Los Alamos - Cuba - Bluff!
(to counter the shadow wet month of November suggest a summer Pezzullo wrote in one of the sunniest days of August with a temperature of 100 Fahrenheit and conditioner in 1000 thanks to 'Washington's infamous weather, the humidity is the same; however, is also an excuse to put some snap resurrect nostalgic for a moment the blue sky)
(New Mexico Plateau)
will be the heat, the heat will be breathtaking, the mosquitoes are very bad and aggressive or maybe just the fault of the age: that is, your columnist American summer sbalestra neurons and synapses, stimulates associations unlikely connections and crooked risky, daring associations of places, names, landscapes, historical events.
An example of such extravagant smoothies mental travel itinerary is the battered, perfectly viable and totally insane, certainly absent from any travel guide worthy of respect, summarized in the title: Los Alamos - Cuba - Bluff!
(the exclamation point, although optional, is there to give undeserved flavor and summon emergency emblematic of survived catastrophes).
Pure divertissement, but a little 'noir .
(Santa Fe, NM)
Los Alamos
Il presupposto è che il turista abbia già visitato le perle del Nuovo Messico: la bella, costosa e trendy Santa Fe, seconda o terza più antica città degli odierni Stati Uniti, e la vicina e più abbordabile Taos, entrambe profondamente impregnate di sapori ispanici e amerindi. Impareggiabile, per esempio, il villaggio di “indiani” Pueblo alle porte di Taos (se solo Cristoforo Colombo non avesse pigliato quell'incredibile granchio geografico pensando d'aver raggiunto le Indie, risulterebbe oggi più easy to call the natives "Native Americans", but never mind).
(Taos, NM: Pueblo)
After tired digital camera and raided the jewelry under the arcades of splendid Santa Fe, it is therefore time to devote to more serious issues. The atomic bomb, for example.
And Los Alamos is right there at your doorstep.
Not that there is much to see, in Los Alamos. But the taste is all in that inevitable frisson takes when you're about to set foot in the town that gave birth to the first nuclear weapons. The operation was launched in '43, was named "Manhattan Project" (perhaps to throw off the lights?), Was developed just on the green forests of this corner of New Mexico, and culminated in August of '45 with the release of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Apart from the undeniable scientific achievements and the most controversial considerations about how the bombs in question have accelerated the surrender of Japan, it is certain that these parts show to have a sense of humor chilling: Los Alamos - where they make discoveries! is welcome in red letters that the city offers visitors. Nipponese tourists refrain.
(Los Alamos, NM, entrance to the city)
Cuba
The nuclear issue, just boarded, with a bit of imagination you can find a little later. Just want it, just look for it, just study carefully map: past Los Alamos, there is a road to Cuba!
The memory of the tourist runs to the Great Fear (case justified) of the distant autumn 1962, when an American spy plane flying over the island of Cuba photographed installations suspicious. Of course, it should be noted that Havana had just foiled a botched invasion attempt by Cuban exiles trained and financed by Washington (you may, in hindsight, because land in a bay called "of Pigs"?)
It must also be said that as soon remedied the fool, the White House was raised and increased the number of attempts to stand back to Fidel Castro and his barbudos. All this to point out that Cuba had their reasons for running for cover, and ask for help Soviet ally.
said that Moscow Fidel provides a bit 'of missiles with nuclear warheads and they focuses on the giant U.S. spy plane flies over us and photographing them, and the entire planet finds itself one step away from Armageddon.
About the film: the story of the missiles is told in a beautiful film with Kevin Costner: Thirteen Days, "Thirteen Days" - which are precisely those days when the Cold War became hot, intense, when a wrong move, diplomatic misunderstanding, a bluff too, badly made or badly broken, it could mean the end of the world.
So how can our rickety tourist, resist the temptation offered by his road map and denied the oblique, perverse pleasure of traveling directly from Los Alamos to Cuba ?
(Valles Caldera, NM, along the highway 126)
What is right and proper that the journey is short but not easy, the road is winding, barely climbs up the mountains, through beautiful mountain landscapes that alternate to the Far West, parading along a verdant volcanic caldera, then suddenly the pavement ends and the New Mexico State 126 you humble strip of gravel and earth, closed to traffic during the winter and whenever a violent downpour transformed the in a trap of mud. Then, after thirty miles of potholes and bumps, the last "down" on Cuba
The quotation marks around the "down" are binding powers of the appearance of the sign announcing the town, stuck in a long valley surrounded by mountains and sharp mountains severed called mesas Cuba, 6'905 feet above sea level, or two thousand one hundred meters. The plateau here is serious stuff.
If the name is borrowed from the homonymous island of Cuba Fidel or whether it comes from the English term or cuba cubeta (vat, cask, tub) is one of the few questions that are proposed to the attention of the wayfarer. Like all villages looking languidly negligible fugitive and vitality, with signs and posters that scream to the void, "Cuba has a long and interesting history," as in fact the website of the country. Maybe, but not seen. And that's okay, just the name. Of the many scattered in the United States that Cuba, with its irreverent proximity to the birthplace of the atomic bomb is armed with perhaps the most evocative force.
(Cuba, NM: Cuban Cafe)
Bluff
To be certain the lure of poker, the last hand when you watch the games and slings. For others, the charm of the greatest duels between systems, where elegant gentlemen and decent play for a few days with rockets and bombs and the fate of mankind. To everyone, without distinction, a place called Bluff can not play irresistible.
A Bluff to get there, from Cuba, with the long shadows of the evening, so the shot is perfect, having digested miles and miles of training to real western landscape, sticking to eighteen tired articulated wheel carrying non-you-know-what-not to you-know-where (even more mysterious because it is passing through this way).
car wrecks, past the press are the only load decoded perfectly reasonable and the SS 550, which slides towards the north- west between mesas and light poles.
Short stop compulsory Four Corners, "Four Corners", the only place in the U.S. where the borders of four states meet, and the traveler can believe for a moment a bit, 'God Almighty, ubiquitous: one foot in Colorado, the other in New Mexico. Arizona left hand, right hand in Utah. Everybody, young and old.
And then there's Bluff, founded in 1880 by an expedition of Mormons (another story charmingly, that the Mormons!). We try to mix true story and our speculation: after three hundred miles of driving the Mormons, exhausted, decided to have arrived in the right place. Exhausted by the troubles del viaggio e a corto di fantasia, si guardano in giro, vedono ovunque mesas, pinnacoli di roccia e rossastri dirupi verticali, e battezzano il loro nuovo insediamento: Bluff , che in inglese significa scogliera, promontorio, falesia (come fondare un villaggio in valle di Muggio e chiamarlo Monte).
(Bluff, UT: Twin Rocks Cafe)
Bluff sono trecento anime immerse in un panorama mozzafiato e incomprensibilmente intatto: un elegante motel Wood, John Wayne-style restaurant, a coffee disturbing at the foot of Twin Rocks , the twin pinnacles, which ask them not to slide down on him like any other and most famous twins implants sky.
(Bluff UT)
Just a few steps, most worthy culmination of this short slant route, as inspired by an unknown hand as he slowly left rotting in the sun and plateau in the wind an old Dodge van and a lovely '49 or '50 Buick. Like those who still live and suffer and puffing in Cuba (the island, not the village).
Maybe I have long suspected: you dream with open eyes better.
(Bluff UT)
( text and images copyright: VASCO DONES, unpublished)
