On the Back Roads (28 page)

Recognized now with its own zip code, the town here, called Continental Divide, goes back to the days of Route 66. Part of the original thoroughfare is still here, paralleled by its replacement, Interstate 40. These roadside curio shops, those that have survived, also date back to those days.

I am getting the message loud and clear that this journey is becoming a circle that is closing in. Geography is telling me something, or maybe preparing me for it. First the Continental Divide, now the Mother Road again.

“Even if you don't like coffee, you can't pass it up for a dime,” said the lady behind the case of turquoise jewelry.

Why does she sound like a recording?

I drew some self-serve coffee that was inconveniently but strategically located in the back corner of the store. To get there, I passed by racks of merchandise. This was no subtle Indian trick. It came right from the pages of
Marketing 101.
“To get the milk and eggs, the customer must pass through the isles of junkfood.”

I went back up front to punch the lady's reset button and get her out of automatic.

“Which direction does the water go when it rains?” I asked.

That did it, all right. Her whole expression changed.

“Been so long since it's rained,” she said, apparently pausing apparently to think about the question. “You read the sign out there, I bet?” She pointed toward the marker.

“Yep, it says that you are perched right on the watershed.”

“Guess so. And they say up here that water goes out of a toil et clockwise on one side of the divide and counterclock-wise on the other side. But I've never really watched it.” She chuckled at the prospect.

“I think someone is confusing the Continental Divide with the equator,” I replied, letting that subject drop.

En route to more Native American coffee, I rubbed a coonskin cap from Turkey, shook a rubber snake from China, and fingered some arrowheads handmade in Mexico. On the jewelry counter was a dish of “rose pods” made back east somewhere. Each the size of an egg, a rose pod is compressed sawdust impregnated with a fragrance. Once it gets on your hands, I found, it's hard to get off.

Back in the motor home, eastbound, I noticed that Route 66 continued to parallel the interstate. So I pulled off at Thoreau and transferred to the old migrant trail to see how far it would take me.

T
hirty miles later, Route 66 became Santa Fe Avenue, the main street of Grants, once the “Carrot Capital” and more recently the “Uranium Capital.” I decided to explore this place to see why now it's just the county seat. Tomorrow, that is.

I hitch a ride into town early the next morning with the folks from Ciboloa Sands RV Park. Empty storefronts, alternating with vacant lots, spread along Santa Fe Avenue for a couple of miles. Obviously, this town of 9,000 once had many more.

It started as “Grant's Camp,” named for the three Grant brothers who were building a railroad. It evolved to “Grant's Station,” then to just “Grants.'” The post office removed the apostrophe in 1937, protesting that towns don't have apostrophes.

Active tracks of the Santa Fe parallel Santa Fe Avenue, but trains don't stop here anymore. The train depot is just another anonymous main-street building. Across the street, however, the Grants Station Restaurant is probably busier today than the old depot ever was.

About ten years ago, Bud and Shirley Rieck decided the town should preserve its railroad heritage. Bud has always been in the food business, so they bought a vacant Denny's and scrounged railroad memorabilia to decorate it. Most of it was given to them, like the 1912 Santa Fe sign that someone literally ripped off the side of the train depot. When it arrived in bits and pieces, Bud spent a whole night gluing it together. It's now a prime showpiece in the Grants Station Restaurant.

At the table next to me sat a trucker, a school administrator, a miner, and a fourth man, identified only as a Democrat—all retired. They were engaged in a serious, about-to-be-table-pounding argument over the distance to the nearby Indian casino. I interrupted and asked them about the heyday of uranium. Apparently it was an easy transition. The casino forgotten, the subject changed instantly.

“After Paddy Martinez came into town with a chunk of uranium ore, the place went nuts. Prospect ors fumbling with Geiger counters were stumbling over each other, trespassers were getting shot at, and the lawyers had a field day. That was in 1950,” one man proclaimed.

Instantly, the others jumped on him. “No, no, it was earlier.”

They went at it again. I learned that the uranium industry here created 7,000 jobs between 1955 and 1985. This area produced 65 percent of this country's uranium and grew from 1,500 to 15,000 people. After the meltdown scare at Three Mile Island in 1979, the price of uranium went down, layoffs here went up, and Grants soon shrunk by one-half.

Hiking back to the RV park, I fought a head wind that was no everyday mesa duster. The outer spin of a Pacific hurricane off Mexico, it had an unobstructed run at me across a 376,000-acre bed of lava. No frozen lake could have given the wind a more bitter bite. The Spanish called this hostile expanse El Malpais, which in their language means “the badlands.” During that bone-chilling trek, I, too, found some names for it in my language.

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.

R
usty, 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 didn'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.