Eyeball a map of New Mexico’s massive Gila National Forest and, off to the southwest of the Gila’s main body, you will see a detached section of green. At the heart of this detached swath of forest lie the Burro Mountains, which consist of three side-by-side 8,000-foot summits that, in loftier realms would be considered modest at best. Hereabouts in Gila Country, they are the mountains of home, a range visible from many miles away as you’re driving up from Tucson or the remote vastness of the Bootheel.

Through the Burro Mountains passes a section of the 3,100-mile-long Continental Divide National Scenic Trail as it winds it way between the Mexican and Canadian borders. The CDNST has since its legal establishment in 1978 consisted in these parts of a mismatched hodgepodge of single-track segments interspersed with rutted jeep tracks, washboardy dirt roads and even long segments of paved highway.

The powers that be at the Gila National Forest have never been, and will never be, inclined toward promoting the outdoor recreational opportunities offered up in spades within the Gila’s 3.3 million acres. Those powers that be have ever been, and ever will be, more focused on the needs and wants of the various extractive industries, mostly those centered upon bovines. Frustrating as this operational reality can be for those of us disinclined to interface with denuded, erosion-prone riparian zones, for many people who have grown tired of the cancer-like growth of the outdoor recreation industry that defines so many otherwise attractive places in the West, this lack of focus on trails and trail maintenance and the aggressive promotion of such is an acceptable trade-off. While we may have to slalom our way through endless piles of stinking, fly-infested cow caca, we rarely have to slalom our way through hordes of mountain bikers and gaggles of peak-baggers so focused upon their pursuits that they are unable to see the forest for the trees.

The Burro Mountains historically have been trail free. And I mean that in the absolute sense. For most of the time I have called this neck of the woods home, there was nary a millimeter of true trail through the Burros. There are vestiges of old logging roads and informal stock driveways, historic remnants of the mining activity that forever defined this mineral-rich area, and serving the transportation needs of the ranchers whose livestock still roam throughout the dry washes and cactus-covered ridgelines that form the bulk of the Burros.

Then came the CDNST, or, better stated, then came the administrative edict from the U.S. Forest Service’s higher-ups in D.C., encouraged by the powerful National Forest Foundation, to the various national forests through which the Continental Divide passes to get with the high-profile CDNST program. Thus, the first tentative tracks of the CDNST began to appear in the Burro Mountains. And, thus, the Burro Mountains, long the exclusive domain of ranchers, miners, ATV riders, gun nuts and sundry variations on the bubba theme, started seeing dayhikers, backpackers and, yes, sadly and inevitably, even mountain bikers.

The main section of the CDNST through the Burros followed a toponymically captivating geographic feature named Deadman Canyon, a heavily forested ravine that passes close to Mud Spring, the first natural water source on the entire CDNST if you’re traveling north from the Mexican border, some 10 arid hiking days away. (And, if you’re traveling south, well, Mud Spring is it; from hereon in, you’ll be slaking your thirst at stock tanks.) The CDNST route up Deadman Canyon — one of my favorite hikes — ascends to the 8,035-foot summit of Burro Peak, from where you can observe the heart of the Gila to the north and the magical bleakness of the Chihuahua Desert all the way south into Old Mexico.

Deadman Canyon Trail, despite being part and parcel of the CDNST, has never been heavily maintained. Nor has it ever been heavily traveled. Verily, though I have tromped upon it dozens and dozens of times, never once have I encountered another person, though I have seen plenty of boot prints and, more and more, mountain bike tracks.

Two years ago, as part of a permanent re-route of the CDNST being slowly and methodically (and, I should state, very tastefully) established to bypass the aforementioned sections of rutted jeep tracks, washboardy dirt roads and even long segments of paved highway, the Deadman Canyon section of single-track trail was essentially decommissioned; it is no longer a part of the CDNST. Thus, it is a section of trail in administrative limbo; whatever resources were allocated to maintain it while it was part of the national scenic trail system have been siphoned off to maintain the newly built, permanent sections of the CDNST. Slowly but surely, the Deadman Canyon Trail will whither away, till it likely has its official system status removed entirely.

And, to that I say: Hooray!

Though I suspect I still bushwhack off trail more than most of my back-toting brethren, I am now at an age where I find myself tromping upon tread far more than I used to. This chagrins my increasingly aged and infirmed self to no end, but, well, grim temporal reality, and the impact that reality has had on one’s physiology, is tough to ignore, especially for a person who does most of his hiking not only by his lonesome but in impromptu fashion (read: I do not often inform a responsible party of my itinerary, at least partially because I am not acquainted with many responsible parties, but mainly because, on those rare instances when I actually have an itinerary, I usually don’t know what it is still I’m on the trail and, even then, it’s almost always subject to real-time improvisation). If you are disposed to bushwhack, but are being visited more often than you used to be by Good Sense, the next-best option is unmaintained trail, which basically offers up the best of both backcountry worlds. While the Deadman Canyon Trail is not yet officially unmaintained, it essentially is, and soon will be.

As I said: Hooray!

I went up there with my dog, Casey, a few weeks ago, with the intent of hiking the two miles up to the new CDNST intersection, right below Mud Spring. My eye was caught and my heart sank almost immediately, for tied to trees and bushes and the occasional barbed-wire fence post were strips of lime-green surveyors’ flagging. As we all know, few are the times when surveyors’ flagging arrives on any scene — urban, rural or backcountry — when the result is anything save negative.

This I know more than most, having worked for three different land surveyors in three different states — Virginia, Illinois and New Mexico — during my formative years. Matter of fact, at one time, I seriously considered pursuing surveying as a life-long vocation and likely would have done so were it not for the unavoidable and unfortunate fact that I am essentially numerically illiterate, and, without finely honed math skills, one’s land-surveying advancement opportunities are limited. Still, it was tempting. Out in the woods all day, following in the footsteps of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and many other historic luminaries. Especially during my surveying stint in Virginia, I would often find myself in a red-bricked pre-Revolutionary-War courthouse building searching through parchment documents with words upon them writ in flowery cursive script, telling me that the boundary marker I needed to find was hacked into a sweet gum stump … more than 200 years ago.

It was not just a decided lack of math skills, however, that ultimately waylaid my budding land-surveying career before it ever really got off the ground. The company I worked for in Virginia specialized in carving large farms into subdivisions. Farms that had been owned by the same families for generations were suddenly being hacked into developments with ironic names like Foxhunt Terrace, interlaced by ersatz streets with names like Wildlife Way.

It did not assuage my reaction to spending my days helping the process of eviscerating both the heritage and the ecology of my home county knowing that one of the biggest reasons this process was transpiring was because property taxes were rising in a seeming premeditated fashion so exponentially that many old families had no choice but to sell their acreage. I saw many an old farmer, who had lived his whole life upon the ground where I was working with my cohorts in surveying crime, break down into blubbering convulsions as ancient trees were felled and orchards bulldozed.

Even though I understood full well that many of those farms were, back in the murkiness of history, stolen from local Powhatan Indians and worked with slave labor, it still hurt to see them replaced with the kind of tasteless cookie-cutter commercialism that now defines America.

There was no way to stave the inevitable, and, if I had resigned my position in righteous indignation, someone else would have quickly and gladly stepped in to replace me. But I was not totally impotent; I had the ability to at least serve as a thorn in the side of the development of which I myself was part. Several of my like-minded compadres and I would often sneak back onto the very farms I was helping to slice up late at night, usually on weekends, and usually after having ingested copious amounts of various chemical courage-inducers, with destructive malice in our hearts.

Though I had lived in New Mexico for two years when I returned to my native turf in the Old Dominion for the requisite year back home before casting one’s lot with the West forevermore (yes, there was a woman involved, one who proved both her intelligence and perceptive nature by unceremoniously dumping my ass), I can not remember whether I had at that time read any Edward Abbey. I seriously don’t believe I had, but I might have. Therefore I cannot claim original thinking when it came to my eventual reaction to land surveying, or, more accurately stated, my reaction to the effects of land surveying.

Years later, when I indeed interfaced with Abbey and his self-congratulatory rantings regarding land surveying, where he boasted lamely about removing surveyors’ stakes, I remember thinking how much of a fucking amateur he was. The process of simply removing the more obvious evidence left behind by land surveyors, while certainly causing inconvenience, is nothing more than a pain in the ass that is generally pretty easily discovered and rectified by simply recreating, via the various control hubs located throughout any project being surveyed, that which was removed by recreational monkey-wrenchers. Matter of fact, a large part of the strategy involved with any large-scale surveying project is building in means by which disturbed markers can easily be relocated.

The true skill in fucking up a land-surveying project comes from being able to locate those control stations, the points from which all other parts of the project are measured, the points from which projects are made relative to the rest of the surveyed world. Had Abbey done his homework, he would have known that, if you want to fuck with the efforts of land surveyors and, by extension, the projects they are working on, very un-Abbey-esque subtlety is the best path.

You need to have an eye for the mechanics of a project to locate the control stations. The company I worked for in Colonial Virginia used 2×2 wooden stakes with a flooring tack nailed into the top. The entire project was measured from not just that tack, but the very center of that tack. In most larger surveying projects, you’re measuring to one-one-hundredth of a foot. In construction surveying, that becomes one-one-thousandth. It does not take much of a tweak of a control hub to cause exponential increases in mis-measurement throughout a project. Matter of fact, if you move a control stake too far, the fact that it has been tampered with will be obvious to the instrument operator next time he or she sets the theodolite up. Move a control hub a mere inch and you can wreak havoc upon a project, making it so property lines are established incorrectly. If you manage to find more than one control station, your efforts at land preservation can translate down the development road to having buildings constructed with property lines running through the middle of them. You can make it so people’s lives are impacted by litigation for years, maybe even decades, to come.

