The Family at Serpiente

by Raymond Tolman

  They were supposed to meet with Don and Leslie Nelson, who were teachers at the University of New Mexico. Don and Leslie were avid outdoor enthusiast, who among other things, were members of the Adobe Canoe club, mountain climbers and avid speleologist. Name an outdoor sport and they were involved in it, which was why they taught recreation and physical education majors at the school, but they were actually much more. To them, recreation and physical conditioning was just a means of preparing them for having real adventures. They had the same mindset as Corey and Hidalgo but worked at it in a more personal if not professional way. I had met Leslie Nelson while taking a workshop at New Mexico State University, immediately developing a friendship. It was only a matter of time until a letter arrived at Serpiente which is why the rendezvous was set up.

  After gassing up the Ford Cherokee, Corey and Hidalgo continued northward until they turned East on Eubank Avenue that would take them toward the center of the city. The address was hard to find, and the snow was starting to accumulate which didn’t help. They found that trying to find an address, while dodging out of control drivers was a challenge. The streets were snow covered and just slick enough to send an occasional car barreling down the road sideways.

  They drove past the entrance several times between two house numbers that left them stymied as to where their meeting house was. Number 208 was easy to find, as well as 216 which was perfectly visible, but where was 209 Eubank? The entrance turned out to be an unmarked and walled in road that curled around to a hidden Hacienda styled adobe house. After driving down the narrow one lane drive for fifty yards or so, the road completely curled around to the right into a very private parking lot. The southwestern adobe walls completely hid the adobe house in the middle of a curve of the wall. After parking, Corey and Hidalgo walked up to a locked gate with a door bell button to push.

  Don Nelson, a young man in his thirties appeared clad in only in house shoes, short pants and a tee shirt. After a fast introduction, they followed him though the courtyard to the front door of the house. The courtyard was now covered by several inches of wet snow which gave it an unworldly appearance. As they followed him to the house, Don turned and said to them, “I really didn’t expect you to come on a night like tonight.”

  Ducking under the lentil of the low door, they were instantly warm again. Before anything was said, Leslie offered them cups of hot apple cider with cinnamon sprinkled on top. Hidalgo instantly relaxed but Corey was anxious and still a little curious as to why they had been called out. They were, after all, just hoping for an excuse to travel but they hadn’t figured on the snow.

  The snow was supposed to go north barely getting into the Rio Grande Valley. Howard Morgan, the weatherman who normally was dead right, had predicted the possibility of one to two inches of snow, there was already four inches of snow on top of everything. Most folks around Albuquerque loved the snow but hated the aftermath, the days filled with accidents both vehicular and pedestrian. The snow storm had stalled over them and it seemed to have no inclination to stop.

  Inside the Southwestern styled house, they sat down to a handmade table made of what appeared to be a solid slab of oak wood. Hidalgo started the conversation with, “My name is Hidalgo and this is Corey and speaking for myself, as well as Corey, thank you for the cider. Penny Anderson suggested that we get in touch with you after she received a letter from you. She said that in the letter you didn’t explain much about the purpose of a meeting or anything else; just that we had to meet. We are free to answer your questions; you must have some kind of proposal for us, something interesting that requires help.”

  They all looked at one another for a moment then Leslie blurted out, “We may have something very interesting for you or we may have just wasted your time.

  Hidalgo says, “Even if there is nothing we can do for one another, you certainly know how to make a person feel welcome.” he held up his empty cup and asked, “May I have some more please?” This seemed to break the ice and Leslie and Don started explaining.

  Leslie says, “Like I said, we are not exactly sure if we can afford the work you do...this might be a waste of your time.” It was an awkward moment, Leslie seemed afraid to approach the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room; money. Would Corey and Hidalgo charge a large fee for working with them? They were uncomfortable asking this question, but it was important to Don and Leslie. They were university teachers and had a small savings to work with, but they were far from wealthy.

  Corey says, “In general, it depends upon the kind of services we get involved with. Generally we charge what it cost us. Penny, for example earns extra money doing genealogical work for people, finding out who their ancestors are. Sometimes they will send her nothing but a letter or picture and ask if she can explain it. Usually, she gets paid and paid well, but if she runs into a dead end, she earns nothing. Hidalgo here is even contacted occasionally to do regular detective work, but ninety-nine percent of what we do have nothing to do with making money and when we do make money it is not from the friends that we work with.”

  “It really depends upon what you are asking us to do. Think of it as excavating a Sunken Pirate Ship, We share the cost of excavation and we share in the bullion we find.”

  Hidalgo started to say something else but Leslie broke into the conversation with, “Let’s talk about it. We are always looking for new caves to explore.” They looked at each other blankly.

  Don said, “We found a cave in the Estancia Basin.”

  Hidalgo asked him, “Well, so why do you need us?”

  Leslie explained, “To gain access to the cave. Three years ago a rancher and the local bank agreed that they had picked out a good spot to drill a well. It should have been a wet well but instead they drilled straight down, some thirty five feet and then broke through the ceiling of a natural cave. They pushed the pipe on down another few feet and stopped when they could not find the cave floor. They dropped a weighted plumb bob down the pipe and discovered it was another forty feet to the cave floor. When the plum bob was pulled back out it was bone dry so the drillers lost interest in the site and went to another job.”

