The Presence of The Dead in ChlorideBack in 1996, my best friend and I drove cross-country, from Cleveland to San Francisco and back. We took the southern route going (which covered a good portion of old Route 66), and the northern route coming back. One of the pleasant surprises about the trip going was the fact that we (for one reason or another) spent several days in New Mexico. Two of those days were spent in and around Albuquerque, and the rest of our time there was spent in places which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. One of those places was a town called Chloride.
Chloride, we later learned, is a former boom town that prospered during the Gold Rush. It is located at the end of the line (literally) of one of New Mexico's state routes. We drove fifty miles in, and there's the town, and that's it… no through roads, no other towns. Just Chloride and one way out- the way we came in.
The town, by our best estimate, had a living population of about twenty-five people, with no industry to speak of (unless the small general store in the center of town counts as industry). We found the store owner to be quite talkative and friendly. In fact, during the course of our conversation, we learned that he and his wife grew up in our home town, Cleveland.
"Yep, we moved out of Cleveland about thirty years ago," he said, "When the niggers started moving in."
'Nuff said. Suddenly concerned with our personal well-being (considering that these were the only living people we had encountered in town so far), we walked on.
We continued down to the end of the town's only street and up a hill, where we discovered an ancient (by American standards) graveyard. This was the first town I'd ever been where the living population was far outnumbered by the dead.
There was something truly present about this graveyard… something that brought it to the forefront of my consciousness in a way that I had not yet experienced, even in other places where I had been surrounded by the dead. I could tell that my traveling companion felt the same way. The people that lived here had a strange ritual of marking territory around the gravesites, in addition to placing headstones on the graves. They built small metal and wood structures around them, placed rocks on them, and most interestingly, placed what looked like ornamental bed frames on top of the graves. I suddenly understood, at age twenty-three, what it meant to stand in a sacred place.
My traveling companion was no less moved, and he refused to refrain from telling me so approximately every five seconds. In fact, after spending about fifteen minutes standing there in awe, his constant talking began to distract me. "Awwww… this is amaaaaazing!" was the nature of things he kept uttering.
I suppose this place had a power and influence that was to remain unaffected by any sort of bothersome distractions that occurred during our visit. But at the time I kept thinking, "Can't you just be quiet and simply be for a moment? Just stand there and take it in. We don't need a running commentary!"
I was a little angry.
Today, four years later, the sting of that distraction has faded to the point that I only think about it in passing. However, my place-memory of that graveyard remains as vivid as ever.
