Greg and I drove over to the Holiday Inn and before dinner took seats at the bar, where I’m sure we discussed something about what he’d been doing and where he’d been, but I don’t remember any of that conversation. I probably didn’t hear much of what he said anyway because behind the bar was a beautiful bartender, Ana Maria.
It was early, there weren’t many people at the bar, and Ana Maria was quite friendly and talkative—a real treat since there hadn’t been many women around to talk to for quite some time, it seemed.
A real beauty, Ana Maria had moved with her family from Guadalajara to Grants. Her father, a true patriarch in every sense, had since passed on, leaving his eldest son to run the family business. He and his brothers owned a successful exploration drilling company in Grants and were doing well. Ana Maria, still living at home, was making her own way working in a variety of jobs including the one at the Holiday Inn tending bar.
I was pleasantly surprised that she spoke more than a few words to me that night. I picked up the accent right away, and when she asked who I was, I changed my name to Rogelio on the spot. Having taken some Spanish in high school and college, I felt confident that I could pass myself off as Mexican.
It was ridiculous, I know, but Ana Maria, good natured as she was, went along with the joke, and we had a nice enough conversation so that by the time Hornaday and I had to leave, Ana Maria had agreed to maybe meet me at the stock-car dirt track the following Sunday afternoon. Maybe was good enough for me.
There weren’t a lot of things to do for recreation around Grants at the time other than rodeos, enjoying hikes in the nearby mountains and stock-car racing. There was a dirt track just northwest of town where races were run almost about every Sunday during the summer months. The track had little if anything, in the way of spectator seating, so many of us would drive our vehicles up to the fence that ringed the track for a nice up-close view of the racing action.
There were several miners in the area who liked to build and race modified stock-cars, most of which looked more like former demolition derby entrants. Nonetheless, the races at the small, quarter-mile track attracted decent crowds on Sundays.
New Mexico allowed no alcohol sales on Sunday at the time, and a few enterprising souls showed up with cases of beer that they would offer for sale to racing fans. The price for a beer was ridiculously inflated, but people paid it.
I had noticed that many beer-drinking mine workers were very poor planners. Rather than double their beer purchase on Saturday and save half for Sunday, they either drank it all on Saturday or forgot about Sunday altogether. Fortunately for them beer was available on Sunday in spots. For example, there was a business in a small village aptly named Budville about twenty-five miles east of Grants off I-40 that illegally sold beer on Sunday for double the regular price. First-time customers had to be shown the way to a side window on a crumbling adobe structure where the transactions were made.
Not being a beer lover, I only showed up at the track from time to time for the exciting racing and now for the possibility that Ana Maria might appear.
As I sat in my car watching the races and listening to music, my hopes weren’t up that she would show. There were plenty of exceptional miners around making $200 an hour or better who were available for a single woman to choose from. Professionally speaking, I was dwarfed by those guys.
To my surprise Ana Maria did show at the agreed-upon time. We had a nice afternoon talking and a few laughs, but I ended up having to drop my alter ego, Rogelio.
After that day we saw a lot of each other, mostly on weekends for a couple of months, until one day Ana Maria announced she was moving to El Paso. The reasons for the move weren’t clear to me or I wasn’t hearing well, but either way there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I was disappointed but took solace in that she encouraged me to visit her in El Paso. I looked forward to that, and soon after I began a long streak of visiting El Paso every weekend.
At the end of every Friday shift at Section 35, I’d be off on the three-hundred-mile drive armed with a case of Tab and my tape collection. It took about four hours to make the trip and, sometimes significantly less if the state police patrol officers weren’t out and about.
Socorro, New Mexico, had a state police office in town, and those who knew the route were aware that speed traps were often set up among the gently rolling hills of I-25 just south of town. Of course there was a price to be paid get that kind of information, and being one of the speeders, I was caught once.
I would drive the route from Grants to El Paso at between eighty-five and ninety. The speed limit at the time was fifty-five. I came up over a hill just south of Socorro doing at least ninety, and there in the center of the interstate was a state police car. Doing ninety miles per hour in a fifty-five zone was going to get me pulled over, so as I approached the police unit, I quickly hit the brakes and was on the side of the road waiting before the officer even had time to turn onto the road.
When the officer approached my car, he said, “That was pretty good. Thanks for stopping so quickly. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’re getting a ticket for doing sixty-five instead of ninety-two. It’ll save you some money.”
The officer did write me the ticket and then said, “Slow down. Got it?”
“Yup, I got it. Thanks.”
Ever grateful for such leniency, I of course had no intention of slowing down, except through Socorro where to this day I always lift off the gas pedal a little.
For the most part, those trips to El Paso were immensely enjoyable. The summer evenings were warm, and the breezes always seemed to be up, and the company of Ana Maria was wonderful. The night life was a respite from the weekly grind at Kerr-McGee and of a kind entirely unavailable in Grants. Still, with visions of Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” rattling around in my head, I’m sure the reality was far less exotic than it felt to me at the time.
I liked El Paso and, having visited many times since in subsequent years, still do. While El Paso was great, Ciudad Juarez was better.
The northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez lies just south of El Paso on the other side of the Rio Grande River. Taken together the two cities have a combined population of about two and a half million.
Spanish explorers in the 1650s founded Juarez. Named for the exiled Mexican president Benito Juarez, it began as a city along the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the Royal Road of the Interior Land) as part of a northern trade route through the southern Rockies all the way to Santa Fe. Many sections of the original trail, in spots running parallel to I-25, are still clearly visible. Evidently Juarez was as much a magnificent place to rest and recuperate in the 1650s as it was in the 1970s.
Ana Maria and I would frequently drive across the Bridge of the Americas and into Juarez to visit bars and restaurants, shop for groceries, go to the outdoor mall, or sometimes just to drive the city streets.
Getting into Mexico was as easy as it got. Mexican customs agents never once had us pull over for any reason. I usually slowed down just enough to see the hand signals the agents would give to either keep on going or to stop.
Our favorite night spot was the Camino Real Hotel. A beautiful old hotel, the Camino Real featured mariachi bands in the downstairs bar and disco upstairs. I greatly preferred the downstairs because of the local flavor it afforded.