Desert

In the early 1980s I lived in a small town in southern New Mexico called Alamogordo. I had a job that required my going to Chino, California, at least once or twice a month, which entailed having to drive two hours through the desert to get a plane in El Paso Texas, with a connecting flight to Los Angeles. These trips usually lasted a day or two at most. Other times I had to fly to different American cities, and again, the closest airport was in El Paso.

Prior to arriving in New Mexico, I had some oddly romantic notions about the place. I envisioned hot and lazy Spanish-style towns, local folk in plazas nodding off during afternoon siestas, adobe homes with small fountains trickling precious water, tall and stately saguaro cacti, delicately formed sand dunes in the desert, tiny flowers at the ends of cactus paddles, tumbleweeds jauntily rolling through dusty streets. Even the name of the town, Alamogordo, which meant “fat cottonwood” conjured the idea of a cottonwood oasis in the dessert. I had never seen a cottonwood, but the name made me think it was somehow soft and puffy (it’s not really, unless it is in bloom, otherwise it’s pleasing but rather plain). The smaller village on the way from El Paso was called Orogrande – “big gold”. This led to me envision bearded 49er California gold rush miners and desperados, all sitting in front of the only general store, leaning back on their chairs and balancing them adroitly on two legs, their leathered faces shaded by cowboy hats or Mexican sombreros. And, of course, everything would have a sepia tint.

I arrived from the dead of winter in Toronto to the little El Paso airport. I was still wearing my heavy coat, not having room in my luggage to pack it and rather stupidly thinking I might need it. When the airplane door opened, it let in a blast of hot air, not unlike the opening of an oven set to bake bread. No humidity, just heat. The sky was an almost painful blue and the sunlight intense, all the more so due to the elevation of the town. Off came the coat.

We were headed to Alamogordo. The desert was not as I had imagined. No shifting sand dunes here. All looked a dismal brownish grey, rather reminiscent of the contents of an enormous ashtray upturned on a 1970s shag carpet. But I knew we would drive through Orogrande after an hour of travelling through this dirty landscape, and I was ready for what I thought would await me there.

It may be different now, but Orogrande was a road sign, one single rather stunted tree (perhaps a cottonwood, looking more dead than alive), a tiny gully with a sluggish trickle of water passing through it, and a few mobile homes and trailers, all with the hitches still attached as though ready to escape at the first possible opportunity. No people anywhere.

Another hour of dirt and Alamogordo was just ahead.

On the edges of town was the Howard Johnson’s hotel (I later learned that this was the “upscale” hotel), and a 24/7 motel with a name close to that (this was the “econo” motel for military contractors on the cheap or for sleazy affairs). In the town there was a “faux-adobe” tourist or municipal building, a supermarket, a gun shop, a sad little park with a broken swing set, several churches, an equal number of bars, and not much else. The main street featured the office of the local newspaper, a Radio Shack outlet, and several bars. I would later learn that at the far end of town there was a space museum that boasted “from cowboys to astronauts in less than 100 years”, or something to that effect. It had an Imax theater that showed some space extravaganza once a month or so — always the same film, with never anyone watching other than visiting relatives of the military desperate for something to do.

The local insurance company was owned by a Dalton, a descendant of a member of the Dalton Gang, outlaws of the Old West. Where I later worked in the town, the switchboard operator was another Dalton. Everyone said she was “as dumb as a post”, but then the bar wasn’t set very high there anyway.

We entered the trailer park to our new home. My husband had been unable to find anything to rent other than a furnished trailer. Things did not look promising. There was an above ground swimming pool partially filled with mud, scum, algae, and maybe some water. I later learned that the pool didn’t open until it got hot — that is, when things got over 100 degrees in the summer.

A road runner crossed our path. I had this idea that a road runner would look something like the largish bird in the cartoon. But no, it was tiny, brown, and somewhat cute.

Welcome to the trailer.

