Road Trips and Remembrances

After transforming my Spring 2020 university courses from face-to-face to online delivery right after spring break when the COVID-19 crisis really took off in the US, and after teaching a summer course, Introduction to Literature, online, my husband and I finally left the house for a quick, safe summer break. Our destination is Mayhill, New Mexico, up in the Lincoln National Forest area. We had vacationed there 36 years ago (where does time go?) when we were becoming a serious couple and took my 4-year old son, Brad, with us for a visit to New Mexico. We had gone to Carlsbad and spent the night with my Grandma and gone out to the farm to visit with my Uncle Julius, and then to the Carlsbad Caverns. Then we had headed up to Mayhill, outside of Cloudcroft, and rented a cabin to do some hiking and sightseeing, going down to White Sands and Alamogordo and looking in at the Rocket Museum. I had been driving a little red car that overheated going back up to Cloudcroft and we had had to pull over and let it cool off.  We stopped at a look-out spot and I snapped a picture of Brad and Wally on the guardrail.

This time, Wally and I are going alone to the same cabins, The Lazy Day Cabins. We want to get away from our computers and get up in the mountains to refresh, hike, and take it easy.  Just as we were getting our supplies together, Wally found out that New Mexico had decided to quarantine visitors from Texas because Texas’s coronavirus numbers were escalating. A moment of stomach clenching, thinking of plan Bs if we could not escape. Then Wally contacted the owner of the cabins and we were reassured that our plan to hike and shelter in the cabin would be fine.  In fact, we saw quite a few Texas license plates, so we were not alone in tempting the law.

So, I turned in grades and then we were off. We left Kingsville at 7 a. m.—a record for us—no returns to the house to gather forgotten things. On the road, we got through San Antonio, and then onto Interstate Highway 10 headed west.  Long and straight, it connects the east and west coasts and follows some of the old trade routes between San Antonio and El Paso. It is interesting that cities like San Antonio seem to be a hub where geographic terrains change. Going west out of San Antonio, you are in a different terrain, leaving the flat, greenish landscape south of San Antonio, skirting the hill country and then down onto the flats of west Texas, the scrub becoming sparser and sparser, mesas occasionally outlining the horizon, wind turbines competing with oil pump jacks in the landscape. Not much else to see from the freeway. The road is straight, the horizon is wide, with lots of room for contemplation or just staring and not doing much (unless you are doing the driving). Just the thing for forgetting the hurry-scurry of classes, computers, and everyday life.

We took a side trip to Ft. Lancaster, between Ozona and Ft. Stockton. Of course, the fort was closed because of COVID, but we had a nice picnic at the scenic overlook. It looked like Fourth of July revelers had been there before us and left some of the remains of the fireworks they popped off the rim of the overlook. The fort was located along the old roads first used by Native Americans and then adopted by US travelers and troops to move goods between San Antonio and El Paso, to transport troops during the Mexican War and goldminers headed to California. Fr. Lancaster was part of a chain of forts along our route meant to safeguard Americans from the Native Americans—Apaches and Comanches-- who also claimed the region. The fort is situated in a wide valley between hills; looking at it from the overlook you can imagine the trail they would have taken. Now it is a quiet, solitary space. Fresh air and quiet after so many months at my home computer. There really is something freeing about the wide western desert landscape, as long you are just passing through. I don’t think I could live in the area, but it is refreshing to view it.

Then on to Fort Stockton, another fort established in late 19th century to protect transportation routes and Euro Americans from the Native Americans.  The Texas and Pacific Railroad line ran through there; it is interesting how many of the West Texas towns are centered around forts and the railroad.  My great grandparents, Hugh and Lucy Petty, lived in Ft. Stockton and mother used to visit them often as a high school girl in the late 1940s.  I remember seeing a sweet photo of me and a cousin, Mike Conley, both of us around three years old, sitting with our great grandparents in a metal rocker under the trees (pecan?) in their yard. Wally and I got off the freeway to drive through historic downtown Ft. Stockton, fairly typical of small rural towns--a few historic buildings, a bank, some hair salons and “boutiques,” karate schools, car shops, and a lot of vacant buildings. Then we drove the old Ft. Stockton Historic Drive, stopping for a peek into the guardhouse. The chains hanging from the wall, the small cut-out windows at least 12 feet up, the limestone building and gravel floor let us quickly understand that spending time there must have been brutal. When we stopped, it was 100 degrees outside. A quick run through McDonald’s for some iced tea, and then back on the road to Pecos, our destination for the night.

