Las Vegas, New Mexico, Part 1

Las Vegas--no not that one--used to be the most important city west of the Mississippi. That’s what Doyle Daves tells me. Doyle is a retired chemistry professor and, like many New Mexicans, has terrible things to say about Houston up till, a few seconds later, he remembers he’s being rude. He loves talking about his town’s history; loves it so much he seems to forget I’m from Texas after a while.

He runs the historical association on Bridge Street, which is National Street in either direction, but is Bridge Street for the two blocks on either side of the quaint bridge that connects the old town, Las Vegas, and the new town that the incoming Anglos set up in the 1870s to access the railroad, East Las Vegas.

"We’ve been going downhill as a city ever since."

That’s a 140 years of downhill.

"It’s not been easy."

He tells me his family is actually new to New Mexico. "My grandparents moved here in 1913." Again, I tell him as a Houstonian I can’t relate. If your family moved to Houston in 1913, you’d be ancien regime. "Families are old here. Some go back to the 1690s, when the Spanish returned after the Pueblo Rebellion."

The shop is lined with old photos of the town, its ruling families, its formerly great hotels, its history of rodeos and Rough Rider reunions, and a bookshelf of chapbook sized history tomes that Doyle has written over the past 15 years. As an addict I jones up with a few.

He tries to interest me in a display he’s working on about S. Omar Barker, Las Vegas’s own legendary cowboy poet. I google a few verses and quickly lose interest. I get him back to talking about the 19th century again, how the Americans came in and established local rule through the existing families, who were not particularly loyal to Mexico City anyway (click on photo for detail), how the outlaws in these parts were mostly old Confederates and the lawmen old Union vets, how Las Vegas avoided picking up an arts scene like, he rolls his eyes a bit, Santa Fe.

An elderly couple comes in. They’re the Romeros and they want to know if Doyle has anything on Mr Romero’s grandfather. After a couple of questions, Doyle realizes he’s the grandson of the brother of the town’s sheriff and political boss from the 1890s, Secundino Romero. And he’s off on a tear, unloading a treasure trove of anecdotes about Boss Romero’s crooked deals, rivalry with the East Las Vegasans, the corrupt trial where he got a snoopy reporter convicted of murder, only to have the Anglo governor pardon the reporter the next day.

Doyle’s stories swim with pride. How the two towns merged, where the brothels and opium dens were, how violent the town got once the railroad came through and all the gangsters were run out of Dodge City--some years there were over a hundred murders in this town of under 6000. He makes event the economics a love ballad. The two great hotels fought relentlessly over which would house Teddy Roosevelt when he joined the Rough Rider Reunion of 1899. The old Spanish families wrangled over irrigation plans so that every lot access to the river, creating long thin land plots that still shape town built on their remains. S. Omar Barker used his own initials and thus named his ranch "the Lazy SOB." The sheering and wool spinning factory downtown used to see six mile long lines of sheepherders waiting to run their herds through. That factory is abandoned in the old town square now, two doors down from the coffeeshop.

After over an hour in his company I’m convinced I have to come back here, but the day is aging. He directs me to check out the Rough Rider museum before I go, although he manages my expectations. Once I get over there, I see he’s right, but the display on the Chinese laundries is completely fascinating, if too sparse. There were gangsters, businessmen bringing over families after working around the Chinese Exclusion Act, and even a spectacular murder which led to the first Chinese immigrant ever being accepted as a witness in an American court.

This the perfect small American town if you love tragedy.

Littleton, CO

There's no bayous in Littleton, Colorado! What the heck--?

Where do they throw their dead dogs?

(Hanging with Adam and Becky in the mountain burbs)

Santa Rosa Lake

Silence at Santa Rosa Lake

the clouds don’t move; they hold
vigil with the sun and the shadows and heat.
a glass-flat and naked laketop
meditates in its earthbed--
mud and sand and an outer mane
of desert shrubs and siltstone--all silent--
all silent save the hush of wind
through leafless fingers of cottonwood--
all silent--
all silent save intermittent lope of fish to surface
feeding on skeeters,
save the infrequent ruffle of wind
bristling the surface,
save the tenor rasp of a bluetail fly,
grown giant in the desert
and pestering my bared knees,
save the lapping impatience of the lake waves
curling like the lips of a wineglass
on the mudded shore,
save all this, plus the punctuated caw
of a desert raven, high perched and eyeballing my socks, strewn
upon the spiral curves of the cottonwood.
till I see there is no silence in this desert
and never was
once sitting and stillness learn
and absorb the symphony
that whispers away from human eyes

Sleepless in Santa Rosa

My insomnia started about an hour earlier tonight because I'm in the mountain time zone.

I just had what may be the worst ever "Mexican food" in the whole world in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The fajitas were made with ground beef. The tortillas were cold & stale. The beans were dry and the rice was a runny. Seriously, runny.