The moment I stepped inside, I began to feel slightly seasick. After I short while, I discovered that it was not properly level, so giving one the feeling of being just a touch tipsy when walking inside. At this point my disappointment with the whole endeavour was complete and I burst into tears, while saying, somewhat incoherently, that “everything will be just fine”. My husband, now fully aware of the depth of my misery, offered to drive me back to the airport to catch the next plane back to Canada. But no, I was here for the long haul, for better or worse, and I planned to begin searching for a better place first thing in the morning. I was also determined to find work.

The job search began. I went to the Chamber of Commerce (they actually had one) and asked for a list of employers. The girl at the counter looked at me like I was slightly demented, and said that they didn’t have such things there. Just apply at the bars or at the stores on the main streets is what she recommended.

Armed with that helpful suggestion, I walked into the local Radio Shack (I would not even begin to consider bars or supermarkets — not yet). As luck would have it, they actually needed some sales help. The store manager was a meaty middle aged man with a gut pinched in by his topaz belt buckle, wearing a western style floral shirt, and very clean cowboy boots. His grin was disturbingly wet and his eyes were piggish little deep set dimples. He rested his hands over his belly while leaning back in his wooden office chair, and I noticed that his fingers resembled uncooked swollen little bratwursts. I began to suspect that the sales opening was created when I walked in, almost like a meal delivery he wasn’t expecting but happy to dig into. We went through the formalities of a job interview and he was delighted with my credentials. I could start the job anytime; all that remained was the polygraph test.

Yes, a polygraph test.

Apparently, he’d had some bad experiences with previous sales help, so he wanted to ensure that I wouldn’t steal anything that wasn’t hog tied to the store fixtures. I needed a job, but not that badly, not yet anyway. The search would continue.

There remained one other possibility, a small (indeed the only) manufacturing company in town. I decided to go there, unannounced, and ask to speak with the President. This is when I first met the Dalton switchboard operator/receptionist. I think she was curious in a sluggish sort of way to see what would happen if she allowed me access to the owner. He consented to see me and after some friendly conversation coupled with persuasion born from desperation, I was hired at minimum wage (something humiliatingly meager, even then). After a short while, I was promoted into management and thus began the frequent drives to the El Paso airport.

Meanwhile, the hunt for better accommodations was becoming more urgent, as I had discovered the trailer’s original occupants. My first glimpse of a cockroach (the first in my life) was at night, while walking slightly off-kilter from the bedroom to the kitchen, turning on the light and seeing the floor and countertops alive with scurrying little creatures. Then one morning as I awoke, I opened my eyes to see a tiny cockroach greeting me from the edge of the pillow. Another morning, I put on my shoes, only to feel a disturbing crunch beneath my toes.

The neighbours in the trailer park were marginally sympathetic, telling me the cockroaches were everywhere, just a fact of life. No need to bother trying to get rid of them with poisons or sprays; they would simply move to the trailer next door and then return a few days later. I think the other occupants of the trailer park thought me “stuck up”, to be complaining so much about such a trivial earmark of their everyday living.

Anyway, I did find a “nice” apartment, a type of double duplex. It was new, so I was told that it shouldn’t have cockroaches, yet. The trick was not to bring them from the trailer. So on moving day I loaded up all our possessions (thankfully very few at the time), unloaded them in front of the new place, spread everything on the ground and proceeded to shake it all like some crazed shaman.

I was successful at not re-homing any of the little beasts, except one, which I found crawling sluggishly inside the sight glass of my steam iron. I plugged it in, set it on the highest temperature, and, with macabre satisfaction, watched the creature boil to death.

Just before the move, I had experienced my first sandstorm. It wasn’t terribly dramatic like those newsreels from the dust bowl of the 1930s; it was just dirt blowing around. Sand got into literally everything. During the move, I found myself shaking out sand from shoes that had been wrapped in plastic and stored inside boxes.

Another first was tumbleweeds. I had imagined them small, and round, and rather delicate. But no, they are large and misshapen, and attach themselves to everything. The radiator grills of cars going down the road would be festooned with them. They would build up on fences, making them look as though they had been decorated by an asylum escapee.

