You’re in the fourth day of your drive from New York to Tucson, using a Triple-A map your father highlighted for you in light blue ink. You began today’s journey two hours ago in Amarillo. Now you’re surviving in the controlled environment of Honda Accord air conditioning while the late August afternoon temperatures rise enough to turn a stick of Doublemint left on a curb to sticky peppermint soup.
Where are you, by the way? Portales, New Mexico. That’s what the sign says.
As you slow down to avoid getting pulled over, you read more signs and surmise. It’s not quite a tiny town — it’s big enough to house a college (Eastern New Mexico University), a few fast food joints, a slew of small, boxy houses alongside U.S. 70, trailers, gas stations, cattle farms, vacant lots of scrub and reddish dirt and expanses of dusty wasteland filling in the many blanks.
Who lives here? Who decides to buy a house, start a family, and bet it all on the hopes and visions that the American Dream starts right here in Portales, New Mexico?
Your street featured Colonial two-thousand-square-footers lined up side by side with oaks and maples curling over the street like a comfy green hood. Lawns were hedged and pruned and kept at the appropriate length. In the winter, snow would quiet everything down. In the summer, the gas grills spat in unison and the sweet smoke rose into the gloaming as the fireflies lit up and disappeared and lit up again. Wiffle balls were smacked over makeshift ballpark walls. Raccoons bumrushed garbage cans deep into the humid nights.
Your street filtered down a hill to a busy two-lane road that snaked its way to a preserved old downtown with a restored brick depot where you could catch a train bound for the pulsing ventricles of Manhattan. Or you could hop in your car and drive fifteen minutes to the sand and sea.
What would happen to you here? Would you work at that Dairy Queen on the left all through high school? Or would it be that place coming up on the right … the Taco Box? Would your parents expect you to attend ENMU, or would you be the one with no desire to go to college anywhere but your little hometown not too far from the Texas Panhandle and not quite desolate enough to be the spooky desert flats where you never know what or who you might run into after dark?
Would you be as into Dylan and Hendrix and the Beatles if you grew up here, or would it be the stuff on your FM dial that you can’t seem to get away from right now — Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, Brooks & Dunn. Would St. John’s basketball and Yankee games still be your thing, or would you prefer bull riding and the Dallas Cowboys? Who would be your girlfriend? Would it be someone like the blonde in the tight jeans clutching a K-Mart bag as you drive by her and she fans herself with a magazine?
You know you’ll never see her again, and you think about that, but you don’t think about Portales anymore — not after the commercial part of town is behind you and you’ve still got quite a hike to Las Cruces and you’re thinking you’d like to make it to Ruidoso Downs in time to make at least one bet on a horse race, and that’s still at least a hundred and fifty miles away.
In fact, you don’t think about Portales at all until twelve years later, when you’re in the tropical heat of a February night in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, a place where trash is lining the shores of the Caribbean, the traffic lights go on and off and on again, just like fireflies, and you can lease an apartment for a year and pay the same amount of money that you would for a week in the Marriott on the Malecon.
You’re at Estadio Quisqueya, watching los Tigres Del Licey take on los Leones Del Escogido in front of a raucous crowd surrounded by members of the military. The game has gone into extra innings and whiskey bottles are being passed in the stands while pockets are being picked outside the gates.
During a break in the action, you meander to a food stand and buy a slice of pizza. You get to talking to the guy in front of you in the line. He’s an American, fluent in Spanish and here writing a book about baseball. You ask him where he’s from and he says New Mexico.
Portales, New Mexico.
***
Tom’s Land of Enchantment starts here …
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Damn, Tom, that was a good one.