Chapter 73: Ski Slopes, Miscreants, and Bear Spray! Oh My!

Saturday, March 9, 1985

We were up and on the road by eight. Slightly early for us (though it would have been late in high school, only a year ago), but hardly a hardship.

Like yesterday, we pretty much just drove, and I wasn’t particularly worried about keeping to the speed limit in rural western Texas. No one else did! I just stayed with the flow of traffic and made about the same time illegally as I would have legally in the 2000s, after speed limits had been raised again (in the 1990s, most likely).

We arrived in Taos Ski Valley around seven in the evening. Not ideal, but it was still daylight out (if not by much) and the roads had been fine.

Once we arrived, we made a few phone calls, to Mom and Dad, Camille and Francis, and Cammie. Mom and Dad said Angie and Paige had been fine, and had picked up another, smaller, bag of mail. Camille and Francis were happy we’d arrived safely. Cammie said everything was fine there.

Check-in was easy, and the lady at the desk didn’t raise an eyebrow at two teenagers checking in. They probably had ‘rich kids’ here regularly, after all. Since she couldn’t see the land yacht, we might well have mostly looked the part. Plus, I was using my American Express card, which is not a card the typical college student would have.

The hotel itself was nice. Not ‘gorgeous’ or anything, but it was certainly a place that wouldn’t turn off the moderately well-to-do. Our room was nice, too, and we’d be happy here.

There was still time for us to rent ski gear in town, and we got that taken care of before getting settled at the hotel.

The hotel’s restaurant had plenty of French food, which made Jasmine very happy. It made me happy, too, but Jas was (relatively speaking) the expert here, and she had lots of fun with the menu.

We would likely eat here again (probably more than once), but we also wanted to try some other places in town. There were plenty of authentic New Mexico-style Mexican restaurants in town, after all, and that was a bit different than the Tex-Mex we mostly got at home. There was also a very nice steakhouse.

It would soak up some more of our travel funds, but this wasn’t going to be so expensive that we would have needed Camille and Francis’s Christmas gift. Nor was it the sort of trip they had in mind, of course.

Sunday, March 10, 1985

We hadn’t lost anything from the January trip, at least. We hadn’t gained anything, either, but we were competent enough to be ‘just fine’ on the blue runs after just a couple of refresher trips down the ‘bunny slopes.’

If we had a goal, it was to move up to the somewhat harder blue runs and be able to take those with relative ease. But this was only our second ski trip and we were well aware of our limitations. There would be no black diamond attempts on this trip, no matter how much we thought we’d progressed.

The ski resort had some great hot tubs and we spent a considerable amount of time soaking and recovering. No drunk girls wound up in my lap. Jas thought that was a pity, while I thought it was a good thing.

Monday, March 11, 1985

The biggest event today had nothing to do with skiing. It was, instead, the front-page news that Mikhail Gorbachev had become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That made me happy because it confirmed history was still on the same path as I’d known before. Gorbachev had been a competent leader through a very difficult period for the Soviet Union (basically, its collapse). Things could have been much, much worse with a reactionary hardliner in place — or merely someone less adept at politics and compromise. Imagining even a Brezhnev, much less a Chernenko or Andropov, presiding in the latter half of the 1980s was a daunting prospect.

This Gorbachev, of course, might not be ‘my’ Gorbachev, but the odds were good.

I had, of course, mentioned Gorbachev over three years ago as part of telling Jane the truth about myself and Angie. That it had played out as predicted was reassuring.

I gave her a call in the early evening. She agreed: had she had needed any convincing (which, of course, she did not), this would have done it. Successfully naming the full succession of the leaders of the Soviet Union from Brezhnev to Gorbachev in January 1982 was pretty convincing.

Tuesday, March 12, 1985

Looking at the paper over breakfast, I got a shock: this was a year we could very productively bet on the NCAAs. I’d missed that, apparently. Of course, I was two states away from where I needed to be to make that happen. I had no bookies in New Mexico, nor could I easily collect from them.

Instead, and after talking it over with Jas, I called Angie and Paige’s hotel and, surprisingly, got them. After much discussion, Angie agreed to place bets when she was back in Houston. The opening rounds started on the 14th, and the odds were unlikely to meaningfully change, particularly since the team I cared about was playing their first game on the 15th. Angie and Paige would be back in Houston in time to bet that game.

