I spent part of Thursday and all day Friday in Portales New Mexico, site of Eastern New Mexico University, and the Jack Williamson Lectureship. Jack would have been one hundred this year. Alas, we lost him at ninety-eight. An amazing life, and he was writing almost until the end of his life.
I made the long drive to the south east corner of the state on Thursday afternoon. Once I crossed I-40 and turned east at Vaughn I was on the eastern plains, heading toward Texas. The wind was howling at a steady forty miles an hour with occasional gusts up to sixty plus mph. The landscape is dry and flat adorned with scrub brush, sand grass and cholla cactus (a sign over overgrazing). In the distance the wind was lifting the salt flats high into the sky. It looked like a plume of white smoke. Fortunately it was just salt and dirt. I passed a place where a grass fire had left it’s black mark, like spilled ink, on the ground. The cholla were seared and black, but still defiantly upright. Everything else had burned away.
After Vaughn there are no real towns until you reach Fort Sumner, the sight of Billy the Kid’s death in 1881. But between these two small towns are a number of small dead or dying villages. (I can’t really call them towns.) I drove through one where a strip motel stood sadly on the side of the road. The windows were boarded shut and the roof was collapsing. Next door was an abandoned gas station with gaping holes where the windows used to be. I found myself with a tightness in my throat. Once upon a time this had been someone’s dream. A little business on the road to Texas. But it became a road to nowhere when the interstate went in, and the dreams shriveled and blew away. I saw only one domicile that looked inhabited — a beat up doublewide perched in the dirt.
At Melrose I headed took the cut off south and east. Alongside the two lane highway stood a line of gigantic metal towers carrying power to this southern corner of the state. They look strange and unearthly because they balance on a narrow point, and are supported by guy wires. They made me think of alien robots marching past the peanut fields, and they sang as the wind swept through the wires. Next was the town of Floyd with the graveyard right next to the highway. Grey granite headstones, and beyond the small fence — prairie. At last I saw the dome of ENMU’s gymnasium looking like the ship that had disgorged the robots all those miles behind me. I was on the main street heading toward the university, and the two hotels in the town — The Super 8, and the Holiday Inn Express. I passed my main landmark for Portales, a jet aircraft impaled on a pedestal.
Walter Jon William, Steve Gould and Connie Willis were at the public library doing a presentation. Walter gave me what passes for directions in a small New Mexico town — “come to one of the stop lights, and the library is across from the old hotel. You know they one.” I did know the hotel. It was four stories tall, I had stayed there once with Robert Silverberg was a guest at the lectureship, and it was one of the first hotels built by Conrad Hilton. New Mexico is filled with these odd little bits of trivia — Billy the Kid and Conrad Hilton.
Dinner was at the usual place — The Cattle Baron. The menu is meat — lots of meat. Fortunately they have a very nice salad bar. Dinner was fun, crowded and lively. I showed off my book cover, and pictures of Vento. (I really am like a little girl with her pretty white pony.) After dinner we went back to the hotel and sat in the breakfast room talking. I was exhausted from the drive, and the sense of loss had hung with me. Jack Williamson was gone. Rick Hauptmann was gone. I went to sleep remembering.
