Seattle to New Orleans Part 3: Ghosts and Things
Piano in The Old Cuchillo Bar | Cuchillo, New Mexico | USA
“Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.”
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
I start seeing billboards for “The THING” just outside Tucson, Arizona, on my way to the New Mexico ghost town I’ll be sleeping in tonight. The relentless signs are likely white noise to anyone that drives this particular stretch of U.S. Interstate 10 regularly. But for someone like me, breaking new ground, the incessant messages to take exit 322 act as a hypnosis that no amount of willpower can fight to keep me from pulling off when it comes.
The actual THING is somewhere within a meta thing: a souvenir shop, gas station, and Dairy Queen counter with some outbuildings in the back, and a trailer park behind that. To get to the thing THING, I pay exactly one dollar at the shop counter, walk through a turnstile, and follow painted yellow footprints on the ground that lead me outside and into the first of the outbuildings, which is a large metal shed. It’s just me and some plush mannequins propped in the driver’s seat of old tractors and carriages here in the stagnant air, plus a whole bunch of life-sized human figures undergoing various types of torture inside a jail cell.
A sign on top of the cell attempts to explain: “This very special exhibit depicting ancient methods of torture is the only one of its kind in the world. Each piece is carved from solid wood and represents an investment of many thousands of dollars.”
I wonder if Ralph Gallagher (the person to whom the quote is attributed) is the bankroller, both bragging and justifying himself with the sign. I follow yet another sign directing towards the THING by exiting this shed, which leads me into another one filled with more creepy and otherwise inexplicable displays of torture and artifacts, then finally into the third shed. The shed that is the keeper of the THING.
From the shed collection at The THING (2016) | Arizona | USA
The THING is a dusty, dried-up human mummy, lying unceremoniously in an open coffin and no temperature control (sheet metal walls and all). Nonplussed, my eyes scan over the rest of the crap in this particular shed (more tractors, more depressing scenes) while my mind wanders to the Dairy Queen counter and what I might order for lunch.
There are two young guys working the Dairy Queen, and neither is at the register, which is fine because I’m deciphering the menu. Chicken snack wrap, I guess. One of them eventually asks me for my order.
“I’d like a chicken snack wrap, I guess,” reading it off the overhead menu as I say it.
“I have a question for you,” the kid says, leaning forward. He awaits eye contact with me before speaking again. “Do you want lettuce in it?”
I take a beat to seriously ponder my answer, which is yes. (Maybe some nutrients?)
He presses a button on the register and looks back up at me. “Now,” (long pause for effect), “do you want it spicy? Or regular?”
I am sure on this one: “Regular.”
“Final question!” he jumps in like a game show host, pointing his finger. I wait, not sure what other options there could be on a chicken snack wrap.
“What color is the counter behind you?” he asks.
I’m thrown. My eyes dart to the counter behind him. “Red!”
“Wrong! It’s black!” He’s downright giddy. “I said the counter behind you.”
He got me, dammit. I say that out loud then ask him if he’ll answer a question for me. He says yes. “What’s with the diorama out back with the ancient forms of torture?”
“Yeah, it’s all weird,” he replies, then admits that before he got promoted to this job he “spent an entire month cleaning the mummy with a toothbrush.”
As I pull away (snack wrap in hand), I wonder if he lives on the compound, and feel lucky I ordered from him because he won’t be there forever. [Ed. note: Recently I read that the whole place was remodeled into more of a museum--complete with temperature control--a couple of years after my visit. Perhaps he had something to do with it.]
THE GHOST TOWN OF CUCHILLO, NEW MEXICO
Pretty soon I’m crossing the Arizona border into New Mexico. I’ve been in the state before, on a six-week-long solo road trip visiting National Parks and Monuments, and I’d loved it then for some of the same reasons I love New Orleans. There’s a gritty beauty, an intangible shadow to the palpable lightness (pastel landscapes and blue sky in New Mexico, pleasure and joy in New Orleans), and a general undertone of memory held in the land and the air, like the things this place has seen are all around you.
Eventually, my next host Josh texts to ask if I might arrive in time for dinner. I dictate a text back that not only am I an hour later than I’d hoped but now the time has changed over the state border and I’ve lost an hour, so technically I’m two hours late. But yes, I want dinner. And I’m going to try and beat the sunset. He tells me to take a side highway to shave off an hour, but there are security checkpoints, so make sure to hide all my weed and booze (ha).
