Alamos could purchase.

But of course, a real tragedy remains concerning the Black Fire in the Black Range of the Gila National Forest. Now deemed the largest wildfire in New Mexico modern history, the cause of that blaze is still believed to have been humans. Not only has it blackened most of the forest in the Black Range, but it has destroyed habitats of wild Gila Trout and Rio Grande Cutthroat trout populations.

And as a good friend of ours who owns a cabin (that was thankfully spared) near Winston and Chloride asked:

“What has happened to all the animals in that forest.”

Let me start by saying that stories about people conspiring to hire someone to kill a family member they don’t like isn’t funny. It happens too often.

However, a case which was reported in Las Cruces recently was just too full of ridiculously fragmented planning to pass up comment. Luckily, the hit job never happened and it also may have given us a new nominee from New Mexico for the Darwin Awards (click on darwinawards.com for more info).

A 32-year-old man went onto a fake website called “Rent-A-Hitman.com” to see if he could find someone to knock off his mother-in-law. The slogan for the website was “Your point and click solution.” I mean really, did the perp really think that someone could put up a dumb-sounding website like that without someone from the government noticing? And was he so dense he didn’t suspect it was a spoof? And how about the website operator’s slimy sounding name: “Guido Finelli?”

In fact, the website was the work of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which hoped to identify people seeking a source to commit a hit job and get them into jail before they did something rash.

At one point, the suspect told the website operator that he needed the hit done “as soon as possible and no evidence.” Well, duh, don’t you think that “no evidence” would be the “core value” of a “hit for hire” business?

As negotiations for the hit began moving along with the fake website, the suspect said he didn’t have much money to pay for the contract and would have to ask his wife for an advance to get the job done. He assured the website operator, however, that he would not divulge the purpose for the financial request from his wife. Well duh, again.

“It’s my wife’s mom we are talking about, so I don’t want any evidence to come back to me or you,” he said.

And again, didn’t he think that writing something like that on the Internet would eventually be divulged?

When the wife said she could only afford to give her husband $53 for his unspecified need, the suspect wrote this gem to the operator of the website:

“Change of plans. She is only giving me $53 so let’s use a baseball bat.”

Federal ATF officials eventually arranged to confront the man when they sent an undercover agent to his home.

It turns out that the suspect was being monitored by a state appointed guardian for intellectual and developmental disabilities. The guardian was able to retrieve the man’s laptop and gave it to authorities to unravel the plot.

Following a hearing before a judge, the suspect was placed with a full-time caregiver and is being monitored full time.

I also don’t mean to make light of people with intellectual and development disabilities. But if the state was already taking care of this guy for his problems, don’t you think they could have figured out something was up much earlier? Maybe whoever was in charge of his case should be on the Darwin list too.

New Mexico is on a big learning curve about consequences of legalization of marijuana, put into motion this year by the state legislature and implemented April 1.

Sales boomed during the first month of legalization, then have dropped back significantly since. Who knows what demand will be like in the long run? That should make things difficult for the proponents who predicted that state coffers would benefit from massive revenue growth from pot sales.

There’s also the issue of how vulnerable pot stores will be to robbery and break-ins, given the fact that they have to deal in cash because of rules involving monetary transactions for what the federal government still considers to be an illegal drug.

And so far, I have not yet seen any statistics about DWS (Driving While Stoned) cases. A big concern I have is how police will be able to tell if someone is driving under the influence of marijuana. Bloodshot eyes would probably be a clue, but in our humidity starved environment, high desert redeye is a pretty common condition. Maybe the only ones who will get stopped will be cruisers like Cheech and Chong in the movie “Up In Smoke,” in which a thick cloud of pungent smoke rolls out of the car when doors are opened on a police stop.

But in Algodones, a small community between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, a new wrinkle showed up a few weeks ago.

It seems that an eight-year-old girl discovered her parents stash of pot-infused candy, apparently looking like Gummy Somethings. Thinking she was doing her classmates a favor, she took the candy to her class and shared it with her BFFs. Later that day, 14 of her classmates became sick, requiring some to be hospitalized. Others felt nauseous or lethargic. But by the next day, most were back in class, apparently none the worse for wear.