Angie knew Gerry, of course, if not well. She knew how to get in touch with the other bookies I’d used, too.

The odds were we could get at least ten to one odds. It might be much higher. The New Mexico paper didn’t carry betting odds.

If Angie couldn’t get at least six to one, we’d call it off. I was pretty certain, but the tax-return angst was becoming increasingly painful, and perhaps not worth it for five to one. Kyle was going to chew us out no matter what, but it would be tempered by a huge profit.

Angie insisted on taking the blame on this, tax-wise. She would be a first-time offender, if caught, after all, and could throw herself on the mercy of the court.

We were betting $30,000 total. The payoff would be enormous, if we were right. Worth all of the angst, Kyle’s ire, and everything else.

It wasn’t Dell money, but it was several houses’ worth of cash.

Fingers crossed!

I managed the most spectacular fall of my brief skiing career in the early afternoon. As these things go, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t fully snag my ski in the snow, I didn’t hit anything (people, plants, buildings, etc.) and I didn’t break anything. At least, I was pretty sure of that. It hurt, but nothing felt bad enough to be a break.

Still, I definitely strained something in my left knee. I was not moving well after the fall.

We took it as a sign to back off and do something else with the day. We drove down to Taos proper (about half an hour away), stopping to take a look at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, one of the highest (and prettiest) bridges in the United States. It was well worth the short detour, and another place I’d been in my first life that I was now visiting for the first time.

Yes, that got me a whap.

Once we got into Taos, we took in some of the art galleries. I’d never been here in the 1980s before (another whap) and had only seen it when there were art galleries on nearly every street corner and crammed together into strip malls. This wasn’t that, but there were plenty of things to look at.

Nothing caught our eye, but at least my knee was behaving itself.

We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant (New Mexico style, naturally). Jas fell in love with New Mexico green chillies on the first bite. We weren’t in ‘Hatch chili’ season, but these were probably those, just preserved from last year. I had a feeling we’d be shopping around when we got back. They were much harder to find in Texas now than they would be in twenty years or so (yet another whap!) but there were plenty of relatively comparable options.

We drove back in late twilight, thankful for well-plowed roads and not overly aggressive hills, then settled in for sleep.

Wednesday, March 13, 1985

My knee stiffened up considerably overnight. I was still sure nothing was broken, but it easily could be a sprain.

There was little point in trying to ski. Even an easy intermediate would have been asking for trouble.

Thus, instead of staying the full day as we’d planned, we instead hit the road for Santa Fe in the early afternoon.

Santa Fe was ... not quite what I remembered. Jas didn’t even bother to whap me when I said that.

It was quaint (something I generally like), interesting, and just showing the beginnings of becoming the tourist trap I’d seen it become. The chain stores and restaurants hadn’t taken over yet and it was still mostly local businesses in the historic downtown area. We stayed at a hotel there that was — I think — the one I’d stayed at in the mid-1990s on a business trip. Can’t swear to it. 1995 (or so) is a long way in my past, and a decade in my future (but without that trip!), so who really knows?

We walked around town for a while, holding hands and window-shopping. Occasionally, that became actual shopping. My knee was pretty much fine as long as I didn’t try to do anything particularly aggressive with it. If I did, it reminded me that it wasn’t fully happy.

Dinner was more Mexican food, this time with margaritas. New Mexico had a drinking age of 21, but we hadn’t been carded at the Edelweiss and we weren’t carded here, either. Had we been, Jas would’ve said, ‘Oh, we’re from Texas. I’m legal there’ and I would’ve said ‘Me, too. And, oops, I forgot about the law change.’

No one wants to lock up tourists for drinking-age violations. It’s not good for business. Not at all!

We didn’t stay up all that late tonight, either. Still, Jas reminded me there were plenty of things we could do that wouldn’t aggravate my knee.

Turned out, she was right!

Thursday, March 14, 1985

As I was driving us from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, I shared two ‘future stories’ with Jas. No whapping on these. She enjoyed both of them.

The first was explaining how March 14th would become known as ‘Pi Day’ in the future. I wasn’t quite sure when it had started. But, by the early 2010s, it was getting pretty entrenched nationwide. One could find ‘Pi Day’ shirts, most restaurants that served pie were very busy and ran specials, and so forth. One of the grocery store chains near us had given out $3.14 off coupons for any pies made at their bakery.