Racing the sunset | I-10 New Mexico | USA
Since he’s tracking me on GPS via the Glympse app, I settle into the drive across the desert, taking in the distant hills as the sun oozes down the horizon, splashing phenomenal buckets of those pastels across the sky. I’m more in love with the shuffle mode of my music than I think maybe I’ve ever been, entirely mesmerized by the pure randomness of what artist is coming next, and every one is hitting. Mazzy Star. David Bowie. Perfume Genius. The White Stripes. Hole. Donna Summer. Otis Redding. Culture Club. Nancy Sinatra.
The sun fully sets while I’m still on the lonely, winding two-lane shortcut highway that dumps me out at a little town called Hatch, home of the famous Hatch Chile Pepper. There are chile peppers signs and actual chile peppers hanging everywhere, but it’s dark and everything is closed. I merge onto the freeway towards the town of Truth or Consequences (that’s another story, look it up), and 45 minutes later I’m on another winding country road in the pitch dark, trying to find Cuchillo, Josh’s ghost town.
I miss a pivotal turn and have to back up a tad and get on the right road again. I see the “Cuchillo Hotel Restaurant and Bar” sign as I pull into town, my headlights reflecting in Josh’s glasses. He’s standing and waving at me. When I roll down the window to say hi, the air is so cold it feels like I just put my head in a walk-in freezer. Josh says he was worried watching me miss the turn on the Glympse app. (I found out later that my dad was watching as well, only he was yelling into the ether, “You missed the turn! Back up!”)
Other than the stars in the sky, it’s pitch black so I can’t really get a concept of where I am or how big the town is. What I do notice is a string of twinkle lights and strewn furniture as Josh leads me through the former hotel’s courtyard and—even though I know better—I still ask if there’s anyone else here. I mean there are so many places other people could be—like all the empty rooms across this courtyard, and the bar the sign says is here. He confirms there isn’t, and brings me through a door at the end of the adobe building, directly into his kitchen.
We get straight to making dinner, which is fine with me because I’m hungry, though I’m sorry I made him wait. I stand next to him at the stove where he’s heating up the pan and ask if I can help. He offers me my favorite thing to do: prep and chop vegetables. Since we’re making chicken tacos, the vegetables are tomatoes, red onions, and cilantro, the latter of which he brings out of the fridge in a little cup with water in the bottom like a bouquet of flowers.
“Diced tiny” is how he wants them, which I accept as a really fun challenge, seeking out my tools in this kitchen of a person I met ten minutes prior, feeling as comfortable as I would in my own sister’s kitchen.
Josh’s dining room | Cuchillo, New Mexico | USA
We get acquainted exchanging questions and thoughts during this food prep and I am mesmerized by his process of making chicken tacos. He fries plain corn tortillas in a cast iron pan with some oil and then lays down the partially-cooked tortilla on a separate griddle, sprinkling some cheddar cheese and shredded chicken on half of it. I notice the slow cooker next to me and inquire if he cooked the chicken in there (he did). He folds each small corn tortilla over and cooks it on both sides to make it chewy and places them in the warm oven with his tongs.
Our small talk is about how we each know our mutual friend Annie (who connected us) and how he’s looking for an investor in the place. Josh bought the whole town on a partial whim over 10 years ago. It was affordable and interesting to an artist, painter, and lover of history like him. He chooses not to sell off all the antiques in here, as he sees them as part of the Cuchillo’s history, and himself as the steward. And although he doesn’t believe in ghosts himself, the place has gotten a lot of media coverage for them. Dozens of ghost hunters have visited, which he thinks is good publicity for whatever it is that he’s doing here.
We sprinkle on my contribution to the tacos (nice job on the tiny dicing, he says) and carry our dishes into the adjacent dining room. The bureau on the wall is full of lit candles and religious icons, and I sense the quiet presence of people who were here before, a stark contrast to the current alive-ness of me and Josh eating four little tacos sitting at the end of this dining room table. It feels like the only way anyone could find us is through my Glympse app. Otherwise, we may as well have dropped off the face of the planet, or at least another dimension of space and time.
Photos from The Old Cuchillo Bar & Hotel archives | New Mexico | USA
Josh tells me about his good friend Mr. Romero, and their upcoming standing weekend lunch date. Mr. Romero lives in a nursing home in Truth or Consequences, and was the owner of this place for 25 years, from 1950 to 1975. As Josh has unpacked the treasures here over the last ten years, Mr. Romero has helped identify some of the people in photographs, what year it was, what they meant to the hotel, bar, and Cuchillo itself. The photos are lovingly placed in albums with details from Mr. Romero on the back, hand-written by Josh.
