by Bill Graves
The wind blew across El Malpais for three more days. The rain came, then the snow. Rusty and I played in it. It was like being a kid again back in Duluth, Minnesota. Of course, in New Mexico I did not have to wait five months for the snow to melt.
On the third night of the storm, a sudden silence awakened me. The blower in my electric heater had stopped. At first I thought the park had lost power but soon discovered that the repeated rocking of the motor home in the high wind had worked my power cord out of the receptacle. An easy fix, and back to bed. Life’s problems are so simple out here.
During the storm, vehicles came and went. Those of us with no schedule chose to wait it out. We all got to know each other. The cable-TV system in the park included the Weather Channel. We in our warm nomadic homes watched as the storm swirled in bright colors, dumped on us, and moved east.
By late afternoon of the fourth day, the low clouds moved out, leaving behind mountains covered with gleaming snow. I had not seen them before. Sundown briefly spread them with color. Then they disappeared.
69
On the Santa Fe Trail
Las Vegas, New Mexico
Rusty, the ever-silent observer, always knows early when it is time to break camp. Once the process starts, she is constantly in the way. I stumble over her occasionally. She must have a deep-seated fear that I will leave without her unless she keeps bumping into me, reminding me that she is here.
I said good-bye to my fellow host ages of the storm. We chugged out of Grants. Rusty finally sett led in her seat. We headed east toward Albuquerque, directly into the fireball. Even with sunglasses, I had to block the glare with my hand. The sun was warm and reassuring. It was good to shake off cabin fever and get back on the road. I love this lifestyle.
Interstate 40 makes a straight shot across New Mexico, skirting its biggest city, and then on into Texas. It ends on the other side of the continent. No country on earth has a highway network as convenient and efficient as our interstate system. Then again, few need one. Without any real plan, I turned north on Interstate 25 where it crosses Interstate 40 at Albuquerque.
It was sixty miles to Santa Fe, a favorite locale for those who write the travel section for the Sunday paper. Multiculturalism, the enduring essence of New Mexico, is apparently the soul and charm of this city of 56,000 people. Now the state capital, parts of it have been around for four centuries. I have heard too much about Santa Fe to even be curious about it. I didn’t stop. Perhaps I should have. I know my well-traveled friends will shake their heads when I tell them that I drove right by it.
Instead, we continued on another sixty-five miles to Las Vegas, which in the 1880s was one of the roughest towns on the frontier. About this town I was curious.
I pulled into a near-empty RV park, put Rusty on a long leash, and took off on foot to explore this hangout of “Doc” Holliday and Billy the Kid. I quickly discovered Las Vegas was better known as a mercantile center on the Santa Fe Trail.
The Victorian-style houses along Seventh Street have deep front yards, covered today with long shadows. Built around 1920, nothing man-made separates them, except some land-scaping. There are no fences or walls.
Dry leaves under my feet make that pleasant crunching sound of late fall. Their warm colors spread over the gray sidewalk, humped in spots to almost stumbling height by the swelling roots of street-side elm trees.
If the behavior of its dogs tells anything about a neighborhood’s peace with itself, Seventh Street is secure and content. Two dogs slept in front of one house. The eye of another, a golden retriever, tracked me as I stepped over him. His tail, thumping the sidewalk, scattered the dry leaves. A frisky sheepdog joined me when I turned onto National Street, but he tired of me after only a block.
I felt sorry that I left Rusty behind. She would have liked Seventh Street.
I walked across the campus of New Mexico Highlands University. National becomes Bridge Street, a logical name change as it crosses the Gallinas River, little more than a marsh-wetting brook. Residents call this Old Town. The sidewalk along here has stubby iron pegs sunk in its outer edge. They anchor iron rings that were once used for tying horses, mules, and oxen.
For many years, Old Town was designated West Las Vegas. Long before that, it was called Nuestra Senora de las Dolores de Las Vegas (Our Lady of Sorrows of the Large Meadows). Until 1970, the only thing it shared with East Las Vegas was a name. Two very independent towns, run by two separate governments, divided by the thin Gallinas River, the old and the new, the traditional and the novel, the Hispanic and the Anglo.