For most of the year I worked land surveying on Colonial Virginia, it was not uncommon for me and several of my co-employees to visit by night the very sites we worked on by day. I knew full well that there were don’t-bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you-type moral implications at play during our nocturnal efforts to set wrongs aright, even if only temporarily. But, as far as I was concerned, those moral implications were clearly mitigated by the fact that the hand that then fed me fed me to the tune of literally $3 an hour. That hand also demanded considerable overtime work on weekends, and steadfastly refused to pay time-and-a-half. So, basically, well, fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

Though I knew I would be long gone before the eventual ramifications of our modest efforts reached fruition — if indeed they ever would — I used to lie in bed in my shithole trailer, smirking at the thought of civil court cases raging for generations because of the well-intentioned efforts of a handful of stoned reprobates. I realized at that point how much fun it was to fuck with The Man for no reason more intellectually complex than the sheer joy of fucking with The Man.

Still, the rampant development of an area that had been hyper-rural throughout its long and storied history — this being the county where Pocahantas was born, this being the county where George Washington quartered his troops before the Battle of Yorktown, this being the heart of the bloody Peninsula Campaign in the Civil War — continued pretty much unabated. The bulldozers always arrived on schedule, plowing down verdant semi-tropical hardwood forests for which, when push came to shove, I had very little in the way of emotional attachment. That part of the country was simply not My Place.

The Gila National Forest of southwest New Mexico, where I first arrived sight unseen in July 1976 — even as the tall ships were descending upon the east coast in full Bicentennial fervor — on the other hand is My Place. Always has been, even before I was born, and always will be, even after I am long gone.

During an especially lean fiscal time, I became employed by a land surveyor in Gila Country, part-time in the late-’70s. By this time, I know for a fact I had read several of Abbey’s books, and I’m sure his observations about recreational surveyors’ stake removal had been processed through my rudimentary mental philosophical filters. But I never once even pondered the notion of reprising my Colonial Virginia nocturnal shenanigans. For one thing, the man I worked for was one of the truly great people it has ever been my pleasure to associate with professionally. For another, we worked mainly in the unpeopled Mimbres Valley, where, to my still-wet-behind-the-ears eyes, there was absolutely no chance whatsoever of bulldozers plowing the juniper and piñon forests under. Well, I was wrong about that, as the Mimbres Valley — the very area I helped survey — is now home to endless vistas filled with the tackiest low-level platted half-acre-lot, manufactured housing subdivisions imaginable.

Shit!

I have not worked in the land-surveying profession for more than 30 years now. For a while, I would occasionally stop to move or remove sakes or property markers that had spouted in places where they ought not have, but, like most of my youthful fancies, those efforts trickled away as my life moved inexorably closer to a mainstream that at this point pretty much defines it.

What has definitely not trickled away has been my ability to notice surveyors’ flagging and to wince accordingly.

The flagging up Deadman Canyon began at the trailhead and continued at regular intervals along the trail as it made it way up toward Mud Spring, the CDNST intersection and, eventually, the summit of Burro Peak. The flagging was not fresh, but neither was it stale. It had not yet become brittle, but its color had started to fade a bit. I estimated that it had been placed along the trail a few months prior, meaning mid-winter.

I could not for the life of me ascertain its function.

Though the flagging followed the trail exactly, I doubt it was placed to delineate the trail’s route, as it is still very obvious, despite the fact that its status, like I said earlier, had been downgraded.

I briefly considered that the flagging was placed at spots where someone — perhaps a Forest Service trail crew employee — wanted GPS coordinates taken so the trail could be entered into a database. But the flagging’s placement did not support that theory.

Had a Forest Service trail crew come through to mark the trail corridor for a future re-design, there would have been sections that ventured from the more poorly designed sections of the existing tread. There were none of those.

Besides, most Forest Service trail crews work in the summer, not the dead of winter.

Perhaps a local senior citizen hiking group had planned a trek upon this section of trail and, to ensure that those members of the group who did not possess enough in the way of backcountry navigation skills to stay upon obvious tread and/or to stay with the group, some well-meaning person had placed copious quantities of surveyors’ flagging along the route, like bright-green breadcrumbs. Perhaps that person did not get around to coming back to retrieve the flagging. Or maybe someone else was supposed to do just that and he or she forgot, or thought someone else was supposed to do it.

Then it dawned on me that, possibly, the Deadman Canyon Trail was not being downgraded at all. Possibly, this flagging was indicative of a decision to actually upgrade it, to make it more easily passable for senior citizen hiking groups and mountain bikers. Perhaps the plan was to brush it out, to widen it, to add more signage.

Yikes!

No matter its genesis, I looked upon the flagging adorning the Deadman Canyon Trail as nothing more than litter. And I hate litter. So I started pulling it off every tree, every bush, every barbed-wire fencepost upon which it fluttered in the springtime wind.

I thought that, maybe, as a result of my efforts, some Forest Service person was going to have to come back in to re-flag the trail. But, I figured, if that’s the worst thing that happens to that Forest Service employee, his or her life ain’t half bad.

Then I thought that perhaps my de-flagging marathon might result in some hapless senior citizen getting directionally discombobulated. Maybe that person — someone’s kindly grandfather — would die an agonizing death alone in the woods as a result. But, I figured that, well, if you need flagging to stay on course in the woods, you ought not venture out of town. And, if you get lost, you have the opportunity to learn many lessons not available to those who remain found.

Soon, both pockets began to bulge with flagging. I had to start transferring the large wads of removed surveyors’ flagging into my daypack, while, likewise, soon began to bulge. There was a lot of flagging.

At one point, the Deadman Canyon Trail leaves the canyon proper and ascends steeply up a hillside. It re-connects with the canyon about a half-mile farther up. Trails are often designed thus in the Southwest to bypass box canyons, places that are often too rocky or precipitous to safely traverse. I had always wanted to venture up that section of canyon bypassed by the trail, and this seemed as good a time as any. I could see that the flagging was still lining the trail as it went up the hill. I figured, if I were indeed able to successfully negotiate the canyon bottom up to the point where it reconnected with the trail, I’d be able to collect the flagging on the way back down. And, if there was some sort of impassable obstacle, I would simply turn around and proceed up the hill on the trail — meaning I would collect the flagging then. And, if what I found on my bushwhack up the canyon was the cause of its ominous appellation then, somewhere in the future, someone — maybe a hunter or a rancher — would stumble upon a corpse whose pockets were inexplicably filled with surveyors’ flagging.

No sooner had I left the trail and started making my way up the trail-less canyon bottom than I spied, of all disheartening things, bright green surveyors’ flagging lining a route that ended up being easily passable. This made no sense and countered whatever innocent explanations I had mentally conjured earlier about the origins of this goddamned flagging epidemic. Some cocksucker was clearly up to no good! Maybe this flagging had nothing whatsoever to do with the trail itself. Maybe its proximity to the trail was mere coincidence. Maybe there was a logging operation in the planning stages.

Shit!

I removed every single strip of flagging between the CDNST junction and the Deadman Canyon Trailhead. It ended up filling to brimming one of those kinds of plastic grocery bags that are now being categorically dissed by people trying to save the world.

I will likely never know who placed that flagging along Deadman Canyon. Or why. Until and unless, that is, I show up one day, ready to hike to Mud Spring or Burro Peak, only to discover chainsaws or bulldozers or some other manifestation of the forces of development evil. Maybe I will then overhear a worker castigating the motherfucker who removed the flagging that was placed to orient their destructive activities.

We all eventually reach an age when we realize, to steal a line from “V for Vendetta,” that almost every change you have seen in your life is for the worse. You find yourself indoctrinated by the concept of the inevitable. You find yourself spending more time trying to figure out how to dodge the inevitable rather than trying to figure out how to confront it. You find yourself replaying the parable of the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the leaking dyke. You find yourself thinking that bulldozers are the fated norm.

You go to meetings. You write letters to the editor. You sign petitions. You send money to MoveOn.org. You subscribe to Mother Jones. You re-read Edward Abbey. You shake your skinny fist at the darkening sky. You campaign for the least-fucked-up asshole on the ballot, only to learn that he or she is 10 times more fucked up than you ever thought possible. And still trees get mowed down. And tacky cookie-cutter subdivisions fill places like the Mimbres Valley. And pristine swaths of desert get plowed under to make room for massive solar arrays so we can have our cake and eat it too. And the rainforest gets plowed under to make room for “sustainable” sugarcane plantations so we can continue to smugly drive our goddamned cars to the goddamned trailhead. And you are told over and over that you can’t stop progress. And you get labeled a rebel or a malcontent or an idealist or an eco-terrorist (all of which are compliments in my book) or, worst, naïve if you respond that destruction is not progress and that, yes, fuck you, we can stop it. But you know that, in order to stop that which the agents of destruction call progress, you might have to condone monstrous acts, and maybe even become a monster yourself. And you sometimes get to thinking as you’re hiking alone out in the quiet woods that maybe the only hope left for the world is a total collapse of civilization. But then you think, fuck, as my wife says, in most ways, that would be a flat-out pain in the ass. You realize you have neither the stones nor the energy to go down that path. You realize you have neither the stones nor the energy to burn shit down and to blow shit up and to maybe even take a life in the name of a greater good that most of us could not define if our lives depend on it. You realize you no longer have the courage of your convictions. Maybe you never did. Probably you never did.

