The Free Press
We’re already halfway through Andy Hickman’s series, Falling Back in Love with America. In the past few months, Andy has taken us to a remote island in the Great Lakes, the far reaches of the Northern Border, the flat plains of Nevada, and the lush paradises of California—all in search of some hope that America is still a nation full of colorful characters, that it’s more than an “economic development zone,” as he puts it. If you’ve missed any of it, you can catch up here, and for even more from Andy, you can subscribe to his own newsletter here.
Today, he writes about the time he and his wife, Keturah, spent in Eastern New Mexico, which, for him, felt less like travel and more like time travel. Scroll down to read the essay. But first: Some news!
While Andy and Keturah had plans to travel for a year, fate had other ideas: Keturah and Andy are expecting their first child. When they found out, on their way out west, they decided it was time to put down some roots, a story we’ll hear more about in the months to come. But the Hickmans have plenty of stories from the road they’ve yet to tell, and some miles yet to travel before they go home for good. We’ll still be bringing you Falling Back in Love with America each month, and tales from the Hickmans of forgotten places, secret enclaves, and great geographical beauty.
After hearing their news, I called Andy up to see how he thought the project was going so far. Had he “fallen back in love”? Had the Hickmans found some hope on the road? He spoke to me from the porch of his home in upstate New York. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation; after that, you’ll find his new essay on New Mexico. —Suzy Weiss
Suzy Weiss: Talk to me about the first half of this journey—what’s changed about America since the last time you were on the road?
A.M. Hickman: Hitchhiking has kind of died. It used to be that you got a lot of old codgers and freaks and people at the margins: They didn’t mind picking up hitchhikers, because they could see that there’s a beauty in that. And now, all the old codgers are dead or dying, and all the marginals and freaks seem to either be on their smartphones or to be on fentanyl. They’re just in a different world than they were 10 years ago. It seems like Americans have lost a certain romantic, carefree spirit that lends itself so naturally to picking up hitchhikers.
SW: What’s something that you’ve experienced while traveling these past few months that gives you hope?
AMH: The first is the land, and the second are the inevitable ways in which the land shapes the psyche. If a man lives in the desert, even if he’s participating in the monoculture in some way, and he probably is, the desert is still going to make him a certain type of man that doesn’t exist in Maine or Michigan. And likewise, the man in the woods is different from the man in the desert. There seem to be differences that still show through in spite of everything.
SW: Talk to me about settling down. How did you choose where to live?
AMH: There’s just certain inevitabilities when you’re from a place. When I look at the Adirondack Mountains, and I grew up in the lowland fringes of this area, it’s kind of undeniable to me that my character and my general disposition is mirrored here. It just works.
And more than that, the Adirondack Park is some of the best protected land in the United States, if not in the world. Its Forever Wild status is enshrined in our New York state constitution, which means that development is extremely difficult to do here, and often impossible. I know by living in this place, they’re not going to put up condos at my favorite swimming hole, or an Arby’s in my front yard.
The village I moved to has 250 people. It was founded by a bunch of drunk loggers who decided to put tin roofs on their tents in 1899, and that character still shows through, even to this day. It’s precisely because of its remoteness, its poverty, and its total obscurity on the tourist circuit that it’s mostly gone unmolested. I think I can help protect it.
SW: So is it fair to say you’ve fallen in love with America?
AMH: I guess I feel like an internal exile who has made his peace with it. I just know I got to be here and play the rear guard for a while.
Lately I’ve been in the habit of modifying the term localism to “yokelism,” because a lot of people call themselves localists, but they just like to go to the farmers market. They’re not talking to the old drunks down at the tavern, or driving down the road with no plates, keeping that old way of doing things. That’s how a yokel does it, and I think it’s important to do.
SW: What have you changed your mind about over the past six months?
AMH: My default for many years has been that you have to fear the hordes and keep the places that you love secret. It’s almost like we have to hide from progress and hide from the times. But as time’s gone on, I’ve met enough people who are doing really cool things where they live that don’t have this vibe of, “Oh, it’s all an apocalypse outside of here, and we gotta hide and keep what we’re doing a secret.”
It doesn’t just boil down to hiding in the woods or fleeing the country. You just have to roll your sleeves up a little. I’m ready to do that.
You would not know that you were not in medieval Spain. The way the cacti perch on the canyons of wine-red stone below the shadows, and the warlike glide of falcons; the cracks in the adobe church that sit beside the twirling wrought iron gates. In Eastern New Mexico’s most isolated villages, there’s not so much as a breath of the twentieth century’s triumphant tones. There are no telephone lines, no cell towers—and in the few homes that stand on the rugged, mysterious land, English is still seldom heard.
We were standing in a canyon so isolated it made the hairs upon the back of my neck stand up. Chills crept over me like the spines on a cactus. We were far out in the vast desolation between Amarillo and Santa Fe, in Eastern New Mexico.
It was there, half a millennium ago, that wandering Spaniards bedded down—descendants of the conquistadors—deep in the snaking and endless hallways of red canyon stone. Out of the wind, down in the sparse black tilth of the riverbanks, and below the few clean springs that boil out of the rock walls, that is where they settled. Their histories weren’t written clearly. Sometimes, they were not written at all; the date of their arrival and from whence they came is a mystery or, at best, a hunch. Their few descendants are still here in the canyons, and I’d come to see them.
