High Plains Drifter

There’s a stretch of NM Highway 104 that runs east of Las Vegas for about thirty miles of undulating pastureland on its serpentine way to Tucumcari.  It’s a piece of road that has captured my fancy for twenty years or so. I do love my prairie and plains.

As we headed back to Taos after a two day jaunt to the metropolis of Canyon, Texas we found ourselves on 104. Props, by the way, to the wonderful Panhandle Plains Museum in Canyon where we were attending an invitational painting exhibition and which was the reason for our trip. Not so much for the dry little burg itself. That’s dry as in no libations to be had in the entire county, one of eleven Texas counties with that dubious distinction.  The folly that is prohibition will studied in detail at a later time. Damn near happened today.

On the Saturday of the show it was a balmy 72 and on Sunday it fell to high of 23 in Canyon. Not only that, the forecast for the whole of the South Plains was for freezing rain and snow squalls. Heading back on I-40 just before Tucumcari we were turtling through blowing snow at 40 miles per hour.  Never the souls of patience we gambled on going overland on the aforementioned 104 as had been our plan.  At the height of land half an hour shy of Las Vega we were buffeted by cross winds and surviving slick roads but when we dipped down to the high plains the skies parted and the grasslands glowed with the saturated colors that follow a deluge.  Behind us was a crystal forest and beyond the beckoning plains after the rain.

This little spread has all the icons of prairie life that a guy could want, an abode, a windmill, a stock tank and a corral.

Full Metal Jackets

There are lots of ways to look at something, up close to wide and long and everything in between. The range of possibilities with a subject are darn near unlimited and so it was with the Campbell Memorial bus that sits in the nether reaches of the former Frontier Drive-In in Center, Colorado .  The defunct theatre is the more obvious subject but the bus has its advocates, as well.

Outback is a graveyard of decommissioned travel trailers, church busses and long haulers. It’s as good a place as any for a covey of bent metal relics. See a sliver of snowcapped Sangre de Cristos middle left just above the red container. Yes, that is the right turn signal of the Campbell Memorial church bus in pic one.

The Good Cutter

My friend Juma Archuleta said goodbye late last year.  He was a larger than life character whose barber shop was a bastion of manly men, irreverent commentary and of neatly stacked magazines of, ahem, educational value.

I wanted to document the waning days of Juma’s shop aka Raoul’s Brotherhood of Love and floated the idea several times without success. Because he had been given a terminal cancer diagnosis he worried that the story would really be about his decline and imminent demise so he demurred and I didn't press.  It was to be about the shop and the end of an era but how actually would I separate the two. Probably couldn't.

Juma, full name Emiliano Juma Archuleta also known as Raoul, chose to be a barber right out of high school in Animas, Colorado and pursued that dream in Denver in the early sixties.  He would have been 72 next month.  He told me several times that he'd fold his tent when he had completed fifty years of barbering. He wanted to retire on his own terms with plenty of living left to do but the disease didn't accommodate the dream.



He was a bon vivant, a raconteur, a patron of the arts, an astute observer of the political world, and one dapper dude.  Why did guy with his intellect and erudition chose to be a barber? I wish I had asked.

 

Whenever I was away from Taos for more than a couple of weeks one of my rituals was an early morning visit to Juma’s for a cut and, more importantly, the latest on the murky world of Taos politics. Juma always knew who did what to whom and why weeks before made the Taos News. I swear he could predict the future.

 

And, credit where credit is due, he was one hell of a barber. He told me that right out of barber school he went to work for a barber in a Denver hotel, maybe The Ambassador, and that he “was lucky” because his boss in the shop was “ a good cutter.” Gotta love the lingo.

 

Juma was a really good cutter.



 

 

Furrowed Brown

I made three overnight treks to the McCullough potato empire last year, one for planting, another when the vines began to sprout and again to photograph the harvest. On the last occasion I got down to soil level to capture the diagonal lines in the tilled earth.
  
Massive combines dig the rich San Luis Valley earth, tear the meaty russets from their vines and feed them into giant hoppers that deliver them to warehouses spread all over Monte Vista.  The giant machines are refueled in the field so the process never has to stop.  Combines pick, trucks gather and workers sort the potatoes for size and quality from sunset to sundown for about a month of eighty hour weeks. 1.2 million hundred weight of bakers takes monumental effort and serious choreography.

Kiss me you fool

Don’t know about you but I think Llamas are just about the cutest things on four legs. Sorry dogs. The impish creatures are bemused, ironic, haughty and, may I say, coquettish in some absurdist way. The llamas shown here are a couple of Stuart Wilde’s Wild Earth herd from up Questa way.  And they’re rescue llamas. Who knew there was such a thing?

Stop and look

This was taken a couple of years ago almost to the day when the valley floor was drizzly and raw while snow fell above 9,000 feet and the Sangre de Cristos were shrouded in windblown clouds.

Frank's Pizza

If you've read this blog for very long you'll remember my unplanned overnighter in Green River, Utah last August.  That's the burg that was closed due to lack of interest but that yielded a bunch of poignant photographs like the erstwhile pizza joint called Frank's.

Short and sweet this time.