So, you’re left with the flaccid act of removing surveyors’ flagging from the side of a trail hardly anyone ever visits. Not out of hope, but out of a frustration that now defines your life clear down to its mortal core.

The baby raccoon, in the care of Gila Wildlife Rescue, before being released back into the wild.

The town is which I dwell is not what you would call prosperous. It’s not as though we have to slalom through bloated-bellied toddlers holding begging bowls as we make our way between the Food Co-op and the Buffalo Bar or anything, but, still, the stench of affluence that defines so many places I have called home does not often waft its way into our social main stream. To wit (and germanely so): When I moved back to Silver City in 2006 after 24 years in Colorado, I worked part-time for one of the local daily papers. Given my past experience with, and my continued interest in, such matters, I volunteered to cover a meeting of the local trails advisory committee that pretty much served as a poster child for the way things sometimes work (and sometimes don’t) in New Mexico, because the main purpose of this particular meeting was to attempt to determine if the trails advisory committee actually legally existed, an exercise in fundamental political theory worthy of contemplation since, if the committee did not in fact legally exist, then how could it convene a meeting of itself to settle that particular matter?

Not long after the meeting was called to order, the group came to the conclusion that, since there were in fact a dozen or so people gathered around a table having themselves a confab that appeared to everyone in attendance to be an actual meeting, the committee must indeed exist, else there would be no one there and, thus, there would be no meeting. This is hard logic to counter. We meet, therefore we are.

Anyhow, given that the committee felt it indeed existed, it jumped headlong into a fairly extensive agenda (whoever put the agenda together was assuredly an optimist, given the tenuous legal standing on the committee), which was something of a disappointment to yours truly, a person who has sat through something on the order of 23,000 meetings during his small-town journalism career. I had hoped the committee would declare at the outset that it did not in fact legally exist, then immediately adjourn, a course of action that would have given me a great article for the paper, without having to actually sit through what turned out to be an unnecessarily long-winded exercise in fundamental democracy. No such luck. Story of my life.

One of the agenda items was a discussion about a lack of signage at the northern terminus of the San Vicente Trail, a critical component of Silver City’s very nice open-space system. The signage-in-question would cost something on the order of $37. For seemingly 75 hours, there was much in the way of head-scratching regarding where on earth the committee was possibly going to come up with $37. A bake sale? Apply to the federal government for a grant? Importing a cadre of bloated-bellied toddlers to walk around town with begging bowls? This discussion went on long enough that I came within a whisker of jumping up (verily, it took every amount of deference to the journalistic code of not investing oneself into the middle of a story where one did not belong to resist so doing), pulling my checkbook out and saying that, if the group would promise to pull the goddamned plug on the goddamned meeting right then and goddamned there so I could wander downtown for a beer, I would personally fund the acquisition of the goddamned trailhead sign. Verily, I would personally endow the entire trail-sign acquisition fund forevermore.

This was indeed a sobering reminder that I was no longer in Kansas, or, more accurately, the heart of Colorado’s prosperous (at least on the surface) ski country. During the last three years I dwelled in Summit County — the busiest ski county in the country — it was my pleasure to serve upon the Frisco Recreation, Open Space and Trails Committee, an entity that has since been dissolved, for the kinds of political reasons that will one day be a component of the armed revolution that will someday come. Though the acquisition of open space formed but one component of our operational mandate, we of course, given our committee’s proper name and all, spent considerable time dialoguing about that subject. And that dialoguing was almost always centered upon the fact that we had literally several million dollars worth of dedicated sales-tax-generated funds earmarked for open space acquisition gathering dust in the bank, because, in fact, there was little in the way of procurable open space left within the town limits upon which we could spend that earmarked cash, cash that could legally be spent on nothing except the acquisition of open space.

It is quite a jolt, let me tell you, to move from a place with several million dollars of open-space funds in the bank that could not be spent because of a lack of procurable open space to a place that has trouble financing a single trail sign.

One day last summer, I found myself at the very trailhead where now can be found that $37 sign. (I do not know by what means the necessary coinage was eventually raised, but, like it often does in New Mexico, a necessary thing was accomplished, as if by magic.) Though we are all justifiably proud of the San Vicente Trail, the trailhead itself is not the nicest place in the world. Located a couple blocks from downtown, adjacent a facility that sells gasoline in bulk to smoke-spewing dumptrucks, the trail follows the only legitimate riparian habitat for near-bouts 20 miles. But, while Ketchum has the Big Wood River flowing through its middle, and while Moab has Mill Creek, and while Breckenridge has the Blue River, Silver City has San Vicente Arroyo, better known as the Big Ditch, a “water feature” that bisects our humble hamlet because, about 100 years ago, a series or flash floods, expedited by over-logging the surrounding hillsides, roared through town, washing away Main Street and leaving us with, as its names indicates, a large swath of ditch that, in addition to providing us with beaucoup shade-making cottonwood trees, gives our sanitation department a perfect place to release water after it has passed through our sewage treatment plant. Ergo: Most of the water that makes its way down San Vicente Arroyo is not what you would call straight from a pristine alpine tarn. It is, rather, primarily a malodorous amalgam of H2O, e. coli and various other forms of detritus.

In addition, given its proximity to downtown, and the fact that there are a couple of fairly deep pools right near the trailhead, the northern terminus of the San Vicente Trail is — how to say this tactfully? — oft-visited by members of Silver City’s social fringe, a demographic that does not seem offended by the placement of broken glass and other forms of trash upon the ground.

Also, to add a little icing to this already unaesthetic picture, the San Vicente Trailhead lies directly under a four-lane overpass for New Mexico Highway 90 as it makes its way south toward Lordsburg.

Though I paint a less-than-flattering picture here, like I said, in this parched part of the country, the San Vicente Trail provides the only in-town place where, during the heat of the summer months, one can take one’s dog for a dip. Besides, once you get away from the undeniably unpleasant trailhead/parking lot area, the trail itself is very pleasant and, also like I said, something of which Silver Citians are justifiably proud.

Still, one does not usually dally at the trailhead. Verily, one usually makes haste from the parking area to points downstream as rapidly as one’s size-11s will move one.

Which is exactly what I was doing that otherwise normal day last summer. Just as I was passing beneath the rattling overpass, though, a sound stopped me dead in my tracks. Though I had not heard that sound in almost four decades, I knew instantly what it was. It took me a few moments to locate the source: A baby raccoon running back and forth on the edge of the overpass — a full 50 feet above my head — searching frantically for a mother that was nowhere to be seen.

The overpass above the San Vicente Trailhead from which the raccoon was rescued. The light post sticking out was where the raccoon decided to retreat while I was trying to save its dumb ass.

The reason I was able to instantly identify the baby raccoon’s cry was that, during the last months of the summer preceding my senior year in high school, I raised a baby raccoon, almost from birth. Even as I raced back to my 4Runner to drive to the top of the overpass above the San Vicente Trailhead, my mind reluctantly journeyed back to 1973, to the fetid swamp country of Gloucester County, Virginia — the very county, I might herein add, where the word “raccoon” entered the English language, via a bastardization of a Powhatan Indian word for “one who rubs and scrubs with its hands.” I had received a phone call from a close friend informing me that she had come upon a female raccoon that had been run over and killed. Still clinging to its mother’s lifeless body was a lone infant. My friend asked if I would be interested in becoming a foster parent to the baby. I was. I did.

This was not my family’s first encounter with Procyon lotor. A few years prior, my stepfather had returned home with a mostly grown male (how and why he did so, I do not recollect) that he immediately and, come to find out, ill advisedly, let loose in the house before even rudimentary orientation was established. The raccoon, which we named (of course) Rascal, made his speedy way behind some half-installed paneling lining our den. All attempts (mostly of the food-based variety) to coax Rascal out from his cozy hiding place were met with growls, snarls and bared teeth. Rascal lived in that wall for most of a week, before both stench and concern for his health and well-being forced my stepfather to come to a hard decision: He had no other choice but to command yours truly to reach behind that paneling to grab Rascal by his head and pull him out.

Despite the fact that I was wearing the thickest work gloves we could find, Rascal still managed to sink a full row of razor-sharp dentition into my right index finger. Fortunately, those teeth were sunk far enough that I was able to extract him merely by pulling my hand out with a combination of pain and alacrity. Sadly, what we then found ourselves dealing with was not a raccoon hiding behind some half-installed paneling, but, rather, a raccoon dangling stubbornly from a bleeding digit born by a yowling high school student. No matter how hard I shook my hand — and, please believe me when I say that I was shaking said hand as aggressively as possible — Bandit, who obviously bore some pit bull genes, would not release his grip. So, I carried him outside, where, with freedom within reach, he let go and ran off.

Thing is, he did not run off completely. Rather, he lived for more than a year in and around one of our barns, where, daily, I brought him a water and dog food. Though Bandit never hid when I approached, the only time he ever let me touch him was the time he showed up sporting a horrible injury to his side. I have no idea how the injury came about, but it looked as though he had been shot with an arrow and the arrow was then yanked out. The wound was so large and deep, it actually exposed some of his organs. I assumed he was not long for this life. Knowing not what else to do, I applied topical ointment to the wound several times a day for more than a week and added some antibiotics to his dog food. Slowly and surely, the wound healed completely, showing, I guess, the resiliency of the species.

