Battle at the Big Nipple
A tale of defeat and glory at the base of Cabezon Peak
“You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”
David Crockett said that. Or at least that’s what the more neutered version left to history tells us.
Like Crockett, I’m a native Tennessean. I came to this world not a mile from the very spot where he laid down his famous 1831 speech out front of the Courthouse in Jackson. As such, my natural proclivity responds with immediate recoil at the likelihood of Davy spouting out such a stiff phrase.
“Y’all can go to hell and I’ll go to Tejas!”
There. That’s better. I refuse to remember it any other way.
No matter which iteration you choose to believe it’s safe to say we can all agree that was one flaming monk of a way to quit Congress. Shortly after serving up one of more crispy political one-liners in history, Crockett left Tennessee for the last time.
Indeed, he did make his way southwest — to San Antonio — ultimately meeting his grim fate in 1836 defending the San Antonio de Valero Mission during the Texas Revolution. A church more widely known as “The Alamo”.
This is New Mexico, not Texas, but the sense that I was a long way from Tennessee never felt more real.
A creeping sensation of impending disaster sat heavy on the high-desert wind. Me, there at the base of Cabezon Peak, facing a strange and unknown doom yet being somehow unwilling to turn from the course. We were headed for assured failure, there was no doubting that.
The gales and the dust would prove the end of us but just like Davy, I was determined to make it such an end that the fight itself would be worthy of remembering.
Within a week I was expected at the drop-off for an exhibition in Phoenix. Leia (my dog/business partner) and I ventured to Cabezon on a great and righteous mission: to pull a single, perfect print from one of our many archived 8x10 negatives.
This was a task we have performed any number of times from the road, in the Hive, my converted ice fishing hut, now turned portable darkroom and mobile beer joint.
All this was familiar footing. I am, afterall, somewhat of a demented folk hero within the greasy world of film picture work. The bad penny that always seems to turn up when least expected; a weird but necessary counterpoint to the sick balance within a photographic world seemingly hellbent on sterilizing the true creative spirit.
I’ve always managed to somehow pull it off, these nomadic printing jobs. More often than not they all inevitably come down to the wire but in the end everything works out. No matter the conditions, no matter the pressure, for whatever reason the Gods would always smile.
Why should this mission be any different?
The locals call Cabezon Peak “the Big Nipple” for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.
Cabezon is a towering clump of solid basalt rising nearly 2,000 feet above the rust red floor of the Rio Puerco Valley. It’s what’s called a volcanic “plug”, the final mortal remains of an ancient fire breather here in north central New Mexico.
The first steps from the vehicle had filled me with dread. Strange terra. My Crocs instantly sank into the soil no less than two inches. It was as if I was walking in burnt orange baby powder, sand the consistency of cayenne pepper. Not an ideal landscape for setting up the Hive, certainly, but this alone was far from an insurmountable obstacle to our work.
It was the wind. That Godforsaken, pounding, fiendish wind. It beat down on my face with an otherworldly hatred. The furious sound of a billion sand crystals buzzed around me like a swarm of atomized bees. This was no good. It was dreadful, unfavorable, far from bueno.
We’ve had worse than this, I thought, as I dragged the Hive down off the 4Runner. I began setting up the big red tent there in the midst of the whipping wind, facing north towards the Big Nipple. Little did I know that, just like Crockett, this was a fight I could not win.
The pitch went smoothly enough. The Hive requires less than a minute to setup even in high wind. That’s the point. The pop-up design was originally intended to facilitate easy deployment on frozen lakes in any number of winter ice fishing scenarios.
I screwed down the corner pins, set the auxiliary wind rigging, weighted the bottom edges with stones to pinch out the blowing dust — same as always.
Everything felt solid. I brought in the chair, the rugs, the table. I even made myself a cup of shrimp ramen noodles. Leia and I sat looking out the open door flap towards the evening sun as it sank lower and lower into the west. I still needed to bring in the bags, all the developing trays, and of course the chemicals, hangers, and print head.
Emerging from the Hive, I rounded the far side of the 4Runner to grab the first of the load. As I came back around the rear of the vehicle…nothing. The Hive was gone. Vanished. All that remained was a heap of rugs and sorrow surrounding an overturned table and chair.
True carnage.
It was like a bad magic trick. I was filled with disbelief; consumed with near-shock at what I was seeing or, really, not seeing. Where was the Hive?
Six craters told the story. A brutal gust had ripped all four corner pins from the loose Earth, even the two wind riggings. The Hive had taken flight over the edge of the canyon and now laid jumbled like a dirty blanket at the bottom. I couldn’t believe it.
