Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Eavesdropping in Cimarron, New Mexico

By Carol Mell, 3-21-07

	This concrete tipi stands for what Westerners resort to so they can stay on the land in the new tourism economy.

The Spanish word Cimarron meant “wild,” and was a word they used for fugitives, runaway slaves and wild animals. You won’t find a sleepier town than Cimarron, New Mexico today.

Wayne and I wander through the lobby of the St. James Hotel, past the bar into the empty diner at one end. Locals who know better use the wooden screen door on the side.

The place fills up at lunchtime so that all five tables are busy. Three ladies celebrating a birthday come in with us. I am the worst eavesdropper ever so I get right to work listening in to their conversation. To me, three ladies and a birthday is more entertaining than a television in a sports bar.

“The trouble with turning 49,” the one in the yellow jacket says, “is that no one believes you. They think you’re really in your fifties but just trying to fake it. So, I’m not telling anyone how old I am.”

Then the talk turns to their flowerbeds and the hazards facing daffodils.

“I don’t know why we even try to have flowers by the house,” the black-haired girlfriend says, “but it looks so good in the magazines. Just when the daffodils are coming up, a big wad of snow falls off the roof and breaks them all off.”

“The deer eat all mine anyway,” the second girlfriend offers, “and the lazy dog does nothing.”

“I built a screen over mine to keep the prairie dogs out,” the other says.

The complaints continue about hard clay, broken fingernails, and aching knees. I believe Cimarron is what they call a hard scrabble place and still the ladies persist, wanting a civilized garden in a wild land.

Just then a roundish man in the classic blue jeans, suspenders and red and white cap saunters in. For his sizable girth he posesses a light step.

“I hear it was your birthday,” he says, offering her a clear plastic gallon container, like the kind you used to find on a drug store counter, of red hot cinnamon suckers.

“Thanks so much,” the 49er says and offers a square sucker to her friends. “These are my favorite.”

Those suckers were the hottest thing going in Cimarron that day.

Not much of the town of Cimarron is left aside from the St. James Hotel and the old Mill. On our way out of town I made Wayne stop so I could take a picture of this cheesy mama tipi and her baby tipi. They advertise an empty RV park and bear testimony to the desperation of so many Western towns to make a gimmick of rich history to survive. Not that I don’t have sympathy. Many Westerners will do whatever it takes to stay on the land. Does a concrete tipi say more about the shallow expectations of visitors than it does about the owner? I have to admit I get a kick out of this stuff unless I see it on an Indian reservation where it just makes me feel sad.

We keep on driving west where the land flattens out into plains except for the broken, half-dead, mostly dead and already dead cottonwood stands around abandoned farmhouses. In the ditches the red willows Taos is named for are beginning to blush with Spring color like thermometers, the heat of the season rising from earth to bud.

Just past Springer, New Mexico we see small groups of antelope grazing in grasses that stretch out to the horizon. In a fenced enclosure, muddy from the trampling of cattle hooves, I see a lone antelope standing with the cows, just as comfy as you please. With all this free pasture, I wonder, what would drive an antelope to stand in an enclosure with cattle? Was it for the company or some richer feed? If that antelope knew about the butchering that awaited those cows, he might not want to consort so freely with his domesticated brothers.

I love travelling through these big empty lands. I feel my thoughts, like brushfires, just fizzling out. Wayne puts some blue grass music on, good forward travelling rhythms to carry us along. I notice he’s careful not to put that old favorite blue grass tape we used on long trips when our three girls were little. That would be too hard. 

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