New Mexico Trip, Chapter 6: The Long Road Home

 

This little homestead appears on my 2016 New Mexico Gazetteer as the Feliz Ranch.  It sits atop a very broad and treeless plateau just off NM highway 104.  We had reason to approach the place and found it to be a lot less impressive than its name would indicate.

I mean, not many houses get to be named on maps.  And that's pretty much all there is here at Feliz Ranch: a rickety old ranch house, a few outbuildings, and a view that looks more like Kansas than New Mexico.

With natural splendor all around, the Feliz Ranch sits in its own little bowl of ugly.  And yet, even ugly in New Mexico has a kind of beauty to it.

And that's a pretty expensive car sticking its nose out of the garage at Feliz Ranch.

Oh, that it would rain out over this barren land.  And I hope for a good, heavy snowfall in the mountains this winter, so the lakes and reservoirs and water tables can be restored.  

But recent rains did make for a greenish landscape, despite the fact that it was merely a superficial health masking the deep dryness beneath.

Beautiful New Mexico, this place has been haunting me, calling to me for years and years.  I first came here in about 1991.  My friend and I drove here in his jalopy from Oklahoma City because I wanted to get out of a date with a girl I didn't really like.  I left a note on her door saying that I'd have to cancel our date because I was in New Mexico.  She left a poem about disappointment on my door, and the poem was named "New Mexico."  (I've sometimes made the right decision.)

The long, empty roads, the grueling heat, the sweet smell of pinyon and juniper.  I love this place most of all in the winter.

Along highway 104, after passing through the empty husk of Trementina and beginning the long ascent to the nearly empty husk of Trujillo, you'll see a church-like structure on the distant hill.  This is a shrine to Mother Mary--in deference to the Catholicism practiced by most generational New Mexicans of Spanish ancestry.

It's just that, a shrine with statues, and candles, and all kinds of gewgaws and trinkets and kitsch.

In a human-made grotto, there's a place where you can leave prayers to the Mother of God.

Personally, I don't have much use for the statues and fake flowers and beads, but someone finds comfort here.  See the notes, and cards, and rosaries that people have left.

This odd-looking thing is a larger-than-life rosary.

And here's a miniature Calvary.

Ah, but all journeys must come to a close, and time drew me back to Oklahoma City and the flight back East.  Oklahoma City was never a glamorous place.  It always felt to me like a temporary town or an outpost in some desperate hinterland.  Despite improvements, it still kind of has that feel.

There's really not much to photograph in Oklahoma City.  Here's "The Roanoke," on Northwest 12th Street, where I had my first apartment--in the lower righthand corner.  The neighborhood was dicey even back then, in the early 90s.  It's about the same today, though many buildings seem to be the worse for wear.  The once-busy church behind the apartment building is long abandoned.  This was the first place where I lived on my own out in the big world after college.  It was here that I had my first phone number, my first utility bills, my first real home.  I made the place nice--with lots of books, and mood lighting, and artistic prints, and candles, and old furniture, and dark music, and the aroma of coffee, and incense, and clove cigarettes.  Oh the freedom of being young, and gainfully employed, and single in the city, even a dumpy city like that one.  In some ways I miss it.