Chapter 6 - Mesa Diablo

Continuing his trek in 1928, Dad describes crossing the Mesa Diablo in New Mexico. I was interested to find that Roswell seems to be the nearest city in that locale. If he and his companions witnessed anything out of the ordinary during those remote nights on the desert, he neglected to mention it when writing home to Scotland. In any case, it sounds as if he may have been a lot more focused on the ground than the heavens.

"We will pass quickly over the month or so spent by four sun-tanned men travelling, carefree and happy, over desert and mountain, where only the seldom travelled trails told that any human had been there before. Ralph was born in this country, of Swedish parents and had traded with peons in Mexico, leading a pack train of burros. Jack was a German by birth but a gold prospector by choice – only he had run shy on his grub stake. Slim wasn’t much of an American, in fact he wasn’t much of any old thing, except that he was a good “dry country” man with an uncanny way of finding water holes on the barren wastes. If he had a hundred dollars in the sole of his socks, nobody ever knew it for at no time did he remove his shoes.

On Mesa Diablo, the bleached skeletons of animals large and small told the tale of relentless sun and the scarcity of water, and the hot wind came blowing through the windshield of our Buick touring car, like the breath from some devilish furnace. The going in the frequent sand was slow and heavy and we had to stop at frequent intervals to allow an overburdened engine to cool down.

Despite the good water-carrying facilities that we had, we were forced to ration ourselves on water, as the car consumed most of our supply and many times our tongues were hanging out by the time that we reached the next water hole. The air was so dry that, as soon as one commenced to sweat, the sweat drops were immediately claimed by the atmosphere. With the glass standing about one hundred and twenty, a handkerchief, soaked and held out to the “breeze” would be completely dry in about seventy seconds. We tried it! At nights we slept on the sands, all huddled together and surrounded by a treated rope (over which a rattlesnake will not go). This was an ordeal for me, because if the various insects, scorpions and lizards that abound in those parts."