Las Vegas goes back to when New Mexico was part of Old Mexico. In 1835, Mexican settlers came to these meadows as part of a land grant from their government. There were fewer than fifty of them, just fifteen families. In the Spanish manner, they laid out a large plaza, which today is the centerpiece of Old Town. Flat-roofed log and adobe houses, sharing common walls, formed a defensive enclosure. The fortlike structure had only two entrances. In case of an Indian attack, their livestock could be herded inside and the entrances blocked.
For many years, Las Vegas was the end of the Santa Fe Trail, which started in Independence, Missouri. The arrival in the plaza of caravans from the east was a festive occasion, with traders setting up their merchandise in the fashion of a farmers market. Townspeople put on lively fandangos to entertain travel-weary Americanos.
The Santa Fe Trail brought jobs to Las Vegas and guns to the Indians. But by then the U.S. Army was moving in. New Mexico became a U.S. territory in 1848. This little Hispanic town of 1,000 people was its major trade center.
“But then the railroad came,” said Jack Lamstra, a history buff and a restorer of stone structures. He describes himself as a masonry-building junkie in paradise. “With the railroad came the cultural collision between the Americans and the Hispanic land-grant community, who had sunk deep roots here by then.” In 1879, Las Vegas saw its first iron horse. The territory got its first railroad town. The newcomers the railroad brought were products of America’s maturing industrial society. Their mentality was one of competition and profit. Their values clashed with the self-sufficient, agrarian culture of the town’s founders.
When the railroad bypassed the Old Town Plaza and ended a mile east of the Gallinas River, a new boomtown was born. They called it the City of Las Vegas at first. What happened to that presumptuous title is unclear. Perhaps the town just did not live up to it. Anyway, it evolved into East Las Vegas.
Immediately the territory’s first telephone system and opera house were established in the new Anglo community. It became a fashionable commercial and residential district by Eastern standards, in sharp contrast with West Las Vegas. By 1882, the combined towns grew to about 6,000 people, rivaling Denver, El Paso, and Tucson in size.
Strategically located on both the Santa Fe Trail and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, Las Vegas was hit by everything untamed and lawless in the Old West. Some said that all the riffraff from Dodge City and other Kans as cow towns came here on the first train that summer of 1879.
“Doc” Holliday practiced a little dentistry and ran a saloon and gambling hall here. But he left town after shooting a drunken cavalry veteran in front of his place. Jesse James, who kept a low pro file under an assumed name, vacationed with his gang at the hot springs north of town. Lawman Pat Garrett shot it out at the train depot with a lynch mob that wanted to remove prisoners from his custody. And Billy the Kid complained about his accommodations at the Las Vegas jail, saying, “It is a terrible place to put a fellow in.”
Fed up with what was happening in their town, a motivated group of citizens began dragging prisoners out of jail and hanging them from the windmill that stood in the plaza. They usually just cleaned out the jail, hanging whoever was there. On one occasion, they strung up three at once. (Children reportedly hanged dogs from the windmill in copycat fashion.)
A second group of townspeople disapproved of the hangings and tore down the windmill to stop them. That d
idn’t accomplish much. Group one then began lynching their victims from telegraph poles and bridges. The word eventually got around in outlaw circles that Billy the Kid was right about Las Ve gas being a terrible place.
I wandered around the tree-lined plaza. Classic, century-old buildings surround it. The original adobe ones went long ago. The Plaza Hotel is now the biggest. Built in 1882, it is one of 908 buildings in this town on the National Register of Historic Places.
In the 1950s, a shortsighted trend to modernize decimated the old hotel. Its original tin ceilings were covered, its floor-to-ceiling windows were filled with brick and mortar, and its elegant twin staircases were closed off. Shag carpet covered the hardwood floors. The finest hotel in New Mexico territory was now a just another beer bar with a hamburger grill.