At least the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department cut the youngster some slack. “There was no intent of distributing any kind of drug or anything of that nature,” the investigator said. 

We’re fortunate to see red tailed hawks flying and soaring around our neighborhood on a daily basis. They roost in some tall Afghan pines nearby and always put on an entertaining show when they began their skillful riding of thermals in the afternoons. What’s especially amusing is how quickly the flocks of white wing doves dive for cover in lower trees when the hawks show up. They’re apparently wanting to make sure they’re not on the hawks’ lunch menu.

I wrote two weeks ago about how humans have been helping abandoned or injured animals around the state and came across another similar story recently, but with a funny twist.

It seems that some hikers along a trail In Oliver Lee State Park on the west side of the Sacramento Mountains near Alamogordo came across what appeared to be an injured red- tailed hawk. The bird appeared to have some blood stains on it and was not able to quickly fly away.

Aware that raptors’ talons and sharp beak can cause some serious injury to humans, the rescuers were able to wrap the bird in a spare jacket for their protection. They quickly took the raptor back down the trail and put it in their car to take it to the Alamogordo Zoo to see if someone could help rehabilitate it.

In their rush to get the injured animal to the Zoo, they exceeded the speed limit and were promptly stopped by a local police officer.  Apparently sympathetic to their rescue effort after seeing the subdued hawk rustling around in the jacket, the officer let the driver go with just a warning ticket.

Once at the zoo, the staff determined that the bird had been injured in an encounter with a high-voltage electric line. After being patched up and kept in captivity while it healed, the hawk was released back into the wild in in Oliver Lee State Park by the family who found it. 

And hopefully, they took a leisurely drive back home this time and avoided any officers swooping in to write a speeding ticket. 

Our church, St. James’ Episcopal in Mesilla Park, is located just across South Main Street from the heavily trafficked north-south BNSF Railway.

Trains passing through this part of town and blasting their horns have always interrupted church services — sometimes funerals — at totally inappropriate times because of the numerous street crossings in the neighborhood. Two long horn blasts, a short and a long required for every road crossing. And then on top of that, the BNSF recently increased speeds of its trains through the Las Cruces area, and if you’re near a 50-car train with three locomotives moving at 45 miles per hour, you can feel the rumbling through the ground.

Our church, built in 1911, is an historic structure that at its age, is getting pretty fragile. Over the years, cracks in the interior and exterior walls have developed, but the building is still in basically sound condition. It is a gem of traditional gothic architecture required by the Episcopal Church of all its churches built during that time period in the United States.

Still, when trains have rumbled through the neighborhood in the last few years with the faster BNSF speed limits, I have witnessed small chunks of plaster falling from interior walls and arches.

Which brings me to this. At our services, we do three Bible readings, one often from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament and one from the Gospel. In between the first and second readings, we join together in reciting a Psalm. 

A couple of weeks ago at our church service, the Psalm appointed for the day was Psalm 103. At the 33rd verse, the Psalm read:

“He looks at the earth and it trembles.”

Our reader, Jennifer, had impeccable timing that day. 

At the moment she led us through those words, the BNSF 8:16 to El Paso rumbled through Mesilla Park and our historic church and those attending the service experienced mighty “trembles” and a shaking building as the train rolled through. 

If you question your faith, then maybe a moment like this will make you think about it a little more. 

 

Well no, not my wedding anniversary. I think Margo would have been a bit annoyed if I had forgotten that one, although we usually don’t make a big event out of it.

What I DID miss was the posting of my first blog on June 5, 2020. I’ve now written 256 of them in the past two-plus years. (At some point, I’ll write a blog about how I will always remember the date of June 5 (1967) but you’ll have to wait for it. )

For my few but dedicated readers, thank you for reading them. Thank you for saying you liked some of them. Thank you for saying that you laughed at some of them. Thank you for indulging me.

I enjoy writing and I think it keeps my brain active. I’m always looking for a blog topic. My favorites, of course, are anything that I think is humorous and unique about New Mexico. There’s never a lack of those kinds of topics in our state.

