The Great American Saloon Series/Dry Run
Shiflett, Dave
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES DRY RUN by Dave Shiflett W here can a man drink a beer in peace? This is an ever-important consideration for those of us who have, for whatever reason (pounding...
...Not surprisingly, we want to make sure that every cold one counts, and we're willing to take great pains to ensure that it does...
...Well, to tell you the truth, the mountains are a little crowded lately...
...This isn't too hard to figure: a large percentage of Colorado's population lives in the Denver area...
...Interstate 25 (our road) cuts down through the top of the state at Raton and drifts slightly west, pulling up beside the Rio Grande north of Albuquerque and finally passing over the river near Truth or Consequences (an odd name for a town, but not quite so odd as Yah:Tah-Hey...
...Which is bad news for the merchants of cheap beer, and for the proprietors of most bars, especially the ones where we built up our reputations...
...At least the snake hadn't gotten me...
...Let's drop by his place and see if he has any ideas...
...And, as I recall, it looked something like an old-west saloon, with swinging doors and a historic western facade...
...Well, it sure felt like a rattlesnake, and sounded like one, kinda...
...Benny, after seeing the problem I'd had with a stationary fence, strongly advised against hitting the bar down in Roy...
...From a distance, Mills seemed a possibility, but it turned out that Mills was a post office located at a wide place in the road...
...On Labor Day weekend, some 37,000 cars squeezed through the Eisenhower Tunnel, forcing long backups and otherwise taking the charm out of a high-country excursion...
...Good Lord, 7,900 humans live here...
...This is an ever-important consideration for those of us who have, for whatever reason (pounding livers, divine intervention, etc...
...Relatively speaking, the longer we stayed on the road, the more danger we had of running into humans, not to mention drunk drivers...
...Its name, as I recall, was the Springer House...
...From our house to the border: just over three hours...
...Besides all that, there is great excitement here, despite the hypnotic vastness...
...Why, there was Roy, New Mexico, and Mills, and Abbott...
...The city of Raton beckoned, but wait a minute...
...We had in mind catching a rattlesnake, maybe one as large as the diamondback hanging on Benny's wall, which was six feetlong and ready to strike when Benny whacked it to death with a fencepost...
...Or, to be more precise, I had escaped the fangs of a length of black rubber hose...
...decided to reduce our alcohol intake...
...So we looked elsewhere...
...I also remember that the town, with a population of 1,600, was just about the sizewe were looking for, but for some reason my foot refused to move from the gas pedal to the brake as we passed this oasis...
...Perhaps it had something to do with those big Harley Davidsons parked out front...
...The space was empty as we whizzed past...
...I don't think you'll come out of that one alive," he counseled...
...We entered the Land of Enchantment Dave Shiflett is deputy editorial page editor at the Rocky Mountain News and TAS 's Rocky Mountain editor through Raton Pass (elevation 7, 834), eyes peeled for a bar...
...Unfortunately, the right forearm caught on the barbed wire, ripping a three-inch gash just past the elbow...
...The first place we came to was right around the corner...
...It couldn't come soon enough...
...And, besides, the atlas showed that several options awaited us just down the road...
...Being exceedingly alert and in excellent physical condition, I made a split-second retreat—up into the air and off to the right, toward the fence...
...The boys and I scouted a fenceline, and as I waded through some calf-deep weeds, I suddenly stepped on something that was round and firm, and which gave off a threatening hiss...
...Yet despite these many attributes, New Mexico comes right after New York in the AAA Road Atlas...
...It is true that the service in Abbott isn't so great, and don't go down there looking to dance or talk sports...
...But it is good news for the folks who sell gasoline, for sometimes a man must go a long ways to find the perfect spot...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990...
...Besides lots of grass, bear grass, turpentine weeds, and insects (we don't have many mosquitos in Denver, perhaps because they all live at Benny's), the grasslands are full of cattle, antelope (which glow a beautiful golden brown in the afternoon sun), deer, coyotes, porcupines, rattlesnakes, and hawks...
...And Momma, doesn't your Uncle Benny live around here somewhere...
...What we need are some real wide-open spaces, where we can escape the hordes...
...This would make for nice conversation when we finally found our watering hole...
...Shall we go to the mountains...
...It's his land, dad gummit...
...More to the point of our mission, this is a wonderful place to work up a thirst...
...Let me suggest Abbott, New Mexico, which stands at the junction of Routes 56 and 39...
...The 80-mph dash through the high grasslands afforded some splendid views, but grass attracts insects, and thousands ended up splattering our windshield...
...In fact, if you want to drink a beer, you've got to bring your own...
...Look at all those people...
...And who knows, maybe he's pullin' a cork himself...
...For Abbott's population, save for the ruins of two buildings, is zero...
...Momma, bring that road atlas over here...
...So we checked the atlas...
...By the time we rolled into town, we could barely see through the mash of guts and wings...
...It is very quiet there, except when a car passes, which isn't very often...
...Onward...
...Springer, the next town listed, could be the place...
...T his cattle ranch, says Uncle Ben- i ny, is pretty small—only 11,400 acres, while the fella across the road has over 64,000 acres on these rolling plains, which stretch east as far as you can see (which is a long, long way) and west about forty or fifty miles, where they meet the southern Rockies...
...The state motto is "It Grows as It Goes," which is surely something to think about...
...The atlas says this is all part of the Kiowa National Grasslands, though Benny says the acreage under federal protection isn't as great as the atlas would have us believe...
...We cleaned off at the gas station (regular unleaded: $1.49) and commenced our search...
...In the canyons, which are nearly invisible from the roadways but which might drop 1,000 feet in a rather dramatic fashion, live bears and mountain lions...
...New Mexico, which is directly south of Colorado, is famous for several things: it is the former home to Geronimo and Billy the Kid, the detonation site of the first A-bomb, and a former national leader in drunk-driving deaths (a politician wanted to put up billboards saying as much, but for some reason the motion didn't carry...
...But so what...
...The land is high and dry: 6,000 feet or so above sea level, with average yearly rainfall of 12-16 inches, and no noticeable humidity...
...Lest anyone fear for this great metropolis's dedication to modern values, however, it should be pointed out that a single parking space had been marked in the widest part of the road, and at the head of that lonely parking space—the only parking space in Mills, New Mexico—stood a very large sign designating that this was a handicapped zone...
...It is also sparsely populated, with 11 people per square mile (Colorado has 28 per square mile, New York 358...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
