Dispatches From New Mexico: Lazy R Welding

One of my favorite bumper stickers is, ”I chose the road less traveled. Now where the hell am I?” This reminds me a lot of what it’s like traveling about rural New Mexico. It’s always beautifully remote, ghostly quiet except for the sound of pointlessly spinning vanes of a long-abandoned windmill, and you never know what you’ll find around the next bend in the road.

So there we were navigating the back roads to Quarai …….

…………… enjoying the expansive views of the plains to the east and the Manzano Mountains to the West, mooing at the occasional cow (for Luna’s benefit, of course), when !Whoa! We nearly missed the turn to Quarai at the little village of Punta de Agua. As a matter of fact, one more blink of the eye and we would’ve missed Punta de Agua all together!

Punta de Agua (Spanish for water point) is a lonely mile north of Quarai, and besides a small spring somewhere (after which the village is named), the place looks mostly abandoned. It’s so mostly abandoned, the village doesn’t even appear on a map. Scattered about are a few 1960s-1970s style homes and working ranches, but a few dozen or more adobe buildings are peacefully melting back into the soil while old wooden structures and fences have collapsed into a buffet for hungry termites.

It’s in and around these places where long forgotten vehicles meet their last mile and come to rest in the dirt after years of faithful service. And not to be disappointed, it’s in Punta de Agua where I spotted this old Chevy pickup, “Lazy R,” rusting and disassembling under the onslaught of random bullets and the never-ending New Mexico sun.

If this Chevy could talk! Lazy R was probably anything but lazy, trucking from place to place, helping to weld and erect this bit of the west. But alas, now she and her proud blue-jean clad owner are just memories dreams are made of.

What stories of the life of Lazy R can you imagine?