Ray

Click on the weird pics.

When I woke up this morning the wind was blowing pretty hard, and the weather report had changed the wind direction to more of a side wind while I'm driving than a tailwind. All of this caused me to scrap my plan of leaving this morning for Deming, and put it off till tomorrow. Tomorrow Is still going to be somewhat windy but looks like not as bad as today.

That's all the news for today so the rest of this blog post will be talking about Ray, the guy I met at the Vulture Mine the other day. He's got some interesting talents and might just be somebody you hear about in the future if some of his plans work out.

When I first ran into Ray he was balancing oddly shaped rocks on one another. This is considered an art form by some folks and he is particularly good at it. He picks rocks that look like they can't be balanced but somehow he manages.

In all the time we talked I forgot to ask him what his relationship is to the Vulture Mine. The mine itself is a separate operation from this old mining property. And when I took the tour several years ago there wasn't much going on at the old property compared to what's happening today. The self-guided tour now shows a lot more things over a bigger area than the guided tour I took a few years ago.

And my first indication that something had changed was when I started seeing weird and fanciful pieces of equipment mixed in with the mining stuff, in a way that made me kind of wonder if some of this weird stuff was real, as it related to mining.

I could soon see that the strange stuff was mixed in all through the old mining property, it wasn't in just one or two areas, it was hidden here and there so throughout the self-guided tour were these unexplained, and odd objects.

I wish I had asked him about it now because I'm wondering if Ray didn't lease the entire old mining property, and is slowly turning it into his dream.

Typical of the things scattered around the area is this cart that from a distance I thought was a real Porta-potty, but up close I could see that a normal size person would barely fit in it.

A little later when I saw Ray again he was doing some carpentry work building a miniature ghost town out of the old lumber from the fallen down buildings on the mining property.

I was actually taking a picture of the sand carving he's doing, which is another thing he's an expert at and does these sand sculptures all over the country.

In fact sculpting is actually what he does. Starting as a high school art teacher, he's worked as a sculptor for DC comics, Warner Bros. Hasbro toys and oddly enough the Food Network.

Ray has built five or six of these miniature 8 foot tall buildings, and he's still building more. And it's not just a facade, if you look in the windows of the saloon you can see little whiskey bottles. And like everything else he makes, this is made out of trash and old wood.

This is more of the weird things that's scattered all around the property. At first you think it might be real, but when you look at it closer you can see that it's just a piece of metal art made out of junk to look like something that's real. I guess this is a good time to say that Ray makes everything out of junk, he calls it repurposing.

And then there's this horse!

With a body made of old burlap sacks, strings for a mane, and the hooves made out of oil cans, it somehow manages to resemble a horse.

More weirdness. I asked Ray if he had nightmares all the time? And he assured me he didn't. He talks perfectly normal but the things he creates from trash are almost unbelievable.

The things I've shown so far are just a tiny taste of what he does, but tomorrow I will take you into his studio where the real magic takes place, and you will be introduced to the characters he has created and may one day, Ray believes, become a movie, and since he already has Hollywood connections I guess it's possible.



Theboondork