I hope you’ll stay connected with my writing. I know everyone is busy, so I promise to try to keep things brief. I also promise to avoid being political. One thing I have learned over the past couple of years is that people who I may disagree with politically are still great friends who are kind and would help me and our family at a moment’s notice. Thanks for that.

The only thing I ask of you is to communicate with me occasionally. Just let me know if you read something that interested you. Or maybe didn’t like. I still just want to hear for you. Maybe just to let me know if you’re still out there.

Thanks.

Just a brief warning to anyone who is ready to venture out into the Gila Wilderness in the next few weeks. Be REALLY REALLY careful with fire or any source of heat.

My wife, dog Chester and I took a day during the Memorial Day weekend to get out of town and drive up to the Gila. We took the New Mexico 15 from Silver City through Pinos Altos to Lake Robers and looped back around through the Mimbres Valley.

We were just stunned by how dry everything was. It was the driest I’ve ever seen that spectacular corner of New Mexico. And off in the distance to the northeast in the Black Range, we could see the huge plumes of smoke from the Black Fire, now the third largest in state history.

Small creeks, such as the Sapello which runs out of Lake Roberts, were completely dry when we crossed or drove alongside them. 

The Gila was already battered in 2012 with the Whitewater Baldy fire, which scorched almost 300,000 acres — the largest in state history.

It has always been a fragile landscape with scant little rainfall during the summer, not much snow in the winter and incessant winds during the spring. I guess that’s why I’ve always felt it was such a unique environment — it has to work so hard to hang on to the little vegetation it has. It’s the contrast of unexpected lush vegetation in deep canyons alongside high desert cliffs, gnarled rock formations and mesas that make it spectacular for me.

And the surprise of finding tiny native trout swimming in its infrequent creeks has always been amazing to me. Unfortunately, many of the trout populations in those streams are probably going to wiped out by the latest fire. 

So let’s all hope for an early monsoon rainy season with not much lightning. 

And when it does start raining, take the time to see this beautiful country. The drive from Silver City to Glenwood at the end of the summer when it’s at its greenest is worth every bit of the $5 per gallon gasoline it will cost you to get there. 

It was uplifting in the last couple of weeks to read stories about humans going out of their way to rescue wildlife babies that had been separated from their mothers.

The first involved a great horned owl baby that had tumbled out of a nest from a cottonwood in the Rio Grande bosque in Albuquerque. It was discovered by two Albuquerque residents who contacted Wildlife Rescue of New Mexico, Inc. The wildlife group said the bird’s parents, who usually mate for life, were probably nearby but just couldn’t get to the owlet on the ground. They recommended bringing the bird to the organization so it could be rehydrated overnight. It was returned to a makeshift nest the next day where it was hoped the parents would be able to spot it and begin caring for it again.

While the owl rescuers could hear the mother and father hooting at night to locate their baby, it became apparent that the makeshift nest was too close to a light source. Since owls are nocturnal, lack of light is important to their behavior. The rescuers were able to convince the electric company to shut off the light in hopes that the parents would come to the darker temporary nest to feed it.

At last report, the owlet seemed to be hanging on with its parents back in charge of its feeding.

In northern New Mexico, a firefighter working to suppress the immense Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire came upon an elk calf huddled in the middle of a field of ashes. At first, the firefighter believed the calf was dead, then when he discovered it was still alive, tried to find its mother. The mother, however, could not be found nearby and it was assumed she had been killed in the fire.

The 32-pound baby was scooped up in the firefighters’ arms and taken to a veterinarian to be checked. Other than a few singes, the bull calf appeared to be okay. It has since been introduced to a herd of elk in a wildlife rehabilitation center near Espanola. The calf appears to have been adopted by another mother elk at the center and will be released back into the wild late this fall after elk hunting season is over.

That story was reminiscent of the discovery of Smokey, a bear cub found clinging to a scorched tree during a major forest fire in the Lincoln National Forest in the 1950s. Smokey, as you know, went on to be famous and was kept at the National Zoo until he died in 1976.

