2008 Writing D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September
2008
Write All About It
An outpouring of authorship for this years' writing contest.
Maybe those signs for Silver City along the interstate ought to change from boasting about "Four Gentle Seasons" to "A Zillion Aspiring Writers." Deming might want to consider dropping its annual Duck Races in favor of a keyboard competition. And Las Cruces should perhaps rethink that spaceport tax and look to building an ink and typing-paper industry instead.
Southwest New Mexico, it turns out, is a hotbed for authors — at least judging from the monsoon-like flood of entries in our annual writing competition. We received more than 70 short stories, essays, articles, poems and even a song, making the picking of just five winners to print in this issue more challenging than ever before. The writers ranged from a teenager to countless grandparents. We were touched by a posthumous submission by the late author's spouse, by painstakingly handwritten poetry, by stories emailed with youthful enthusiasm regardless of the entrant's age.
Nor was this surge of submissions limited to Desert Exposure's geographic coverage area. Somehow, by word of mouth and via the Internet, news of our annual contest spread far from our little corner of the Southwest; one packet of short stories arrived all the way from England. (Even these far-afield entries, typically by New Mexico expatriates, carefully adhered to our lone submission requirement — namely, that the piece of writing somehow reflect life in Southwest New Mexico.)
The winners, once we winnowed the stacks of submissions by reading, rereading, sorting and sharing favorites among the staff, proved equally diverse. Two of the winners — Danna Stout and Betty McMahon Buman, both of whom live and write in Deming — have placed in the prestigious top five in previous years' Desert Exposure Writing Contests. The other three 2008 honorees are new to our writing winners' circle. David Popelka, whose winning poem reflects his experience fighting fires, lives in Glenwood. Sharon Barr, also a poet, wrote about a cemetery in Lordsburg but calls Silver City home — thanks in part, she says, to Desert Exposure, which helped inspire her to move here from Alamogordo.
The 2008 Grand Prize Winner is both a newcomer to our writing contest and yet might be a familiar name to regular Desert Exposure readers. Jack Warner retired — sort of, as he now keeps busy as a reserve sheriff's deputy — to Silver City after a long and stellar career as a journalist, primarily working in Atlanta with the Journal-Constitution and the late, lamented United Press International (UPI). He also wrote a novel, Shikar, before leaving Atlanta, which hit bookstores after his arrival in New Mexico; we wrote about Jack and that publishing accomplishment in only our third issue as the new owners of Desert Exposure, in June 2003. Since then, Jack's spent more energy with the sheriff's department and Office of Medical Investigation (OMI) than at the keyboard, though he did write an article for us about his OMI experiences (December 2007).
All that being said, the final judging for the Grand Prize was done blind, without Jack's name on his winning manuscript. So it's a pleasant surprise to welcome him back to our pages with his first published fiction since Shikar. His winning story, "Emiliano's War," was begun as part of a larger work. But, as you'll see, it also stands alone as a riveting, multiple-viewpoint tale of how part of the region's past comes back to haunt an all-too-familiar part of our present along the Bootheel's borderline.
Interestingly, all three short-story winners this year take the inspiration for their setting from the southern stretches of "Desert Exposure country," close to where the US collides with Mexico. Betty McMahon Buman's locale isn't spelled out exactly in her story, "The Old Goat's Secret," but that US-Mexican intersection is essential to her tale. And although Danna Stout's story, "Rabbit Hunting," takes place decades ago, shortly after World War II, its richly rendered setting is "way down south of Deming."
Maybe there's an explanation in that coincidence for the explosion of written creativity we saw in this year's competition. Living so close to the border, with its intersecting cultural influences and undeniable tensions, must inspire the impulse to take pen to paper or tap out words onto a glowing screen. Here where we can see the seams of the country, we're moved to stitch together meaning from lives sometimes lived likewise at the edge.
Enjoy these five exceptional examples — and thanks to all who entered and made our task of selecting winners so happily hard!
You Drink, You Nuke, You Lose
It's silly season for campaign commercials.
One good thing about the debate in New Mexico's US Senate contest shifting to the subject of energy is that we may have seen the last of Rep. Tom Udall's ads boasting about what a tough attorney general he was. Call us persnickety, but the TV commercial's focus on battling DWI bothered us every time it aired. Like fellow Democrat Harry Teague's primary-season ad about education funding, Udall's commercial made us wonder if the candidate knows what office he's running for.
Memo to Tom Udall: The US Senate has very little to do with locking up DWI offenders and throwing away the key. After your years on the other side of the US capitol in the House of Representatives, you should have picked up on that fact by now.
Unfortunately, the shift in the campaign has also brought us an ad by Rep. Steve Pearce — Udall's GOP opponent — touting his support for nuclear power. This commercial, too, makes us holler back at the TV. At one point, the ad shows spiraling prices at a gas pump, and the announcer says nuclear power will liberate us from "Middle East oil cartels."
If Pearce has really invented a car that will run on nuclear power, his talents would be wasted in the US Senate. We're flummoxed as to how the heck nuclear power — whether you're for it or agin' it — could reduce the price at the pump or the grip of foreign oil. OK, theoretically, we suppose that once we're all driving electric cars, nuclear-generated electricity could provide some of the power. Or maybe electric heat from atomic plants could substitute for some of the oil burned up north? (We'd still be importing oil by the millions of barrels.) In either case, you're looking at an awful lot of infrastructure changes before those oil cartels would have anything to worry about — not to mention the long time horizon for actually bringing a new nuclear plant online.
