Great Reasons to Visit Southwest. Warmth Not One in January.
The Southwest invited us with falsehoods.
I believed the spaces of the Southwest were open, big, repetitive and warm. Fifty percent correct.
I believed Wisconsin was not the place to spend the winter. One hundred percent right.
By mid-January, my partner and I flew out of Milwaukee and drove from Tucson, in the southern part of Arizona, across the border to New Mexico, and north to the middle of the state towards Albuquerque.
The Southwest Was OPEN
The Southwest felt as if it had no limitations. If there were fences, rights of way, or regulations, they’re invisible to the newcomer.
Leaving Tucson, we approached Benson. We saw hundreds of locomotives parked, nose to nose, tail to tail. The train of engines snaked over hills and around buttes, appearing and disappearing across the expanse, but never moving. Odd, eerie. Southern Pacific Railway had established Benson, AZ, as a rail terminal in the late 1800s. The town’s tourist center offered train memorabilia gathered over the decades. The locomotives, stretched for over four miles, were mothballed, waiting to die.
The vast expanse of this area treated towns like oases. The hardscape and tightly gridded houses felt familiar. In Silver City, NM, we sat at a railway crossing. We were not blocked by a train with 100s of cars like the miles of locomotives we’d just seen. Instead, the train totaled seven cars. For some reason, its length had crossed our street and stopped. Had we gone offroad, we would have solved our problem. This was town, not desert. We were polite; we had nothing pressing; we sat and waited. The conductor talked to the trainman from his locomotive window up high. The trainman walked from one side of the locomotive to the other looking beneath the train. Finally, after 15 minutes, the locomotive pulled its six cars out of our way and we drove on.
The Southwest Was BIG
Scale changed in the southwest. Something large in one place looked diminutive in another.
Hatch, NM sold itself as “The Chile Capital of the World.” Acres upon acres of commercial farms growing chiles on the outskirts were convincing. Similarly, hundreds of colorful wreathes of dried chile peppers hung on vendors’ kiosks.
Oddly, Hatch’s webpage had no mention of its other spectacle — oversized 1950s characters — Bob’s Big Boy, the A&W Root Beer’s Mama and Papa, and a giant red chile pepper. The owner of a local diner had brought attention to his business with 50 or more of these giant iconic statues. A personal favorite was the real van that had a piano dropped through the roof.
Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge proved I would never see some of the wild animals of the desert, no matter how large they might be. Rangers have a long list of wildlife that inhabit the area, from mountain lions to elk and bears to javelina (pig-like animals). Cameras set up at watering holes documented their travels, often at night. I saw none of these charismatic mammals, no matter how hard I looked.
[Then again, when we drove from the higher elevations to the lower flatlands, an animal suddenly scurried across the road and dropped down into the drainage ditch. My partner yelled “raccoon!” I yelled, “lemur!” (A primate endemic to the African island of Madagascar.)]
The Southwest Was NOT REPETITIVE
The feeling of space and openness prompted many big-sky images, but I had expected sameness. As we drove, I asked my partner to pull the car over so I could take multiple photos. And when he tired of my requests and didn’t stop, I rolled down the window and shot from the passenger seat. The desert changed constantly. The weather, the land forms, the clouds, the light, the change in elevation, the change in flora. Every mile differed. And when darkness came, it happened immediately. First a spectacular sunset, then a deep blue velvety darkness, finally a deep, solid black. Our headlights, or the moon and stars, offered the only illumination. I realized why New Mexico called itself “The Land of Enchantment.”
The Southwest Was NOT WARM
We looked for tropical but did not find it. More than once, the southwestern spaces called to me to walk. I left the car — to climb a huge boulder, to look at the vast varieties of cacti, or to compare the difference between the landscape of Wisconsin and the Southwest. Each time, I donned some combination of turtleneck sweater, winter coat, and wind parka. Always wearing my Wisconsin wool cap and heavy gloves, I know the southwest was not warm in January.
Other places of interest between Tucson and Albuquerque:
The town of Truth or Consequences, NM, noted for its unique name, provided a hotspring to the warrior, Comanche, to soak his wounds after battle. Later the warm water drew tourists, the most famous of whom was game show host Ralph Edwards.
Mountainaire, NM Forty miles east of the Rio Grande and forty miles south of Albuquerque. Mountainair has a Family Dollar Store, a gas station, and a hardware store. There’s Jerry’s Ancient Cities Café, but Mountainair has been a dry town for some years. Most surprising to me, there’s an art gallery. The more I learned about the state, I found that’s typical of New Mexico — artists’ influences abound. In Mountainair are artists, an arts council, and many patrons of the arts who have escaped from elsewhere to build homes in these beautiful high plains.
Your thoughts and opinion are always welcome by scrolling down or emailing JudyO@JOHaselhoef.com.
Judy O Haselhoef, a social artist, story-teller, and author of “GIVE & TAKE: Doing Our Damnedest NOT to be Another Charity in Haiti,” blogs regularly at her website, www.JOHaselhoef.com.
Copyright @2017: If you’d like to use any part of it (up to 200 words), please give full attribution and this website, www.JOHaselhoef.com.