I needed a car. A fellow employee sold me his very old Datsun B-210. He had driven the snot out of it. The paint was all gone due to encounters with tumbleweeds and from having been driven hundreds of miles in the desert sands. He had gone off-roading with it, before that was even a popular activity. The resulting colour was an odd, mildly startling and inconsistent shade of rusty orange. The seats were black imitation leather, brittle with age and sporting many rips and torn places. Most of the upholstery and stuffing was too dejected to push out of the ripped holes, although the odd tuft would poke through here and there. The dashboard had a huge split about an inch wide right in its center, undoubtably caused by the desert sun over the years. The transmission was manual, and every time I shifted gears it would let out a loud squeal of protest. With tires of unmatched sizes, driving over 10 mph was very bumpy. The radio was stuck on some “hallelujah”, “repent” and “thank-you-Jesus” Evangelical station so I tended not to turn it on. All in all, it would have looked perfect parked next to the trailer but didn’t seem terribly out of place at the new apartment either. It likely made me look less “stuck up”. Nonetheless, it got me everywhere I needed to go and it never needed repairs. I sold it two years later for more than I paid for it. Thank you Jesus, I guess.

The town’s demographics: Evangelical Christians and non-Evangelical Christians. Heavy drinkers and abstainers (very few of the latter). Long-time settler families (like the Daltons), temporary military people, and Mexican families, who mostly lived just outside of town.

With the exception of the military, most wore Western dress — jeans, cowboy boots with very pointy toes (the joke being to better kill the roaches in the corners of the room), large hats or baseball caps with pithy sayings like “I’ll give up my guns when hell freezes over”, topaz buckled belts, bolo ties, and floral shirts with a double western yoke. Many drove pick-up trucks, accessorized with gun racks and a clutch of runny-nosed children riding in the flat bed. Sometimes they had “dawgs”.

They said things like “well, alrighty then” and “y’all” and “m’am” and “Miss Denise” and “hoo-ee, what-choo talkin’ bout?”.

The company where I worked had weekly morning “management” meetings. Prior to each meeting we would all have to say a prayer of thanks and request divine guidance from the Lord Jesus Christ. Then the group would proceed to decide who to fire, whose pay would be cut, whose hours would be extended without extra pay, which vendor could be strung along without paying the bill, which customer warranty could be successfully avoided and so on. I had the temerity to refuse to participate in the prayer session, which was very much frowned upon.

I once wished a co-worker a Merry Christmas, and was promptly told I was promoting a heathen holiday and that nowhere in the Bible did it say that Jesus was born on December 25th. Then there was the tremendous ruckus just prior to Halloween, a sinful pagan celebration of evil. Many parents were removing their children from any daycare arrangement that “observed sinful practice”. My daycare provider saw almost all the children removed for the day (she had dressed up as Glinda the good witch from the Wizard of Oz, bless her!), and she was not worried. She said it happened every year and that the kids would come back on November 1st. She was right.

The military lived mostly on the nearby Air Force base and only a few lived in the town. They lived their lives mostly amongst each another. Many family activities were organized on the base for the wives and children, and this was where I first became more intimately acquainted with the military wife.

I was not unfamiliar with military life. While living in Italy, before arriving in New Mexico, I had completed high school at a US Army base near Vicenza. There I got to know a few “army brats”, as they themselves called one other. I don’t recall seeing any of the soldiers’ wives, although I did see the odd officer’s wife from afar. The high school teens spent the better part of their time at the commissary, getting American food, listening to American pop music, watching American television programs, trying to score weed, and generally bemoaning their fate with their parents being stationed in Italy. Most of them couldn’t wait “to get back to the world” as they phrased it. On the other hand, the American teachers were mostly civilians, and overseas by happy choice. They were constantly organizing field trips to historical sites in Italy, not because they were even remotely connected to the subject being taught but because the teacher had a particular interest in the excursion. For example, we once went on a trip to view Palladian architecture as part of an English course studying “I Left My Heart at Wounded Knee”. Not even the most creative individual could make a connection, but off we went.