The good news, though, is that if somebody drives a nuclear-powered Pearcemobile while drunk, Tom Udall will be there to put him in the clink.
Doing a Slow Burn
Out West, returning to 55 mph is a non-starter.
Speaking of silliness, let's hope that outgoing Sen. John Warner's suggestion that the US return to a federally mandated 55-mph national speed limit goes out the capitol doors with him. A 55-mph limit might make sense in parts of Virginia, which Warner represents — especially the traffic-clogged highways around Washington, DC, where getting up to 55 is just a dream, anyway. But let's put the good senator in a car crawling at 55 mph across the vast expanses of New Mexico and see how long he thinks this is a good idea. The point, of course, would be to save gas — or, rather, to force people to save gas, which seems a peculiar position for a GOP senator to take. Don't they believe in market forces and individual liberty? "I drive over 55 mph. . . sometimes 65," Warner said. "But I am willing to give up whatever advantage to me to drive at those speeds with the fervent hope that modest sacrifice on my part will help those people across this land. . . dealing with this financial crisis."
Isn't the whole point of "sacrifice" that it be voluntary? If Sen. Warner wants to conserve energy, he's welcome to buy a Prius, switch to fluorescent light bulbs and turn down the thermostat this winter. Coming into somebody else's house and dialing down that person's heat, though, doesn't count as "sacrifice."
As we're constantly explaining to people who've never been here, New Mexico is a big place. We can bemoan our pioneer ancestors' lack of foresight in planting towns here so far apart, but it's a situation we're stuck with. Forcing people to drive 55 — when they know that, unlike covered-wagon days, they have the ability to go 75 — simply isn't practical.
Let's do a little math. Figure that the trip between Silver City and Las Cruces is roughly split between 65 mph highway and 75 mph interstate, and that you're actually obeying the law. (Use your imagination here, folks.) Mandating 55 mph would add roughly a half-hour to the almost two-hour journey. The all-interstate drive from Las Cruces to Albuquerque would balloon from three hours to four. (By comparison, driving the 107 miles from Richmond, Va., to the nation's capital takes an hour and 48 minutes, according to Google Maps — an average speed of 60 mph. Sen. Warner's "sacrifice" of slowing to 55 would add a whole eight minutes to that trip.)
But isn't it worth a few minutes to save precious fuel? Put aside the point that, as we observed last month, $4 a gallon gas seems to be doing a bang-up job of reducing America's thirst for fuel, with no help from Sen. Warner. (New Mexico driving dropped 5.1 percent in June.) When 55 mph was last enacted nationwide — and, initially, actually enforced — in October 1974, gasoline consumption was reduced by 167,000 barrels of oil a day, according to the Congressional Research Service. That sounds like a lot, but it represents only eight-tenths of one percent of current US oil usage (21 million barrels a day).
Back in 1974, because of the OPEC oil embargo, there was an actual shortage of oil, not just an uncomfortable price for it. Even so, the National Motorists Association estimated that 95 percent of American drivers exceeded the 55 mph limit — especially as the oil shock and enforcement pressures relaxed. Is it really smart public policy to make us a nation of speeding lawbreakers?
Proponents of going back to a national "double-nickel" limit — repealed in 1995 — also argue that slower speeds save lives. As Wall Street Journal senior economics writer Stephen Moore points out, however, traffic fatalities actually fell by 17 percent in the decade after nationwide speeds were increased. From 1995 to 2005, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, traffic injuries also dropped by 33 percent and total crashes declined by 38 percent.
A study Moore conducted for the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in 1999 adds, well, fuel to this counter-argument. Of the 31 states — mostly places like New Mexico, in the West, and in the South — that raised speed limits to 70 mph or higher after 1995, only two — North and South Dakota — showed even a slight increase in highway deaths. "The evidence is overwhelming," Moore adds, "that traffic safety is based less on how fast the traffic is going than on the variability in speeds that people are driving. The granny who drives 20 mph below the pace of traffic on the freeway is often as much a safety menace as the 20-year-old hot rodder."
Given its dubious benefits, consider the tradeoffs of a national 55-mph limit — which will be borne disproportionately by spacious states like New Mexico. In 1984, the National Research Council calculated that Americans spent an extra 1 billion hours sitting in automobiles because of the 55-mph law. Today, according to the Labor Department, the impact in lost time and productivity would be between $20 billion and $30 billion.
Certainly, the gas-price crunch and America's dependence on foreign oil argue for common-sense steps to reduce consumption. Driving steadily and at no more than the speed limit, grouping your errands and even properly inflating your tires — despite Sen. John McCain's campaign ridicule — can all save money and gas. So can switching to a more fuel-efficient vehicle, though here the emphasis needs to be on getting the worst gas-guzzlers off the road. (Again, do the math: Exchanging a vehicle that gets 16 mpg for one that gets 24 mpg saves more gas than upgrading from 24 mpg to 32 mpg. The former saves almost two gallons for every 100 miles; the latter saves only about a gallon per 100 miles.)
Before requiring New Mexicans and others out here in the big, rectangular states to "sacrifice" with extra hours of driving time, however, Congress should weigh the benefits versus the costs. And Sen. Warner should come drive a mile in our tires, so to speak.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.