The Empty Quarter

  I had to go to Roswell the other day for a fancy eye appointment.  Part of the “adventure” was getting a hypodermic needle to the eyeball.  Yeah…that’s another story.

  When I go to doctor’s offices for  I like to shoot the breeze with the staff…where you from, stuff like that.

  A portion of the folks were from Roswell but there were people there who came to Chaves County to work at the eye clinic for just a couple of days a week from Albuquerque or Santa Fe. 

  What I found interesting was that out of nowhere they’d mention “I HATE that drive from Vaughn to Roswell.”

  “Why?” I asked, “All that wide-open rangeland, the Golden West.”

  “Exactly,” said one young woman, “There’s nothing out there.  And my cell phone doesn’t work out there.”

  Then there was the tech from Roswell who said her work took her to Albuquerque from time to time.

  “I HATE that drive from Roswell to Vaughn,” she said.

  “Because…?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  Well, there’s truth to this:  There’s a whole lot of nothing between Roswell and Cline’s Corner out on the Eastern Plains of New Mexico.

  Or is there?

  If you live in Roswell and you need to get to Albuquerque or Santa Fe you have to traverse this great wide open to get to I-40 at Cline’s Corner….about 140 miles…2 hours…of the highway, grassland, pronghorn antelope or mule deer.

  Check it out.

  Look at a map.

  There’s nothing out there.

  It’s a big, wide-open quarter of the whole state of New Mexico.

  Well, actually there ARE ranches there:  Cattle ranches, sheep ranches.  It’s wide open rangeland, shortgrass prairie, mesquite, cholla, juniper.

  I learned this when I lived in Roswell almost 30 years ago.

  The vast emptiness is really driven home if you go to the higher reaches of the Capitan Mountain Range west of Roswell and look north…it’s really impressive at twilight.  As the night starts to spread from the east to west you look out over a vast sea of dark land that spreads from horizon to horizon and to the north until it flows into the sky.  There’s a dot of light there, probably a ranch house.  Another spec of light that seems to be moving, probably a car or 18-wheeler headed south to Roswell on US 285.  These bits of light are miles away from the mountain slopes.

  There ARE towns out there.

  Well, not all of them are towns, they’re points on the map.

  Heading north out of Roswell you’ll encounter Mesa after about 20-25 minutes.

Actual factual photo of Mesa, New Mexico 

courtesy of Rhonda Hill-Reed, The Remarkable Roswell Radio Receptionist...

  All that was at Mesa was a gas station and a pay phone.  I know there was a pay phone there because that’s where my ex-girlfriend stopped to call me on her way back to Albuquerque in September 1990 BCP (before cell phones).

  After we broke up.

  I had watched her drive away from my groovy bachelor pad.

  There's an old tradition that you're not supposed to watch someone drive away until they're out of sight because that means you'll never see them again.  Tradition says you wave goodbye then walk back into the house.

  I watched her drive away until I couldn't see her car anymore.  

  I never wanted to see her drama queen ass again.

  Yet less than a half-hour later there she was on the phone.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Are you at Mesa?” I ask.

  She gasped, “How did you know?”

  “You’ve been gone about a half-hour so I reckoned you’re calling from the pay phone at Mesa,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Not that it’s any business of yours but I’m having a beer and cleaning my apartment,” I said.

  There was a pained wailing sound on the other end of the line.

  “YOU’RE CLEANING YOUR APARTMENT???” she yelled over the phone with dramatic sobbing.  “WE BREAK UP AND YOU CLEAN YOUR APARTMENT?????”

  “Not that it’s any business of yours but pray-tell what am I supposed to be doing?”

  “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SAD,” she screamed.  “I’M COMING BACK.”

  “Oh JEEZ!” I said, “Don’t….”

  *CLICK*

  I held the phone back from my face and looked at it.

 “Damn,” I said.  I finished my beer and reached for another.

  It would be another 3 months before she and I would be done…for the most part…but that’s another story.

  Go another 40 or 50 miles north of Mesa and you used to come up on a small building that once housed a little bar and standing outside the building was a pay phone stand…the pay phone disappeared probably 28 years ago, the stand is gone now too.

  This is Ramon.

Ramon, New Mexico

  Ramon is a dot on the map out in the middle of nowhere.

