Saturday, April 30, 2005

A nice day at the park

Berg and Animas Parks, which stretch along the Animas River, is about the only pretty place Chris and I have discovered in Farmington. It's right next to a Halliburton plant and the vegetation in that area isn't thick enough to shield unsuspecting strollers from that particular germ of industrial ugliness. Still, if you ignore it, you might actually enjoy yourself.

Lots of trees around and honking ducks fighting in the river and you might even spot a squirrel or racoon -- major score for me, who grew up in the land of mongoose.

I find that I actually like walking around in Colorado and New Mexico more than I did in Hawaii. It's still early spring here in the land of actual seasons, so the air is crisp and I don't feel all icky and gross and sweaty after 10 minutes of meandering. (It's funny how salt in the air can do that to you).

Today I went on a walking tour of Animas Park with Donna Thatcher, who is the director of the Nature Center at the park. Only three other people showed up for the tour. I thought it was going to be lame at first, and was stressing out because I knew I had to write a newspaper story (boringest kind of story in the world) about it and that it is always difficult to write a newspaper story when the news element is not readily apparent (i.e. no disaster).

The walk was nice though. If you're like me, you could sit at that Nature Center for hours watching the huge, honking Canadian geese with their goslings, making up stories about them in your head.

Donna, who spends most of her days at the pond by the center, said the goslings don't do any one thing for more than two minutes.

"They're very hyper-active. I imagine it's very difficult to be the parent of goslings."

We also passed by a Veteran's Memorial.

"I don't know why they put it in this part of the park," Donna said. "It's not readily accessible to the older veterans. I wondered why they didn't put it somewhere where it was handicap accessible."

The centerpiece of the memorial was a big, black marble globe with all of the world accounted for -- except Hawaii. That's right. The artist commissioned to make the globe somehow managed to leave out Hawaii and there has been some hoopla about how to get Hawaii on there.

"Somewhat ironic," Donna said. "Being that Pearl Harbor was quite significant to the battle of World War II. Maybe the Japanese obliterated it after all."

Right now the memorial is still pretty stark with just the giant globe (sans Hawaii) and a few plaques but Donna said there are plans to erect eagles with patriotic banners hanging from their beaks. True nature lover, she seemed concerned that this would look tacky.

All in all, it was a nice day. Man, it's sure going to be hard to write an article about it.