Trips

After meeting for worship in Durango this morning, we came back by way of Farmington to pick up some items at Sam's Club.

I'm a newcomer to the area, relatively, but I've been in and out of Farmington for more than 40 years now; what a lot of changes in that time!

When I worked at Mesa Verde in 1966, I would still see Navajo families riding in horse-drawn buckboards down the highway south of Shiprock. Then they were all replaced by pickup trucks, with Grandma and the kids riding in the back, wrapped in Pendleton blankets and other warm coverings. King-cabs, vans and pickup shells got Grandma and the kids out of the weather and today at Sam's Club, I saw a Navajo family loading their purchases into a Hummer!

Some things haven't changed ... the Encore Motel is still in the same place on East Main!

And the heart of the town - downtown along Main Street - is still pretty much the same buildings in the same places, surprisingly alive, considering the big-box sprawl at the east end of town. 

When I was at Chaco (1985-1989), we shopped weekly in Farmington. Even since then, the layout and the ambience has changed. Shops come and go in the Animas Mall, but today's shoppers were another generation in the chain of American life ... South Asian shoppers, an East Asian family giving massages at a booth in the hall, New Mexicans whose families came to the area 400 years ago, New Mexicans who were born south of the border, Utes, Navajo, Apaches, Blacks ... and the results of another generation of loving outside the ethnic box.

Lunch at Golden Corral was a perfect stew of American diversity, spiced with sounds of Spanish and  Navajo, as well as English. It looks and sounds very different from the energy-boom-town-gone-bust of two dozen years ago!

The complex of Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, Target, Office Max, etc. at the east end of Farmington is also home to Applebee's, Outback, Fuddrucker's and faster food joints. Sign of the times: Long John Silver's with a sign advertising "healthier," grilled entrees!

On the way home, coming up the Hesperus Highway, we watched the last rays of the sun painting the western slopes of the La Platas pink and then purple. While the ranches and houses in the foreground are new, the peaks and the forests must look essentially as they did to the Pueblo farmers and hunters of 1,000 years ago. TV