  When I was a DJ on the Country radio in Roswell I used to have great fun with Ramon, talking about “The Ramon Hilton” and on snow days flights being delayed or cancelled out of “Ramon International Airport” but there was probably plenty of room for stranded travelers at “The Ramon Marriott.”

  That’s when I discovered there were actually-factually people in the area of Ramon, you just couldn’t see where they lived because they were over the hill from the highway.  They were folks who ran sheep ranches.

  The folks in the Ramon area listened to our station out of Roswell because we were blasting across the whole southeast quadrant of New Mexico with 50,000 watts of Country music radio. 

  The Ramon sheep people were such good sports about fun being poked at their little corner of New Mexico that they even invited me up to be Grand Marshal of their “Ramon Daze” parade.  It’s something that they never did before and probably haven’t done since. 

  I couldn’t make it to their parade.

  They mailed me pictures.

  The parade was made up of a fellow on horseback, a couple of kids pulling little red wagons and some border collies on ropes for leashes.  It was a grand affair.  Sorry I missed it.

  It seems like no matter how fast you drive it takes an hour-and-a-half to get from Roswell to Vaughn…98 miles.  Vaughn’s the only real sizable, functioning town between Roswell and Cline’s Corner.

  Vaughn has a few motels, a truck stop, a diner, a convenience store.  It sits at over 6,000 feet above sea level in the middle of the last swatch of un-overgrazed shortgrass prairie in New Mexico.

  It seems like if you speed, it takes an hour-and-a-half to get from Roswell to Vaughn, if you go 55 it takes an hour-and-a-half and if you’re riding a bus it takes an hour-and-a-half.

  Back in the day that’s how I used to take trips to Albuquerque, I figured my old Dodge might break down out in the middle of really nowhere.

  This was back when the TNM&O bus line was still around…TNM&O stood for “Texas, New Mexico & Oklahoma,” a division of Greyhound.

  There’s a certain luxury to hopping on a bus and letting someone else drive.

  So it was that I paid my money…was it 9 bucks…19 bucks…and took my seat.

  We passed Mesa.  Take a right there and you head off to Fort Sumner…I had listeners out that way, cattle ranchers, a few weeks earlier they’d come back from an African safari.  I reckoned there was money to be made in cattle ranching.

  Some miles later there was the turnoff to Corona, 48 miles to the west.  Me and my buddy Wayne had driven over there with the station music setup and disc jockeyed dances over there.

  We passed by Ramon, the old bar still empty, the pay phone still missing from its stand.

  And then an hour-and-a-half later we rolled into Vaughn.

  “We’ll be stopping here for 20 minutes folks,” said the bus driver over the intercom.

  The driver pulled off the highway right up to the restaurant on the west side of the town.

Where the TNM&O bus used to stop in Vaughn, New Mexico......

  All of us passengers, 12 or so of us, filed off the bus.

  I ordered a bag of fries and a Coke.

  Is it any wonder I have The Sugar (diabetes) now.

  Anyway, I took my bag o’ fries and drink and strolled outside and stood by the bus.  The driver was standing a few feet away enjoying a smoke.

  I like traveling by bus.  It’s from when I was a kid, my parents would put me on a Greyhound bus and ship me off to visit my aunt and uncle in North Carolina, or when we moved to Baltimore they’d put me on a Greyhound to Roanoke, Virginia to stay with my grandparents.  I think I was 11 when they first put me on a bus all by myself.

  I had been pondering riding the bus from Roswell back east to Florida to visit my momma.  The fare was cheaper than flying but the trip would take like, a day-and-a-half.

  I thought about stuff like sleeping and eating and needing to go to the bathroom.

  “So,” I said to the bus driver, “You get many cross country travelers?”

  “Nah,” said the driver taking a drag off his smoke.  “You know buddy, I work for this company, I drive for this company, but I wouldn’t ride one of these damn things across the country if you paid me.  Too damn uncomfortable.”

  I smiled and nodded and put another fistful of fries in my mouth.

  It would be 12 years in the future that I would ride a Greyhound across a big chunk of America.  I learned that you drink water or tea, leave the sodas alone, don’t eat salty snacks, try to eat fruit, take your own pillow and watch your luggage.

  The time had come to get back on the bus and finish the trip on in to Albuquerque.

  Yep, whether you’re driving it or looking at it on the map, it looks like there’s a whole lot of nothing between Roswell and I-40, but there really is life out there.

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