By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
4-11-25

The last winds of March brought on fierce sand-storms across the arid border region of New Mexico. Fine particles of alkali sand choked the throats of local residents with coughing, hacking and expelling gobs of yellow-green spittle. If there was an iconic symbol of this godforsaken dust bowl, it would be a spittoon.

The grinding force of hostile Nature encouraged me to take a coward’s way out of the gritty haze. After tossing a gallon bottle of water and a sleeping bag into the truck, I headed off toward the distant refuge of Fort Apache in densely forested northeast Arizona. Past the dug-out slopes of Silver City, the boyhood home of Billy the Kid, the Chihuahua desert gives way to a rock-strewn Mimbres forest, the birthplace of Geronimo. Outlaw country, as opposed to the Cartel’s borderland, is at least free of clouds of blowing toxic sand. Under a blue sky I pulled over to take photos of an old iron bridge, which was decommissioned in the 1970s due to its rust-caused near-collapse. It was replaced by a concrete roadway at equal elevation - about 40 feet above the rocky bed of a narrow river contaminated by the mining industry.

Fortuitously, by the old bridge, I happened to meet a local hunter who had just trapped a beaver that had attempted to dam up the stream, a criminal act that could easily have undermined the ironwork with rising water and thereby toppling the concrete elevated roadway. Born in the wilderness surrounding Santa Fe, the lanky fellow disclosed that his immigrant father had been a friend of families descended from Kit Carson’s pioneer circle. Taking the bait, the beaver had choked in the maws of a steel-wire trap. It was an overfed female fattened by easy pickings in the riverbed with dining on croaker frogs and minnows. Its yellowed teeth were a sign of chemical contamination from upstream mining operations. Over past months the clever beast had evaded traps and continued to block the stream ever higher. Its gluttony eventually proved suicidal as it waded into the wires of the strangulator. This drama came as a surprise due to my assumption that beavers were a species limited to the Midwestern headwaters of the Mississippi rather than this far-west arid highland. The out-of-place rogue species turned out to be me..

Hackman’s demise

The sight of hapless beaver’s carcass brought to mind the tragic demise of retired actor Gene Hackman and his Japanese musician wife Betsy Arakawa. Her family name translates as “Raging River”, taken after the wild river in the Chichibu highlands north of Tokyo - which served as my mountain retreat amid limestone cliffs during several years as an editor for The Japan Times. The Hackmans arrived from Los Angeles a bit too late to have insinuated themselves into oldtime Santa Fe or nearby Taos, which I remember from the early 1960s as a rather primitive region of blue corn, three-pronged pine needles and posole - an Aztec inspired dish of white corn and tomatoes replicating the brilliant colors of raw sacrificial hearts of humans served in a soup of wet blood. The sacred blue lake of the Taos Indians, I recall, was something like a chunk of lapis lazuli lodged in the sky.

Like a faded dream, old New Mexico has long since morphed into a junkyard of murderous dope dealers, sleazy bar whores and illegal desperadoes - your average borderline hellhole.. One of the saddest facts that I learned in NM was that the biker movie “Easy Rider” was actually filmed in the chic art colony of Marfa, Texas, not in New Mexico. That disappointing Hollywood tidbit is somewhat compensated by the movie fact that the sunken volcano an alien spaceship bursted out of in Indiana Jone’s jungle adventure was dynamited in southern New Mexico.

I am digressing from a key point in the Hackman’s demise in the state capital Santa Fe, which declares itself a “sanctuary city” - a haven for illegals, incorrigible meth heads and Mexican fentanyl smugglers under the benign regime of Govenor Michelle Luhan Grisham, a crony of the late Bill Richardson along with his sidekick the local “rancher” Jeffrey Epstain. Hey, Jeffrey, how’s life been treating you after escaping prison alive? The long tradition of criminality in New Mexico’s ancient capital - the oldest city in North America - explained the presence of three large watch dogs on the Hackman property.

What the actor and his spouse failed to comprehend is that the desert region has other lethal species of lethal - most nearly invisible to the human eye, especially at night. I am speaking here of the native fauna - black widow spiders (which are actually kind mothers), nests of red ants, scorpions, rattlesnakes and blood-thirsty fleas riding aboard their favored modes of transport - goats, wild hogs, horses and dogs. The sole exception are cats.