Then, one day, Rascal was gone, and did not return.

You would think that experience might well have weaned us off whatever raccoon-as-pet fantasies we might have harbored.

But, when my friend called asking if I would consider taking in an orphaned raccoon infant, I jumped in the car and drove rapidly to a place called Naxera.

She filled less than half the palm of my hand. She looked nothing like a mature member of her species. Her nose was disproportionately long and her ring-less tail disproportionately short. She had fragile claws that did not yet retract. I immediately took her to the veterinarian who lived on the farm next door. This was an old-school vet, one who tended to horses and cows and maybe the occasional bird dog if it was lying at death’s doorstep. He had never before dealt with an orphaned raccoon and clearly did not comprehend why anyone would be interested in taking upon himself the task I then faced. But he always did think I was a bit odd. Nevertheless, he mixed up a formulaic concoction, gave me a soft eyedropper and guesstimated that I would have to feed the young beast every few hours, day and night. He also told me that I would have to help the diminutive, helpless creature with both digestive and urinary elimination procedures, which, the smirking vet said, could be sufficiently accomplished by lightly rubbing a warm, wet washcloth over the necessary areas, mimicking the mother’s unenviable task of coaxing piss and shit from her offsprings’ most-foul orifices via very focused tongue action — yet another reason to strive to live a karmically positive life, lest one get reincarnated as a creature required by the shortcomings of the evolutionary process to pass time thusly.

I undertook the business of, first, saving, then raising, this orphaned animal with a focused zeal I had rarely experienced in my short life. This was less a personality transformation for my ADD self than it was a means by which my attention could be positively diverted from a fractured home life that can best be described as a domestic train wreck feedback loop. My entire senior year, my mom was in and out of a mental institution, which did not add anything resembling stability to what was already a violently anarchistic household. But, in the midst of ceaseless familial fireworks, here I had this beautiful little raccoon baby, which I named “Sloth,” because of the way she used to dangle upside-down from my index finger even before her eyes opened.

Sloth grew to be a great pet, half like a kitten and half like a puppy. She followed me around better than our dog, Beebee (named after the size of her brain) did. She knew her name and answered to it. She also learned the command to sit. I took Sloth camping. I took her to the beach. We went for walks through the thick woods that bounded our farm in every direction. I would put pieces of turkey between my incisors and she would try to use her dexterous little fingers to get at the meat, which proved to be a great source of amusement for me and my perpetually stoned compadres. And, whenever she did not know where I was, she made the exact same frantic sound I heard coming from the overpass above the San Vicente Trailhead.

Even after I was summarily booted out of the house well before I even graduated high school, Sloth remained a loyal family pet. After I left, though, she began visiting the woods on her own. She always came back, but her treks through the dense semi-tropical hardwood forests became longer of duration, until, at last, she was spending more time in the wild than she was in civilization, something I totally understand and respect. Somehow, even though she had never received any species-specific survival training from the boy who rescued and raised her, she learned how to be a raccoon. Evidently, she had made the acquaintance of some fellow procyon lotors who had shown her the necessary ropes for living a wild life.

One day, my mother called and told me Sloth had come home with a full litter of her own, six babies, of which she was evidently extremely proud. She wanted to show her raccoon family off to her human family. I dashed over, but, by the time I arrived, Sloth had already returned to her home in the forest and I never did get to see her brood.

The last time I saw Sloth was when I was home from college in New Mexico for Christmas. She stopped by and I placed some turkey between my incisors to see if she remembered our old game. She did. But, by then, she was much closer to my mom and sister than she was to me, which stung a bit, to be sure.

My sister, my mom and Sloth at the family farm in Virginia.

Later that year, back in New Mexico, I got a call from my mom during, of all things, the middle of an acid-infused strip-poker game. She told me Sloth had been getting sicker and sicker, though no one knew the nature of the malady. There was concern she might be rabid. There was a pause on the phone line, and I knew Sloth was dead. I also knew without being told that her end came from a .22-calibre rifle borne by my stepfather. I was so crestfallen, I asked my half-dressed, tripping partying chums to re-clothe and move on.

And here, in the very same town where I got the bad news about Sloth, I found myself four decades later racing to save yet another raccoon baby! I would not fail!

Sadly, I could not park upon the overpass itself, so I had to drive up the road a bit, where I pulled over on the shoulder and left my dog — who was at that point clearly wondering what had become of the walk we were about to take along the San Vicente Trail — to sit alone in a car parked on a shadeless highway shoulder in the middle of the day in the middle of summer in New Mexico. It was very hot. I grabbed a blanket out of my 4Runner, then dashed back to the overpass, where I quickly located the raccoon, which was not hard, given the high-volumed nature of its pitiful cries.

It quickly became apparent that my rescue attempts were going to be more complicated than I had hoped. This raccoon was probably three or four months old — big enough to be both nimble and to have a full rack of chompers. It was also clearly in physiological distress. At my approach, it retreated to the farthest recesses of an exposed concrete support beam, where it swayed back and forth, as if ready to faint, and, twice, had to react fast to prevent itself from falling down to the very trailhead I had just left.

I wrapped the blanket around my hand and reached slowly to try to grab the little guy, but, each time I did, it retreated and came within a whisker of plummeting to its assured death. It huddled close to the edge, shivering and whining. I pulled out my cell phone and placed a quick call to 911 to report a raccoon in distress. There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “A what in what?” came the dumbfounded response. The 911 lady referred me to central dispatch, which I called in hopes of getting Silver City’s Animal Control Officer on the scene. “Sorry,” I was told, “but he only deals with dogs and cats.” Given the tenseness of the scene, and the severity of the midsummer heat and sun, my fuse was short. “I’m a taxpayer and I need the Animal Control Officer NOW!!!” I shouted. “As I said, sir, he won’t respond to a raccoon-in-distress call. If you think we should change our animal control policy, you can voice your concerns to the town council. Or you could call the New Mexico Game & Fish Department.” I thought my head was going to explode.

So, I started calling friends. Cat was in Idaho. No answer from Julie. Jen, Jaxon and Shawn were at work. No answer from Jay.

My frustration level was red-lining. I spend a lot of time — too much, to be sure — hosting a mental wrestling match between Colorado and New Mexico, and this was one instance when Colorado was winning. Had I placed a call to central dispatch in Summit County reporting a raccoon in distress, I would have been patched through to one of the best animal shelters in the Rockies, and help would have been sent. I thought as I was standing there on the overpass, were I still in Frisco, I could have dialed any random 668-prefixed phone number and throngs of would-be raccoon rescuers would have descended upon the scene so intensely, people would have been elbowing each other out of the way. (I know this may sound a tad over the top, but, at almost exactly the same time I was trying to rescue the raccoon from the overpass, a group of people in Colorado were in the process of rescuing a dog that had been abandoned by its owner at 13,000 feet on Mount Bierstadt. I guess I should add that the Clear Creek County Search & Rescue Team had declined to participate in the rescue of the poor cur, but in Summit County, where I lived, the local SAR group had helped on numerous animal-in-distress-in-the-backcountry calls over the years.)

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21314292/volunteers-rescue-dog-from-top-mount-bierstadt

I finally get through to my animal-loving friend Luan, who was, sadly, unable to come help me. But she said she would try to get in touch with Dennis and Denise Miller.

Those were some seriously soothing words. Dennis and Denise Miller run an outfit called Gila Wildlife Rescue, which, as its name would indicate, is in the (non-profit) business of taking in animals of every phylum and genus imaginable, rehabilitating them and, hopefully, releasing them back into the wild.

http://www.desertexposure.com/200508/200508_wildlife_rescue.html

I am embarrassed to report that I do not know much about Denise, except that she we raised in silver city and is an equal partner in Gila Wildlife Recue. Dennis I know a bit better. He is a retired biology professor at Western New Mexico University (my alma mater) whose father was also a biology professor at WNMU. He is held is such high and universal esteem hereabouts that he is the final arbiter of all local questions critter related. His expertise cuts across all demographic chasms in these parts. There was one time, for instance, when a buddy of mine thought that he might have been bitten by a brown recluse spider, a concern that caused much in the way of gab at the watering hole I visit most often. There were stories about brown recluse nests and relatives being attacked by veritable herds of this particular loathsome species of arachnid. People related how such-and-such a relative over in Hanover or up on Mangas had come within a whisker of dying after having been bit by a brown recluse.

My buddy, the one who thought he had been bitten, talked to Dennis Miller about it. Dennis told him that brown recluses do not live this far north. That was it. Rugged cowboys and macho bikers and arrogant academics, who, scant minutes before, were relating indisputable stories about epidemic brown recluse infestation in the very town in which we were then sitting, upon hearing that Dennis Miller had rained upon their venomous parade, meekly admitted the obvious errors of their biological ways, meekly saying things like, “Well, must have been some other kind of spider” and “If Dennis says there aren’t brown recluses this far north, then I beg everyone’s pardon for being so wrong.”

A few years back, Silver City played host to a major gathering of, of all strange and maybe even frightening social things, the International Dipterology Society. For a full week, our highways, byways and pathways were populated by scads of extraordinarily geekish individuals walking around wielding big nets, trying to gather specimens from what, we all came to learn, was Gila Country’s impressive array of fly species. One night, several of us found ourselves sitting on barstools next to one of these dipterologists, a professor from Quebec. We tried to make the best fly-based chitchat we could, but, let me tell you, it was a stretch to come up with anything worthy of a professor enthusiastic enough to travel all the way to Southwest New Mexico to study flies.