The man I traveled there with was not a descendant of the Spanish pioneers. He was a sort of domestic expatriate—a man from elsewhere who’d been drawn to this strange and lonesome place as if by magnetism some seven years ago. He’d stationed himself and his family in a ghost town on the plain. For work, he drives a school bus, and on the side makes handmade knives, and posts heavily on X, which is how we first came across each other. His handle there is @Empty_America, but his real name is Adam. We met him for the first time at the train station in Las Vegas, New Mexico. My wife and I hopped in his car and blazed eastward across the plain, talking long about the peculiar nature of this secretive hinterland with this stranger from the internet.
He told us that as recently as the 1970s, there were still New Mexican families living here without any modern conveniences. More than this, their manner of thinking, living, and speaking, he said, still had a distinctly “ancient” patina on it; the world they inhabited was one of ghosts and energies, of superstitions and myth.
We forged up the canyon road, sliding down rock scrambles in our new friend’s old Jeep.
“Up there on that rock,” Adam pointed out to us, “that’s where a man was nearly murdered back in 1976. He was digging up chunks of the road that had been blown out by a flood. The night before, he’d slept with his neighbor’s wife. Her husband raised his .45 behind the man and fired into the back of his head.”
But the bullet did not kill him. A man who dwells in a canyon as rugged as this one is a difficult creature to kill. Instead, it damaged his brain badly, and he was reduced to a childlike state. To this day, he is still living in the canyon, with a bullet in his brain, babbling.
Today, the man who pulled the trigger—who never faced any charges, Adam told us—will now and again lean over to the brother of the brain-damaged man, saying, “By the way . . . how’s your brother doing?”
Such men are the fruits of a violent place. A place where the peregrines snatch up the field mice and prairie dogs with cool and remorseless precision. They survive on what they kill. The whole earth here yields nothing; it is parched, and it is lonely. The land is either starkly flat or it is a densely rippled complex of ankle-breaking stone and razor-sharp cacti; travel here is never easy.
Where there is desolation and violence, however—there are also great comforts. Chili and wine; woodstoves and warm adobe; broad grins of slate-faced relatives for whom family is all there is. The homes of the old New Mexicans are sacrosanct realms of perfect contrast with the bleakness of the land; mud-walled palaces housing unknown saints in a bejeweled grotto of peppers and crucifixes and gold. It was into these homes that my wife and I slipped, with Adam by our side, to hear stories of ancient-seeming days that passed not so long ago.
“I liked the electricity fine,” a man named Nick told us. He was 83 years old, and he had first experienced electricity when he briefly moved to Albuquerque in the early 1960s. Such men took the whole twentieth century down in a single gulp. By how they recount the experience today—they do not seem to have been too terribly frightened by it. Nick was born at a farm outside the canyon in 1942, and Adam had arranged for us to meet him at his little house across from the village church, where we drank coffee and talked about bygone days.
“The way we were raised, it was probably the bottom of the barrel!”
Nick smiled as he said it, his big, cloudy blue eyes bright. Nick had grown up with 11 other siblings in a three-room adobe house. That house had a dirt floor—even the roof was made of dirt. “In a big, soaking rain, it leaked bad,” he said. “Needed to be redone every two years.”
Nick’s father was born at the same farm, in 1889. Even when electricity came to New Mexico and many of his neighbors were purchasing their first automobiles, Nick’s father refused. He had no interest in them. Until the day he died in 1972, the man had never driven an automobile, and only experienced life in an electrified home in the final year of his life.
“We did everything the hard way,” Nick said, with solemnity in his voice. “The young people today do not know what ‘work’ means. We worked! That was real work!”
It’s a classic sentiment among the elderly everywhere—“Kids these days!”—but when my wife asked him if he’d rather be a child today or a child back in the ’50s and ’60s, there was no question. “Oh, I’d rather be a kid today. Life is much easier.”
If I’d come here to hear romantic platitudes about the past, I’d come to the wrong place. Or, at least, the sorts of romantic ideas I’d hear about the past could not cohere into a totalizing critique or celebration of modernity. While this man did seem to have a certain amount of nostalgia for the past, it is only a measured, careful nostalgia. He doesn’t want to go back.
The first Europeans to colonize the present-day American Southwest were there hundreds of years before the United States was formed. Some of them were probably in what is today New Mexico as early as a century before Virginia was made a colony by England in 1607. Suffice it to say that when New Mexico became an American territory in 1850, and later, when it became the 47th U.S. state in 1912—a people with centuries-long roots in this place simply got the news.
Of course, New Mexicans’ status as Americans was something they settled into with the sort of passion common to Spanish-descendant peoples. In 1861, when New Mexico was an American territory that had not yet achieved statehood, a regiment of men from northern New Mexico was formed in the U.S. Army, and fought valiantly both at Valverde and at Glorieta Pass the next year. This would begin a long tradition of New Mexicans proudly serving in the U.S. military. If anyone should seek to find some evidence of an anti-colonial mentality, or some kind of militant desire for secession from the USA, they are not liable to find it in rural Eastern New Mexico. Instead, they will find memories of long-buried sons who died honorably under the flag.
