The whole story Part I

We started out driving through Cloudcroft on our way from Lubbock to Las Cruces. That trip was about six or seven hours, with Cloudcroft high in the mountains in about the fifth hour going west. After five hours of flat, hot, windy dusty plains, the high mountain air, the cool fog, the deer and the greenery really made a contrast.

Often it was just me driving, from our home in Lubbock to see my parents in Las Cruces. On the other side of Cloudcroft, down through Alamogordo and past the White Sands, I'd have to endure the Tularosa Basin and another mountain climb, this one the Organs, before I got to their place in Las Cruces. It was actually a pretty wild and diverse trip, but Cloudcroft was the high point in more ways than ooe.

My wife was chair of the Sociology department at Texas Tech, but things were falling apart. She had a good salary, but politics there were making her lose her hair. She too however was impressed by the high mountain atmosphere. Pretty soon we had a good realtor who found us a wonderful house on the cliff looking out at the White Sands, and we moved out there for the summer. The house wasn't quite big enough for us and the three kids, but we figured it was summer only and then we'd go back.

Already we'd go out on the porch and look way out over the White Sands, or go down into the town, two blocks, full of tourist places and tourists. That second wasn't so appealing to me, but the town was nice and friendly. We had no problem being accepted. Some policeman came by and introduced himself as our son was the first black kid they'd seen in a while. They liked us; things were going well.

In the schools though the son had some problems. Looking back I think it was a lesson they did on slavery. It was just part of the curriculum, and people weren't mean to him, but he didn't know how to take it. He didn't know who he was as a kid and it wasn't getting any better. Pretty soon he thought he had to be crazier than they were in order to fit in, and he set out to do that.

My wife and I were walking on a path near the town and encountered a bear, a couple of them. It's a story I like to tell and retell, but basically nobody was surprised. They had bears as neighbors. They cared about how people treated them.

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of moving back off into the mountains, but I agreed with it. This would happen right before the pandemic. We could all see the pandemic coming but didn't know quite what to do about it. It turns out that in an isolated town like Cloudcroft (our kids would still be in its schools) we were relatively safe. Not much in the way of covid came up the mountain and when it did, like everything, everyone knew about it pretty quickly. As we moved out to the mountains, we were about halfway through our six-year stint in southern New Mexico, three in the village, three out there in Sixteen Springs. We rented the house and bought the land that my dad left me when he died.

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