Grasping at conversational straws, I told him that, if it’s flies he’s after, he ought to stop by the town’s dog park, which, given the sheer quantity of perro caca, is as fly infested as a place could possibly be. Thing is, we told our suddenly perked-up Quebecois fly aficionado, almost all the flies at the local dog park are basic houseflies. “I’ve never known houseflies to bite like the ones at our dog park,” I stated, hoping to add something salient to a fly-based discussion that was fast fizzling. “Well, houseflies don’t bite,” the Quebecois dipterologist stated, to much reactive mirth. “Well, maybe they don’t bite in Quebec, but they sure as hell bite here!” I replied to universal acclamation. This went on for a few minutes, the local peanut gallery, proving our point by way of legs adorned with housefly bites, and a man who, for reasons I will never comprehend, makes his living studying flies.

A few weeks later, I related this conversation to Dennis Miller. “Houseflies don’t bite,” he said, soberly. “What’s biting you at the dog park must be some sort of horsefly that looks like a house fly.”

And that was that: houseflies apparently DON’T bite! I’ll just shut the fuck up about flies right now.

This was the guy my friend Luan was trying to get hold of as I stood there on the overpass trying to rescue a stranded baby raccoon that was within an inch of splatting into a nasty, trash-filled trailhead parking lot 50 feet below.

After a few minutes, Luan called back. She could reach neither Dennis nor Denise, but she left them a message. Luan wished me the best of luck.

Fuck!

What to do now?

The baby raccoon was starting to teeter above the void even more.

There was only one course of immediate action: I picked up the blanket and, without hesitation, lunged at the raccoon, grabbed it firmly within the confines of the blanket, yanked the squirming mass away from the looming drop-off, wrapped the blanket around it several times in hopes of preventing escape and, with arms extended in front of me enough that, should its little noggin pop out, it would not be able to latch any dentition onto my face, waddled back to my parked vehicle, during which time the planlessness part of my plan became glaringly obvious. Somehow or another, I was going to have to get the raccoon into my 4Runner, a course of action made more complicated by the fact that I did not right then have any extra hands to spare, as both were fully occupied in the task of keeping one very motivated raccoon within the confines of a flimsy blanket.

Moreover, assuming I could figure out a way to open one of the doors, it occurred to me that I had no institutionalized means of stowing the squirming creature in my tentative possession. The temptation to simply toss it into the confines of my vehicle was short-lived, as, within that vehicle, as I indicated earlier, was 50 pounds of drooling Lab mix. What my dog’s reaction would have been to having an infant raccoon introduced unfettered into the 4Runner, who can say? Additionally, it’s my guess that the raccoon would not have reacted well to finding itself nose to nose with 50 pounds of curious canine. Given the way things had been progressing thus far, I envisioned a yowling dog face with a raccoon aggressively attached to it, a la the alien in, well, “Alien.”

But, first things first. How to get the goddamned rear hatch open? While firming up my grasp on the diminutive contortionist between my hands, I extended a pinky under the rear-hatch latch and tried with all my pinky-based might to get it to release. It refused to budge. So, I called in digit reinforcements by ordering my right ring finger to aid and abet my attempts. Sadly, at that point, my grip on the flailing raccoon was now down 20 percent. I could feel my already tenuous hold beginning to slip. So, I yet again went for broke, completely releasing my entire right hand from the flailing procyon, opening the tailgate, then rapidly re-grasping the animal before it could escape. At that point, my dog, which had been incarcerated inside the sweltering vehicle for more than hour, decided now would be a great time to leap out onto the side of a very busy highway. Thus, I now had to deal with a dog, who was wondering mightily what on earth her master had within his grasp, and a raccoon, who was obviously wondering mightily about many matters, including, but not limited to, the proximate dog that it could surely by then smell, if not see.

I had to, using solely verbal commands, herd the excited/confused/not-entirely-bright dog back into the 4Runner, getting her to leap not only into the back but over the back of the back seat so as to leave the far back un-animaled, whilst I concocted a transport plan utilizing a stunningly short supply of available appropriate materials. Only then did I realize that I had in the back of my ride an empty box that had, the very day before, been filled with Mountain Gazettes, which had since been distributed around town. Joy! Thing is, I had nothing to cover that box with, at least nothing able to withhold the inevitable escape attempts I would surely be facing once I placed the raccoon within those cardboard walls. I walked around and viewed sitting in the passenger seat hope for a positive outcome: I had recently purchased a Big Agnes Big House 6 car-camping tent that, after much head-scratching, I decided was too big for my needs. I was going to send it back, and, therefore, it was in my car, awaiting a visit to the UPS Store. I did the best spatial calculations I could under those trying circumstances and decided that, yes, that large tent, which was neatly packaged up in expectation of its imminent return to Big Agnes, would indeed fit over the top of the empty Mountain Gazette box.

So, using my right pinky, I got the passenger door open, and, with that same pinky, I carried a 15-pound tent around to the back. I plopped the raccoon, still wrapped in the blanket, into the box and placed the tent over the top. I then carried the box to the passenger seat. I had hoped that perhaps the raccoon would then calm down. My hopes were not fulfilled. Faced with both confinement and an uncertain future, the little bugger went crazy, tearing into both the expensive tent I was planning to return and what turned out to be a dishearteningly flimsy cardboard box.

And there I sat, in the driver’s seat, my right arm extended over the tent, which was atop the box, which was being disassembled by an animal the size of a rat that, somehow, I came to understand, was part Tasmanian Devil.

What to do?

Well, the first thought that entered my head, given my previous history with this particular species of animal, was to take it directly home, where it would join a menagerie that already included the aforementioned dog, a cross-eyed cat with an IQ of 4 and a wife, who would assuredly remind me that the covenants for our subdivision unambiguously prohibit domestic possession of any creatures more exotic than, yes, dogs, cats and wives.

Suddenly, for the first time since this animal-rescue ordeal began, a reasonable course of action visited my cranial mainframe: Very close to where I now sat parked with a flailing baby raccoon in a box covered with a tent was the local animal shelter! If I could manage to get there in one piece, surely, they would have some sort of animal cage into which I could I transfer the creature in my care. Then, I could just wait out the storm until Dennis and Denise rode to my rescue. Thing is, given that I had to use my right arm to keep the raccoon in the box, the process of shifting gears was not easy. So, once I pulled onto the highway, I had to use my thighs to steady the steering wheel while I reached across with my left hand to shift gears. Not easy, not safe, but it worked. Within minutes, I arrived at the animal shelter, otherwise known as the light at the end of this saga’s long-and-winding tunnel. And what was I faced with once I arrived at the place of my imminent salvation? A locked gate sporting a big “closed” sign. It was Monday, and the goddamned animal shelter is closed on Sundays and, yes, Mondays.

The goddamned closed sign at the goddamned animal shelter.

By this point, a good 40 percent of the raccoon’s body was sticking out of the box, and my dog could scarcely contain her curiosity. I simply could not believe that the fucking shelter was closed. I was, at that point, well into my “why-can’t-anything-work-out-easily-in-New-Mexico?” mode.

Though the gate was locked, there were a couple vehicles parked in front of the main shelter building, located maybe 150 feet from the gate. I honked my horn a couple times, in hopes that someone inside would be curious enough to investigate. The only effect my horn honking had was to further agitate the raccoon, which, by that point, was more out of the box than in. And the amount of pressure I was having to apply to the tent atop the now partially shredded box was, I feared, going to crush the creature I had worked so hard to save from certain death. I was going to have to re-package the raccoon, lest it escape, necessitating yet another rescue. So, I pulled the box out, shook it hard enough to cause the raccoon to fall back inside, then re-covered it with a multi-hundred-dollar tent that was by this point no longer in a condition that Big Agnes would likely have considered returnable. (Mr. Fayhee, what exactly happened to this tent?” the Big Agnes customer representative would ask. “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but …”)

Then, I pulled the box and its agitated contents out of the 4Runner, at which point the box’s lack of physical integrity finally manifest itself to the degree that the raccoon managed at last to escape.

Aarghhh!!!

And, of course, the creature opted to complicate the situation as much as possible as quickly as possible. There’s a tall chain-link fence surrounding the animal shelter property. And there was one chink in the chain-link armor, one small ground-level kink that allowed the raccoon to slip under what appeared to be an otherwise impenetrable fence.

Once again, my frustration level was about to reach a boiling point. I mean, didn’t this little animal understand by now that I was trying to save it? Could it not tune into the vibes I had been for more than an hour trying mightily to focus and send into its obviously dimwitted little brain to let it know that it’s only hope for survival rested in my hands, hands that were by this point thinking in terms of washing themselves of the entire enterprise?

Apparently not.

