The whole story Part II

To find Part I, scroll down. All of these will eventually appear together.

We were in the Cloudcroft area for six years, about half in the village and half on a piece of land way out Sixteen Springs and up against the reservation. We learned a lot from both places, and we're not sorry we did it. We had to leave, in the end, because we couldn't force our kids to go to school, and they had to do something. So we finally packed it all in and moved up here to Illinois.

But first, the charming things about Cloudcroft. I was struck by the way it was isolated compared to the rest of the southwest: much higher, much cooler, much wetter, much snowier - it had an entirely different climate. And up there on the mountain, we could literally look down at the drier, hotter valley every day of the year. The Tularosa Basin got what, about five inches of rain a year? And all on the same day? Cloudcroft in the bigger picture is still quite dry - it has trouble collecting enough water to provide for its own residents - but at least it rains there, and it snows too - a lot. We occasionally dug ourselves out of drifts of a few feet. And the locals loved the snow - they said that whereas the rain washes right off, the snow melts and seeps down into the water table where we need it - thus replenishing a water table that has become very depleted.

This is probably the single biggest issue of living in the area. Without much effort we can look down into El Paso, or drive over to Las Cruces - but the feeling of infinite dryness is overpowering. At one point we looked into Timberon - remarkably remote, hilly, beautiful in its own way (talk about looking down into ELP). But it was a tinderbox! the trees down there hadn't had a drop of rain in years, and in fact went up in flames once while we were there. Scary! Of course they drop fire retardant by the bucket and pretty soon it's all smoldering. But it still reminded me: this is one very dry country.

The same was true, basically, out by Mayhill/Sixteen Springs. We were evacuated once - had to load up everything and drive down to Mayhill, which we did. My fire department buddies battled the fire, which was just off the highway and apparently pretty easily containable. But it was at that point that my wife realized that we were literally surrounded by thousands of acres of very dry forest that could go up in a minute - and at various times in the past, it had - and that we'd be sitting ducks, unable to escape in any direction. In fact there were two directions we could escape, only a single main road over a very dry mountain, but also a backroad, over another very dry mountain. One stiff wind and we'd be trapped.

Socially, things fell apart for our kids, and it was partly that they were special, and nobody had much experience with this kind of kid before. I don't entirely blame the kids of the village, though they did some pretty low things before it was all over. Our own kid had a violent temper and really didn't know who he was or how he fit in.

I trace it back to his junior high, when we arrived, and they apparently taught a lesson on slavery. He was the only black kid. He literally didn't know what to make of it, and his classmates didn't help. It was just history - how did anyone know? They also didn't have many Mexican or Chicano students though they occasionally had a few. At some point this boy - large and black and usually scowling - became too uncomfortable to walk down and play basketball at the junior high outdoor court. It was painful for him. He tried to be a gangsta and it just didn't work.

Now a lot of times small towns will make you feel excluded for a simple reason - everyone has a huge history with each other, going back all their lives, and they have no history with a newcomer. So they too are out of their comfort zone and don't know how to deal with it, since their usual tricks for sizing each other up just simply don't work. Obviously it's doubly bad when the kid is large and black. They don't think of themselves as racist and in fact go out of their way to include him, and treat him like the others, yet they don't really know much about where he's been, or who he is, or anything like that. He made friends, and did ok in some school things - for example he played basketball - yet he was on a path toward alienation that he would never come back from. This was partly from his trying to be "gangsta" and prove that he was the most troublous of the troublous.

What I'm saying is that all these things are a two-way street, but we somehow didn't see how we could have supported him differently so that the inevitable falling-out could be prevented.

We had our own trials - I taught at a junior high down in the valley, and was steadily losing my hearing; my wife took work as a hospice nurse but found it too hard on her back.

A tourist town is by nature hard to get to know people in. People are going to be friendly to everyone, as they see new people every day, and everyone could be a customer. Yet this kind of surface interaction is hard to get past sometimes; it's like they're in the habit of being polite but not really trying to go any further. That's for their own survival, really; you can't blame them. I found the whole region - Texas too - to be very friendly and genuinely friendly. Yet I also felt that in some ways we could have spent another ten years there and still would have been tourists.

My wife and I saw a bear on one of our first hikes out on the cliffs overlooking the Tularosa Basin. There are pine-filled mountains south of town, and you can walk around what I believe they call the Rim Trail, and there we were, looking at a mother bear and her teenager, blocking the trail with a mountain behind them and a cliff in front of them. I stopped my wife and then yelled at the bear. The bear looked at me with utmost contempt and led her teenager off the path. We inched forward, aware that they couldn't be that far away, since the mountain blocked them behind, and the cliff was on the other side. But when we got up to that spot, they were thoroughly gone. Disappeared. Not a trace.

Even more surprising was the villagers' response. Yes, they saw bears often, even in town. Bears would come down out of the mountains and open the dumpsters if they could. While we were there I met one guy who, as a kid of about twelve, opened a dumpster to find a bear in it; he was traumatized for life. Uninjured, though. They aren't out to maul you, though they will if they have to. More later.

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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