  “Because of the cavity they had drilled into, they left the pipe in the ground. Obviously there is a large cave there or possibly a whole system of caves, dropping off through the bedrock, seemingly dry and completely unexplored,” continued Leslie.

  “Do you realize what scientific discoveries could be made? There is actually life inside of caves and this is a sealed cave. Just think about it, there are stubborn microorganisms that live deep in the earth and break down rocks into simple chemicals that they live off of. Different caves produce different types of biological materials. The microorganisms there may be used in scientific research in order to develop new products such as medicines.” Leslie paused to catch her breath.

  Corey asked, “Wouldn’t our presence there destroy those isolated strains of biological life?”

  “Possibly,” she answered, but the value of what we learn is well worth it.”

  “Really,” answered Hidalgo, “speaking as a Navajo, I find that modern scientific cultures are more than ready to go to places that they shouldn’t. They tend to destroy everything they touch.”

  Leslie countered Hidalgos objection with, “You are correct, but cave microbiology has been studied for years without hurting any of the natural microorganisms. I really doubt that anything can hurt them. Even fully desiccated caves have microorganisms that spring back to life as soon as a little moisture is added. They live for years that way, but there is far more that we would like to learn about this cave than about possible microorganisms.”

  Hidalgo asked, “The likelihood of finding minerals, gold or silver is pretty unlikely I take it.”

  “Not likely,” laughed Don, “But there are true treasures to be found in natural caves.”

  The Skeletal Hand

  Hidalgo was still playing devil’s advocate; he knew the answer to his next simple question. In fact, he had explor
ed many caves during his lifetime. At the Rio Grande Gorge he had been in a natural cave that had an underground river in it. He thought back to the amazing bio luminosity that microorganisms from another world produced in this most unique cave. “Aren’t all caves just holes in the ground with a few formations that people like to look at?” he asked with a sly smile on his face.

  “Hardly,” answered Leslie. In this area of New Mexico several caves have produced fossils of early animals as well as people. Think of Sandia Cave on the back side of Sandia Crest. Dr. Hibbens from the University discovered the remains of an Ice Age culture that lived here in New Mexico way before ‘modern Indians’ migrated into this area. They may have been here well before the last ice age, certainly well before the Indians that make up the tribes that live here now.”

  Hidalgo countered her argument with, “My ancestors migrated down into this area only a few hundred years before the Spanish arrived here. What makes you so certain that people were living in the Estancia basin thousands of years ago?”

  “Well,” answered Leslie, “Would you agree that such animals as mastodon and wooly mammoths are ice age animals? Clovis age arrow heads have actually been found buried inside of mastodon bones. Some very brave and hungry person managed to get close enough to them to stab them with an obsidian tipped spear. Those people wintered over in caves.”

  Corey says, “Just like our ranch animals, they must have gotten tired of the monotonous and cold New Mexico wind.”

  “That’s true” said Leslie, “But I take it you two are not interested in this, perhaps we have wasted your time.”

  “Actually,” answered Hidalgo attempting to calm the sudden turn of conversation that had just occurred, “We are very interested in your project, but we are still confused as to why you need us.”

  Don entered the conversation at this point. “The last time we were there Mr. Sanchez who owns the property became belligerent with us and demanded that we leave his property. People who live off of highway 10 are very secretive and private. In the small towns of Torreon and Chilili for example, several people have been attacked by a group of men who claim independence from America. As far as they are concerned, they should be the owners of the entire Estancia basin as laid out in the old Spanish land grants. They resent the taxes that they must pay just to keep ownership of the tiny plots of land they now own. In many ways I don’t blame them. As the population of Albuquerque and other cities around Estancia continue to grow, more and more of the land they once owned is bought up for taxes, subdivided and sold to Anglos.”

  Leslie added, “They resent the loss of their culture as well as the loss of their land.”

  Hidalgo, who was smiling the entire time she had spoken, answered her with a bit of sarcasm of his own, “Again, speaking as a Navajo, I think I can relate to that. The Estancia Valley was prime hunting grounds for the indigenous peoples who lived there well before any Spanish king decreed ownership to their conquistadores.”

  Leslie continued, “We need you to break the impasse we have with Mr. Sanchez. The last time we were there he and another fellow showed up with a trailer behind his truck and released a bull on the property. We gathered up what we could and left as fast as we could.”

  “Ok,” said Corey, “So even if we can get permission to go back to the well site and if Mr. Sanchez agrees to move his bull to another pasture, what do we do then?”

  “From a practical point,” she continued, “A pipe with a diameter large enough to allow people to drop down it would need to be installed at the site. This of course, would take major equipment as well as time and money. We would need a rescue well drilled, like the ones used by miners in order to get trapped miners out of caved in mines. They drill straight down until they break though then bring the trapped miners out one at a time. A pipe that allows a cylinder to drop down it attached by a steal cable would allow a person to not ‘hang up’ as they drop down the shaft. Drilling a vertical shaft and installing a pipe would be expensive but it might pay off if the cave is unique enough.”

