Divide and conquer

Southern Living, Oct 1999 by Horton, Orene Stroud

We head to the Depot District to make our request in person, and there we find Bill Clement finishing up his show in the sound-proof, computerized studio of KDAV This station, we learn, is his dream. It specializes in fifties and early sixties music, a format he describes simply as, "No Beatles, no Beach Boys, and no white rabbits."

Bill ran a substantial business restoring classic Chevrolets, but he began to grow restless. "For years my friends and I all talked about doing radio and doing fifties and putting it on the Internet. Now you can tune us in anywhere if you have a computer, a sound card, and a couple of speakers. Just type in www.kdav.com. We've got an audience all over the world." He points to the stack of faxed requests received in the last three hours.

"Buddy Holly is our most popular recording artist, Elvis comes in second, and the Crickets are third," declares Bill. "People can't get the sound that we create anywhere else."

Something of an anachronism himself, Bill looks as if he just stepped out of American Graffiti, and he makes no apologies for that. "I'm still a kid," he declares with a shrug and a wide grin, "an 18-yearold juvenile delinquent playing with cars and music. The fifties weren't perfect by any stretch," he admits, "but, boy, there was an awful lot that was right. And the old cars, the old music, they still appeal today."

Cloudcroft, New Mexico

For many a mile in New Mexico, the spartan landscape seems so flat that you actually begin to question if the Earth is still round. But just when the monotony threatens to overwhelm, lovely mountains rise up like a mirage on the horizon ahead, and Highway 82 begins to climb.

Drawn by the promise of dry, clear air and hours of strong, unrelenting sunshine, scientists erected the National Solar Observatory atop the 9,200-foot-tall Sacramento Peak a half-century ago. It is an eerie sight, this cluster of odd-shaped buildings. One, reminiscent of a traffic cone, is a tower used to study solar flares, sunspots, and such.

The scholarly pull of solar physics loses out to our sheer desire to enjoy these mountains in the fall. Streams of butter-yellow aspen flow through hillsides shaded dark green by fir and pine. The effect is absolutely unforgettable, and every turn that Highway 82 takes as it zigzags down into the Tularosa Basin affords another picturesque view.

White Sands, New Mexico

According to various maps, Highway 82 disappears somewhere around here. On one map it dead-ends into U.S. 54, just north of Alamogordo. Another has it merging and then sliding south with U.S. 70 until it's swallowed up by I-10 on its way to Arizona. Gary and I declare White Sands National Monument the official end of our road-and what a place it is to punctuate this incredible journey.

We arrive near the sweet hour of sunset. Autumn's slanting light turns the rolling miles of gypsum sand around us from blinding white to pastel shades of rose, violet, and blue. Lengthening shadows accent tuate every sculpted ridge and hollow, and the wind rustles as it pulls and scatters the grains from beneath our feet. I listen hard to its hoarSe whispers, and in them I hear the voice of every person I have met And the echo of every tale I have heard. I hear something, too, of the kidal rush of waters that back to the east, far to the east, far to the east, sweep through the Marshes of Glynn.