So, there I am, looking at this little raccoon on the other side of a fence, wondering yet again what course of action to take. It began to emit the exact kinds of pitiful cries that first drew my attention from the overpass. It was so weak it could barely move. It teetered like it was drunk, fell over a couple times and could scarcely pull itself upright. And, because of the fence that the stupid little fuck just crawled under, I could no longer reach it. Much to the consternation of my dog, I pulled out some Milkbones and tossed them over the fence in hopes that some sustenance might be just what the doctor ordered. I mean, Sloth loved dog biscuits. But this raccoon was not Sloth; it did not seem to recognize the Milkbones as a food source. I was hot, tired and, quite frankly, ready to bid the raccoon the best of luck making it in a wild that would surely consume it sooner rather than later. Just as those thoughts began to germinate and fester, a car pulled out from behind the animal shelter building and began driving toward the locked gate, which my vehicle was blocking. Turned out it was the shelter’s resident caretaker whose first language was not English. When he asked me what was up, I pointed to the raccoon, which was now partially hidden by a juniper tree, and told him a truncated version of the story. He thought I was telling him that I had rescued the juniper and had brought it to the shelter. This proved to be confusing. Then, out of the deepest recesses of a memory that these days can best be described as hit-or-miss, I remembered the Spanish word for raccoon: mapache. Once I clarified that I was not some crazy juniper rescuer, he quickly came to realize that I was, rather, a crazy mapache rescuer, which I guess is not too surprising as, in much of the rural world, raccoons are considered chicken-killing vermin. The shelter caretaker’s perplexedness was not assuaged by the fact that he could not actually see the mapache in question. Then it moved, and the expression on this man’s face could not have been more shocked had Sasquatch itself reared up and come running toward him. His eyes splayed wide, his jaw dropped and he leaned back so far, I thought he was going to land on his ass.

“Yo voy a traer un rifle,” he told me.

“No no no, yo no necesito un goddamned rifle, necesito un” … what the fucking fuck is the Spanish word for “cage?” Fortunately for me, I keep an English/Spanish dictionary in my glove compartment, just in case I find myself rescuing a raccoon and needing to convince an animal shelter caretaker that I don’t need a rifle, that I, in fact, need a cage.

“Una jaula … Yo necesito una jaula.” This did not clear up the caretaker’s confusion. What he did then, though, eventually saved the day. He had the cell phone number for the Animal Control Officer — the very same one that, seeming eons ago, the dispatcher had told me only dealt with dogs and cats. He told the Animal Control Officer nothing more than he was needed post haste at the shelter. When the ACO arrived, I related a truncated version of the story yet again and, truth be told, I did not give him much of a chance to chime in. I told him that, right then, I needed one of his cat cages and one of those long poles with the wire loop on the end. I told him I planned to get the raccoon to Dennis and Denise Miller, who the ACO knew, and I gave my word I would get the cage back to him. He visage bespoke bewilderment regarding why someone would want to save a raccoon, but, to his eternal credit, he did nothing except, as requested, pull out a cat cage and one of those long poles with a wire loop on the end. I went over to re-capture the mapache, who was by then beyond lethargic. I seriously doubted it would live. Just as I started to place the wire loop around its head, it came back to life with a vengeance. The little motherfucker actually started growling and it tried to attack my leg.

With relative ease, I got the unappreciative little bugger into the cat cage and, just as I did so, the phone rang. It was Dennis Miller letting me know that he had received Luan’s message and that he was 20 minutes away and would meet me at the shelter. The animal shelter caretaker re-locked the gate, wished me luck and drove off. The ACO likewise left, and, there I sat, awaiting Dennis’ arrival while, at my feet, the raccoon paced back and forth in the cage, awaiting its fate. I believe I even heard a bit of a purr, like it knew that, whatever was coming next, it was going to be OK. (Yes, raccoons purr.)

Dennis arrived, took both the cage and its contents and that was that. Adventure over.

The next day, Denise Miller posted a couple photos on the Gila Animal Rescue Facebook page. The accompanying text let everyone know that the mapache was in good health and that the process of preparing it for reintroduction into the wild would commence forthwith. “We’ll teach it to hunt and forage,” Dennis said.

And here I take yet another trip back to Colorado. Earlier I had mentioned how I could have placed a random call to any 668 number and would have had all the help I would have needed to easily save this little raccoon. What I did not then say was that, had the raccoon been captured in Colorado, it would almost assuredly have been transported to a Division of wildlife-licensed animal rehab facility. The one such facility I ever visited was located outside Fairplay and it was run by a wonderful and dedicated husband-and-wife team. Thing is, once an animal came into their care (they at the time had an orphaned fawn and an owl that had been hit by a car), that was it on the freedom front. There was no eventual release back into the wild; the animals would spend the rest of their lives in zoos. Which I guess is better than death, but not much.

That’s not how stories end for animals that end up in the care of Dennis and Denise Miller and their Gila Wildlife Rescue.

A few weeks later after my part in this raccoon story ended, Dennis and Denise were visiting the Little Toad Creek Inn & Tavern, a watering hole/restaurant/motel between Silver City and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. They noticed that an extended family of raccoons was making nightly rounds that passed close by the Inn and on toward nearby Sapillo Creek. Dennis drove back to Silver City to retrieve the raccoon in hopes that it might be accepted into the family. He let it go and watched as both rescued mapache and a wild group of its own species rubbed noses, sniffed asses and sussed each other out. Then, without further ado, the raccoon I rescued from that overpass was apparently accepted, and Dennis and Denise watched as the group happily made its way into the wilderness.

When Dennis related that story of spontaneous reintroduction to me at the Buckhorn Saloon in Pinos Altos, I could not help but appreciate the fact that, even though there are plenty of times when New Mexico seems to be a clusterfuck incarnate, things, especially important things, most always have a way of working out for the very best that borders on magic.

In the great scheme of the mostly fictitious American Dream, a great many people could rightly argue that, not only am I and not only have I long been one serious U.S. Grade-A fuck-up, but I could very well pen a how-to tome about being a fuck-up. My retirement savings are not nearly what they ought to be for a man of my advancing years. I never seem to get caught up on the myriad home-improvement projects that daily await attention that will likely never be forthcoming. I still haven’t finished that damned tennis novel. My rap sheet, while not exactly world-class, has more red check marks than it ought to have. I drink and smoke too much.

From the ashes of a near-clinical fuck-up life, there are three components that are most assuredly not fuck-ups.

I married very well (26th anniversary this summer).

I have done a lot of very cool shit.

I have always managed to live within spitting distance of the kind of turf people dwelling in lesser realms would drool over.

Three miles from where these words are being penned lies the closest boundary of the famed 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest. Almost immediately upon passing the forest sign is found the Gomez Peak Trailhead. A quarter-mile farther is found the Little Walnut Trailhead. And, two miles past that lies a double trailhead for the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. All three of those trail systems hook into and out of one another, forming a series of loops that, should one be thus inclined, could occupy a hiker for many hours without re-tracing one’s steps.

Certainly, from the perspective of true backcountry aficionados, the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/CDT trail complex is certainly something of a yawner. It is what it is: a front-country/almost urban-interface system that is perfectly suitable for trail work-week forays. These are the closest national forest trails to town, though, in town, there are many acres of footpath-crisscrossed open space.

Because the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/CDT trail complex is only a few minutes drive from the center of town, it serves as a siphon for hikers and mountain bikers who would otherwise venture farther in the Gila to commune with nature. Ergo, the complex gets more use than most of our less-populated trails. On some weekends, there can be as many as six or eight cars in the Gomez Peak Trailhead parking lot, a sad reality that causes many of us who moved to Gila Country at least partially because of the empty woods shake our heads and wonder how long it will be before this place starts looking like Colorado.

During the summer months, I interface with the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/CDT trail complex almost every morning during the workweek. There are other more-wilderness-ish trails I prefer, but none close enough to the Casa de Fayhee to merit serious consideration on days where vocation-based toil is unavoidable. I generally leave home at 6:30 a.m., arrive at the trailhead at 6:40 and, after changing into my hiking boots, generally leave about 6:43 or 6:44. Since I usually have to wait while my dog takes a dump 15 feet from the car, that means I’m generally limping my way upward by 6:45. The reason I hit the trail so early (at least by my historically non-early-riser standards) is that summers in southwest New Mexico are rough on a man who has lived most of his adult life above 9,000 feet. In summer in this neck of the woods, if I do nor hike in the coolness of morning, then I will likely not be hiking that day.

I biorhythmically prefer to hike in late afternoon/early evening, and, in the non-summer months, that’s exactly what I do. I also really like to take a toke or two before venturing forth into the backcountry, and that’s something I have never been inclined to do before Happy Hour time. I have of course had many chums over the years who opted to commence each new day with a couple bong hits. For me, that’s a one-way ticket to an extended stay on the couch. So, all things considered, I much prefer taking my daily hike at 4 p.m. rather than 6:43 a.m., but I also prefer hiking when it’s 60 degrees rather than when it’s 92.

This hot-season/non-hot-season hiking schedule juggling act has time-related implications that transcend its early-morning/late-afternoon, stone-or-not-stoned components. Some of those implications are direct: When I hike in the early morning, I generally hike for 90 minutes at most, because, unregimented though my work day might be, it is still a work day and therefore I need to get back to my home office at a reasonable hour. When I hike in the late afternoon, I generally kick it out for two or three hours, because my work day then is over and done with.

And some of those time-related implications are less direct.

Though the main reason I hike the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex near-bouts every morning is, as I have indicated, its proximity to my front door, there is one other reason, and this reason may seem counter-intuitive when applied to a perceived ragtag life such as mine. Though my preference for moving through the woods is to walk upon a path less followed into the great unknown — and, believe me, I have done just that for more miles than could likely ever be counted — I also very much like to tromp upon the same ground on a regular basis. This is time-relative on several levels. The first of those levels is more macro in nature: I am not exactly getting any younger, and, by impacting my bootprints onto the same tread several times a week, I am more able to gauge — if not mitigate somewhat the almost stunning effects of — Father Time’s inexorable journey into the depths of my physiology.

The Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex is very interconnected — meaning there are long series of both and informal formal loops. There are system trails, social trails and unmaintained trails galore. It is easy to be as spontaneous as one can be in the midst of a defined trails system, and it is, of course, easy to stay the regimented course.

Though I deviate somewhat, here is my basic summer/early-morning schedule:

• Monday: The Angel Loop (55-60 minutes).

• Tuesday: The Mountain Loop (60-65 minutes).

• Wednesday: Angel Loop with a side trip to the summit of Gomez Peak (80 minutes).

• Thursday: Angel Loop and Mountain Loop (90 minutes).

• Friday: If I’m not off somewhere camping, either the Mountain Loop and the Angel Loop with a side trip to the summit of Gomez Peak (two hours) or the Mountain Loop, with a connect to the Dragon Trail via the Angel Loop (90 minutes).

Though there are permutations, like doing these loops/trails clockwise or counter-clockwise, that’s pretty much it. And, while such a rigid schedule may sound a bit repetitive and, therefore, boring, it’s not. Well, it is, sometimes, sorta. But, overall, it works, at least partially because I always bear in mind that there are millions of people out there who spend similar amounts of time and effort in gyms on Stairmasters and NordicTracks and at least partially because, from the summit of Gomez Peak, you can see clear down into Mexico. From the Mountain Loop, you can see 50 miles away to the Mogollon Mountains.

More than that, though, those familiar loops, around which I have circled hundreds of times, provide chronology-based opportunity to measure my ongoing journey into physiological decrepitude. It serves as a psychic salve to know that, this morning, at age, 56, I was able to hike the afore-referenced Thursday schedule in 87 minutes, without stopping a single time. That is at least 10 minutes faster than I could do five years ago, and, five years ago, I usually had to stop and catch my breath midway up both the ascents.

Assuredly, I understand these are not the only ways by which my increasing decrepitude can be measured. Though I am now hiking those Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex trails faster than I was five years ago, it is not lost on me that, increased speed notwithstanding, there are more and more real-time pain-based manifestations of that increasing decrepitude that rear their ugly heads, most often simultaneously. Those various maladies have a bothersome way of making journeys of their own from one part of my weary corpus to another, depending on whether I’m ascending, descending or striding on level ground, whether the trail itself is rocky or smooth. And my recovery time is not exactly following the same line on my personal health-and-fitness graph. The standard health-and-fitness line is that, when one exercises in the mañana, it energizes one for the rest of the day. I find, at my age, this is not often the case. Verily, on days when I hike early, I usually find my weary eyeballs wandering toward the daybed along about siesta time, which may just be a function of the summertime afternoon heat. Maybe not.

Moreover, though, I find myself wondering, as I’m risking every piece of soft tissue I own as I sprint down the trail trying to beat last week’s best time, why on earth I bother. I mean, after 56 years, oughtn’t a man have come to understand that the goal should be to increase time spent in the woods, rather than intentionally and with great effort, decreasing one’s time? I mean, what kind of dumbass, when he has a couple hours to kill in the beauteousness of the Gila National Forest, tries his damnedest to get back to the office as quickly as his little legs will carry him? A truly dumbass dumbass, methinks.

Well, this dumbass dumbass is at least partially at the mercy of his aforementioned biorhythms. This is the biggest difference for me between the necessity of hiking early in the morning in Gila Country when it’s too hot to hike any other time of day and hiking later in the day during those wonderful months when the weather is perfect no matter what time of day one chooses to tromp through the wild land that defines this part of the world. When I hike in the mornings, my thought processes are far more literal. I am awakened by an alarm clock set for no other reason that to get me out of bed early enough to hike before it gets too hot to do anything save sit in the shade. Though I am blessed insofar as I have no one looking over my shoulder and telling me what time I have to punch in, I still have to figuratively punch in, something I try to do by 9 a.m. (Though I am biorhythmically inclined to exercise later in the day, I am more biorhythmically inclined to get work done in the mornings.) So, when one factors in the need to shovel down some breakfast, it’s somewhat understandable that I have little choice but to think in terms of time while passing through terrain that, like most terrain in the Mountain Time (!!!) Zone, is more, or least partially, conducive to leisure and contemplation.

When I hike in the mornings, I am focused on the hiking itself. On foot placement, on the impending terrain, on pace, on breathing, on heart rate, indeed, even on the mechanics of arm swing. Some might call this a perfect example of living in the moment, being here (or, more accurately, there) now (or, more accurately, then). Which is great and all, except that such focus makes the actual hiking less pleasurable. It makes the minutes seem like hours, which, when you get to be my age, might seem from the sidelines like a positive, but, when your thighs are getting ready to explode as you’re pushing it up the south end of the Dragon Trail, it is functionally counter-productive, at least as I define the process of hiking through the woods.

I understand how fortunate I am to be able to “work out” in the Gila National Forest. I pity the poor people who live in Omaha, at least in this context. My recognition of my good fortune requires that I further recognize that anyone who looks at two hours out on the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex trails as solely, or even predominantly, as a “workout” deserves whatever bad shit comes his or her way. I am not too bright, but I am bright enough to comprehend that forays out into the woods are physically healthful by default; one does not need to keep track of how long it takes to get from the trailhead to the Ponderosa Loop junction in order to benefit the cardio-vascular system.

The other reasons — the most important reasons — the reasons that separate a national forest trail from a Stairmaster at a gym in Omaha — are mental and spiritual. This is of course not to say there are not inherent mental and spiritual benefits associated with Stairmastering in Omaha, especially if that’s all you got, which I think is the case with people who live in Omaha. I guess if you’re an open-minded, perceptive sort, you can gain enlightenment, whatever that is, no matter your immediate circumstance. But you know what I mean: At a minimum, one should not only stop to smell the roses, but one should maybe even ponder the roses one smells within a frame of reference larger than immediate aromatic sensation. I too often look at the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex trails as workout facilities with views (and rattlesnakes), except that I often don’t pay the views enough attention because I’m too fucking focused on cutting two minutes off my trail time.

I don’t think there are any roses to smell or ponder in a gym in Omaha. Yet, when I hike in the early mornings, I sometimes feel as though I might as well be indoors on a Stairmaster. Which, of course, once again shows what a serious dumbass my dumbass self really is. There is no doubt that, by osmosis, if not recognition, being outdoors positively affects one’s mental and spiritual states, even if one is too obtuse to notice.

Now, when things cool off in Gila Country and I am able to comfortably visit the local trails in late afternoon, things are different, and not just because, at that time of day, I am inclined to maybe get a bit stoned pre-hike. Well, OK, maybe partially, but not totally. During the non-scorching times of year, I do not set an alarm; I wake up when I wake up. And, since, by late afternoon, my work day is done, I rarely have to worry about returning home by a certain time. I can hike till darkness falls or till my legs give way — which means I do not keep track of time, I venture further afield, to trails I visit less often and therefore am less familiar with, trails that I can’t remember how long it “takes” to follow them. I bushwhack more.

And this is where and when things get a bit more interesting on the temporal plane. For, even when, during the cooler months, I do by default hike on the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex trails, I rarely find myself thinking very much at all about the hiking itself. My mind wanders, and this is when I “do” the bulk of my actual writing. I am sure my heart rate is increasing and that my overall cardio-vascular fitness level is improving much the same way I assume it does when I’m hammering it early in the morning during the summer months.

There is this concept of “folding space,” a concept made popular — at least insofar as incomprehensible scientist jabber can be made popular — in Frank Herbert’s astounding “Dune” series. The idea is that, in order to cover great distances, you do not increase your speed, but, rather, shorten the distance.

When I hike in the afternoons, I often get to where I am going (understanding that I am often going nowhere in particular) and I can’t remember getting there. Space has been folded. Even on the Gomez Peak/Little Walnut/Continental Divide Trail complex trails, trails I know in 30-second increments (yes, I most often measure distances in time, rather than space), I will suddenly snap out of some sort of reverie and realize I am on top of 80 Mountain or most of the way to Bear Mountain Road or even back at the trailhead. And at those times, I rarely am out of breath. I rarely notice the aches and pains that define my corporeal here and now. I am not tired. I am not stiff. I just am.

It is during such instances that I come to realize how relative time really is. We try to capture and maybe even control it with day planners and schedules and with verb tenses and, yes, with digital and analog measurement devices. But when we’re alone out in the woods, time comes down to a deep mathematical formula that includes more sun than day planner, more wind than schedule, more mental wandering than limiting verb tenses, more perception than watches and clocks.

I do not argue that my time-oriented morning hikes are less valid or important or relevant than are my time-free afternoon hikes. They are assuredly part of a yin-yang-esque greater whole that will thankfully always be well out of my conscious grasp.

Because of the change of the seasons, because of time layering again and again upon itself, I have no choice but to interface with the complicated tick-tick-ticking of the cosmic clock as I go about the simple process of walking through beautiful woods near the place I have come to spend my little part of eternity.

