Another Damn Newcomer

Catron County is the largest county in New Mexico, consisting of 6,928 square miles. That’s actually larger than two or three eastern states put together. In moving there from Santa Fe and being used to Spanish pronunciation, I thought the name was pronounced “cah-trone”, but I was quickly informed that it’s “ka-trun” with the accent on the first syllable. It was split from Socorro County in 1923 and named after a New Mexico State Senator. Despite the large size, it has one of the smallest populations of any New Mexico county and the majority of the county is just unoccupied land. But most of that land is beautiful and there’s hardly a spot that doesn’t have an abundance of wildflowers. The people are a mix of Hispanic and Anglo. It’s a good mix.

Deep into the county, a long way on the empty road is the small village of Reserve. It is the county seat and was home to some interesting people. My husband, Mike and I spent a part of our lives there.

The Forest Service, which is one of the few employers of the area, occasionally asks for bids on special projects. These might be planting trees, thinning trees, building trails, or whatever comes along. We were introduced to the county when our daughter, Pat, her “significant other”, David, and their baby son, Abraham, went to the Reserve area in 1979 to work  They had started a tree planting Co-op which had a good reputation and was quite successful in having jobs awarded to their crew. It’s very hard work, but you get to live in the forest and set your own hours. Most of the Co-op members were college-educated hippies, and hippies don’t like to have regular jobs. Because their contracted work was near Reserve, Pat and David became familiar with the little town and when they saw a small house on Main Street for sale at a ridiculously low price, they decided to buy it and have a home base. That’s where they were living at the time of Abraham’s first birthday in December of 1979. We had been lucky enough to get to spend considerable time with the baby when he was brand-new, so Mike and I wanted to be there when his first birthday came around.

All we knew about Reserve was that it was a very small town near the western edge of the state, in the lower half. The first time we made this more than 300 mile trip from Santa Fe, we were expecting the country to be more or less just desert with some trees on the edge. Much to our surprise, Reserve is in the middle of some beautiful country. As was explained to me later, this part of New Mexico (and maybe more) is considered a “transition zone” between the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and the Sierra Madres of Mexico. It doesn’t have all the characteristics of either mountain range but it has many attributes of each. You can find the tall high-altitude conifers in the forest, but you can also find flowering specimens of Agave. It’s an unusual and wonderful combination.

As we drove deeper into Catron County, there was little traffic, yet the driver of each vehicle waved as he passed by. We agreed that someone who drives a vehicle like ours must be really popular and all those people were mistakenly trying to wave at him. We found out later that our guess was completely wrong. It is a custom in Catron County to wave at every driver you encounter, whether or not you know them and whether or not you like them.

Abe’s birthday was a beautiful warm day, even though it was the 14^th of December.  It was much more pleasant than Santa Fe right then. We had our birthday cake and little party outside, which could not have been done further north. We stayed there a day or two and found all the people we met to be quite pleasant. Reserve seemed to be such a quiet, restful community.

December of 1979 was truly “hell month” for Santa Fe. First, three prisoners escaped from the state prison just south of Santa Fe, and were at large for 10 or more days. Everybody was up tight. Our UPS driver, who had become a friend, carried a loaded gun on the front seat of his delivery van. Mike walked me to the closed door of our freestanding greenhouse, and waited there until I was inside with the door locked. When I was ready to come out, I was able to notify him by a buzzer so that he could escort me back to the house.

One night, someone tried to break into our house through the back door. While I was busy dialing 911 on the phone, the person kept slamming against the wooden door and only stopped when Mike told him that he had a shotgun leveled at the door, and if the intruder got in, he’d get a bellyful of lead. We heard the guy stomp away. The truth was that we didn’t even own a gun. After the Santa Fe police arrived, they tried to track the footprints in the snow but lost them at some point. One of the escaped prisoners did, indeed, break into a home nearby, and hold the couple who lived there hostage for several days.

