Tucumcari, New Mexico

The population of Tucumcari, a town in eastern New Mexico, has been declining for 70 years, from a high of about 8,500 in 1950 down to just under 5,000 in 2020. It shows. Downtown Tucumcari felt like a ghost town when we were there in 2003.

Per capita income in the town has been in decline for decades as well. It's pretty sad. I guess this is the dark side of beautiful New Mexico.

In 2003, a lot of the buildings in the old downtown area seemed to be standing empty.

In 2003, this is what the town's "federal building" looked like. At street level there was a drugstore. I assume the upstairs was where federal government offices were located. Wikipedia says the building was heavily damage by fire in 2008 and was demolished.

In its heyday, Tucumcari must have been quite a place. That's when it was a stop on the highway that ran from Chicago to L.A., the legendary Route 66. Tucumcari is the "seat" of Quay County, with an area of about 3,000 square miles and a total population of just over 8,000. In comparison, the "county" (département) where we live in France, the Loir-et-Cher, has an area of  2,500 square miles and a population of about 332,000.

Here's an evocation of Tucumcari's better days. It was a mural on the wall of a building downtown. Many well-known American films and television series — "westerns" — were filmed in the Tucumcari area in past decades.

For us, Tucumcari was just a brief stopover. We were ready to continue our eastward trek through the Texas Panhandle and the states of Oklahoma and Missouri, on our way to visit friends in Illinois.

Horizontalité

“I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah...”
And I have, too. The line with the town names in it is a verse in a famous 1970s song.
The towns are in, respectively, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Nevada.

When you drive east from Santa Fe toward Tucumcari (pop. 5,000),
the landscape gradually goes flat and the horizon becomes, well, horizontal.
The drive takes about about three hours. There's not much traffic.

I like flatlands. They make for big skies. And they remind me of home.
Where I grew up, on the North Carolina coast, what land there is is flat. And there's a lot of water. It's flat too.

So eastern New Mexico appealed to me. It was more arid in character than the flat places I've lived in,

including central Illinois and its prairie, but it was otherwise familiar.

These are high plains, at an altitude of 4,000 or 5,000 feet (1250 to 1500 meters).

Even the buildings are horizontal. Below is the motel we stayed in when we spent the night in Tucumcari.
From a room here on May 1, 2003, I telephoned the moving company in California and told them
to go ahead and ship our container-load of belongings to France.

And this is Tucumcari's train station. I'm sure it used to bustle, back when people rode trains from cities
like Chicago all the way to Los Angeles, passing through here. In 2003, the station clearly wasn't bustling.

Tomorrow: Tucumcari itself. I had never been there before 2003.

A quick stop in Santa Fe

We spent one day in New Mexico. It was May 1, 2003, and we were driving across the U.S. on our way from California to France. I had been to Santa Fe before, just once, but Walt hadn't ever been there. We had a nice lunch at the Inn of the Anasazi restaurant, took a walk around the town with the dog, and then drove on to the town of Tucumcari to spend the night. Here's a two-minute slideshow. One of the first things I saw in Santa Fe was a 2CV, or deux-chevaux, the iconic French car, driving down the street. Santa Fe is that kind of town.

Santa Fe is the capital of the state of New Mexico. It was founded in 1610 and has a population of less than 100,000. It's a great art city, with many galleries and museums. The architecture is distinctly New Mexican (or Southwestern). The city and state also have a distinctive cuisine, but I don't really remember what we at at the Anasazi. I just remember it as being very old-fashioned (in a good way) and formal in atmosphere, and not crowded at lunchtime. The city is built on a very high plateau at an elevation of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters). I'd love to go back to Santa Fe one day. Could happen.

The Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico (USA)

On May 1, 2003, we continued our cross-country trip from California to North Carolina by driving across the U.S. state of New Mexico. We had spent the night in Gallup, a town of some 22,000 near the Arizona border on the old route 66 highway (now I-40). Nearly half the people who live in Gallup are Native Americans — people of the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi tribes.

Our first stop of the day was at the Acoma Pueblo, a settlement or village that dates back to the 13th century (according to the sign below). We couldn't go up into the village with the dog and it was too hot to leave her in the car. You can't drive up into the pueblo; there are shuttle buses to take visitors up to the top of the mesa (the "table rock" or plateau that it's built on). Only guided tours are allowed. Use of still and video cameras is restricted and by permit only.

I'm not sure I was even supposed to be taking these photos, but nobody seemed to notice me. I took a lot of photos of the surrounding countryside too, and I'm posting some of them in a slideshow below.

Here's a historical marker that gives a brief description of the pueblo, which is the term that describes Native American communities or settlements in the U.S. Southwest.

And here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about the Acoma pueblo and the Acoma people:

Today, about 300 two- and three-story adobe buildings stand on the mesa, with exterior ladders used to access the upper levels where residents live. Access to the mesa is by a road blasted into the rock face during the 1950s.

Approximately 30 or so people live permanently on the mesa, with the population increasing on the weekends as family members come to visit and tourists, some 55,000 annually, visit for the day.

Acoma Pueblo has no electricity, running water, or sewage disposal. A reservation surrounds the mesa, totaling 600 square miles (1,600 km2). Tribal members live both on the reservation and outside it.

Contemporary Acoma culture remains relatively closed, however. According to the 2000 United States census, 4,989 people identify themselves as Acoma.

Finally, here's a two-minute slideshow to give you an idea of how rugged and beautiful the landscape in this part of New Mexico is. New Mexico covers a very large territory, by the way — it's about half as big in area as France. It measures 500 km from east to west and 600 km from north to south. But the population of the state is only about two million. Compare that to 25 million people who live in Texas and 40 million in California.

We were on our way to the state's capital city, Santa Fe, for lunch.