When I was an undergraduate at Baylor University in Waco, Texas and my parents were living in Jamaica, I had to visit my Grandma Roberson in Carlsbad for a holiday—spring break or Thanksgiving, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that I took a Greyhound bus across Texas and into southeastern New Mexico. As a young woman in the late 1960s this was a bit dicey, given the gender politics whereby a young coed was fair game for lurking, lecherous men hoping to get something going on the Greyhound.  Well, we got to Pecos at about two o’clock in the morning for a layover. Here I was, 18 or 19, left in a Greyhound station in dark, dusty Pecos, Texas, naïve, apprehensive. I was the only woman, a white woman, left in a sketchy station with a Black guy and a Mexican guy. At that time, it was intimidating to me. Nothing happened, but I obviously remember my sense of vulnerability with those large men of color.  It is interesting how you remember a scene from your past and then when you pull it up again, you think about it differently, check the racism inherent in your remembrance of these men. This time when I got to Pecos, Wally and I checked into our motel, wearing our masks, and then ordered pick-up dinner from Alfredo’s Restaurant to bring back to the motel room. Wally had a beer and I drank some wine from those little plastic bottles that come in a wine four-pack. No eating out on this trip.

Leaving Pecos, I was struck by how totally the area—the Permian Basin—is an energy zone. Lots of old-fashioned oil jacks. My mother tells the story that when she and my brother John, who was about four, drove from Corpus Christi to Carlsbad she made up a song to keep him occupied in the days before our family had radio in the car. The lyrics went something like this: “Pumping oil, pumping oil, up and around, from the ground.” Now there are tanks, pipelines, telephone and electric lines, huge transformers marching in a line across the landscape, processing equipment and deep well equipment, signs, and lots of “man camps.” A few solar energy farms but no wind farms here. In town we saw many RV parks for the men, some with coverings to protect the RVs from the sun and heat. We saw several lodging lots, rows of plain, brown mobile homes or tiny homes sitting barracks style on the barren gravel expanse for the men who work in the great energy zone. Some of the camps, particularly those between Pecos and Loving, advertised a cook, wifi, and other amenities. But it looks to be bleak living, no greenery or recreation visible. One imagines these guys just work out in the sun and weather and then go to their mobile home or man camp, drink some beer, watch tv, and then do it again the next day. I hope they rotate on- and off-weeks between home and work.

The terrain out here, between Pecos and Loving, is flat, dusty, a few rises, a few draws. You know you are in West Texas/New Mexico when a creek, with or without water, is called a draw. The plants seem to be short mesquite-looking bushes, some yucca, cactus. Lots of rocks. The sand is a bleached clay color that fades to beige. If it weren’t for the poles, silos, tanks, and pump jacks, there would not be much in the way of vertical vision. The sky is blue, a dusty blue near the horizon, brighter overhead, with a few wispy clouds. This desert terrain will vary to some degree as we travel toward the mountains, more or less vegetation, more or less flat. Sandy, dusty. A wide horizon, a lonely place—except for the vehicles and structures devoted to oil and gas. Right now, the road between Pecos and Loving is busy, but most all of the vehicles are some sort of truck. Pickups, gravel trucks, trucks hauling pipes, tankers. A few lonely taco trucks sit on the side of the road, no doubt for the hungry breakfast and lunch crowd that spills out from the distant job sites, their dusty roads disappearing off the horizon from the highway.

Roberson Road

Finally, in New Mexico, my home state. We drove in to Loving, where my father and his dad built a rock house, probably in the 1940s. I phoned my quite elderly parents to find out where the rock house is, but all Dad could tell me was that there were only two rock houses in town. Mom said it was on a road off the main street to the right. We found a rock house, not sure if it is the Roberson house, but we took a picture of it. We also took pictures of the new Loving school complex. When I was in second grade, we were moving from Idaho to Corpus Christi and stayed about two weeks on my grandparents’ farm outside of Loving. I went to school in Loving for about two weeks: my teacher had been my Dad’s second grade teacher—a small world. I remember it as a dusty school with a dusty playground. Now the elementary school is part of a modern complex, most likely due to the oil business that seems to have transformed Loving from a sleepy agricultural town to a less sleepy town, full of its own business. When we stopped at a gas station so I could run in to the restroom, I was dismayed to find that very few people were wearing masks, as if COVID would not find them or they were impervious or too independent to be struck by the disease.

From Loving we headed to Carlsbad, where I was born. On the way we took Roberson Road out to the Roberson farm that my Grandpa had built. It was so sad to see that it is no longer a farming site but has become the location of an excavation company. Still, we did a quick drive through and took some pictures to document the change from 36 years ago—time does change things. The brick house that my grandparents had built to replace the white shiplap house seems now to be headquarters for the MMX excavation company—lots of pickups parked alongside the house. The old white house is now gone, the great trees that had shaded it now stumps. The dairy barn, a cement block structure, still stands, but with no cows to milk, it stands abandoned, perhaps a place for storage. The corral that had once been full of milk cows, Jerseys, was empty and barren, sad really. I needed to see it and then to leave quickly, my memories of summers with cousins running about the farm, getting into trouble, learning things that the city would not teach me, too great to stand the present reality.