The realization that I would now have to climb down to retrieve the entire thing with night closing in fell upon me like Judgement Day. What’s more, the entire ordeal left Leia in a state of extreme terror. Shaking with fear.
The sight of her filled me with a true rage. I felt that old anger brewing up from the bottom of my chest.
Who's to blame? Mother Nature? God? The Land itself?
Yes. All of them. I blamed all of them, not sparing my own short sightedness for bringing us out here. I knew this place was no good. I ignored it. The ground had told me, the wind had told me, I refused to listen.
Instantly, in a fit of atavistic self-preservation, my mind sounded the retreat.
Get out of here. Crawl down and get your little tent and head back to Albuquerque. Rent a room, a bed, running water. This is too much.
What’s this noise? Could it be I had met my match out here below Cabezon? Likely so. In fact, I knew it as much as I have known anything. The notion of being back in town before midnight with a toilet and a television did seem an extremely pleasant prospect. My brain continued to argue the case, this time in a whisper.
Just send the scan into a lab. You don’t need to print it right. Nobody cares but you. It could all be so much easier.
You’re right, myself said to myself.
This is pointless. There’s no reason for…
…what is that? The sound. That’s not just the wind.
“…remember the Alamo.”
It was quiet. Barely an echo above the blowing sand. But it was there.
“Remember the Alamo!” it came again, this time with an incomparable fury that drowned out the wind and the dust and the doubt. The cry barreled down from the top of the Big Nipple with a boundless electricity.
“REMEMBER THE ALAMOOOOOO!”
My throat tightened. My eyes blurred with tears. I saw Davy, bound, screaming in the face of Santa Ana with a Tennessee yell that I knew all too well as he was hacked to pieces on his knees there in Texas.
No! We will not retreat! Never surrender!
We’ll dig our graves here if need be. In my heart I knew it was hopeless but now the very idea of leaving this place without mounting a war of extreme atrician seemed as alien to me as surely this tale does to you now.
As night loomed in, and with the Hive recovered and stowed, Leia and I crawled into the 4Runner. The gale continued to rock the car far into the night with it’s rotten lullaby. Time to sleep for both of us. Tomorrow there will be games.
Fashioning a reliable stake comes down to a function of three imperatives: depth, diameter, and friction.
Generally speaking, the wider the stake the more friction it will exude on the surrounding Earth. The more loose the ground, the greater diameter the stake should be; the deeper the stake is driven the less likely an impending force is to extrude it from the ground.
The Hive must be secured beyond what the small, screw-in ice pins can facilitate. We need additional stakes. Big stakes. Stakes that can be driven down deep and bite hard into this miserable powder. Two pieces of downed Juniper fit the bill.
I whittled and sawed like a psychopathic beaver. I shaped the pieces of wood into two matching spear points no less than fifteen inches long and two inches wide. Our last resort to hold the Hive fast.
After repositioning the 4Runner to act as a barricade I pitched the Hive once more behind it in an effort to deflect the majority of the prevailing west winds. The original ice pins go first, then the Dracula stakes. I drive each one into the Earth to a depth of 12 inches, as far as they will go without splintering under the weight of the hammer. One stake at the front, one at the rear, pinning the Hive in the middle. Finally, I lash off the north face of the shelter to the driver’s rear wheel of the vehicle. If all else fails at least there will be no more dusk climbs down into the canyon.
After laying on a healthy amount of freshly hewn slate along the bottom edges I again moved in the chair, my big table, and the rugs — which really tie the room together. What now? Nothing to do but weight for the next barrage of late afternoon wind and hope the defenses hold. I seared up a good bone-in beef shank, fed Leia, mixed another Sazerac, and welcomed the end of another long day. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll print tomorrow.
The stakes held. The Hive stayed. Glory. We had beaten the wind but not the sand. No matter how tightly sealed I made the corners and the doors, the windows and the base, that fine devil dust still made its way into the space. Everything was covered from the ceiling to the table. A thin sheen of dirt rested on the rugs, chair, all of it. I could print, sure, but a drying print is a dust magnet even in the most controlled of environments. Here, the wet paper would grab hold of the air and turn to shark skin. This was the end.
There was no use in attempting to bring into the world what was certain to be stillborn. It would be cruel and unusual, a waste of our water and our precious paper; directly counterproductive to the business we’re in. I felt no shame, no regret in pushing it to the very edge before finally here, in front of the walls of my own pathetic Alamo, I laid it all down with a full heart.
We went back to Albuquerque. I rented a small casita and we conducted our dark business within the depths of a cramped laundry room. We made it to Phoenix with the picture and it hangs on the gallery wall even as these words spill onto the page.
It was a fine print.
All text and images copyright 2023 by Adam Welch unless otherwise indicated.