Fortunately, that uninspired trend of covering the past with gloss paint and glass brick has been reversed, and none too soon. The fourteen-foot ceiling in the hotel lobby again displays a pattern created in tin by an artist of the last century. The wide wood staircases now lead to thirty-eight sunlit guest rooms. The shag carpet has gone to a landfill.
Just off the plaza, a one-time cowboy has a store of antiques and barn and attic clean-outs. Surprisingly, he is not too keen on selling any of them. I picked up an issue of Life dated August 12, 1946. It sported a black-and-white picture of Loretta Young on the cover. I asked him the price.
“Kind of hate to sell that. Once it’s gone, I may never get an other one.”
“Then why not just call this place a museum and charge admission?” I whimsically replied
“You a wise guy, or something?” he snapped.
I sensed we were not getting on too well, but I wanted to hear about his days as a cowboy. He said he hated all cows and most people but liked horses. He drew a picture of a horse’s eye on the back of an unopened telephone bill to graphically display why a horse has such wide peripheral vision. Having an eye on each side of your head is a good enough explanation, I suppose, but he had his theory.
And another theory. “An old-time cowboy walks ramrod straight from being on a horse so much. These new cowboys ride a pickup all day and walk bent over.”
I admitted that I had never not iced. I hoped he would stand up so that I could check his post ure. But he spent the whole time in a chair by the door, within reach of his coffee, an ashtray, his mail, and a radio. I never saw a cash register.
70
A Route around Albuquerque
Vaughn, New Mexico
We got started late the next day, sometime after lunch. People in the workaday world had faced a decision or two by now. I had not, but was about to. How do I get from westbound Interstate 40 to southbound Interstate 25 without going through Albuquerque?
Competing in the motor home with the thank-god-it’s-Friday crowd through the city that has a third of the state’s population was not my idea of how to spend happy hour. Besides that, the sun was in my eyes again. So I cut south on Highway 54 at Santa Rosa.
Like most old highways of the Southwest, it runs parallel to the railroad tracks, confirming one of my platitudes of the road: Once the way is made, we all follow. Rushing water was the continent’s first trailblazer. Animals were next, then the Indians, the foreign explorers, the wagon masters, the railroad builders, the engineers of highway departments, and now the rest of us.
On this flat, shackless grassland, even the impersonal freight trains of the Santa Fe are welcome, hinting of life. All going the other way, they pass about as often as a car.
Ten minutes into this course change, I began to regret it. A heavy wind out of the west slowed me to forty miles per hour. Strong gusts whipped the wires of my mirror-mounted antennas against the motor home, which increasingly showed a mind of own about where we are headed.
Still fighting the sun, now at dashboard level, I stopped at Vaughn, a junction. Highways 54 and 60 meet here. I pulled onto a gravel area next to the town’s only AAA-rated motel. It seemed a comfortable rest stop for conventional travelers, those who must unpack a suitcase be fore even brushing their teeth. I was beat, ready to start my Friday happy hour and let the wind and the rest of the day blow themselves out.
After clicking the volume down on The Ricki Lake Show, the lady at the motel desk said that she had not heard a weather forecast. “But I’ve lived here a long while and know about our winds. They stop at night, sometimes. Then sometimes they don’t,” she explained, offering me coffee left from the morning shift.
Recognizing my visit was not for motel business, she reached for the remote control and punched the volume up. “Will ya look at that?” Her hand swept toward the TV “Where do you suppose they get these people who talk about their personal lives like that, in front of everybody? Those three women,” she now shook a flyswatter at the TV, “all say they are jealous of gay men. Now, what in the world is that about?”
“You don’t have that kind around here?”
“You kidding! Have them around here?” She glared at me. “I didn’t know they existed until I got this job and started watching TV all day.”
She suggested that I park for the night by the Shell Food Mart. It would be quieter there, she insisted.
While I was in the motel, an empty stake truck pulled in near my motor home. It had Mexican license plates. Two men were under it.