My admittedly modest everyday jewelry ensemble consists of:

• One yin-yang-motif earring I’ve owned since the late-’70s. It was given to me by the man who pierced my ear. No matter how hard he tried, the man, a friend to this day who had pieced the ears of several other chums over the years, could not force the stunningly unsterilized leather punch through my stubborn lobe, which was anesthetized only by the bottle of tequila I shared with the man who was trying with increasing might to puncture his way through a section of skin that was captivatingly close to my jugular vein. Eventually, in abject frustration, the man reared back with the leather punch and went through my lobe with a big enough follow-through that the momentum carried the sharp point all the way into my neck. Next morning, my memory was a tad hazy. When I looked into the mirror, the first thing I saw was a long streak of dried blood caked onto the side of my neck. The earring is rarely visible because of the normally shaggy state of my mane.

• A black jade necklace I bought in Guatemala in the early-’90s that sports a Mayan decoration supposedly representing my birth month (December), which might, for all I know, be a message to the Mayan gods to deny me a place in heaven after the resurrection dust settles after the Dec. 2012 apocalypse.

• Since I developed knuckle-swelling arthritis in my left ring finger a few years back, I have stopped wearing my silver wedding band — a Hopi-type-pattern story ring made by renowned Santo Domingo Pueblo artist Vidal Aragon — because I now have trouble getting it on and off.

• When I’m really stepping out, I sometimes wear a copper bracelet, which I bought at a local art shop.

• And that’s it on the personal adornment front … except for my watch.

I don’t think my watch — a basic Timex digital model procured for 40-something bucks at the Albuquerque REI — would even be considered jewelry in most fashion circles, especially given the tattered and soiled state of its Velcro wristband. It is nothing more than a tool that happens to be more visible than most tools.

The question is: Given my life, my lifestyle and where I live, why do I need this particular tool? Why do I even wear a watch? I mean, I could see it if I scurried through life as an investment banker-type in Manhattan, though, if I scurried through life as an investment banker-type in Manhattan, I would likely commit seppuku by day three and, thus, wouldn’t need a watch for long.

I live in the most-mañana’d part of the Land of Mañana. (Read: Those of us who dwell hereabouts can generally meet most of our space/time continuum-based needs and obligations well enough by eyeballing a calendar.) I work at home, in a room that boasts not one but two clocks — one integrated onto my computer screen and one whose main characteristic is its ability to unambiguously roust me from peaceful slumber at 0530 every day. Those are not the only clocks in the Casa de Fayhee. There are two in the kitchen, one on the microwave and one on the range. There’s yet another in the living room, glaring from the cable-TV interface. The guestroom has a clock. I keep one near my weight bench to help keep track of time between sets. Both our vehicles have clocks.

It’s not as though I have to search far and wide to accurately orient myself to Mountain Daylight Time.

My wife, who works in a dental office, does not have it quite so easy. Her 8-5 gig is measured in minute-by-minute increments. If time is lost early in the day, it resonates and multiplies till quitting time. Still, she does not wear a watch.

I, a man who controls his loose schedule almost absolutely, who rarely needs to be anywhere at a given time, do wear a watch, and I basically let that watch rule and run my life. In the summer, I generally hike as early in the morning as I can drag my lame carcass out into the woods. There is actually a practical reason for this scheduling effort: I abhor heat and, if I don’t make it onto the trail before morning’s blessed coolness dissipates, then I likely won’t. Yet, I always strive to get to the trailhead by 6:40 a.m., so I can change into my boots and begin hiking by 6:43 on the dot. If, for whatever reason, or combination of reasons, I don’t hit the trail till, say, 6:46, I get agitated and, well, behind. Late. While I certainly enjoy my time (fuck … there’s that damned word again … you can’t outrun time) in the woods, I am also out there to get the heart rate up. Ergo, I push it, both aerobically and anaerobically. I am a vigorous hiker. When I commit the unpardonable sin of not leaving till 6:46, I verily push myself to the point where it feels like my chest will explode trying to make up those three lost minutes. Why? It’s not like I have to be home by any certain … time.

Now, in my partial defense, I am one of those people who “move better” through life if my schedule is somewhat regimented (and that, admittedly, covers a lot of conceptual ground — everything from “accomplishing more in the way of work” to “getting more and better exercise” to “eating more healthfully” to “achieving more headway in our ongoing effort to make our abode more habitable”). It may seem counter-intuitive to the point of near-irony that someone who comes across in his writing as fundamentally chaotic requires, or at least benefits from, a modicum of regimen, but 1) it’s a lot easier to lead a loose life if your are reasonably tightly wrapped and 2) a lot of the autobiographical pandemonium I present in my writing, not surprisingly, is a result of self-invented-character fictionalization. In other words: Don’t believe everything you read.

Because of the need for total range of motion in all my aching joints, including wrists, when I interface with strength training (twice a week, three times a week in the winter, I embark upon a losing battle with a set of Bowflex SelectTech Dumbbells, which is preceded by 15 minutes of dynamic stretching), I remove my watch. One day last week, after losing yet another battle with the weights, I left to take my dog down to the creek (at exactly 2 p.m., as always!) and did not realize till I was halfway to town that I had neglected to put my watch back on! I found myself not just watchless, which was bad enough, but timeless! I suddenly felt completely discombobulated. I literally considered turning around to fetch that damned digital tether.

Again, I stress that I was not exactly right then on my back floating in a sensory deprivation chamber. All I had to do was divert my eyes like 10 degrees and, right there above the CD player in my truck could be found a perfectly workable and mostly accurate clock, which I didn’t need anyhow, beings as there was no place I needed to be and no time I needed, or didn’t need, to get there.

Yet, try though I might to resist the temptation, once I realized I was watchless, my eyes kept darting down to that highly conspicuous non-suntanned band across my right wrist. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I castigated myself for doing so, I kept glancing down at the watch that was not there.

While sitting next to the creek, throwing sticks for my dog and nursing a cigar, once again, I could not help but look where my watch should have been. This, I should point out, despite the fact that I had with me my cell phone, which, of course, displays the time. Moreover, most of Silver City, including where I was then sitting, has the pleasure of being reminded every 30 minutes by the bell tower at the university library what time it is. Plus, again, I point out that 1) I knew before I left home what time it was and 2) I did not have to be anywhere anytime.

WTF?

Part of my time focus surely comes from the fact that I abhor the concept and execution of tardiness, both on my part and on the part of others. Always have, always will. On the fetid fringes of Dixie, the place I say I am “from,” it was considered bad form to get too agitated about tardiness. People should all be given a courtesy 15 minutes was the operational concept. And that is understandable. After all, who knows, the person you’re scheduled to meet for a tennis date might have been pulled for drunk driving yet again or might have been waylaid by an emergency drug acquisition that would make the tennis more pleasant. Try though I might over the course of five-plus decades, I have never been able to cut people such tardiness slack, an assholey trait to be sure, but there you have it. I’ve even terminated friendships with people who are habitually tardy.

And neither is it a matter of being addicted to the technology. I am not a person, for example, who teeters off into near-terminal disorientation if I forget my cell phone. Matter of fact, I tend to happily leave my phone behind when I venture forth unless there is a compelling reason to have it with me.

No, when it comes to my watch/time fixation, something larger and far more sinister is at work. Somewhere along the developmental line, my otherwise-blissfully anarchistic mindset was inexplicably corrupted. And that corruption is not just social in nature. When I get up in the middle of the night to relieve myself, I can usually guess what time it is within a few minutes sans additional temporal clues, such as, say, the sun rising. Worse: I almost always make the effort to guess and smile when I am correct. On those rare instances when I am off, I feel like something’s sorely amiss in the universe.

I have a regrettable cigar habit, and, on an almost daily basis, I ponder some sort of strategy for giving up stogies. When I still lived in the Colorado High Country, it was easy, at least seasonally easy: Since I only smoke outside, out of courtesy to my wife, Mother Nature provided an annual smoking off season. Rarely did I ever light up when it was 25-below zero outside. I have no such climatic crutch in Gila Country, which makes eschewing my daily couple of Macanudo Ascots even more difficult. Still, I give the matter frequent considered thought.

Similarly, I ponder the notion of somehow trying to jettison my bad time habit. As I indicated earlier, I live in a place where, one would think, such an effort would be made easier solely via environmental influences, or lack thereof. And, as I indicated earlier, I rarely ever have to be anywhere on time. If I’m five minutes early or late for table tennis, it’s not like anyone is even going to notice, much less comment or judge. When I meet chums for beers, we rarely get more specific in our planning than “Happy Hour” or “tonight.” And that works out perfectly. Admittedly, there are times (damn that word!) that require more detailed punctuality, such as doctor appointments (though our local doctors do not generally stress themselves out when it comes to keeping their end of the appointment deal), airplane departures (ditto), court dates (ditto) and, more importantly, when backpacking trip shuttles are being organized and executed.

How does one quit, or at least cut back on, time? Far as I know, there’s no such thing as a time patch or time chewing gum or time methadone. And, if there were, New Mexico, with no additional effort save existing in status-quo fashion, would serve as a perfect poster child.

Whenever I rope someone into providing a food drop for one of my long backpacking trips, my wife tells them straight up: If I am not where I am supposed to be right exactly when I’m supposed to be there, go ahead and call search-and-rescue.

Hello, my name is John, and I am an addict. I drink too much beer, smoke too many cigars and twitch like I’ve been wired to an electric fence on those rare occasions when I forget my watch. I do not get up when the sun rises. I get up at 5:30 a.m. I am never late.

Please help me.

I’m not getting any younger.

Time’s a-wastin’.