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.
