My Strange New Mexico

It was December, 1961, in the desert just southeast of Carlsbad.  Tufts of dry grass bent low beneath a winter wind, sand swirled across a desert plain, and here and…

Mr. Edwards was a successful Taos businessman who rode a good horse, carried hundreds of dollars in his pockets, and traveled using mules to carry his belongings.  In the fall…

Judging from the things for sale in almost all New Mexico gift shops and tourist traps, this entire state of ours is tan and turquoise, prefers its red chili coated in weatherproofing…

Drive eighteen miles west of the central New Mexico village of Los Lunas, and you drive into a world of dirt, and rocks, and little else.  In the middle of…

Perhaps the most distrusted name in news today, the Weekly World News, is a black-and-white supermarket tabloid featuring entertaining and untrue stories, with headlines that vary from the impossible to the deranged. …

Painted in 1940 by Chicago artist Warner Sallman, Head of Christ was a luminous, brown-and-gold-toned oil painting of the head and shoulders of Jesus Christ.  It was said to possess an almost…

It was 1982, in America—a time and a place steeped in the fear of nuclear war, burdened by the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and occasionally made bearable by…

When it comes to tales of enormous and legendary amphibians, Scotland boasts its elusive mascot in the waters of Loch Ness, China shares rumors of a gorge-dwelling creature that chases fishermen, and South Africa…

It may well be that there are as many reasons to avoid talking about the strangeness of New Mexico as there are reasons to talk about it.   As conversational subject matter,…

New Mexico, one hundred million years ago, lay nameless and borderless and partially submerged beneath sprawling, shallow, briny seas.   Dinosaurs of every size and appetite wandered to the edge of these seas,…