I WANT TO GO TO MADRID

I want to go to Madrid, but not the city in Spain.  The Madrid I'm talking about is a village along the Turquoise Trail in New Mexico, a place with about 400 inhabitants.  I went to Madrid for the first time back in the early 1970s, when it was still pretty much just a ghost town.  About all I saw there then were a few hippies living in tumbled down old houses, but that was before the restoration of the village took place.  Madrid is now a thriving little town that's somewhat of an art haven, and some of those artists are the real thing.  I kept going back to Madrid on occasions over they years, watched it grow and come alive again, but I haven't been there now in twenty years.  It's time to see it again, to see if it became what I hoped it would.

The Turquoise Trail is an old highway liking Santa Fe to Albuquerque, and most folks who travel it are tourists out to absorb some New Mexico culture.  That's why most tourists come to northern New Mexico, especially to Santa Fe.  Santa Fe itself is a city of perhaps seventy thousand, but all sorts of smaller towns and villages around it bring the total population of that area to around a quarter of a million people.  Madrid is in the desert south of Santa Fe, near mountains, and within easy driving distance to a city.  I'm wondering if Madrid has been able to pull off what Santa Fe lost . . . that art colony atmosphere.  Are the artists really there, or is the village full of curio shops and stuff like that?  Just checking it out on Google Earth, it looks like some legitimate artists are indeed there, and I see few signs of all the tacky stuff showing up.  You know, the fast food places, the foreign made stuff sold in curio shops, the motels, etc.  Madrid is too small for most of that, and that's the really good thing about the place.

Even small places can have things worth seeing.  There's an old railroad museum in Madrid, and a baseball field with an interesting story behind it.  Why would such a tiny town have a fancy baseball park?  Well, because a guy who owned a coal mine there many years ago wanted the town to have a baseball team, so he build the field.  When the coal played out, the town played out too, and the baseball field went neglected like everything else around there.  I understand that the state took over the baseball field, but I don't know if it's used for actually playing baseball now.  It's worth preserving, I think, because even little Madrid once had a farm team associated with the Dodgers.  I'm old enough to remember when small towns sponsored baseball teams.  I even played on one for a while, back in the old days.  We lost something when town leagues disappeared, and so did the weekly games held in the fields built around the country.

Yeah, I need to go back to Madrid and hang out a few days, maybe drift on up to Santa Fe and see what's still there worth seeing.  One of the few advantages of being old is remembering how things used to be, back before corporate America spoiled so much of the traditional things people like me appreciate.  The one constant you can count on is change, and sometimes it isn't an improvement over what we already had.  Progress, under whatever name we call it, is sometimes a regression.