  “Just think about it,” said Don, “A speleologist would need to dead drop through a pipe, just big enough for a body to fit in. That would be a very scary moment. Just think about it, you would be the first person to descend into an unknown world.”

  Corey asked, “How old is the rock in the cave?”

  Don answered, “If you could get down the pipe, you’d drop into a Pennsylvanian Age seabed, some three hundred and sixty million years old.”

  “Actually,” replied Corey, “You’d find yourself dangling above a pitch black cave and you’d have no idea what is down there.”

  “Actually we have a very good idea of what is down there,” Leslie continued in making her point. Her assurance, coming from a teacher in her prime was showing. She knew her stuff. “In this area, very old Sandia Granite, some 3.6 billion years old, is covered with Pennsylvanian age sea beds. A geological unconformity occurs here because the geological ages of sedimentary rock that should be on top of the bedrock are not there. At one time the area was under a lot of erosion. All of the rock that might have been deposited during the Paleozoic age eroded away until finally oceans and seaways appeared. The sea beds of the Pennsylvanian Age or what is sometimes called the Carboniferous Age have left very interesting fossils there. The earth was several degrees warmer during those times and all manner of life lived in those shallow seas as well as on land. They are, by the way, the same rocks that make up the rind of the watermelon that the Spanish named Sandia Crest that makes up the Eastern Albuquerque skyline.”

  Hidalgo thought about it, from the west mesa of Albuquerque the observer sees red Sandia granite topped with a grey rind of sedimentary rocks and finally capped by the green of the forest that is on top. It literally looks like a large slice of watermelon. The Spanish were right in naming it watermelon or Sandia.

  Don continued, “We think the cave may have formed during a wet period millions of years after the seas withdrew. We think that the cave was shaped by underground streams that were active during the age of dinosaurs. Estancia basin is an old sea bed but geologically new. Sandia Granite is slightly tilted up to the West making up the edge of the Rio Grande Rift Zone. The granite is impermeable to water forming a natural north and south basin with drainage patterns on the side with many tributaries. Actually the slope of the Estancia basin...” he was interrupted by Corey.

  “So let me get this straight, which of us is going to put up the thousands of dollars it would cost to drill a hole so humans can get into that cave?”

  “Well, actually, Leslie and I have some resources but we are certainly not rich. We live well, but we have to live within our means, and that means the money we make from teaching. But we have connections to some interesting and great friends. They just might be willing to put up the money if we can demonstrate the value of the cave.”

  Testing them again, Hidalgo said, “We also have some resources but I am not sure that we can afford to put up money for some spelunking club to have its own cave to explore.” He strived to make a diplomatic point, he paused then said, “But we will think about it.”

  This seemed to bring the conversation to an impasse but after a moment, Leslie said, “We are professionals, “What if I told you that we dropped a miniature camera down the pipe last year.”

  His curiosity peaked Corey asked “What did you see?”

  Leslie answered, “Wonderful things, formations, fossils and something really strange, what appears to be the bones of a skeletal human hand, a very large human hand.” Leslie brought out the photograph, a black and white photo of a skeletal hand that appeared to have been cut off from the rest of the body at the wrist.

  Corey asked, “How would a human hand get into a cave that apparently was formed millions of years ago that does not appear to have a natural entrance, at least not now?”

  Leslie answered, “That’s one of the mysteries we would like you to help us solve. Obviously at one time or another there was
a natural entrance. If it is a human hand down there it must have been deposited sometime since the last Ice Age.” Leslie stopped talking for a moment and then added, “We wondered why would there be just a hand there and not a full skeleton.”

  Corey mumbled, “Another mystery to solve.”

  They were certainly interested but wanted more information. Because of the snow they were invited to sleepover. Don and Leslie brought out sleeping bags and pads for them to sleep on and they piled out in front of the huge iron, inset stove that because of the thick adobe walls, kept the house toasty even on the coldest of days.

  After breakfast with Don and Leslie they agreed to do some preliminary investigations and left to find Corey’s relatives who lived on Valley Road off the old Isleta highway in the South Valley of Albuquerque.

  The Great Estancia BB Gun Shootout

  The next morning the sky had completely cleared off and the temperature rose to thirty eight degrees. The four to five inches of snow that had accumulated overnight was already starting to disappear. They turned south on Isleta Road and drove until they reached Valley Road, a side street. Traveling down the road they turned into Alice and Boone’s place. There, they knew they could get a history of the Estancia Valley. Alice had grown up in Estancia and knew the area well.

  The Hollidays lived in a small home that had been built by Boone on weekends. For years they had lived in the middle of a construction zone and it was still under construction. Richard; age nineteen was the only one who was at home at the time and after a brief description of their problem over some hot coffee, that Hidalgo relished, Richard began a description of the Estancia Valley from his point of view from a day in the life of a nine year old.