On the Back Roads (29 page)

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.

W
e 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.

W
ideawake 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 depot 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.

Back on Highway 60, the motor home was almost coasting as I lost elevation coming off the Manzano Range. I dropped into neutral. The speedometer didn't move a notch. I remember doing the same thing months ago coming out of Borrego Springs, California. This time, however, I felt like I was drifting—no, more like being pushed—toward a finish line. It's always out there somewhere.

Ahead lay the Rio Grande River. In this dead expanse of brown, trees do not grow except along the river. There they flourish. Today they are a rich, gorgeous curtain of brilliant fall colors that extend across the earth, I am sure, from top to bottom.

Mexicans know the Rio Grande as the Rio Bravo, the “Wild River.” Yet it is neither
bravo
nor
grande
right now. The riverbed is wide, room for more water than is in it. I can only guess what it was once, and may still be at a different time.

Maybe someday I'll come back and see for mys elf, God willing.

T
he residents of San Francisco get upset when their swank city by the bay is called “Frisco.” But down here, folks don't care if you shorten the name of their town. They all do. Everybody calls it “T or C,” because “Truth or Consequences” is just too much.

“Better than half our incoming mail is addressed to T or C, New Mexico 87901. Some of it is still addressed to Hot Springs. If the zip is right, we get it,” a clerk at the post office told me.

A few here, holdouts from four decades back, stubbornly persist that Hot Springs is their correct address. The school board may be the most die-hard holdouts of them all. The high school, to this day, is still Hot Springs High.

“This name always causes problems when I order things by phone.” says Reyes Tenorio in Ron's Sporting Goods. “When I give my address, they don't believe me. They say, ‘That can't be a town.' Then I have to go through the whole nine yards.”

Truth or Consequences,
the radio quiz show, started in 1940. Hosted by Ralph Edwards, it was a national hit and continued into the 1950s as a network TV show. In 1950, Edwards
announced that he would do his tenth-anniversary radio show from any town in the country that would change its name to Truth or Consequences. There were several takers. Edwards' choice was Hot Springs, New Mexico, a small town of ranchers, merchants, and mineral-water bathers. He liked the idea of the natural hot springs here, which were said to have benefited thousands who suffered from rheumatism and arthritis. Also, there was an orthopedic hospital for children here that interested him.

But the final decision laid with those who lived here. Many here asked, “Why take the silly name of a radio program and give up a name that is descriptive of what nature has given us? And all this for an hour in the national spotlight?” The other side argued, “Why not? The Hot Springs name is too common. Consider all the free publicity the town will get, now and forever.” The vote came in 1,294 for, 295 against. On March 31, 1950, the name changed.

The next day, the first Truth of Consequences Fiesta was staged here. It brought 10,000 people into town. That evening, the
Truth or Consequences
show originated from its day-old namesake.

T or C still celebrates its fiesta every year, on the first weekend in May. Edwards is always here for it. He brings a celebrity of two to help draw a crowd and rides a horse in the annual parade. His relations hip with this community is still very close. They named a riverside park after him a few years back.

The Geronimo Springs Museum, on Main Street, has a large room devoted to Edwards and his radio show. The photography and memorabilia cover his nearly fifty-year association with this town. Outside is a stone arch covering a pool of warm water bubbling up out of the ground. “Geronimo often stopped here to bathe and relax,” the sign says. It lists nine bathhouses, with an invitation to visit them.

Ann Welborn has lived here all her life and runs the museum. She acknowledges that Edwards has helped the town, but everything considered, the name change has not accomplished what many thought it would. In fact, in 1964 and
again in 1967, the question of whether to keep the name went to a vote here. Though obviously controversial, the T or C name still suits the majority.