Truth or Consequences

The envelope of the day presses its white folds around us—brilliant white glancing off the Rio Grande, where a few people half-heartedly fish and a fat woman in a filthy t-shirt, filthy hair, sits by her piled-high car that looks like it hasn’t run since the 1980s and which she certainly lives out of in the dirt lot that passes for a campground by the river.

We pass trailers and junk-strewn yards, cars without all four wheels, dogs too languid in this heat and vapidity to bark—and it’s only March. All will, drive, energy leave you here, and you drift in the same unblinking languor of the locals, content. People come for a night, a weekend, a visit and never leave, beguiled by something, a place where for once it doesn’t matter that they don’t fit in?, that accepts many anomalies into its wide blank streets and scrubbed-raw hills: The cranio-sacral practitioner next door to the bible-thumping church and just up the road from the meth-producing trailer homes. Half the shops in town are boarded up. The other half seem to be anybody’s whim of an idea for a business, and many of them eke out their income by doubling as a couple different businesses at once—the hippie clothing store with tarot cards and crystals also has used clothing in a room in the back. Two natural food stores but both of them carrying not much on the few shelves and anything resembling fresh produce is scarce; one of them also serves breakfast and lunch. Yet the town supports a used bookstore/café with a fairly interesting selection of books and a lovely, funky ambience. People are exceptionally friendly, seeming pretty excited to meet someone new, even though this is a tourist destination because of the many hot spring motels.

The one we stay in is ragged—the rooms are nice enough, cozy, cabin-like, though we hear the slamming of the neighboring doors and everything in the room shakes when you walk across the floor. The rooms surround a dirt courtyard where people sit smoking cigarettes in the blazing sun. The hot spring baths are individual rooms with small square pools of various depths, none of them very deep, set in cracked and not very clean-looking concrete, nowhere really comfortable to sit, and they pipe awful New Age music through the bathhouse. It’s so bad in a way that it’s comical, and we cannot stop laughing, though you are supposed to whisper in the bathhouse because “people might be meditating” to that awful music.

We decided right away that Truth or Consequences is obviously an alien processing station; the "people" here are either aliens in disguise or actual humans who have already been experimented on with unfortunate results. It is easy to tell which is which.

A tattoed boy with an unnatural gleam in his eye urges us enthusiastically to come back for “the best pizza in town” (who are they competing with? As far as we can tell there’s only one other restaurant that serves pizza) at the Happy Belly Deli. We sit outside on the patio under an awning propped up on beams that have been set on a row of old carved lions that were obviously part of some other structure once.

The next morning the locals instruct us to sit tight at the café where we go for breakfast. One woman way too busy in the kitchen is doing her best to feed and wait on a roomful of people, so we’re told to go behind the counter and help ourselves to coffee while we wait, eat a homemade scone that’s quite good, chat with the folks at the next table, including a woman who came for a night in her RV and hasn’t left yet, two months later. Everyone knows everyone by name, and no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. Everything happens in a leisurely way here, if it happens at all. Not much seems to be going on anywhere, though there are posters for a poetry reading and some sort of art walk happens on the second Saturday of the month. Many of the shops and cafes close by 3:00—that’s enough work for one day.

The day is a flat glassy pane, a little wind, some birdsong. Yesterday great gusts would suddenly stir up huge whirlwinds of dust, shake the buildings, then move on. A woman at the café said her bedding was torn from the wash line into the ditch.

You empty yourself of resistance here, extraneous effort, even useful effort. But is leaves you a little more open, a little burnished, sanded down, edges softened. I grow quiet and listen without trying to listen for anything, without reaching. There is no one to be here, nothing to do, nowhere in particular to go. So you can slow down, watch, receive, and you’ll be pretty much left alone to do it, except for some curious glances, friendly greetings, a little mostly-unneeded advice.