Country Roads

I confess that I love to take rides in the car, especially on scenic byways. Last month, I was able to take one of my favorite rides, the Turquoise Trail that runs from east of Albuquerque to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is not the fastest or most direct route to Santa Fe, but then nothing ruins a pleasurable ride more for me than being in a hurry. The Turquoise Trail is a two-lane highway framed by mountains both to the west and to the north, a route that never seems crowded.

Unlike the busy freeway off to the west, the Turquoise Trail invites drivers to step back in time and remember what life was like a hundred years ago and more. The route once connected old mining centers in New Mexico, where prospectors and mining companies searched for gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, and turquoise. Few if any of the mines are still in operation, but they have left their mark on the landscape.

One of my favorite stops is the old coal-mining town of Madrid, pronounced MADrid. The town, shops and art studios on two sides of the one main street, became a hippy hangout after the mining operations closed down. What is obvious about Madrid is that zoning and building codes didn’t seem to exist; the houses appear to have popped up helter-skelter like mushrooms on the hills surrounding the town. The rumor is that travelers can find the best cheeseburger in New Mexico in Madrid. This time through Madrid, I stopped at an historical marker and read more about Madrid’s past.

One of Madrid’s claims to fame is that, in its heyday, the town had the first electrified baseball fiends west of the Mississippi. Walt Disney also visited Madrid in the 1920s, where he was so impressed with the electrified main street that he took Madrid as the model for Disneyland’s first main street.

Not more than ten minutes farther north on the Turquoise Trail is the equally interesting town of Cerrillos. If Madrid lets visitors step back a hundred years, Cerrillos takes us back to a turquoise-mining town in the mid-nineteenth century.

Stepping out of the car in Cerrillos always gives my wife and me the feeling that we’re on a movie set. In fact, the dirt streets and horse rails of Cerrillos have been used for numerous movies and TV programs. No, Cerrillos is not a town dressed up to serve as a set for westerns. There is nothing artificial about Cerrillos. To borrow Garrison Keillor’s famous line, Cerrillos is “a town that time forgot.”

There is also great mining museum in Cerrillos, which includes thousands of artifacts from the area’s rich past. The owner is the sole collector of everything in the museum, so he’s a local authority on all-things-Cerrillos.

There are car rides in Indiana, especially in Brown County and near New Harmony, where I’ve felt a similar sensation of time-traveling. A half-hour side trip can throw us back a century or more, and when we return to our present time, we’re not the same people we were before. We’ve been touched by the past; better, we’ve been enriched by the past.