After his death, Smokey’s body was returned to New Mexico and buried at what would become the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, near where I grew up. When I was a journalist in Santa Fe, I remember listening to debate in the New Mexico Legislature about funding for the park. I specifically recall some crusty lawmaker grumbling about why the New Mexico taxpayers had to foot the bill to bury “some dumb old bear.” I’m glad his view didn’t resonate with other legislators who eventually approved funding for the park. And if you’re ever in the area of Capitan, it’s worth a stop.

The annual first release of water down the Rio Grande from Elephant Butte and Leasburg Dam happened Wednesday, June 1.

And as usual, large blocks of white foam accompanied the welcome rush of water down the watercourse that had been dry since early last fall. At first, it looks like the entire river has been taken over by some kind of toxic disaster. You might think that an entire load of Styrofoam has accidentally been dumped in the water when a truck smashed through a guardrail over Interstate 10.

But nope, it’s not toxic and it’s just something that happens every year for the first couple of days after the initial water release in the river. The amount of foam decreases rapidly until it’s all gone in just a few days.

Longtime Elephant Butte Irrigation District Manager Gary Esslinger took time on Friday last week to explain what’s going on.

“It’s just a chemical reaction between the water that has been stored upstream and the dry riverbed,” Esslinger said. “It’s not a contamination and it’s not toxic. It’s just a natural phenomena that happens every year.”

He said that during the dry months, all kinds of natural debris blow into the river and when the water is released, the material in the riverbed creates a chemical reaction with the water that results in the temporary foam.

It looks kind of icky and I’m not sure I’d be willing to wade around in it, but on the day my wife and dog Chester investigated, there were already some people wading in the turgid and foamy water.

The good news is that water is returning to the river and parched looking willows along the banks will soon be turning greener and the wildlife that lives along the bosque will be back. The birds that live along the river, especially the trilling red wing blackbirds, always make me happy when I hear their sound.

The lateral canals in our neighborhood will be getting water soon, making it feel like a creek runs through the area.

And of course, Chester will be all too eager to slosh around in the muddy water and get loads of sand in his fur that will result in a back yard hose down that he doesn’t particularly like. Ah summer!

My wife and I were enjoying a glass of wine on the back patio on Wednesday afternoon last week when we were startled by two thundering booms that we could feel.

I was pretty sure it was a sonic boom, but we haven’t heard many of those around here in years.

Shortly afterwards, something popped up on Twitter that explained it all. It was the re-entry of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft returning from the International Space Station to land at White Sands Missile Range just northeast of us over the Organ Mountains.

The spacecraft was unmanned and returning to earth as part of a test by NASA. The sonic booms were triggered as it broke the sound barrier upon re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

It had been on a six-day mission to the International Space Station as a test for future manned missions. NASA and Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 launched successfully May 19 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It landed in New Mexico at 4:49 p.m. MDT last Wednesday, four hours after leaving the orbiting lab. Flight engineers said it made a “virtual bull’s eye” landing, less than three-tenths of a mile from the landing target in the Tularosa Basin.

NASA sources said the re-entry was probably visible over the Gulf of California and northern Mexico. Our skies at the time were clogged with smoke from the Black Fire scorching the Black Range on the eastern edge of the Gila, so we probably could not have seen anything.

What was interesting to my wife and me was that neither of us had seen any advance notification or publicity about the landing. NASA says it hopes to be using the spacecraft in the future to shuttle astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station. It makes us wonder what kinds of other things go on out at White Sands that we never know about. Our good friend and neighbor Frank, who at one time temporarily became be the top non-military officer to command the base, would probably have the right to kill us if he divulged any of that information. Knowing Frank, I doubt he’d do that.

What I would like to know is whether NASA plans to use WSMR for the regular landing site for future manned Starliner missions. I think the Achilles heel for parachute landings in this part of the world is the strong winds we have each spring.

An interesting side story was that the returning spacecraft had a full-sized human dummy, named Rosie after Rosie the Riveter, on board during the re-entry. It survived the test and I’ll bet it didn’t flinch as much as we did when the capsule broke through the sound barrier. And I’m sure she didn’t need a glass of wine to calm her nerves.

