Camp Strange

The Old Las Vegas (NM) Armory

I’m work­ing on the This Old House issue of my regional arts mag­a­zine, and in the process of writ­ing a story on pen­i­ten­tiary tiles, I began to think about my adopted home town, Las Vegas, New Mexico.…

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My home­town in New Eng­land held a node on the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary road. Most of the towns­peo­ple — sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion Pol­ish — worked at the State Hos­pi­tal, an insti­tu­tion for the men­tally chal­lenged and the crim­i­nally insane. My fam­ily lived near the escape horn. Dark nights when patients snuck out­side the grounds, the siren blew fear into the streets. Old Pol­ish bab­cias would lock their doors, afraid of the “retarded.”

Our house sat across the street from the library, a quar­ter mile from the town com­mon — a cir­cu­lar expanse of pub­lic park dot­ted with beetle-infected elm and cold Yan­kee stat­ues. My par­ents pur­chased a beat-up Vic­to­rian man­sion. It saw 200 years of strife, saw the clash of Tory and Rebel, saw the moment defi­ant men signed a doc­u­ment giv­ing birth to our coun­try. Run­away slaves hid in a secret room under our ele­gantly curved stairs dur­ing the Under­ground Railroad’s heyday.

The neigh­bors swore the ghost of the pre­vi­ous owner haunted the grounds. She hanged her­self in the dilap­i­dated barn in the back­yard, the vic­tim of alco­holism and small town gos­sip. The light from a sin­gle can­dle she placed in the loft flick­ered in the mid­dle of the night, said the neigh­bors, and her moans hid behind the wind dur­ing win­ter storms. The Pol­ish can be super­sti­tious. Humans can be superstitious.

I look out­side the drafty win­dow bor­der­ing my desk here in Las Vegas and see that I’ve man­aged to find a place so much like my first small town, per­haps the one place in the world most like my fad­ing mem­ory. Eth­nic food, devo­tion to the Vir­gin Mary, stately homes in var­i­ous stages of repair and decay — if I were to describe a typ­i­cal street, a typ­i­cal fam­ily, you might think I were describ­ing New Mex­ico Avenue.

We were the work­ing poor. We were the stew­ards of pierogi recipes, of Catholic rosary rit­ual. We danced the polka to the music of accor­dion and gui­tar. We lived in rot­ting Vic­to­ri­ans, in homes built dur­ing a time of hope­ful excess. We shared but­ter and pick­les, nove­nas to St. Jude, gos­sip across the clothes­line, babysit­ting duties, the over­flow of squash from our gar­dens. The years melt. They melt. My mind some­times for­gets which place hid the best rasp­ber­ries, the first shock of autumn. I am as old as an old home. I hold as much lay­ered mem­ory, as much scar and rusty nail.

Pol­ish, Span­ish, doesn’t mat­ter your her­itage. Doesn’t mat­ter the lan­guage you learn after birth.  We all live in homes, in lives ripe for remodel. This old house and heart spans 43 years of hope, regret, laugh­ter, com­pro­mise. This old house chases fresh teenagers across a windy yard. This old house holds more wrin­kles than money. This old house lives in an old house, a house I can’t afford to fix.

As I tell you this story, the toi­let in my Las Vegas home decides to quit. Some fixit projects demand our wal­lets, our day­light hours. We may think we’re intel­lec­tual, urbane, an impor­tant fix­ture in our local land­scape. Truth is, though, we’re just tourists, every one of us. One day all of these small towns will be for­got­ten, a layer of dust under an aster­oid, per­haps, or some hor­ror of our own destruc­tion. While I’m around to enjoy it, I’m going to dive right into the deep end. This old house raises her arms to heaven, lets her feet dig deep into New Mexico’s finest caliche. Remodel me if you must. Just let me keep my front porch, my invi­ta­tion to the world.