Seeing new parts of the country

“Vacation, all I ever wanted; vacation, had to get away.” These lyrics are included in the chorus of the classic 80’s song “Vacation,” by the Go-Gos. They also ring true as I experience a two-week family vacation in 2023. Truthfully, I haven’t had a real break since Easter, so it’s nice to relax a bit. Even when our idea of relaxing is walking around museums for hours, hiking up to abandoned mines in the Rocky Mountains, and shopping till we drop. In contrast to last summer’s trip to  Door County, Wisconsin, we left the midwest behind through a southern/southwestern adventure through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. There’s still a solid 4 days left of this vacation, but undoubtedly, things are winding down and I’ll be returning soon enough. But before that, I’d like to recap what I consider to be the highlight of the trip for me thus far: 

Yesterday, my family visited Sugarite Canyon State Park in New Mexico, which served as a real-life history lesson about mining company towns. While I’ve always been aware of the concept, somehow I never knew that mining companies could get away with putting their workers through dangerous situations and paying them not in dollars, but in “script” (basically vouchers that were only valid in company-owned stores). Many of their laborers were the most vulnerable people of the day: ethnic/cultural minorities, immigrants, and the poor. The camps at Sugarite (and presumably other mining towns) were racially segregated as well. By the time the mines were drained of all useful resources (in this case, coal), company towns would be demolished (though some homes got to be transported), leaving ruins in their wake. Throughout our hike, we got to see the remains of the former Sugarite company town: The sight was not pretty. Most buildings, including schoolhouses, the community center, and houses had nothing remaining except vague outlines of leftover material (presumably from the demolition) and historical markers. With my dad (and my sister Solveig for part of the journey), I hiked a trail that went up a mountain to be able to see two of the abandoned mines. Both had collapsed and only the exteriors were visible. Several parts of the trail were covered in scattered pieces of coal as well. Abandoned cities, fictional and real, have always fascinated me, so it was a pretty interesting (yet chilling) experience to see the Sugarite camps from an outsider perspective. However, I would never have expected a place that had a lively community less than a century ago to be considered an archaeological site. I personally interpreted Sugarite Canyon State Park as a cautionary tale about the exploitation of both people and natural resources. We’ve come a long way as a country since Sugarite’s heyday of the 1890s-1940s, but we still need to learn to be kinder to each other and the planet. I hope that’s a lesson that will endure, though that town did not.