On the road in New Mexico

The Livery Stable, Springer, NM

Yesterday, on the last day of our drive home from the Oregon coast, we stopped for a bit in the town of Springer, New Mexico. We had been there 15 years ago or more. My only memory from then was of a hot day and an older, elongated building with a screen door where we stopped to ask directions. On the other side of that door was an older man from the 30's, working at a desk, his eyes shielded beneath one of those green transparent billed shades as worn years ago by accountants and professional card dealers.

As my wife went inside to speak with the man, as she "stepped back in time," I watched as the tracks immediately across the street hosted a speeding Amtrak train on its way to Albuquerque. It was coming from Denver. As quickly as it had appeared it vanished. But I remembered the rows of windows, some shielding faces behind them. People on their way to someplace else, much as we were.

But something about Springer captured my and my wife's imaginations that day and the desire to revisit had been with us since. It's part of the reason I opted to return from Oregon via a longer, hence slower route than the California--Arizona one. (Less traffic was another.)

As we drove the streets of Springer trying to locate that little place we had stopped at so many years ago, it was apparent our memories of it were quite different. I enjoyed comparing mine with my wife's. Together we reconciled memories on a place that now houses an old-fashioned gas station, mini-store combination. The man with the green visor behind the screen door is long gone.

The Springer Hotel. It's just a door or two down the street from the Livery Stable. Unlike many little towns that are dying, Springer seems to have defied the odds, as both an active hotel and livery stable would seem to indicate.

But as we drove around this little town of about 1,300 people, we enriched our memories of Springer far beyond our original impressions. And we were both impressed! In many ways, Springer is a town beyond time.

Sitting on the very doorstep of the vast plains of eastern New Mexico, Springer reminds me of the Oregon coastal town on the edge of the Pacific ocean we had left just days earlier. Except here there exists a quiet that is rare in Cannon Beach. That's because there are no tourists, save for a passing Amtrak train twice a day. But they don't stop. They just speed through on their way to someplace else. But that's okay. Nice, in fact.

Springer's also in the area where the Santa Fe trail brought thousands across the plains in covered wagons. Much like the Amtrak train, they were just passing through. But a few of 'em must have decided they'd had enough "sightseeing" and stopped right here. And *POOF* -- up sprang a Springer!

That ocean of grasslands just to its east of town is so vast, it's possible to imagine one could see the dust from wagons rising up in a brown cloud over the horizon days before they came into view, crawling slowly ever so nearer.

I like this town. I imagine if I lived there and ever got to feeling lonely, I'd amble down to the train tracks around lunch time to catch the southbound, or maybe at dinner time to catch the northbound Amtrak speeding through. And I'd wave to those folks shielded behind little windows sipping drinks on their way to some other place. And I'd try to remember how it was, rushing to be somewhere else.