Early into the following year (1980), the notorious prison riot began. This horrible occurrence received national publicity. There were deaths, fires, and severe injuries. Our house was in a direct line between the prison and the hospital. As quickly as an injured person could be reached, they were transported to the hospital by helicopter. The overhead flights seemed almost continuous, and our nerves were completely on edge because the only programming available on TV was constant coverage of the riot itself. Santa Fe is a wonderful place, only it really wasn’t at that time. It was no wonder that Reserve seemed so appealing.

We went back to Reserve again. One morning while walking up Main Street, we noticed an empty house just two doors from Pat’s. We went in the gate and walked around the house staring in the windows. It had a small living room with a lighting fixture that looked like wilted flowers suspended from the ceiling; just looking at it made me laugh. There were several small bedrooms, and a big kitchen. It seemed like a large piece of property and there was even a small building that looked like an automotive repair shop at the end of the driveway. Another building served as a garage for a car. We asked around town who the owner was, but all people could tell us was that they weren’t sure anymore .So we went to the courthouse and asked the County Clerk.

He told us that the property belonged to a Karl Kiehne, and even called the man for us. Mr. Kiehne lived out of town but came right in to show us the house.

His plan had been to re-plumb the house, so he had torn the floor out of the laundry room. He had also removed most of the bathroom fixtures and put them outside, but a bathtub and toilet sitting in the back yard didn’t contribute much to the looks of the place. In the kitchen, there was no sink. In fact, there was just one kitchen cabinet about four feet wide, but it reached clear to the ceiling, making the upper cabinet impossible to reach. Despite all that, we liked it.

I asked Karl how much he was asking for the property “as is”.

He said “Oh, about thirty-five thousand”.

“And how much would you ask after it’s completed?”

“Oh, about thirty-five thousand”.

I said “Karl, that doesn’t make any sense”.

He said, “Yes, it does, ‘cause I ain’t ever gonna get it finished”.

After that, a few days thought convinced us that we should buy it.  And yes, we paid thirty-five thousand for it.

Karl and his wife, Zona, said they’d carry the paper, and made arrangements at the bank for us to make payments. That worked to our advantage a few years later when we were able to pay it off early with no penalties.

That first time that Karl met with us to show us the house, he also showed us another way to get in if we wanted to look at it again. In one of the bedrooms (there were four at that time), there was a place cut into the floor that could be lifted out so that a person could go underneath the floor and get outside through a crawl-hole in the foundation. Obviously, you could also get inside by reversing the process.

I was so impressed that he would trust us enough to give us access to his property when he wasn’t there, but I later realized that the only reason the doors were locked was because nobody lived there. Within a short time we learned that unlike Santa Fe, there was no need to lock doors unless you were going out of town for more than just a day. We learned not to worry if the keys were left in the car. We usually took them out, but if we forgot, there was no reason to panic. That trust in others was shown in other ways also. Innumerable times, I’ve seen the whole bed of a pickup filled with sacks of groceries left parked in front of the grocery store while the owner(s) went to the bar for a few hours. I never heard of a single thing being disturbed.

Several years later, our next-door neighbor, Wilford, showed us how he kept the keys to his brand-new car under the seat cushion. He said that if we ever needed to use it to get somewhere at night, that we should quietly take it—just don’t wake him up. After having lived in Reserve a year or so, the owner of the hardware store down the street from us told Mike “I don’t lock the back door of the store, so if you ever need anything on Sunday when the store is closed, just come in the back door and get it. Leave a list on the counter of what you got and we’ll settle up later”.