(With apologies to Paul Simon)

When the New Mexico State University baseball team made arrangements to go to Mesa, AZ, for the Western Athletic Conference baseball tournament last week, the school didn’t have the budget to charter a fancy jet to make the relatively short journey to Arizona. The plan was to charter a lowly bus.

Well, it turns out the bus was even lowlier than they had anticipated. Two times on the 388-mile journey, the bus broke down, leaving the team stranded for about one hour and 40 minutes the first time and about 45 minutes the second time. Team members were forced to wait for repairs for more than two hours parked alongside Interstate 10 while temperatures were blistering near or above the 100 degree mark.

Getting into the tournament itself wasn’t easy, with the Aggies just barely sliding into the brackets by winning its final regular-season series against Utah Valley. The game included a seven-run ninth-inning comeback for the Aggies.

However, the Aggies were undaunted and managed to work their way into the championship game by knocking off two of the top seeds. The aggies first defeated top-seeded Utah Valley State, then punished the University of Texas Rio Grande 10-0 in a game called by the mercy rule in the 7th inning.

And on Friday, the underdog Aggies defeated Abilene Christian University 7-1 to take the WAC championship and earn an automatic bid to the NCAA baseball tournament.

The Aggies will now travel to Corvallis, Oregon, to face the No. 3 seeded Oregon State Beavers on Friday, June 3.

I’m sure they’ll get there on a plane for this game. But maybe traveling by a “break-down” bus would bring them good luck.

I wrote last week about my grandfather, Charles Hurst, and his talent for writing, painting and creative engineering designs. The post was the result of a friend commenting about what an interesting man he must have been.

After reading that, our good friend Cheryl dug a little more into my family’s past and came up with some information about my father, Victor Lamb, that I had not known before.

My dad was always involved in newspapers, acting as editor and publisher of the Ruidoso News in the 1950s and 60s, and as editor and writer for at least three newspapers in West Texas. It turns out his father was involved in the newspaper business in Florida as well.

My father was a good writer, even though he never completed high school and banged out his stories blindingly fast by using just two fingers on each hand on his old typewriter.

I also knew he was an artist as well, mostly drawing cartoonish things for special publications but occasionally venturing into artwork which we displayed in our home in Ruidoso.

What I did not know is that he had created a cartoon character named Archibald that appeared on the front page of his newspaper in Abernathy, TX.

A story in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal from Sept. 24, 1933, profiled my father and his cartoon creation in the Abernathy Review newspaper.

“We are the only weekly (newspaper) in the U.S. printing a home drawn cartoon,” my father boasted. “And if there were another, it wouldn’t be printing a comic drawn by the editor.”

The character first appeared in a newspaper in La Mesa, TX, where my father worked before moving to Abernathy.

“When Lamb went to Abernathy, Archibald went along too,” the Avalanche Journal article noted.

I looked online and could not find any examples of the cartoon in old newspaper files. A search of comic strip or cartoon characters on Google did not find any examples of my father’s work. It appears that there were other cartoon characters named Archibald, so my father apparently never copyrighted or trademarked the character or the name.

I’m not sure what kinds of topics Archibald addressed in his cartoons. I’m sure it was mostly just corny, folksy stuff, based on a few cartoons of his that I had seen earlier. I’m sure he followed humorists of the time like Will Rogers and cartoonist Mort Walker (“Pogo”).

However, I don’t think Archibald would be politically correct now, since he is depicted as having a cigarette dangling from his mouth and dressed in a way that makes him appear to be homeless. But who knows, maybe pants with obnoxiously big patterns will make a comeback for men’s fasion.

It was fun to discover a little more about my family’s history. I’m sure my readers (all three or four of you) have interesting stories about people in your family tree. I encourage you to dig into Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com and find undiscovered stories about your own family. I’m still looking for things about my family I didn’t know. Hope I don’t find anything too embarrassing.

And thanks again Cheryl, for finding out about “Archibald.”