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Years ago,
whenever I flew across
the continent, I used to reserve a window seat. Because
I lived in the islanded confines of Hawaii, I felt a
compelling need to focus intensely on the wide reaches of the earth
below. Especially as we jetted over New Mexico and I’d catch sight of a ghost
town hidden in the mountains, I’d press close to the thick, cold glass,
gazing
on what was beneath, wondering, wondering.
I could tell I was looking at
a ghost town when I
spotted one now and again. Down there,
the weathered remnants of old mining structures testified to the past. The small ramshackle houses I saw were where
the residents used to live, miners and their families.
Those narrow roads I observed clinging to
New Mexico mountainsides had been traversed by hundreds of vehicles—the
slow-moving wagons and carts loaded with gold and silver ore. Thousands
of
human feet of the miners also had toiled up those circuitous trails.
But that was long ago. Why would my contemporaries make such a choice
today? Why, with all that space available
for the
companionship of civilization, would people choose to live in in a New
Mexico
ghost town? But I’m a city person. How
could I begin to guess? Yet I was convinced that people did live there,
because
I saw proof: Look. There’s
smoke coming out of the chimneys.
Then I would doze off,
dreaming my way into the
lives of those old-timers, those ghosts, whose lives and times were
utterly
remote from my own.
But lives and times keep
changing. I married. I
left the islands. I
settled in
Albuquerque, New Mexico with my new husband. Then
he made an unexpected move—he bought a house in
the south of the
state, in a mountainous ghost town —Mogollon— which had been one of the
major
producers of gold and silver in the Southwest. The hands of a large
clock,
painted on the rocks at the entry to the town, are set at 4:00,
memorializing
the hour when the last whistle was blown and the mines closed down.
After that foray into the New
Mexico wilderness, I
began to understand something about why people make such a choice, to
live in a ghost town. We became integrated
into the small
community of ghost town residents—seven to ten of us in the winter,
maybe forty
in the summer. With our friendly Boxer Max, I walked all over that
mountain. I waded in that stream. I hiked into the cemetery.
I stood gazing out of those ramshackle,
empty houses, whose glassless windows framed the beautiful distances. I clambered over the ruins of the Little Fanny
Mine. Meanwhile, little by little, Max,
sniffing and bounding all over that New Mexico ghost town, introduced
me and my husband to
all the
local dogs. We became familiar with the
daily routines of a town in the back woods, and we shared in the
unexpected
adventures offered by visitors and tourists. We
even became part of the local mythology.
And I came to know the people
who lived in Mogollon,
their quirks, their hopes, their lives. The Painted Clock: Memoirs
of a New Mexico Ghost Town Bride records
their stories, and my own.
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