The sopapillas were basically rectangular-shaped breakfast biscuits with a side of dipping honey. But at least the sopapillas were complimentary. I had to actually pay for that thing they called fajitas. I couldn't even stiff them on the tip, because the waitress was kind of nice. Clueless, but nice.

New Mexico otherwise seems like a much nicer place than Texas. Why can they not get their Mexican food right? Lord knows they've had Mexicans there for about 100 years longer than Texas has.

I'm reminded of that Orson Welles soliloquy from the Third Man:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Today, at Joseph's Route 66 Diner, I ate cuckoo clocks.

A friend on facebook suggested the mediocrity of Mexican food correlates to population density. Had I stopped in a bigger town, I would not have been to hamburger-based "fajitas". I accept this trade off. The fajita was invented by impoverished people utilizing an unexplored facet of the cow, the skirt-cut, which was long considered an inferior cut, something a butcher tossed aside for his poorer customers. Mother necessity, or rather Madre Necesario, took this castaway, spiced it right, and created a delicate staple. So I have to wonder if it is maybe economic prosperity that results in shitty recipes.

A comparable accomplishment to the fajita is the Scottish Enlightenment. Economics and Moral Philosophy are essentially the fajitas of Scotland. And this is on my mind lately. Had it not been for the devastating poverty, political oppression, and widespread starvation in the mid 1700s, there probably wouldn't have been a David Hume questioning the nature of humanity, bringing the "experimental method of reasoning" to the "science of man" he sought to create. People literally starving to death in the streets during his childhood is largely what motivated Adam Smith to attack the Mercantilist policies of England and the corporate fat cats who profited by Scotland's poverty.

So next time you get a bright idea for a poem or painting or an ethical solution for a moral quandary, be sure and thank a dictator.

Starting from Eastwood

To get ready for this latest trip, I've been reading Walt Whitman. He saved my life once and I feel that, now that things have settled down for me a bit in my autumn years, I owe it to him to pay a little more attention to what the chap was saying.

I've been studying Song of Myself lately, for reasons I'll reveal to my friends and fam eventually, comparing the edits and emendations between the 1855 and 1892 versions of his biggest, famousest, second-most-autobiographical poem--and note that the 1892 version is really the 1881 version because that is when he quit fiddling on it--and there's a painful evolution of the man, despite the career-length timelessness he aspired to.

But for the purposes of setting out on another road trip to find America (and I swear I left it around here somewhere) it's probably more fitting that I spend a moment on Starting From Paumanok, his opening ode, written long after his fertilest years, about setting out on the road to find his country, by which Whitman meant himself.

And finding Whitman is a convoluted process because Walt Whitman was a convoluted dude--despite all his efforts to self-protray as a simple, sweaty workingman's American poet. He wasn't that simple. Being American is a complex job. One has to embody contradictions.

I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.

Tell it, bruh. Tell it.

He wants to tell us being American is just hard work, but only about the sweat part of hard work--not the thinky kind of existential, root-troubling, overcoming self doubt kind of hard work. Look at this ditty (as usual, all Whitman poetry must be shouted out loud to the breezy clouds):

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

If only that were it. If only we could just go back to working all sweaty with earth-wrenching, metal-forging honest labor. America sings now of the office drone, typing in her cubicle, the data analyst's eyes stinging red from staring at a computer screen all day, and the middle manager keeping his resume polished from the insecurity of his job. We feel like we've lost something. We haven't. The carpenter, the mason, the boatman, and the shoemaker all had to struggle for the next job and face the dislocation of the turbulent, plow-jogging American economy--even then.

But it feels good. It feels right to imagine they didn't have to worry about job security back in some golden age, some sweaty 19th century mechanic's job or some assembly line grinder from the 1950s. The past has always been golden. What I like about Whitman is he sees the future is golden too, and the present.

I wanna see the future and the present all golden again too. I want to climb out of this swampy Houston for a fortnight, see some mountains, see some different people, fall in love with ordinary Americans again instead of seeing them as blue and red and yellow statistics on a political approval rating chart. I'm tired of seeing them as white and black and brown culture blocs that only exist in some dry academic rhetoric or the panicky gunsites of a trigger happy cop. I want to see my people in all their hues and all their blues and all their intermittent smiles. I want to see past the grumbling suspicions of television eyes and internet arguments and weavy traffic snarls and credit rating scores and blinking rules rules rules about where you can go and what grass you can't step on.

I'm tired of my country. I want to see my nation again. I want to walk on the grass.

And so, starting out from my personal Paumanok, Eastwood Houston, I strike up for a New World; the only New World there ever is. The part of the world I haven't been to yet.

2017

Looks like a new trip is in the works. More to come as the situation progresses.