A Rambling Remembrance Of The Future, Actually Written From Memory

The cusp between April and May of 2004 caught us in Las Vegas!  (The real Las Vegas ... Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de Las Vegas Grandes, on the eastern base of the Sangre de Cristo in New Mexico.)

Shortly before Christmas in the preceding year, my wife suggested that we were getting up in years, and should probably be thinking about relocating to a pedestrian town, in anticipation of the declining abilities.  She suggested Las Vegas, and I became so excited I could hardly breathe!  We could go to Heaven, perhaps well in advance of our inevitable demise.

We went to scout out the place for my birthday at the end of April.  Although we'd been there several times before, this was to be a critical appraisal.

One of the things I really wanted to do while there was to follow the Gallinas River up to El Porvenir.  I had seen the name on maps for a long, long time, but did not know what to expect.  I was surely expecting a little mountain village at the very least, and we were on the way up there on the narrow paved road State Route 65 beyond the village of Montezuma when my wife suddenly asked, "Did you know that El Porvenir means 'The Future'.."?

OMG!  I'd never thought of myself as fluent in Spanish, but the simple combination of por (for) venir (to come) should have certainly been recognizable!

When we reached our goal, we hardly knew we were there.  El Porvenir is not a village.  It is a Forest Service campground at the base of Hermit's Peak, which provides a trailhead to the cave where John Augustani, the Italian hermit who hung around Las Vegas for several years selling hand carved Santos before finally moving on, and who was the inspiration for the name Hermit's Peak.

I wrote this originally on my wife's iBook at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, and somehow it escaped me, and has been lost forever.  Therefore, this slightly inferior account is recaptured from an old guy's memory, and seems to leave out some of the most exciting details of John Augustiani.  Maybe Google might help both the reader and me to fill in these details.

For now, I'll simply close by mentioning that we've seen The Future, and I would someday like to go "Back to The Future", but for now, I'll simply say that my excitement eventually faded after my wife decided that we really shouldn't go so far away from our daughters and their families, all of whom now live nearby.  I can't argue with that kind of logic.


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