Bill-on-the-Hill

Every generation has its defining events, such that members of that generation can remember with stark clarity where they were and what they were doing when the event happened. Pearl Harbor ... the JFK assassination ... first man on the moon ... John Lennon's murder ... when the Berlin Wall came down ... 9/11/01 ... that kind of thing. For baseball fans, seeing Hank Aaron's hallowed home-run record reached by Barry Bonds must be such a moment, if not really a globally significant one. So where was I when Bonds got his 755th? Watching a minor-league baseball game in Albuquerque, although the game was the least of the spectacles that night.

Albuquerque, for those of you familiar with the place only through pop-culture references (for example, where Bugs Bunny was constantly taking a wrong turn), is a medium-size city (population about 500,000) right in the middle of New Mexico, where the deserts of the southern part of the state and the mountains of the north meet. For ten months of the year, it is a very attractive Southwestern city with a pleasant, if rather warm, climate. (The other two months are May and June, ferociously windy as well as beastly hot and dry, when it looks much more like the Dust Bowl parodies in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Don't visit from mid-April to mid-June if you can be there at other times.) It's about 90 miles from the small town where Emily and I live, which makes it just right for a quick overnight getaway, although we more commonly do day excursions there. On this particular occasion we needed to do some shopping there that can't be done at home, so decided to make a 24-hour escape out of it, incorporating a ball game at the Albuquerque Isotopes (seriously!) stadium, then some hiking in the gorgeous Jemez Mountains on the way home the next day.

I'll spare you the shopping and most other logistics, except to say that both the dinner at Garduño's of Mexico (http://www.gardunosrestaurants.com) and lodging at a Country Inn and Suites were better than just satisfactory -- apparently the hotel had gone through some tough times a couple of years back and got negative reviews, but whatever was wrong appears to have been fixed and I'd give it a distinct thumbs-up now. So on to the game. The Isotopes, AAA-level farm team for the Florida Marlins, play in an attractive, modern stadium in the southeastern part of the city near the University of New Mexico's athletic facilities. It's a more pleasant place to watch pro baseball than many major-league parks are, and for dirt-cheap ticket prices you can usually get seats so close to the action that you can see the players' acne (remember, this is for kids on the way up to the bigs, and many are quite young). Not, however, last night; the promotional gimmick for the weekend was a promised-to-be-grandiose fireworks show right after the game, and so the stands were full of young families who'd got their tickets earlier than we did, leaving us in nosebleed seats on the right-field line. Well, it's good to see minor-league teams draw well -- too many fold because they don't -- and the spectators did have a post-game treat to look forward to. Little did they know ...

Now one additional bit of information about Albuquerque. Like much of New Mexico and the American Southwest, it exhibits a "monsoon" weather pattern: most of the year's precipitation is concentrated in a few weeks in the latter part of the summer, when the Sandia Mountains above town give rise to scattered and brief, but incredibly intense, thunderstorms. It was clear when we got to the park that thunder-boomers were building both north and south of us. That was a scenic treat -- thunderstorms in New Mexico issue from isolated thunderclouds that you can see 50 miles away like turreted castles in the air, queue Judy Collins here -- but of course posed a potential threat to the game. Well, no big deal, we thought; on days of "isolated" t-storms, any particular site is only about 30% likely to get rained on, and if the park was in the 30% for today, we'd just get under cover until the thing passed. But then, on the way to our seats, we looked at the sky beyond the storms, and suddenly the game literally paled into insignificance.

For the barest, tiniest hint of what we saw, look at the Web Site du Jour: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/corona.htm , dedicated to the remarkable atmospheric phenomenon known as a "corona." I won't try to duplicate the explanation for coronae that they give on that page, but we were seeing one that so far transcends any of the examples there (and the site has a terrific photo page) as to defy description. It's like comparing the colors of the brightest, most beautiful rainbow you've ever seen to the reflections off a splotch of oil slick on a driveway. The thundercloud was positioned so that not only were the ice crystals in its upper reaches creating this incredible, shimmering, shifting array of colors, you could actually see them because the sun itself was blocked. And despite what the web site says about the size of a corona, this thing was HUGE. One entire corner of the sky was lit up. I particularly remember a little cloud off the main body of the thunderhead that was turned a fluorescent, lime green. It was like looking at a doorway into heaven, any moment we might have expected angels to start coming through that one green cloud. We literally just stood there watching the show with our mouths hanging open for about 20 minutes, until the sun dropped lower behind the thundercloud and the colors faded.

The funny thing is: I think we may have been the only people in the whole park -- and remember, it was a sellout because of the fireworks, with a crowd around 12,000 -- who saw this thing. Certainly nobody that I could see was staring up into the sky, and if you could see the show at all, you would have to stare at it. People just weren't noticing. Their eyes were on the field, their friends, their beer, the goofy-looking Isotopes mascot, who knows what. And all of this was going on before the game even started. What were these people thinking of, that they didn't even bother to look at a sky full of wonders -- despite the knowledge that the New Mexico sky at monsoon time is a thing of beauty even without a corona and a ballpark is a great place to see it? I don't know. I don't think I want to know.

After this light show the game, such as it was, was sort of an anticlimax. It got interrupted in the top of the 4th, just as it was getting dark and the stadium lights were taking charge, when the southern thunderstorm decided to swerve from its path and head straight for us. We got a tremendous downpour for about half an hour, lightning crashing everywhere (one probably wasn't much farther away than the parking lot where we'd left our car), followed by a more sustained rain that lasted for another hour before stopping. At that point they made a half-hearted attempt to finish the game, and set off the fireworks display (very nice) to entertain the remaining fans while the grounds crew tried to get the field into shape. It was pretty obvious, however, that we'd just taken too much rain for the game to continue. When the rains resumed, a crew came out to put the overnight tarp on the pitching mound -- a signal that the game is going to be called -- and we decided we'd had enough. The official postponement announcement came just as we were getting to our car.

Oh yes, back to the subject at the top of the page. As we were cowering under shelter (having abandoned our nosebleed seats at the first nearby crash of lightning, reasoning that we were in a likely location for the next one) with thousands of other fans waiting out the downpour, word came over the PA system that Bonds had just hit homer number 755. There was scattered applause, but a lot more booing than cheering, and Emily and I were among the boobirds. The baseball fans of New Mexico do not like Barry Bonds. We don't like the way he has turned our beloved game into a travesty, a circus, a freak show that will never seem pure again until/unless he either comes clean about steroid use or is conclusively and convincingly exonerated -- but I will give more complete, non-travel thoughts in another blog entry when (alas, "when" is likely, not "if") he hits number 756. That, I assure you, will be a sad day in our household, and it's unlikely that it will be leavened with anything like the celestial glories that accompanied number 755.