I left Amarillo this past spring after
seeing the grandkids and headed into New Mexico with a midday stop in Roswell.
This midsized southeastern New Mexico community was a former home of mine earlier
in my career when I was a young, practicing city planner.
I connected with an old friend and
co-worker from back in the day to have lunch and catch up on all that has
transpired since I was last here 30 years ago. We talked and reminisced with ease,
as if we had been in regular and routine contact on a yearly basis, a mark of a
good friendship that took root all so long ago.
 |
| With my old friend Jim |
My time in Roswell lasted only 2 ½
years, a small chunk of time in an otherwise long and varied 33 year career in
local government. But those distant years as a young city planner for the City
of Roswell were very memorable and had helped shape and mold me considerably,
both professionally and personally. I thought those same 2 ½ years would be but
a small and inconsequential blip in the history of my friend’s life time of
living and working in Roswell. But as he talked, he easily recalled and
recollected the various good times and shared friends we had back then. After
only a few minutes into our conversation, it became clear to me that those were
memorable times for him as well.
After lunch, I toured the community
looking up old haunts and the homes my first wife and I lived in. Surprisingly,
the home that we rented, which at the time was your typical rental in a
marginal neighborhood, was now in very good shape in a part of town that has
evolved in a pleasant and well-maintained manner. The home that we later
bought, which at the time was very nice and in a well-maintained neighborhood,
was now run down, painted in a lime-green color, and was replete with deferred
maintenance and burned out or non-existent
grass on which an assortment of cars and other vehicles were parked. The
neighborhood in which it is located is now a part of town that is in serious
decline.
The Roswell UFO craze didn’t exist
when I was here in the early 1980s. Back then, such a story, if discussed at
all, was brushed aside as some distant, old, and not-to-be believed footnote in
the town’s history. In the late 90s, some local businessmen drummed up this old
1947 story and began to hype and publish stories about it to the point that it
started to catch more and more national attention. The increase in tourism and
name recognition for Roswell has been impressive ever since.
This event and the UFO phenomenon in
general, are all captured in a museum that has been converted out of an old
main street main theater. It has become a major tourist draw for people from
all over the world. To this day, when I mention I had once lived in Roswell,
the automatic reaction from those I tell is whether or not I had seen any UFOs.
Contrast this with my time back in the 80s. When I told people I was moving to
Roswell, the automatic reaction was a quizzical, “Where’s that at?” I
don’t believe at all the existence of UFOs let alone the story that supposedly
happened here. But I had to do my tourist duty and visit the museum none the
same.
I left town in the late afternoon to
make further progress to the south. I spent the night in Carlsbad at the
local KOA campground. MK and I have found that a stay in one of their one room
cabins for $50 or so is a cost effective way to travel. Sure, you have to use a
common bath and shower house located a couple of hundred feet away, but the
cheap accommodations allows us to spend our money seeing and doing more of
other things while on our journeys, all the while staying within our
budget. Smart traveling, we prefer to call it. But, we always double check to
make sure the cabin’s prices are less than the cost of a decent local motel.
Sometimes, we will find that the cost of a motel room is generally the same. In
those cases, we’ll go with comfort and convenience of the motel and its
en-suite bathrooms, soft beds, fresh towels, and decent hot breakfasts in the
morning.
 |
| Looking up and out of the main entrance at Carlsbad Caverns |
I made my way to Carlsbad Caverns
National Park the following morning. I took the self-guided tour of the “Big
Room” route. Spectacularly beautiful and very large speleothems adorn every
portion of the caverns. This route took me only an hour or so to traverse. I
waited in the top-side cafeteria for my early afternoon “ranger-guided” tour of
the King’s Palace. I am glad I reserved a spot on this tour, for it attracted a
large, 40 person crowd. The ranger did a good job of marching us around,
thoughtfully stopping at wide spots along the otherwise narrow and sinuous
trail so that of us could hear her talk about the wonders of this part of the
cavern. The “Palace” tour turned out to be more intimate, prettier, and
colorful than the “Big Room” tour I took earlier in the day.
By mid afternoon, I was heading south
again. This time, I was back into Texas and the campground at Guadalupe
Mountains National Park. My time there is another story for another day.
Comments
Post a Comment