Desert lake beach, dam museum

The Boulder City Museum packs a lot of fascination into a few rooms, starting with the Crash of 1929 and constructing the setting from which the Boulder Dam (or Hoover Dam) emerged. It is especially evocative of the dam workers' perspectives, full of small details of daily life at work and at home. The political history seems peripheral to this, but it gives you all the context you need to get a sense of who built it and how, and who fed and clothed them. (My favourite fact learned in this visit: an old name for the Colorado River was the Red Bull, because of its huge power and waters ruddy with sandstone sediment when in flood.)

There's also a twenty minute 1960s government video that I would not by any means have missed and might require a bribe of some kind to watch again. It's a modernist paeon to Man (especially Man the Engineer) and how he pours forth his manly concretions to cement his control over Nature (that wild red-blooded river) and it's as one-eyed as the one-eyed snake it fervidly evokes. (If I hear once more about the the river being penetrated and subjugated by the mighty erection of the dam I shall enter a nunnery. Possibly.) You'd have to know in advance, because you wouldn't find out during, that Indian, Black, and Asian Americans were prohibited from working on the project. Also that the damming of the Colorado at Black Canyon (the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead) irretrievably destroyed a whole downstream river ecology and native agriculture in order to redirect the water to subsidise rich California growers, It also drowned and destroyed important archaeological sites. No wonder the Bureau of Reclamation is at such pains to point out that the dam doesn't cost the taxpayer anything!

But the information about the dam construction, including original film, was fascinating and much of it was new to me. Even now it's a towering achievement of engineering. For the time, it must have been astounding.

I bought a small book about the CCC at Lake Mead by local author Dennis McBride before we left.

After a brief tour of the local art gallery in the same building, some lunch was in order. We drove down the hill to picnic at Boulder Beach, under a shade ramada provided by a benevolent government. There were several other families doing the same - some folks even had a cooking fire going in the 115 degree heat. We just had cold food and iced coffee quickly put together before leaving that morning.

We continued down to the lake shore itself. It's rocky, rather than sandy, and rough going, but we found a place to put down a blanket and get into our togs. Walking into the water was like stepping into a warm bath shared with two hundred other people. The silt makes the water completely opaque for the first forty feet or so, and each slow footstep, feeling for rocks, raises more. (Some guy near me went charging joyously in, inadvertently found a rock, and went headlong into the drink. He said he was okay. I saw him later with a cloth tied around his leg.) The water is clear and blue further out, near where the jetskis and fizz boats are buzzing back and forth, beyond a buoyed tape barrier. I kept walking, a slow zombie lurch from the uneven footing. Then, almost impalpably, the first slow tendrils of cooler water touched my ankles. I kept walking further and there was actual cold lake water. Really, almost cold ... although I can't recall the last time it was so painless dropping down into cool water on a hot day, because there was still a warm layer at the surface down to about waist depth.

I'm happy to say that even by the time we climbed out, wrestled with clothes onto damp skin, and walked up the slope to the car - there was still a tiny little bit of residual coolness on my skin.

Summer storm

We had our 4th of July fireworks early last night when a huge thunderstorm came down the valley. It started to get close and spectacular around midnight. Simon went sensibly and seasonably to bed, but I stayed up to watch it for an hour or so.

Full disclosure: reading florid Victorian ethnography* atm. This may get rhapsodic.

At first it was lightning flashes and rare rumbles of thunder. The main part of the storm was east of us and our outlook to the east is not that great, so I was only seeing the sky reflections. The lightning strikes didn't come in ones but in half dozens, flickering like some crazy ball of celestial paparazzi. A few flashes bright enough to dazzle. Belated thunder tells me it's mostly a good ten miles away as the crow flies ( I hear small birds twittering sleepily. Perhaps the storm has kept them awake.)

We passed into some invisible zone around the storm and the wind bowled through, from a fresh, warm and steady breeze to a strong blast, thrashing the trees into constant applause. The sound now is layered from the wind in the trees, the irrigation systems out past the wall, the traffic on the already wet road, and a low rumble of thunder like some noisy midnight neighbours rearranging their furniture, still with the occasional flash and crack of close lightning.

Then the rain, a first few large deliberate drops - a steady incursion into the open doorway - battering the glass in ceaseless barrage. The garden path is quickly an inch deep in water. The street outside looks like a film noir set, streetlight on rain, white buildings and the black pavement with grey clouds above from the city's ambient light.

And the smell, of wet asphalt and concrete and creosote.

Abruptly, several ground strikes of lightning away to the south-east, followed by protracted and complicated thunder. As it rolls by, the rain renews its enthusiasm - but has already spent much of its substance.

The rapid flashes continue, further off now. Like a sleepy child (or middle-aged lady) out in Vegas where the glitter and twinkle keeps pounding on endlessly, my tiredness has overtaken me, I can't watch any more, my eyes won't stay open. Goodnight.

---

*Zuni Breadstuff by Cushing. Can't find much about this online so I'll post a review when I'm finished reading it.  

When they roast the Hatch chiles for you

This is kind of a southwest thing, and I guess they don't tell you about it because it's as matter-of-fact as fresh tortillas, or raspberries, or toilet paper, or 900 kinds of cereal, or an entire wall of canned and bottled chiles. 

But as a stranger to these here parts, I couldn't help noticing ... 

In August and (depending on the season) into early September, you can buy Hatch chiles at the supermarket by the 25 lb box for about $20. That's quite good, but it's not the amazing part. 

The amazing part is that you can then take your box of peppers outside, and some poor bloke who's been assigned to this duty presumably for his sins, will stand out there in the 115 heat and flame roast them for you in a purpose-built, gas-powered roaster. True story.

Hatch chiles, from the eponymous New Mexico county, have a very particular flavour to them. So delicious - so hard to describe. (Come and visit, I'll make you some kind of something with them that we'll eat with fresh, hand-made, blue corn tortillas, out on the patio while the fountain splashes. And drink margaritas while the sun sets, or sample several kinds of local gin into the night.)

I'm a wimp, I got the 'mild' kind, which are all flavour and hardly any heat.

This is up the road at one of our many local supermarkets. I asked the lovely, helpful man if I could take photos. Bemused but obliging, he agreed, and while the chiles roasted, I explained that back home they would never have heard of this. 

Dude! Your hat totally matches the fresh chillies!

It takes 5 minutes or so, but he watches them and knows the perfect moment to power down the blowtorch, stop the revolving drum and decant them back into the now plastic-bag-lined box. 

Tip the guy real good; it's hot and he'll deserve a beer.

Yep, I womanfully trundled them home on the back of my bike. This was back in September 2015 when we didn't yet have Harry. 

When you get them home, let them cool. Then without peeling them, freeze them (we did them in lots of 10 in freezer paper.) When you want to use some, the skins slip off easily as they defrost. Then use them for good and not evil.