Page 10 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Hooked on New Mexico - Chapter 2
La Bajada Hill
I first glimpsed this part of the country on a trip with our next-door neighbors in Oklahoma. Hazel and Tyner Perkins and Hazel’s father planned the trip so the two men could look at homestead land. I’m so grateful they asked me to share this trip with them in 1931, for it changed my life completely and affected the life of every member of my family.
I’m glad I saw Albuquerque when it was a small city of 27,000 population instead of 320,000 as it is now, and had the thrill of driving on the original La Bajada Hill with its series of hairpin turns too sharp for a truck or a bus to negotiate without backing up first.
Since it was summertime, we camped out to my joy, cooking our meals over the campfire and sleeping on the ground under the stars.
New Mexico was a totally new experience for me, since I’d grown up in Texas and
Oklahoma and had never ventured beyond their borders.
From southwestern Oklahoma we traveled across the Texas Panhandle and entered New Mexico near Clayton. Hazel and Tyner had some friends south of there on ranch near the small village of Bueyeros, and we went down to visit them for a few days. All our travel was on dirt roads, for at that time there was not a single paved road in the entire state of New Mexico.
While we were there, we were taken to see a few points of interest in the vicinity. The dry ice well was amazing, with its formation of frost on the pipes as the carbon dioxide came to the surface.
Another sight that appealed to my sense of history was an old burial ground on top of a mesa. It could be reached only by way of a path which passed through a narrow opening in the rock — like the eye of a huge needle.
The structure of our host’s house was unusual, and interesting to me. I had never seen a house quite like it since the Spanish influence in architecture was unknown in Oklahoma. The house was built of adobe bricks, in the shape of a square-cornered U with a patio in the center. The entire structure was only one room wide, and each room contained a door leading onto the patio. The amazing thing to me was that there were no hallways or connecting doors. In order to go from one room to another it was necessary to go outside.