January 28, 2005 - Volksmarch in Mesilla, New Mexico

Despite the other attractions in the area around us, we had decided to head on to Tucson where we could visit my niece Debbie and her family over the weekend. Since both Debbie and her husband Rob work and their son Karl is in school, we thought it only polite to try to get there on a weekend to visit. Also, I figured we would swing back east through Albuquerque and visit my brother Terry there, and in that case we could possibly see some of the other attractions of the middle of New Mexico during that visit. Convenient having friends and relations all across the south, isn't it?

Hitching up the trailer after breakfast and dumping the tanks, we were on the road shortly after 9 o'clock. We passed by the White Sands National Monument on our way southwest to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and I was sorely tempted to pull in and try to take more pictures under a clear blue sky with the sun brightly lighting the dunes, but Monika dissuaded me and we continued on. After crossing the big basin in which White Sands and Alamogordo, etc. are all located, we started climbing (slowly) over the next pass between two curiously distinct ranges of mountains. The mountains to the right or north of the pass were the typical gently sloped mountains covered with low-lying vegetation and having fairly flat tops, but the mountains to the south of the pass were quite craggy in appearance with large surfaces of exposed white rock and saw-toothed tops. Those mountain ranges actually met at the pass we drove over, and I would have expected them to be pretty similar, but that was not the case and I wondered why.

Pulling the trailer up the steep grade was slow work and we had to use the extra far right lane for heavy trucks and slowpokes like us. But we made it over the pass and then descended a long slope into the next broad, dry valley. The air was so clear that we could already see Las Cruces way across the valley although it was at least 20 miles away. We followed US 70 to Interstate 25, which we took south to connect with Interstate 10 going west. Here we made a stop to walk a Volksmarch in historic Messilla, New Mexico, just on the western edge of Las Cruces.

Messilla is a town dating at least as far back as a Mexican Civil Colony Land Grant issued in 1848. The interesting thing about the grant was that it specified some of the farm fields would be held in common and all men in the town were required to help dig irrigation ditches to bring Rio Grande water to the fields. That being the Good Old Days, the men took turns actually digging the ditch, which we saw on our walk, and being lookouts for attacks by the local Indian tribes.

I had been worried about finding a place to park the rig at the starting point, a nice Best Western motel, but as it turned out there was a Wal Mart one block back on the same road, and I could pull in there next to some semis in a side lot. My 25' trailer plus hitch plus the length of the truck is about the same as a medium semi, so finding a parking space next to one works pretty well. We walked from Wal Mart to the hotel, signed up, and took the directions plus a "Points of Interest" guide along on the walk. The club had done a marvelous job writing a summary of the history of Messilla in general plus details about 32 points of interest that they had also marked on our walking map. Naturally reading all that as we walked by each place slowed us down, but the sites in Mesilla had a remarkable amount of history and reading about it added immeasurably to our enjoyment of the walk.

The first segment of the walk was from the Best Western 2.2 kilometers over to the historic Old Town district along a busy highway. Fortunately, we could walk either on a gravel shoulder or sidewalks, so at least we weren't mixing it up directly with the traffic, but it was the least enjoyable part of the walk. Once we turned off into the Old Town district and could read about the historic buildings, things got more interesting. The first block in led us past the old San Albino Catholic church that anchored one end of the central square. It was made, as one might expect, of a pretty dun-colored adobe but it also sported some shiny rolled tin roofing, which looked a bit startling but certainly impressive.

From the square we immediately turned north to walk a loop on the northern and eastern edges of the historic district. As we were coming back south along the Calle Del Picacho, we stopped to read the description of the Reynolds/Chavez/Fountain Home and while we did that a pair of folks in the front yard asked what we were doing. After we explained, the man checked our description for accuracy (it was), and the woman invited us in for a tour! We weren't sure if we were intruding or not, but it seemed to be a sincere invitation so we all trooped inside.

It turned out that the couple had just owned the house for the last year or so and had invested huge amounts of time, energy, and money in restoring the oldest section of the house (dating from about 1860, I think he said) plus renovating the newer section into an absolutely beautiful dwelling. When I looked at those highly polished hardwood floors, I considered taking off my boots and probably should have done so, but since they are a bother to unlace I settled for wiping them off very thoroughly at the entrance. Both the exterior and the interior walls were a good 2 feet thick in cross section-double layers of adobe I think the owner said. He also reported that the amount of thermal mass given by those walls kept the interior temperatures quite stable during the day and night. This couple had obviously worked very hard at either putting in period antique fixtures or having a local blacksmith custom fabricate fixtures that fit the house's décor.

