Planning Emergency
Image: 1927 New Mexico highway map show route of today’s 550 as 44 joining 19 at Aztec. The road to Silver City crossing the Black Range over Emory Pass, now NM152, as US 180
My first concern is no hot shower. The phone is charged, which is good because otherwise I would have missed the notice on my weather app about a “Regional Planned Emergency Power Outage.” That’s the wording. I’m especially amused by the oxymoronic ‘planned emergency.’ Apparently it provided “plausible deniability” for hotels that rented rooms in spite on knowing what was coming.
Up until then I liked my big bright corner room in the grand old hotel. The fire escape door at the end of the hall was tied open and there was a smell of room deodorant masking a sewer scent in the bathroom. But the mountain view - incomparable and stunning.
Red Mountain White Knuckles
The drive on US 550 up here is intense. As kids we called the whole stretch the “Million Dollar Highway.” It probably costs at least that much every year just to maintain it. It is now apparently only called that between Silverton and Ouray. According to wiki, it’s the portion twelve miles south of Ouray - that last hair raising portion through Uncompagre Gorge, that gives the highway its name. Quick glances at faces in oncoming cars show passengers expressing worry or terror.
The highway is an impressive drive all the way from Albuquerque. It’s US 550 the entire way - the Rio Grande Valley to Montrose on the Western Slope through some of the most interesting geology in the west. Portions follow routes used in prehistory and the Old Spanish Trail. In the San Juans a man named Otto Mears built the first tollroads on parts of what became this highway. Then he built the first railroad to Silverton. Collectors of railroad memorabilia love his Silverton Railroad passes, printed on buckskin and adorned with silver filigree.
It’s nice to divide the drive into two parts with a stop in Silverton for relief from the cliff-clinging road. A free Shakespeare production of As You Like It in intimate little Anesi Park that night was delightful. Multiple sponsors included UpstART Theater That Moves. The play was also preformed in Ouray.
The Silverton history museum expanded from the old jail to a mining boarding house donated to the San Juan Historical Society. In and under those buildings is everything related to mining but a live burro. A mineral exhibit had me transfixed and I stared at innocent looking yellow uranium powder for probably too long wondering if it’s safe.
My second concern on the morning of no electricity, is no hot coffee. I thank my stars for the cold brew I bought yesterday and sit in my car taking big gulps while admiring the looming mountainsides, illuminated like a stage backdrop by the rising sun. Somewhere someone is whistling.
The whole county is lined up in the one coffee shop with a generator. There are delicious pastries. A hot cup takes ten minutes. Everyone is listening to city workers talking loud and greeting each other as they file in between the tourists. One guy says marijuana is a gateway drug and another says it sure was for him. The whole place erupts in laughter.
Give me an old hotel over a new dull and anonymous one any day. Preferably with electricity.
To Tucson
From I-25 I drove west to Silver City through the Black Range. It is a magical drive and less scary for the height conscious passengers. I remember boys at NMSU hauling bicycles up and riding them down the curvy steep bits above Kingston. I drove the pickup. No one was hurt, remarkably. Tiny grey deer under ponderosa watch the occasional traffic. I try and take photos but end up attempting watercolors later for the first time in years - simply inspired.
Silver City is a good and interesting. It's one of those places where the rolling Wheel of Fortune has been very visible and left an indelible track. Artists and seekers sometimes come to places like this. Sometimes money or popularity "ruin it" and we'll talk about how Vail or Durango or Santa Fe used to be. Silver is like that now. I'm sure it'll change again. Cultures have been displacing, absorbing, undermining each other from prehistory. Land and landscapes used and abused. Mountains turned upside down for copper. Rebellion over cows to controversial feral cow elimination.
It’s always the end of an era. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes (usually) long after “we” are gone. Like how a flood in 1895 washed out Silver City’s Main Street leaving a 55 foot deep trench. Main street became the next street over. Now the trench is a pretty linear park.
The copper mines could be a set piece for the Netflix series “KAOS” with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus sitting in a giant excavator observing the miles-wide pockmarks, seeping festules, funny-colored fake mountains. A friendly cowboy in the brew pub said when dust from blasting settles on cars it eats away the paint, “and that can’t be good." He knows dust, being from where dust storms frequently close I-10. I asked if the mines employed many people. He said he didn't really know but that they'll never close them. They'll always keep "a skeleton crew" to avoid the costs of reclamation work required when they close.
I stayed at the Murphy Hotel, a downtown classic. It is solid, simple, nice. I like to pretend I’m the Hotel Inspector. That reality show follows famed hotelier, Alex Polizzi, around Britain as she visits and critiques hotels and B and Bs. I don’t have her background, experience, heritage or chops, but I know good vibes and clean sheets when I feel and see them. I also see that cool Mondrian inspired mural on the back wall across from restored old brick buildings. I can smell the sweet little bakery downstairs around the corner.
Mimbres pottery is a reminder of prehistory and that spinning wheel of time. Western New Mexico University has a huge collection housed in a beautiful 1917 Arts and Crafts building. The distinctive black on white Mimbres pots with animal images became so popular with collectors that ancient sites where the pottery originated have been routinely destroyed. A century of looting resulted in several large private collections that this museum has acquired for analysis and display.
Mimbres means little willow in Spanish. We don’t know what these people called themselves or the beautiful river valley where many villages were located. Similarly, the Mimbres are classified as part of the Mogollon culture, named after mountains that were named for a Governor of New Spain.
The Sonoran Desert
Interstate 10 is very bumpy and busy past the Arizona border. It’s best viewed as it stretches out in the distance on the descent from Silver City. Trainline-like lines of tractor trailers move back and forth. You barely see the cars, seemingly outnumbered by big trucks.
This was part of the Gadsden Purchase - 45,000 square miles the US ripped-off from Mexico in 1854 for a transcontinental route and a railroad magnate’s aspirations. Mexico pretty much ripped it off from the Apaches who ripped it off from the Mogollon and Hohokam and Ancient Puebloans. All this within a millennium.
It never stops. Subdivisions punch holes in the delicate Sonoran desert. It is an honor and a tragedy to be this close. Like petting an endangered fish. I baby talk to javalina from a swimming pool and sketch quail from the bedroom window. The relentless wheel spins. What will be next, you can’t predict.
So breathe the delicate morning air. Enjoy the native desert. Come back when it’s cooler.