Yet by the same token, abstract consideration of “America” seemed rare to me there—for many of those I met seemed to have had only the most fleeting experiences outside New Mexico. Some had never left the state before—and others, no doubt, had barely ever left the desolate stretches on the eastern side of The Land of Enchantment that they have always called home. Of the three elderly New Mexicans we interviewed, each had spent no more than a couple years living elsewhere.
When I asked the elders I met what they thought about America as a whole, it was as if their position on the matter was akin to an ancient butte gazing up at a passing cloud. Remarking on its beauty, perhaps; but knowing that they were there before, and so far as they can tell, they will be there after, too.
In a place like this, one’s eyes quickly move heavenward—to contemplate the Divine. Crosses and shrines punctuate the landscape. We entered through a doorway above which hung a sign that read “AVE MARIA,” when we visited a woman named Amelia, aged 85. She grew up deep in the canyon; rosaries hung on the walls of her living room, and she spoke with passionate eyes about the Lord Jesus—and the Penitentes she’d known in her youth.
“They do hard penance,” Amelia told us. “Very hard.”
The Penitentes were—and are—a penitential Catholic order whose canonical licitude has always been questionable— a group of penitents who emerged in a climate where priests were scarce and communication with the Vatican was basically nonexistent. They built windowless moradas, which were for men only—and there, they would enter a deep state of prayer, literally flagellating themselves, and engaging in secretive and passionate religious rituals in lieu of being able to attend a regular mass. Once, when Amelia was 5 years old, she got lost on the river, deep in the canyon. At the time, there were no telephones, no electricity, few, if any, automobiles—and no emergency services of any kind.
Word that she’d gotten lost in the canyon spread to the morada, and her father asked Jesus to help the men of the village find her. By now, it was nighttime, and Amelia was scared. The priest—who was only rarely in the community, having arrived by way of his small plane—immediately got into his aircraft to fly low over the moonlit canyon to search for her.
“My grandfather, he was blind,” she told us, but he knew the canyons well. Unable to see where he was going, he felt his way along the stone floor of the river with his feet and his cane. He called after his granddaughter—who by now was running scared. The men in the morada prayed, kneeling before the altar in their windowless shed, begging Jesus that the searchers be guided. Soon, Amelia heard a call ring out through the canyon—but, not knowing who it might’ve been, she ran. The blind grandfather finally caught up with the child, and, using his cane, snatched her up.
Afterwards, he led her to the morada, where her father was praying the rosary. They allowed her inside, put her on the altar, and prayed over her. So far as Amelia could tell, she may have been the only female in the community ever to enter that mysterious, dark building. And she was almost certainly the only child in the canyon’s long, centuries-long history to be rescued in the canyon by a blind man.
Amelia’s beloved woodstove crackled in the quietness of a windy night on the plains. We bid her goodnight, ambling in a strange reverie, walking through her little near-ghost town, where the gate to a long-gone garden of thorns clanked open in the wind, then shut again; opening and shutting autonomously, for no one.
Our search for America had led us here. What we found lay buried in history’s deep and unwritten annals: a final tendril of premodern, “old-world” life and spirit, still living, for now.
They reminded me that underneath every novelty, every sickness, every contemporary howl of anguish—the ancient past still lives. It still thrives deep in the bones of living human beings; a strange and holy ghost whose memory cannot die. It lives in the land.
I raised my own eyes skyward, searching for the God who has nourished the rugged souls of this lonesome, far-flung place for so many centuries.
Can humans ever fade into the landscape so totally that they are as immovable as mountains and great canyons of stone? Can the color of their hearts blend completely into the orange-red glimmer of centuries’ worth of dawns upon the plains? Perhaps they can. Perhaps they are a truly timeless people; unbothered by what has changed—firm as the mesquite bushes stationed way up upon primeval cliffsides. And in their contented tranquility and firmness, there is a certain kind of smile; one which has no great pretension and makes no effort at putting on airs. Contentment exudes from their eyes—they have no sharp criticism for the modernity that has crept onto their desolate realm of plains and canyon lands; no harsh words for the world that so rapidly visited their isolated home.
Soon, the rough dirt of the canyon road gave way to pavement, then to the speeding lights of traffic on Interstate 25. City lights, Walmart, the train station—it was as if we’d time-traveled from ancient days to the modern era. We bid Adam goodbye and headed toward our train. And as the dark plains rolled by the Amtrak window, I thought to myself: Without this most valuable rudder from the past—who are we? When these elders pass from this world to rest with Jesus—will this ancient past die with them, never to return again?
Let us pray that it does not. Let us record the memories of our elders, but not merely to display them in museums or write them out in anthologies and books. We should be wise enough to live by them, too.
For two more stories about our elders, and about the history that they pass down to us, read Amit Shemesh and Polina Fradkin’s piece on the Purim scrolls that survived two separate, oppressive antisemitic regimes, and that were given to them by their grandmothers.