Thar's silver in them thar hills

The rain won’t catch me now. Since leaving Las Cruces the sky in my rear view mirror has gone from blue/black to clear blue. This is no cause for silent celebration in these parts, where, as the guy in the gas station store informs me, there has been no precipitation since December. Then it was only a flurry of snow that didn’t amount to much.

He offers no thoughts on a cause or a solution, just adds it to a list of reasons that has convinced him to sell up and move back to east Texas where his son lives. He and his wife have run the place for four years now, but the business is in decline and it’s time to cut and run if he can find a buyer. He seems frail and vulnerable, his hairless bare arms pale and blue-veined sticking out from a short sleeved shirt, his grey watery eyes focussing on something far distant from behind the thick lenses of black framed spectacles. His words slow, then finally peter out, his story told. I thank him and without thinking to reason why, I offer my hand to be shaken, which he does, his own hand strong and calloused from a lifetime’s hard toil. I can still feel his grip as I step out into the sunlight.

His is a story that I see repeated in every hamlet, town and city that I pass through. Abandoned businesses litter this country from coast to coast; a lonesome trail of broken hopes and shattered American dreams. Sometimes its as if whole communities have just upped sticks and moved on, leaving empty homes and stores, to fall piece by piece back to the earth from which they have sprung. In the vastness of this land, it’s as though this is the natural thing to do; if it’s not working here, pack up, move on and start again someplace else. The wind, rain and sun will take care of that which is left behind, until there’s just a trace in the weeds and half-grown trees, with a scattering of bent rusted nails, flaky remains of corrugated iron and charred wood to mark the spot.

I start to climb, leaving the open grasslands and pass into the round topped hill country that characterises much of New Mexico, as seen in the paintings of Georgia O’ Keefe. Small twisted pines, spaced widely at a regular distance, grow on the slopes, getting more numerous and taller the higher I go, until finally the hills disappear under a thick covering of dark green. It’s in a valley below these peaks, in Grant County, that I find the old mining town of Silver City.