The second was what I could remember of the strange and twisted tale that is Weird Al’s ‘Albuquerque’. There was no way I could fully do justice to it, but I could certainly remember the donuts, the box of crazed weasels, the biting, the repeated mentions of sauerkraut, the fully upright seat back and properly stowed tray table, and the Holiday Inn. There was something about a lucky snorkel, too, and some sketchy man. One-nostriled? That seemed right.

The whole thing likely made no more sense to Jas than the song made to anyone, possibly including Weird Al, himself. He had never expected it to be popular, though it had become beloved. If Al didn’t make that song in this universe, Jas could join me (and maybe Laura) in lamenting its absence.

That said, I couldn’t remember when he’d made it. It could have been as late as the early 2000s. We had a lot of time yet to go.

I also got into talking about streaming music. Jas was hardly going to go off and ‘invent’ it, and it would be at least two decades before the cellular infrastructure could support it in any case. Still, when I’d visited Albuquerque in the 2010s, we just scrolled through a zillion songs, found ones that mentioned Albuquerque (surprisingly many!), and made a playlist. Access to that much music nearly blew Jas’s mind. The ability to easily rearrange it was nearly as mind-blowing.

There was no guarantee our world would be the same, but the odds were high that it was going to be similar. Someone was going to invent smartphones. Alan Kay’s ‘Dynabook’ concept had been around for over a decade, and many of those ideas (though not Kay’s specifics) had gone into what became the iPhone (and thence the iPad).

The iPhone was one ‘fixed point’ I was certain of. Definitely 2007, not before or after. If it hadn’t shown up for a couple of years past that point, or if Apple seemed so derailed they would never get there, I felt reasonably free to ‘invent’ it myself.

Well, hire a team and make them invent it. I knew what it should look like, act like, cost, and what it was possible to do. That last one is the biggest one. If you know something is possible, actually doing it is simpler (since you spend no time doubting your goals are achievable).

Once in town, we drove around a bit, then wound up at Old Town. It, too, wasn’t quite the tourist trap it would become thirty years from now, but it was close. We had fun with it, and my knee mostly behaved itself.

We had dinner at the High Noon Restaurant and Saloon. The restaurant itself was fairly new, but it was located in one of the oldest buildings in Albuquerque, and the steaks were terrific.

Wine, too, continuing our trend of thumbing our noses at drinking-age laws. We just had a glass each, but that was nice.

When we got back to the motel, we pretty much just hung out and talked for a while, then went to sleep.

Friday, March 15, 1985

Today we took a short driving tour of Albuquerque, then drove to the top of Sandia Peak. The view from up there was pretty amazing. It was also very cold, but clear of snow.

After that, it was off to Tucumcari, where I’d never been before. My knee held up just fine the whole way.

The Blue Swallow Motel was cute, and the owner, one Lillian Redman, was a bit of a character. She’d been running the place since the 1950s and was happy to share tales of the old Route 66 travelers. Jas was fascinated, and so was I, but we came at it from very different directions. She’d never seen that much of Route 66, of course, but knew of its legend. I’d missed a lot of it, too, but I came from a time where Route 66 nostalgia was a major business opportunity (far more than it was in 1985).

For Ms. Redman, and somewhat for Jas, Route 66 was the past. Gone but not forgotten, and not coming back. For me, it was more complicated. Sure, the route itself would never come back, but many small towns would rebrand parts of themselves around it and, with that, would come new tourists and new prosperity.

I doubted Ms. Redman would live to see it, but we would. I also wished very much that I could tell her about ‘Cars’, because I thought it would do her heart good to hear about it and know the next generation of kids would grow up knowing about these sorts of places and that these places would get a second chance of their own.

There was no way to do that, of course, not without spinning a story that would either be far too fantastical to be believed or, worse, something she would believe. If anyone was a spinner of other people’s stories, it was Lillian Redman.

The best I could do was offer my earnest belief that places like this, and stories like hers, would not be forgotten. I doubt she believed me, but I know she appreciated my saying it.

That was enough.

When we left her company to head to our room, she gave us a copy of the ‘Blue Swallow Benediction.’ We took it and promised to read it.

When we got to the room, we did. I’d expected a religious message, and there was indeed mention of God in the first paragraph, yet it was merely a passing mention and pointed to no particular God.