Back in New Mexico, I was attending a baseball game (the wife of a friend of my husband had some family member playing), where I met a whole new sub-species: The Military Wife of the Enlisted Soldier (not to be confused with the Military Wife of a Non-commissioned Office or the Military Wife of an Officer). Maybe the breed has changed, but at the time there were certain commonalities that would help the casual observer spot them in the wild: They travel in packs; are all of a certain girth; most wear clothing that is way too tight, too low cut, and often too high up the behind (based on the general heftiness of their physiques); most wear excessive makeup, especially around the eyes — unusually brilliant eye shadow, dramatic eyeliner, startling lip liners, sometimes really big eyelashes; and some sport “higher the hair, closer to god” back-combed mullets. Conversations often centered around the family:

“You see that there boy in the green t-shirt? Yeah, he’s here with me, but he’s not mine. He’s my husband’s kid he got off his ex-wife. He’s a nice boy, but he’s not getting along so well with my son. You know, my older son from my first marriage. Anyhow, now that we have a new one on the way, me and my husband Billy, the guy playing shortstop over there, we’re hoping that they will all get along”. And “we’re hoping that my ex-husband gets a posting State-side so’s he can come get his daughter from us and take the dawg too”.

After intricately intertwined discussions of step-children, ex wives, pregnancies, and miscarriages, there was usually the ongoing comparison of different military bases. Hot topics were the commissary supplies, housing, movie theatre (did they get up to date films?), dances and bars. I never heard anyone discuss schools. Overseas bases were anathema, and akin to being sent to purgatory for a few years. Many of the ex-spouses were a result of the stresses of being “away from the world”.

Despite all the negatives, New Mexico had some places of astonishing beauty. The desert, which I had likened to an upturned ashtray, would occasionally burst into a fairy-tale-like array of colour just after a rain. For a brief hour or so, the entire floor of the desert would be covered in tiny little blooms from thousands of plants that were normally withered and unseen. Desert life: brief and delicate and tenacious.

A short drive into the mountains was a town with the descriptive name of Cloudcroft. It overlooked a lush forested valley. Just one hour from the blast furnace of the desert, you could be in the cool of the mountains. Further north, you could go to White Oaks, an entirely deserted town, still standing.

Behind Alamogordo, the mountain range sported a trail called the “Eyebrow Ridge”, so-called because of the narrowness of the path that skirted along its edge.

Most beautiful of all, though, was the drive back from the El Paso airport. I would normally return very late at night, and begin the two hour drive around midnight or so. El Paso was a small city at the time, with the usual lights and traffic you might expect. But once you got into the desert, it became another world. Other than the noise of my car, there were no sounds, no street lights, no reflective paint on the road, but not utterly dark. I would sometimes turn off my headlights and drive by starlight. Yes, a crazy thing to do, but crazy beautiful. The stars were so bright that I could see the road in front and far ahead of me. Sometimes I would pull off to the side of the road, kill the engine, turn off the lights, and simply stare ahead and upwards. There are no words big enough, powerful enough, to express the enormity of the New Mexico desert night. Silence, yet not silent, as there were quiet sounds of insects and the odd animal rustling about. Dark, yet brilliantly lit. And if the moon was out, it became almost a negative image of the day in soft grayscale.

The only word I can use to convey this satiety of the senses is “fullness”.

Midway through the drive, you would come upon the border patrol’s trailer. From quite some distance, you could see the glow of faint light coming from its small windows. Usually sleepy by this time, I would pull up and say hello to whoever was manning the station and ask to share a cup of coffee. I was never refused. I think the guard was bored and enjoyed the interruption.

And so, I'd go onwards into the night. About thirty minutes away from Alamogordo, you could begin to see the glow of the town many miles distant. Once I saw the glow, I knew I was close to home.

Later, when we decided to leave New Mexico, I began to see the innate beauty of the place with more poignancy. Perhaps that is always the way; when you know you cannot stay, a place becomes more beautiful.