When we got dinner at Lowe’s Signature Market, on our only night in Alamogordo, we got breakfast for today. Then we dropped by White Sands, just to see it in bright sunlight, before hitting the road to my sister’s in Albuquerque. Our original plan was to stay south but both of us were a little burned out and going to my sister’s was almost like going home for a break.

White Sands National Monument is not what I expected. I’ve been to and hiked around numerous sand dune formations in deserts – and, probably, more than dozens at beaches – and I expected the sand dunes at White Sands to be more like Eureka Dunes or the main dune field in Death Valley. They aren’t and not just because they are white – slightly gray on our trip because, I’ve since learned, they were damp from a recent rainfall – they also have a different texture and are much lower than I expected. This is because they are gypsum – hydrous calcium sulfate, if you prefer – not quartz, silicon dioxide, most of us are used to. Sand, it turns out, is defined by size, not material (according to Wikipedia, it is “finer than gravel and coarser than silt”.

What I don’t know is how all this gypsum got here. What I do know is that this area shares a similar general history to the nearby – relatively speaking, that is – Carlsbad and Wolfcamp areas. About 280 to 250 million years ago, the land on earth was one supercontinent – with some smaller island arcs and isolated islands – which geologists have named Pangaea. As an aside, Pangaea was not the only supercontinent. The basis of modern geology is that the plates – sections of earth, imagine the different sections of a soccer ball – move around, driven by currents deep in the liquid core of the earth. These plates have, over about 4.5 billion years, come together to form supercontinents more than once, more likely more than five times, building mountains and raising seabeds and then bounced or drifted apart forming isolated land masses like North America or Africa. End aside. Anyway, at the edge of Pangaea was a shallow sea in which, over millions of years, layers of sediment collected. In this local area – and this is what I don’t quite understand, why only here? – gypsum, which is water-soluble, collected in the layers. About 70 million years ago, the Farallon Plate started slipping under the North American Plate lifting this part of the world, exposing the layered gypsum. About 30 million years ago, the Farallon Plate also started stretching the earth apart in this area, with the Nevadan Basin and Range, and the land that is now White Sands National Monument dropped, forming the large basin we drove into a couple of hours ago. About 24 to 12 thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, large amounts of gypsum were washed into the basin, forming a lake without an outlet. Recently, geologically speaking, that lake dried up exposing the gypsum deposits, crystallizing them, and winds have blown the now sand into what is now White Sands National the Monument, for us to enjoy on a warm afternoon.      

El Paso is a desert border town and a military town which, IMHO, are two strikes against it. But, this is a prejudged, I was stationed at Fort Bliss – the Military Base that makes this a military town – for training in a Surface to Air missile system called HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) from March 1963 to January 1964 when I was transferred to an active unit in Korea and then from April to June 1965 when I came back from Korea and ended up teaching Germans at the nearby Orogrande Missile Range. 

Being in the Army for three years was a major influence on my life, much of it good and some not so good. When I was in the military, it was an almost universal American male coming of age experience.  Yes, if someone didn’t want to go in the military and had the means to get a deferment, they were able to stay out, but that was more of an exception than a rule. Like most men my age, by the time I was in my early twenties, we had actually contributed at least two years – three in my case – to our country. I was exposed to other men, many from vastly different social and economic backgrounds, who I would never have met otherwise; not only exposed to but lived with, and, in many cases, befriended, which I give at least partial credit for why I am more tolerant of Trump voters than most of my friends. But, most importantly and somewhat counter-intuitively, the draft makes war less likely. People revolted against the Vietnam War because they or their relatives might go. Now,  with a so-called Professional Military, war does not involve the citizenry. Now, because almost nobody has been in the military, killing people in faraway lands is looked upon as a noble cause. Now we say, “Thank you for your service.” instead of protesting our wars. End of rant. 

El Paso is about 144 and two hours and 25 minutes miles from Whites City, according to Google and that is about what it took us. We started on a four-lane divided highway that goes between Carlsbad Caverns National Park and Guadalupe Mountains Nation Park named, creatively enough, National Park Highway.