The next town, Artesia, was interesting to drive through because of its public art—some cowboys rounding up some long horns, a spectacular sculpture of an oil derrick, men working on it while others looked on, two figures conferring over the hood of a pickup truck. Apparently 1924 marked the beginning of the oil and gas boom in southeastern New Mexico, at just about the same time that irrigation opened up the Pecos Valley, enticing my young grandparents to migrate from Oklahoma in hopes of better prospects from themselves. Driving through the middle of Artesia, I imagined that the city has used some of its oil and gas money to support the arts and the schools. The public art, the artsy looking buildings, modern complexes, impressive high school football stadium, belie the usual sad state of much of desert small towns.

Then, finally, we get serious about getting to the mountains. We have poked along enough, reminiscing. Our goal is Mayhill, a tiny village in the Lincoln National Forest area on the way to Cloudcroft.

Lazy Days Cabin

We spent three nights in a cabin at the Lazy Days Cabin and RV Park. I had packed enough food so that we did not have to eat out any. We got in some good hikes; though rated easy –to- moderate, they were at nearly 9,000 feet a bit challenging for us old-timers used to an altitude of 38 feet above sea level. We were glad to have our walking sticks to help us up the inclines. Some glorious views out over the valley, White Sands, a glistening, iridescent white strip on the valley floor. You could almost see the sand being whipped up by the wind and the ozone rays coming down from the sky in that far-off sliver of white. When I was a kid and we would go up to Cloudcroft to get out of the Carlsbad summer heat, we would go down to White Sands and play on the dunes. But in July, it was too hot for us to even think about going to the dunes. The mountains were cool and green, just what we needed. It was so wonderful to be in the quiet of the forest, the trees, the space, the cool. As I thought some about John Muir, the great naturalist and walker, I wished that I knew more biology and botany. I wished I knew which birds were calling to each other, the names and histories of the trees. I did see pine trees, ash, oak. But even in my ignorance, what a wonderful escape from home and computers, to get into the western mountains.

Our last day in the mountains, we went to the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, in the desert Tularosa Basin to the west. On the way through the valley, we saw orchards, pecan and pistachio, vineyards and wine-tasting stations. One place with a giant pistachio nut in the parking lot, advertised pistachios and wine tasting. We just kept going, but the idea of what wine to pair with pistachios was intriguing. At the Site, the only other person we saw was the park host, a guy who lives in his RV on the parking lot and takes care of the place. There are around 21,400 petroglyphs made by the Jornado Mogollon indigenous people who lived in the area from about 200 to 1450 A.D.  The drawings are on seemingly random rocks clustered along a hillock. They feature some animals—big horn sheep, fish, lizards, snakes, birds—humans, circular drawings that may represent the sun or skies, and geometric designs. One circle surrounded by dots also a directional cross in the middle that aligned with the compass that my husband had with him. One wonders what the purpose of the drawings might have been, storytelling, religious ceremony, calendaring events, giving directions to travelers?  As we followed the rocky trail, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and etchings, I got a bit woozy in the July heat. The compass we used to check the directions showed the heat at 100 degrees. And it was only about 10:00 in the morning.

We took the long way back to the cabin via Ruidoso, where we bought a few southwestern items. Shopping with a mask on is a bit off-putting. I don’t feel like I can really talk to the salespeople or hear them. Some visitors and shoppers in the tourist district were wearing masks, but then some were not.  Ice cream sounded good on that hot afternoon, but seeing families slurping their cones on the sidewalks squashed the appeal of that idea.  Not during a COVID outbreak. We tried to find a picnic table in town so we could eat our sandwiches, but the GPS kept sending us to places that may once have had tables but were now residential areas. At least we got to see some of the Ruidoso homes, many of which featured a wooden carved bear in the front yard. The only elk we saw during our trip were three great beasts munching the grass on someone’s lawn.

To return to our cabin, I suggested we drive to Mescalero and through the Mescalero Apache reservation.  The GPS routed us on a short cut that turned into a dirt road with a sign announcing that passage was prohibited to non-reservation travelers. So, we turned around and tried another route off the reservation. I did get a picture of St. Joseph’s church, established in 1889. The last time we were there, we went inside the cathedral. I remember being impressed by the mix of Catholic and Native icons and decorations. But now, we were tired and wanted to get back to the cabin, to showers, drinks, dinner.

The next day, we headed home, doing the entire drive in 12 hours.

Signs of vacationing in the time of coronavirus: museums and forts closed; some camp sites and picnic areas closed; park ranger stations closed, hiking and camping maps set outside for visitors to help themselves; the attendant at one trail head/camp ground was set up in the shade outside of an RV.  Usually when you travel in rural areas, there is a note in the ladies’ restroom not to flush tampons (ok—I get that) or used toilet paper—these both would go in the trash can. This time there was a sign to Please Flush your toilet paper because of the spread of germs. Signs at stores and restaurants that masks were required, even if this was not enforced and only partially complied with. A line of cars along the shoulder of the road outside the hospital in Ruidoso, most likely lined up for COVID testing.