We had been traveling through eastern New Mexico for hours now, toward the west edge of Texas. I had never been on these southwestern plains before. Each town we passed through seemed to have its own characteristic shape of grain elevator and a tiny railway station tucked on one side.
Melrose, N.M. Not a large town, by any means. Maybe 500 or a thousand people, and, as the size of the grain elevators showed, a lot more spread out in the landscape around Melrose.What would inspire a person to want to live in Melrose, N.M.? Probably, more than anything, it would be that you were born here. I began to wonder how many of those who grew up here had moved away, and of those who stayed, what had possessed them to do so.
And then I began to step outside myself and explore this mindset, these assumptions I was making about the presumably bleak nature of this place that I had never seen before and would probably never pass through again.
Such thinking, I thought, is a bit pretentious, as I was helped to realize by an image that popped into my mind about this time, an image from my own place and time, which I had experienced before, more than once on familiar soil:
I am at the Kountry Korner in Highland, eating a hamburger. I have just filled the car with gas and taken a lunch break from my work. I enjoy sitting here sometimes, sipping on a Pepsi and watching the people go in and out.
There are a lot of construction people these days who buy their lunch at Kountry Korner, teams of guys in overalls with white splotches of perfa-tape compound splattered on their arms and faces, and framers who smell like sawdust, and roofers who smell like tar and have a sooty glow about them.
There are also the occasional tourists, who have dropped off the beaten track and made the circuitous route over the Alpine Loop on their way to somewhere else, but have found themselves hungry or low on gas and have had to stop here to fill up.
There is always a certain look about such interlopers. For half a minute you can almost see your own world through their eyes. It is always a humbling assessment, for you realize that to them this place is nothing more than a spot on the map, a place to stop for gas on the way to somewhere else.
Whether the pop is cold is more important to them than the size of the school, or the names of the people, or anything else we might feel is special about "our" place.
And for a second I am tempted to take them aside and say, "Now wait a minute. You don't get away this easy! Don't you know there used to be a pea vinery just up the street from here. I remember because my dad took me there one summer when I was little, and I remember the smell of the place in my nostrils whenever I think about it. And just across the street, over there, behind the Bank of AF billboard, where that faint line of grown-over asphalt still shows, was the cafe that belonged to the country club when it was new, and we would ride our bikes out here and buy a Coke and an order of fries on boring summer afternoons. Those Cokes had a special fizz about them. And I could tell you about the families, the Healeys and the Whitbys and the Strongs in Alpine, and Buhlers and the Days here in Highland, and about the early days, before there were even photos, when the first settlers went into the mountains for wood - and this intersection here was not much more than a trail for the criss-crossing of miners heading into American Fork Canyon, and farmers heading out to market and home again. . . ."
But then I realized it wouldn't make any difference, that the heart of the history of a place is in the living of it, and that somewhere else these passers-through have histories of their own.
Just like here, now, on the edge of Melrose, N.M., where I struggle in vain to find some connection with a place to which I have no connection, and how I realize, at last, that to struggle isn't the point at all, that the important thing is to just have a respect for these people out here and not judge them for not moving on to where the rest of the world is more exciting as I might judge it to be.
A person's place is a person's place, and it is only when we come to terms with the place of where we are that we find a sense of belonging in a world that is constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly becoming something other than what we expect it to be.