A perfect summer day, sunshine and low humidity, and I’m finally off to New Mexico, first heading for northwestern Iowa to meet Tom, my fellow traveler. It had been a year and a half since my last trip to New Mexico, and over to Ft. Hood Texas to visit daughter Kara. Between the pandemic, and a postponed earlier summer trip, it was good to finally be on the road.
My fascination with the Southwest began back 1948. After threshing time in August our family of four piled into that 1939 Pontiac and headed west to visit my mother’s cousin in Glendale, Arizona, then a small rural town of about 8,000 people — it now has over 252,400 — separated by several miles from Phoenix. In those days traditional dairy farmers and their kids didn’t take vacations. This road trip was a rare exception. Phoenix then had a population of less than 105,000—it now has 1.7 million. The Phoenix Metropolitan area has nearly 5 million. In 1948 the entire state of Arizona had less than 750,000 people — it now has over 7.2 million. I was intrigued by the sparsely populated desert and its warm, dry air. I knew that I would someday return.
My next trip to the Southwest was seven years later — three months of Marine Boot Camp in San Diego, another month of infantry training at Camp Pendleton, then back to San Diego for four months of Radio Operators School. Southern California was a different Southwest than the desert country of Arizona and New Mexico.
Following Radio School, I was assigned to the 2nd Marine Air Wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina. North Carolina has it good points, but I preferred the Southwest. The opportunity to return came in a totally unexpected way.
After my enlistment was up, I returned to Wisconsin and hit the UW campus. The typical freshman was eighteen and fresh out of high school. I was twenty-one and fresh out of the Marine Corps. It made all the difference in the world.
With a good UW record majoring in agricultural economics, the University of Arizona at Tucson offered me a research assistantship to study for an M.S. degree. I jumped at the chance. Fortunately, my fiancé agreed to embark on that new adventure with me, and as a newly married couple, we headed for Tucson. It then had a population of about 750,000. Its warm dry air had not a hint of pollution — the sky was perpetually clear blue. The foothills between the north side of town and the Santa Catalina Mountains was open desert.
While at U of A, we traveled up to Glendale to visit the relatives that my family had visited fourteen years earlier. It sure wasn’t the same Glendale I had visited as a kid. Glendale and surrounding towns including Mesa and Tempe had already been swallowed up by the mushrooming Phoenix Metropolitan Area.
From Arizona, it was once again to California, this time to the San Francisco Bay area and UC Berkeley. After laboring through that mill, I landed back in the Midwest at the University of Minnesota. Son Johnny and I took a couple of summer road trips through the Southwest, including the growing city of Tucson. I was shocked and dismayed at the brown cloud of air pollution hanging over the city. Human habitation already had replaced the open desert between Tucson and the Santa Catalina Mountains. With its metro population of over one million, it is not the Tucson that I fondly remember.
I liked Minnesota well enough, and Minnesota was good to me. But the Southwest beckoned once again. I was offered the headship of New Mexico State University’s Agricultural Economics Department, and I couldn’t resist. That position enabled me to get around and to know and appreciate the interesting and beautiful State of New Mexico.
I lived in a small, artistically designed adobe in the historic town of Mesilla, adjacent to Las Cruces, home of NMSU. Mesilla has imposed strict building codes to maintain its historic flavor — there is no other place like it, and I was fortunate to land there.
After eleven years at NMSU, I capped off my career with four years in the Middle East as Head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. But I retained that adobe in romantic old Mesilla, with the idea of retiring there.
Circumstances brought Sherry and me back to my native Monroe, and that has been fulfilling in many ways — reconnecting with my Swiss heritage and entertaining with accomplished accordionist, Bobby Edler. But I still retain that adobe in old Mesilla. That, along with visiting friends and former colleagues from my days at NMSU gives me reason to revisit New Mexico — not that I needed a reason. Tenants are more than happy to rent that adobe, and friend and neighbor, Jacque, is a great manager of the place. And how I miss the great Mexican food characteristic of New Mexico.
Since retiring, I have made two or three trips back to New Mexico every year, with the exception of these last two years. But at last the time has come.
Longtime pal from St. Paul sometimes accompanies me. Tom grew up on a farm in Southwestern Minnesota and still has relatives there. That’s how I come to leave for Sibley, a small town in Northwestern Iowa, to meet him.
I cross the Mississippi, and head west on US 20. About 25 miles west of Dubuque I pass Dyersville, site of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams. Only days earlier, the White Sox had played the Yankees on the very Field of Dreams on which the movie was filmed.
In spite of the dry weather, the corn and soybeans look good as I roll across Iowa to Ft. Dodge, and I meander north and west to Sibley.
I meet Tom in Sibley and we hit a great Mexican restaurant we like to frequent. It was gone, a casualty of the pandemic. We would encounter others as we head south.
To be continued.
— John Waelti’s column appears regularly in the Times. He can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net.