We were able to move there and sustain ourselves because we brought our livelihood with us. We manufactured clutch alignment tools for almost all foreign and domestic cars. Because he had worked as a mechanic for the majority of his adult life, Mike was aware of the need for such tools. A simple explanation of this is that the input-shaft of any car with a standard transmission must line up properly to fit into the cogs of the clutch disc and pressure plate to engage or disengage the clutch. The disc and pressure plate are enclosed in a housing, so the mechanic can’t see them. Our tools enabled the mechanic to line up both units so that the input shaft of the transmission would easily slide into place. The ends of the in-put shafts for each model of car are different from all others. Our tools were a reproduction of the individual shaft ends. It may sound complicated, but it was quite simple. We sold the majority of our tools to a foreign-car parts distributor in California. That company would place an order; we would make the tools and ship them by UPS. Shortly after making the prototype for each tool, we checked with a friend who happened to be a patent attorney about the possibility of obtaining a patent for our tools. His reply was that since we were reproducing something already in existence, ours would be classified as “substitution of materials” (ours were made of polyurethane), and therefore ineligible for a patent. Damn!

Even though Mike and I worked alone in our shop and the tools we made were shipped out of town, just the idea of manufacturing seemed strange in this wood-oriented area. The principal employers were the sawmill south of town, the Forest Service, the logging companies that transported the harvested trees to the sawmill, the individual cutting crews, the county government, and the school system. There were a few other jobs available but the emphasis is on “few”.

It was no easy job moving from Santa Fe. In addition to our household goods and personal belongings, we had all of our shop set-up, all of Mike’s mechanic and machining tools, and my collection of cacti and succulents, which ran into the thousands of plants. It took several trips to get everything moved but at last the day came when we were ready to make the final trip. Our Santa Fe landlord, Mr. Tapia, surprised us by coming over and saying that they were preparing a barbecue in their back yard, and we were invited to come over and eat before leaving. It was a warm and wonderful send-off from Santa Fe, but when we were ready to go, we couldn’t find our cat. We looked everywhere, called and called, but with no luck. We finally had to just go and hope that the cat would be found by someone who would be kind to her.

Mike and I rode in the big truck, pulling a large enclosed trailer loaded with plants. Our adult son, Mike, who was home on leave from the Navy, drove the little maybe-twelve-passenger bus we had bought from a church with the intention of making it into a camper, but had not done so. The little bus carried Snoopy, our family dog, and the remainder of the plants. After spending the night in Belen, we arrived in Reserve around noon the next day. The end of the moving story is that two days after our arrival, the cat crawled out from the engine compartment of the bus. She was fine.

There was so much to do right at first. In addition to getting the shop in shape to continue earning a living, getting the new greenhouse built was a priority because the plants were being damaged by being tucked away in a bedroom, the front porch, the side yard, and the little bus. Mike also wanted to replace all the water and sewer lines under the house. After crawling in on hands and knees, the front part of the house was elevated enough by the slope of the ground to allow a person to sit up. Unfortunately, all the plumbing was closer to the back of the house, where the lack of clearance caused the long-suffering plumber to lie on his back to work. The unusual plumbing situation under the house was that all the sewer line was four-inch steel sections of pipe, welded together. That made a weird kind of sense; Karl, the previous owner, was a welder. We also found out later that he had welded the metal stove-pipe to the tin roof. Additionally, there was a bit of an electricity problem. The house, which was about 1500 square feet, had one small fuse-box to handle the electrical current. There were two 20-amp circuits for the entire house; one for the north side, one for the south. If more than two things were plugged in at the same time on either side of the house, it popped the breaker. It also made cooking a challenge at times, as in using the coffee maker and an electric skillet at the same time.

Moving to Reserve at that time was like turning back the clock to the 1950s. Most of the people drove pickups, there were a lot of horses around, no sidewalks, and none of the malls, supermarkets, or other types of stores so common elsewhere. It was a style of life that was reminiscent of an earlier, more simple time. The feelings of isolation were increased by the fact that television reception was so bad that it was a waste of time trying to see any of the programs being broadcast. Because of the lay of the land, the only TV signals that could reach the short towers on the top of a nearby hill were transmitted from Tucson. Many years later, with a better system, our news came from Denver. It was a strange situation to get news only from Arizona or Colorado when we lived in New Mexico. Radio reception was also poor, and there was no newspaper. There was also no fast food available in this, the largest county in New Mexico, just as there was not a single traffic light nor a single lawyer.