When the conversation slows, you can liven things up by asking people how they got here.
When they ask me, I tell them I was sent here by an act of God — just another miracle. In fact, you tend to get a lot of strange answers to that question, and people seldom think mine is all that weird.
To quote from my other life as an occasional songwriter: “How’d Apaches get here? Where’d the Mimbres go? How come you to be here? Me neither. I don’t know.”
Even the people born here may have unusual details — such as that they were “born in space.” For the benefit of the few who don’t know what that means, I’ll explain. The rest of you can skip down two paragraphs.
Everyone has seen the deep hole next to Highway 152. There’s a pullout next to the fence so you can get a good view of toy monster trucks hauling treasure out of the bottom. Well, that hole used to not be a hole. If you look straight out instead of down, all you see is air. That was Santa Rita, a town of about 6,000 with many homes, a school and a hospital.
People born at that hospital are said to have been “born in space.” The most famous person born in space is former astronaut and U.S. Sen. Harrison Schmitt, but I have met various other people born above the Chino pit. For extra points, check out the Born in Space Facebook page.
Welcome back, natives. Sometimes you hear people tell how they studied the internet looking for a new hometown. After rating according to obscure criteria, they chose Silver City. We have been put on lists of desirable small towns, but those lists change, and Silver City isn’t always on them.
A surprising number of Silver City people can trace their arrival to the New Mexico College of Natural Healing. The building is still there on Sixth Street, but the college disappeared about 15 years ago, leaving a whole lot of herbalists and massage therapists.
Once at the Twisted Vine — remember the Twisted Vine? — I found myself at a table with two attractive women. By way of conversation, I joked that they were probably both massage therapists. They were.
Some readers may have no idea what is so special about herbalism or massage therapy. That’s because there are many Silver Citys, and they don’t always interact. Hippies, miners, ranchers and professors sometimes get mixed up, but other times the subcultures have no connection.
Usually the weird stories about immigration to our area involve fortuitous accidents. We’re not on the freeway, and highways 180 and 90 aren’t major routes. I have never heard anyone say, “I was just passing through on my way to Alma, but I never got there.”
OK, back to that miracle. It started in 1997, when I left a job at a large corporation in Seattle where I had worked for 12 years — about one year too long. I was worn out from my final monumental project. My therapy was to take a road trip around the United States. After traversing the northern border, the East Coast and the South, I found myself on U.S. 60 heading from Socorro toward Show Low, Ariz.
The plains of San Augustin, the Very Large Array and the rough area just east of Arizona made a big impression on me. I decided to come back and find some land in the area to build a vacation cabin. Then I went back to my life in Seattle and forgot all about it.
But in the winter of ’98 to ’99, it rained for 90 days in Seattle. If you’re not from there, you might say, “Isn’t that normal?” No. It rains a lot, but not that much. I remembered my plan, but a big snowstorm blocked my plan to look at land near Show Low. As I now know, but didn’t then, big snow in March is unusual, but not unheard of. The real estate offices were shut down.
I decided to drive in a big loop around the area, starting with the northern desert. When I got to the southern part of the loop, the road was blocked by snow. There was another route a few miles on, but it was also snowed in. There was only one road open: U.S. 180 headed south to Silver City. I took it.
And the rest is history. I just passed my 25th anniversary here. Why I stayed and how my planned vacation cabin became something very different is another story. But you know how stories go. Nothing turns out the way you expect. What’s your story?
Bruce McKinney is a Silver City business owner, close observer of government and occasional troublemaker. In his column, which appears every other Wednesday, he tries to address big questions from a local perspective. Send comments to bruce@greensilverlinings.com