All in all, it was an excellent example of a restored historic southwest home, but please don't pester these people for a tour if you take the walk-they are justifiably proud of it but can't really take the time to show it to every Tom, Dick or Harry that walks by. Why they showed it to us I am not sure, but it was similar to the lady who let us tour her lighthouse during Wanderung 4 and the lady in Helena, Montana, who let us tour her antique-filled house during Wanderung 6. It's nice that some folks are so trusting given that we probably cut rather strange figures with our red caps stuck full of pins, hip belts with water bottles and other accessories attached, and extra jackets usually wound around our waists. I guess I'm a bit surprised because if I saw people looking and acting like us, I'm not sure I'd trust them in my house. I guess in some ways I feel like Groucho Marx who said that he would not want to join any club that would accept someone like him as a member!

Continuing on our way we looped out to the eastern edge of the historic district and then came back to walk down the Calle De Principal, one of the main streets forming the central square. Monika stopped off in the El Platero gift shop to look around. It was site #13 on our tour and had been used as a flourmill, freight business, and stage line in the 1860s and then some kind of business before ultimately became a gift shop in the modern era. She picked up a thimble and a spoon rest-I broke the one at home during one of my less successful forays into gourmet cooking so we needed one. Afterwards we ambled on down the street past the Mesilla Book Store where Republicans and Democrats staged competing political rallies on August 27th, 1871. This being the Old West period, many of these folks were packing heat, and after some preliminary shouting and name calling, Sheriff Barela fired his gun in the air to quiet the crow, which had the predictable effect of eliciting a fusillade of gunfire from the opposing parties. During the ensuing firefight, "nine men were killed and forty or fifty injured" until the troops from nearby Fort Selden could restore order. So that was life in the Old West. I can hardly wait until the NRA campaign to extend "carry concealed" handgun laws across the US leads us to those thrilling days of yesterday year, where political rallies could turn in seconds into bloody killing fields.

As we turned the next corner we found a (surprise!) Mexican restaurant, and there we stopped for lunch (shredded beef tacos-delicious). After refueling, we walked the final loop from the historic district out to the San Albino cemetery. The cemetery belonged, naturally, to the local church and had many of the historic folks buried in it. The graves were festively decorated with flowers in the Mexican fashion, and I must say that the splashes of color made the cemetery look more cheerful. Whether you want a cheerful cemetery is, of course, up to you and probably depends on what you are doing there, but it seemed pleasant to me as a casual passer-by.

After the cemetery we made one last pass through the central square on the Calle De Guadeloupe which had a different set of historic sites. Site #24 was the place where Billy the Kid, a well-armed and accurate sociopath, had been tried and convicted of murder. On his way to be hanged, he escaped and murdered his guards, but he was ultimately tracked down and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett. You might think I'm exaggerating about the violence of the Old West period, but I'm not even including the several mentions of town citizens killed during robberies. Despite the occasionally violent history, the square itself was both peaceful and remarkably pretty while we were there.

We stopped to admire the large and pretty band shell in the center of the square before we turned to exit the historic district.

And that's where we got lost and headed out of town on the wrong road. We missed the sign for "Canal" street and ended up walking down a country road that was definitely not part of our instructions. The shoulder was narrow, but fortunately the traffic was sparse and the folks were very good about moving over to give us walking room. I checked on the GPS and found out the road was leading us back in the rough direction of the Wal Mart, so we kept marching on and turned left just after passing under Interstate 10 to get back to the parking lot where our truck was waiting.

All in all, we liked this walk and it was a great break from the driving. The first segment on the busy road was just so-so, but the central square and loops around the historic district were quite interesting. To be fair, I should emphasize that the historic district contains some seedy, old, run-down places as well as the beautifully restored old houses like the one we toured, and quite a few places were equipped with small yappy dogs. Some of the dogs could possibly have emigrated from Mexico, and they might have even been Chihuahuas! But all the dogs were either tied up or restrained by fences, so although we were barked at a lot-I expect with our hats and equipment we do look like an odd sight to an average dog-it was usually with a wagging tail and there was never even a hint of an attack.

After our walking break, we drove right back onto Interstate 10 and continued west to Demmings, New Mexico, where we put in for the night at the Roadrunner RV Park. Monika had picked it partly for low cost (what did you expect?), but also for advertising a heated pool and hot tub. We set up the trailer and then tried out the pool, and much to my relief it really was heated well. I could get in without problems and swim ½ laps back and forth. I swam a half a lap at a time because I kept bumping into the rope and buoys in the center of the pool. After doing that for a half an hour or so, we walked a couple of steps over to the hot tub room and spent 15 minutes or so soaking in a big Jacuzzi style tub with bubbles and water jets. Very relaxing. We got back to the trailer before dark where Monika cooked an eggs and bacon dinner before we turned to the evening chores of processing pictures and completing the journal. But Monika also found that our new spoon rest had been wrapped with a newspaper page containing a crossword puzzle, so we entertained ourselves a bit with that before turning in for the evening.