Against this host of bloodsucking threats dogs are powerless. The hilltop defense perimeter of Gene-and-Betsy’s city-slicker Alamo was obviously missing night prowling cats. As an example of bravery under duress, I recall how my young feral female kitten named “Tora-chan” (Tiger child) ripped through a nest of vicious toxin-spitting green-striped lizards nestled under a storage shed. Their unforgiveable crime was to hack down my springtime flowering blooms - not to dine on the flora but just for the hell of it, to prove their nastiness. Tora’s decisive battle occurred between her other pastimes of ripping apart black widow nests and eliminating a swarm of roaches hiding in the cracks of the porch - just prior to the morning she was run over by an ultimate bad-driver - my Mexican neighbor’s teenage daughter. In short, the desert terrain is doomed to a permanent state of life-and-death warfare between species, humans being the absolute worst.

The mammalian struggle for survival against pests and predators is also transpiring among large apes in this arid space bounded by a fragile borderline. While a lot of economic migrants have begun the process of moving back across the border, the larger cities and towns run by the compromised Democrats offer safe havens for Cartel thugs, deranged bikers and sadistic women killers. Needless to say, law-abiding local citizens are patiently awaiting the arrival of the federal strike forces that will muster the National Guardsmen, Army troopers and Border Patrol officers to knock out the criminal elements at their last stand. We patiently await the next gunfight at the OK Corral.

Abuse of Forestry

Just before crossing the state line, I stopped at a logging area by the second southward dip of the San Francisco River. The sight was a god-awful mess of smashed trees, broken limbs, spotty bent new growth and huge pits in the tracks of lumber trucks. What a waste of wood, soil and water by a bunch of lazy crooks. I had just heard on the radio that the new admin in Washington DC is aiming to convert the national forests into logging camps. Well, there goes the water, then the soil and all of Arizona will soon be a vast graveyard like Southern New Mexico. Money’s not everything especially if you’re left with a sand pit and toxic old mines stripped of greenery. Money isn’t everything because it soon runs out leaving you with nothing at all. I do enjoy Trump but he is a eastern city slicker and not a Gene Autry, much less a wise Cochise.

Leaving the logging site in disgust, I pushed onward into Mormon territory I passed through tiny villages devoid of saloons, the Timid West. So pushing into pine forests across Apache territory with their views of mountain peaks, I was delighted to see wild horses trotting along the grassy shoulder of the roadway. By grazing on the roadside grass, those ponies vastly reduce the risk of forest fires caused by tossed beer bottles and lit cigarettes. The backside of aboriginal culture came alive, unfortunately, when coming uppm a ratty casino, best passed at high speed to avoid embarassment to the spirits of Cochise and Geronimo. Yeah, Kimosabe, white man ruined Indian and now Indian ruins white folks in an unvirtuous cycle.

Arriving at the first town with a strip mall, I stop at a Chinese restaurant to devour ribs and swill beer like a rude Japanese businessman. Then proceeding westward to inspect life in these unfamiliar parts, I noticed a shadowy dark structure resembling a haunted house from an Edgar Allen Poe novel. So closing in past a bunch of humble trailers, I found the place to be a recently vacated house for sale. A peek through a window showed the floors to be a newly laid plasticized covering painted black. Walking around the front and backwoods, I noticed the complete absence of battered toys, car parts, punctured tires and clotheslines along with the other detritus of the American way of life in the woods. The barren surroundings foretold of a massive monthly “landscaping” fee imposed by the realty cartel.

Low Hand Wins

Gunning the engine, I got the hell out toward a town named after a card game - Show Low - which had only one institution of note, a cosmetology college. Remember girls, always curl your hair before going out back to chop wood and pluck a wild turkey for dinner. With alot of daylight left to waste, I decided to drive around in a loop to examine the outer perimeter of that town. The railroad town of Snow Flake turned up large old churches without congregations, monuments to the post-Civil War boom when most Easterner migrants astutely continued on to San Francisco. On the backside of town, there was a vast Mormon colony topped by a temple spire. Since I never took to polygamy - one woman at a time being more than enough to tolerate - there was no point in blowing my horn at those saints. (The best historical account of Mormon settlement was penned by Sherlock Holmes’ author Arthur Conan Doyle who exposed the cult’s massacre of white settler wagons (to capture women and girls), a crime done in the guise of Indian costumes. History does bite you in the rear, ye polygamist holy rollers!)

Then the trail looped back through ranchlands being converted into resort homes for exiled Californians, in a sort of reverse settlement from west to east. I noticed a covered wooden bridge in the distance, obviously inspired by the Clint Eastwood movie “Bridges of Madison County” minus the hot Italian widow. To my great disappointment, the bridge was small, over as dry creek that is is easily crossed. A mere gimmic, there was none of the graffiti and crude drawings of genitals left by Hoosier aborigines on those ancient bridges in Indiana.