“We make it work,” a third man offered in very timid and labored English. I think he expected me to run him off. I wished them luck and left for the Shell Food Mart. So much for my first face-to-face encounter with NAFTA, our recent free-trade treaty with Mexico.
I woke only once during the night. A truckload of cattle had stopped upwind of me. You never know how many air holes there are in a buttoned-up motor home until that happens. Whether it was the smell or the noise of the cows banging around on the steel deck, I got up to check on the weather. No change.
71
Where Dust Bunnies Can’t Hide
Mountainair, New Mexico
Wideawake and ready at 5:00, I picked up Highway 60 again against a lesser wind. Because it was dark, it seemed more a of challenge. I welcomed it. The dash lights radiated a soft white luminance. The only sound was the low hum of the heater motors and the engine. The compass, awash in a faint green glow, was steady on a course of 285 degrees. It just doesn’t get any better. Yesterday was work. Today was an adventure.
Rusty continued her snooze, but shifted it to her travel chair across from me.
Ahead, a triangle of bright lights drew closer. Five engines were pulling a long line of flatcars. Each car carried the back half of an eighteen-wheeler. It takes one man to run a truck, but only two or three to run a train carrying hundreds of trucks. As long as economics control the way we move things in this country, there will always be railroads. Just a thought in the dark. Another platitude on the road.
Encino and Willard had nothing open that sold coffee, but Mountainair did. The sun was just coming up as I drove through town. With 1,500 people, most involved in ranching, Mountainair is the biggest town along here. It’s ten miles off from being the geographic center of New Mexico.
The waitress in the Ancient Cities Café wore a green-and-black plaid shirt over her loose, pink uniform. She poured my coffee at the counter, then poured rounds for customers at the tables.
Four were local ranchers, hunched around a table, talking with little animation or express ion. Two others were obviously tourists, a natty couple who talked not at all. They read a newspaper. The only new car outside, with a dealer’s sticker from Dallas, was probably theirs. The lady wore tinted glasses attached to a silver leash that looped around her neck. It reminded me of a piece of yarn that my mother in Minnesota attached to my mittens so that I would not lose them.
The cook, in jeans and an apron, stepped out of the kitchen with a rack of clean coffee cups. She stacked them by a radio that played a country station “and always has,” she added. Looking at my camera, she suggested I take pictures of the Shaffer Hotel and the train depo
t before I leave town.
“Everybody makes a fuss over the seventeenth-century Indian ruins we have around here, but I like the old things my ancestors built.” She left for the kitchen to butter some English muffins, then came back. “You know the thing now is to pick up and move these old rural train depots and make shops or restaurants out of them for city people. Nobody will touch our depot,” she insisted, smiling. “It’s solid concrete.”
The Shaffer Hotel, which opened in May of 1924, still has that classic, mature look of the twenties, if you can divorce it from the portable TV in the lobby. Just being there, even dark and silent, the idiot box jars the senses like graffiti. The lobby is small, as is the hotel. No one was at the desk or in the dining room.
The only people around were a couple speaking French who were recording the walls, furnishings, ceilings, everything with a video camera. They looked at the wooden stairs for the longest time. Then the man zoomed the camera into the corner of several steps. This was too much for my curiosity. Luckily, they spoke English and showed me what they had discovered.
Where each step meets the wall, a three-sided corner, a piece of wood, had been inserted. It’s best described as a dished-out, inverted pyramid, which made the corner a curve. “Dust bunnies hide in corners,” the lady said. “They cannot hide where there are no corners.”
The train depot is now a workshop for the railroad workers. The windows were boarded up, but the doors were wide open. In front, an empty pickup truck with its driver’s door open spoke loudly of railroad business up and down the line on a two-way radio. I saw no one around listening to it.
Mountainair started on this very spot in 1903 with the railroad. It brought the homesteaders. Like the Spanish settlers and Indians before them, the newcomers grew corn and beans. As the town grew, it took on the name “Pinto-Bean Capital of the World.” The droughts of the late 1940s and 1950s caused most of the farms to be abandoned or sold. Today a livestock industry flourishes.
