So, you think that life in a
small town might be boring, well not in Ajo. Ajo only has 4,000 residents in
the winter and about half that in the summer. But life here is anything but
boring, take today…
Today I towed a friend’s car out
of the mud, hiked 6 miles through the desert, did 3 water drops and sleuthed a
mysterious stranger. Its all really rather exciting...
First the towing. Towing is
always fun! This is my third time at the towing rodeo, so I am getting pretty
good at it. We were driving down Pozo Nuevo Road to do our drops and to our
surprise the road was still flooded in places from the rain we had last
Saturday morning. Coming to a particularly long stretch of flooded road I
decided to take the “work around.” That is a track that people have taken through
the desert to get around the flooded bit of the road. The Mossy made it fine,
but the car behind me got stuck in the mud of the “work around.” We tried all
the usual stuff: putting wood under the tires, pushing and digging out various
wheels. None of that worked. So, I took the Mossy around behind the car, backed
it up and we got out the tow straps. Hooked them up, put the Mossy in 4LOW and
boom! less than a minute later the car is free, and we are on our way again.
We arrived at our parking spot an
hour later, and an hour hotter, than expected. Loaded up our “bro” packs for
the day’s drops and set off east into the Bates Mountains. It has been over 2
months since the last time we were there so we could find a whole lot of
something, or a whole lot of nothing. Today it was the later, our drops had not
been used by people, removed by law enforcement or broken into by animals.
Sometimes its hard for people
when the drops are not used. They question why they (the people) are there, why
they (the drops) are there, and why they hiked 6 miles in the heat carrying so
much weight. Even humanitarian aid workers sometimes need validation for their
work. The longer I am here, the more I recognize the value of “negative space.”
A space that has not be recently travelled, a space where the desert and the
aid workers have a chance to just breathe and be together, a space to return to
later because routes change and seasons change but sadly border militarization
remains the same and so the need to come back and check and check again remains
too.
Luckily in this COVID time we are
a veteran crew, we have so much accumulated validation sometimes it was a bit
of a relief not to have more. Not to find the water used or vandalized, not to
worry about the people who used the drops and are they still OK, not to have a
human remains recovery, not to encounter law enforcement; just to hike in the
desert, enjoy its beauty, check on supplies and log them in the log book.
Now we know about the mud it is a
chill ride back to Ajo, where there is cold water and popsicles, it is 80 plus
degrees remember. A quick stop at the Aid Office to fill in the log and we are
on the way home, but wait, not so fast, there is a mysterious stranger at the
barn…
This bit was really odd, one of
the Ajo Samaritans went to the barn, and when she arrived, she found the water
running and someone in the bathroom requesting his shirt. She called around for
assistance deciphering the mystery and me and another friend went to see what
was going on. By time we arrived the stranger had left.
What appeared to have been going
on was cleaning, not in the regular way of cleaning, more in the way of
indiscriminately grabbing things and throwing them in the trash cans.
Definitely there was some evidence of regular type cleaning, for example the
bathroom floor had been swept. Other evidence pointed to something not in the
regular way of cleaning, like throwing a box of toilet paper, a whole box, not
just one roll, in the trash…are you kidding me, that box of toilet paper is
worth more than my investments right now!
Aside from rescuing the box of
toilet paper and locking it up securely in the barnlet, there wasn’t much else
we could do. So, we left. After a couple of phone calls, I think I know who it
was. There will be more discussion about this at the Ajo Samaritans Meeting
tomorrow…
PS If you want to make an offer,
and it needs to be substantial, I am trying to stay retired, on the box of
toilet paper DM me.
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