Real Estate by Fire

I soon came upon another vacant multi-bedroom house, the folks dislodged around the end of December - with an identical new black floor. The surroundings likewise had also been scroured of all evidence of family life. The twin structures were about 25 miles apart. After driving down the narrow lanes to scout out the local community, I spotted a new car parked by the vacated home that I had just stopped by. So I walked up to the front porch to converse with the skinny short fellow, who said he was a real estate agent waiting for a potential tenant. The realtor posted on the sign was a local woman, not this Jewish dude from out of state standing in front of me. To my query - I acted serious as if intending to purchase a home rather than disclose my actual intent of investigative journalism about property fraud and mass arson - the thin Jew responded “560,000 dollars” - certain a fair price for a painted-over dump worth a third that price in the real world. I asked if he was with the agency posted on the real estate sign out front, and he remained silent.

So taking leave I said: “Good Luck because you’re going to need it because California is screwed.” He appeared a bit shaken - as if the Chinese mafia was onto his boss Warren Buffett. It did not take a crystal ball to figure that that creepy realtor from Bill Gate’s neighborhood was behind the Great Arizona realty scam being palmed off to survivors of the Pacific Palisades fire that had just swept the the Los Angeles coast between Santa Monica and Topanga Canyon. In collusion with Governor Gavin “Nuisance” Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass of Scientology, some of those blaze survivors would probably soon be offered a land buyout of maybe a quarter-million with a pat on the butt to try out the housing market in Arizona. That scenario would account for the official four-year delay prior in rebuilding the Pacific Palisades.

The big money from that illicit fire drill - likely deliberate arson on a huge scale - can be expected to come from re-subdivision of that seaside landscape into much larger lots for gigantic ocean-view mansions to be sold to wealthy foreigners from Asia and Europe seeking a piece of the L.A. dream. Being a former Angelino, my immediate reaction to news footage of the fires along with the Altadena blaze was: “This is another realty arson like the many before, another murderous crime at the expense of local families.” A jaunt to Arizona proved my instincts to be spot on - not that it takes genius to smell the stench of a property scam. Perhaps because Buffett is nearing the age of embalmnent like a senile Egyptian Pharoah, it’s “insensitive” and obviously disrespectful of me to dredge up his deviant role in the Nebraska Boy’s Town scandal. “Karma Comes Back” - with a vengeance - dear Warren. And in any case your wastrel time on Earth is about to be rolled up and slid into an eternal vault. So let’s hope the mortuary resells your plot of ground to another gullible buyer! Good-by and good riddance, Ye Sage of Omaha!

The Future of Forestry

Clownish swindlers from the West Coast, however, wer not my main purpose for traveling in Arizona. The more compelling reason was to escape desert dust storms. Yet the journey stirred my interest in the poor condition of western forests due to often-misguided schemes of the U.S. Forest Service and the real-estate obsession of Gov. Katie Hobbs and her Scottsdale real-estate sorority. The arid forested mountains of eastern Arizona are strikingly reminiscent to my past sojourn in the arid Chichibu limestone region north of Tokyo. Coaxing new growth in such arid places requires techniques never taught in forestry programs nor by the predatory lumber industry. The coming disbandment of the U.S. Forest Service could bring on the final phase of desertification of the West - or alternatively proper care for those woods could result in a revival of the great American forests of our childhood.

What really inspire this long-delayed interest are my childhood memories of cubs and mother bears swarming my family car in Yosemite when the forests were pristine and running waters abundant. Only recently did I discover that Smokey the Bear was actually a resident of Lincoln County, New Mexico. Which goes to show: What you don’t know could save you. After standing in front of Smokey’s granite slab tomb - I realized that a childhood fantasy could eventually be the culmination of a life worth living - and that notion came true on a narrow plateau with many hundred miles of viewing pristine forests stretching across New Mexico and Arizona borderland - without a building or any human presence in sight over this panorama of real America, once beheld by native tribes and astonished settlers just a couple of centuries ago. The limestone shelf with a view was along the high-ridge route of the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in the 16th Century on his mythic and futile search for the fabulously wealthy Indian “cities of Cibola.” The illusion is sometimes worth more than infinite troves of gold.

Soon thereafter in the reluctant drive back to New Mexico, I at last reached the end of journey - massive mountains stripped of all trees and mined for copper, the work of man and money creating a permanent death zone. And those contrasting environments - nature full of life and man-made death - are the real choice ahead of us Republican and Democrat, native born and immigrant, elite and humble: America the Beautiful or Hell on Earth. My vote is for Smokey the Bear.