NEW MEXICO
Would you stop your car at a clearly marked crosswalk if
Santa Claus were strolling across the street? Would you
even slow down or get off your cell phone to gawk at a walking
gorilla? The University of New Mexico wanted to investigate
pedestrian safety at crosswalks in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Gallup
and Las Cruces, and got federal funding to test drivers with
scenarios just like these. Well, abysmal doesn’t begin to
describe the driving habits of folks in those four cities, reports
the Denver Post. “People drove right by Santa Claus,”
said Las Cruces police officer Chris Miller. “We had people
say they saw the gorilla trying to cross the street, but they
didn’t think they had to stop for him.” In Santa Fe,
police tried to be explicit, placing orange cones well ahead of
crosswalks and posting signs that warned of a safety crackdown.
Nobody stopped. “The first few times they went right by me, I
couldn’t believe it,” said police officer Anthony
Rivera, who was dressed in plainclothes as he tried to cross the
street. Las Cruces officer Kiri Daines found that even when she
dressed up as Spider-Man, “I literally had to tap on the
hoods of cars as they stopped an inch away from me. I’m in
the intersection, and they’re almost running over me.”
Hundreds of scofflaws were nailed with $51 tickets, but it’s
an open question whether fines have any impact on drivers
determined to keep moving.
ARIZONA
Some residents of one of the more expensive ZIP
codes in Phoenix have alarmed homeowners with their
“brazen” behavior, reports the
Arizona Republic. Coyotes are the interlopers,
and one was so ill-mannered it grabbed a leashed bichon frise by
the neck and tried to run off with it. Luckily, Lexy, short for
Lexus, was saved by its owner, who yanked the little dog free. But
the shameless coyote held its ground, said the owner. “He
would not budge. It was like I was infringing on his
territory.” That’s actually the truth, since the
Biltmore area of Phoenix has expanded onto turf that was once the
exclusive domain of wildlife. Darren Julian, an urban wildlife
specialist with the state Game and Fish Department, considers
coyotes invading Biltmore the “ultimate opportunists.”
His advice: Feed pets indoors. Keep garbage in cans.
“Don’t allow these animals to become comfortable in the
human arena,” he says. “Be rude to them. Yell. Throw
rocks.”
SEATTLE AND SAUDI
ARABIA
We stopped reading comments
posted to the online “Slog” of Seattle’s
alternative weekly, The Stranger,
after 56 people weighed in. The red-hot story that got people going
was a first-person account of a woman thrilled at finding a rare
Starbucks in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Once the
burka-clad American writer spotted the coffee mecca, she boldly
entered, though no woman had ever been admitted before. A stunned
barrista gave her a coffee, but then he ordered her out —
immediately. Females were admitted only to a small espresso bar out
back, labeled “family.” Comments ranged widely, with
some readers saying no surprise here — all women are
second-class citizens in Saudi Arabia. Others fulminated against
the country’s barbarism and the discriminatory role that
Starbucks had played. A blogger named Roflamo took a humorous tack:
“As someone who has picked up a lot of girls at Starbucks, I
just want to say these Saudi guys are not getting their
money’s worth on that coffee.”
THE
WEST
Timothy Egan pointed out in a
recent New York Times op-ed that the two creators of every
American’s birthright — our 565 million acres
of public lands — were privileged men with democratic
convictions: They wanted everyone in the country to share in its
wealth of natural beauty. The two men, who were friends, were also
manly to the max: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest
Service, had his valet wake him up each day with a splash of cold
water to the face; President Theodore Roosevelt, who created the
federal agency, considered it bracing to swim naked in the Potomac
River. We may still own our birth- right, Egan said, but the
public-lands legacy of George W. Bush has been a tawdry
“cash-out” that leaves wildlife refuges without staff
and national forests like slums: “Roosevelt had his place on
Oyster Bay. Pinchot had a family estate in Pennsylvania. Bush has
the ranch in Crawford. Only one of them has never been able to see
beyond the front porch.”
COLORADO
The resort town of
Vail used to require “bear-resistant”
Dumpsters, but since black bears are both smart and
powerful, it just took the animals a little longer to get to the
delicious garbage. Recently, the town council mandated
“bear-proof” Dumpsters, reports the Vail
Daily, but now there’s a new problem: The lids are
too heavy. “We put a man on the moon,” said councilman
Farrow Hitt; what’s needed is “a Dumpster lid that
doesn’t chop people’s hands off.”
Betsy Marston is editor of Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. Tips of Western
oddities are always appreciated and often shared in the column,
Heard around the West.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard Around the West.
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