He tells me that the town of Cuchillo was named after the Mimbreno Apache Warrior and Chief Cuchillo Negro (Spanish for “Black Knife”) and that the original structure was established on this site in 1850. We are on the ancestral land of the Warm Springs tribe of the Apache people, a land that was colonized by Spain in 1598. (New Mexico was purchased by the U.S. in 1853 as a territory and didn’t become a state until 1912. Slavery in the U.S. was abolished in 1865, for reference. I type this because no one should forget, and it’s always important to put it into the context of American history.) In addition to being a bar and restaurant, it has been a hotel, mercantile, post office, trading post, and even a stop-over for stage lines around 1886, then a popular place for cowboys and miners.
Ghosts from the New Wave “Rock of the 80s” | Cuchillo, New Mexico | USA
Our night turns into music, thanks to Josh’s vinyl records taking up full walls in one room, curated from thrift shops and used record stores over the years (he’s even got a bunch that came from a radio station). We end up splayed out on the floor, pulling out albums from our respective sides of the turntable sitting low in the middle of one wall and take turns queuing up songs, mostly from the 80s. Inspired by the deep cuts and knowing he’s in need of multiple revenue streams to keep this place going, I have a brilliant idea. “You should run an online radio station spinning these records!” I say (thinking I’ve saved the day). “The Wifi is too spotty,” Josh replies as he drops the needle on his next song. Fitting. This place is a physical experience, not a virtual one.
Before we go to sleep, he prepares me for noises I’m going to hear and explanations of what they are, including a donkey I can expect to hear early in the morning. It lives in the yard next door, he says, and he loves it. There’s also a noise that might sound like a ghost. “It’s not, it’s just the hot water heater."
I sleep soundly in the two-foot-thick original adobe walls, and am, in fact, awoken by that donkey, along with the surprising sound of some cars driving by (which I later find out are turkey and deer hunters). Josh is up making coffee in a french press already. “Did you hear the donkey?” he asks with a huge smile on his face. I nod. "I just think it really adds to the whole Cuchillo thing,” he says. It does.
With our warm coffees in hand, Josh leads us outside to give me a daylight tour of what I couldn’t see last night. We head straight across the courtyard into the remains of the bar, restaurant, and general store which has been vacant since a fire in the mid-aughts. Sunbeams coming through the caved-in roof are illuminating cans on shelves, tools behind the counter, and the piano up against a wall. It all looks like someone just walked out 40 years ago and left everything behind, which is exactly how Josh likes it, though he’d like to get it up to code to reopen it as a bar again. He just needs that investor. For the bar, and all his other ideas.
The Old Cuchillo Bar | Cuchillo, New Mexico | USA
Everything is quiet except for the moments Josh and I exchange words and when our feet are quietly shuffling across the old floors, likely crushing tiny shards of historical glass and other things hidden under a layer of dirt on the floor. It smells like ghost hunter territory.
He leads me to the game room, which is where the illegal poker games took place at night. No one was concerned about getting into trouble for playing them, Mr. Romero said, because anyone with the authority to do something about it was sitting at the poker table itself. Josh sees me glance at the rotary phone on the bar and tells me it was a party line up until 1994, and for quite a while before that, it was the only phone available within a three-town radius.
We walk out back to see the old stables and multiple other outbuildings that Josh wants to fix up to make studios so people can come here for artist retreats. I’m still entirely invested in Josh’s plight, remarking on how much work all of this is, and what a labor of love it’s been for him. I’m pulled to stay and get into the bigger picture and dreams of this place, but I have to hit the road to make it to Marfa, Texas by nightfall. He asks me to keep sending him the texts from the Glympse app so he can track me.
When I eventually do get to New Orleans, I make breakfast tacos in the way he recommended, with the cilantro and onions all diced up small, and eat it for breakfast nearly every day for two months straight. I text him a photo of it one morning and tell him he was my inspiration.
What I haven’t told him yet is that to this day, I keep my cilantro in a cup of cold water in the fridge, just like a bouquet of flowers.
Epilogue: Josh and Cuchillo were most recently featured on an episode of the American Pickers reality TV show that aired on July 6, 2020. Mr. Romero passed in 2019. Josh has since adopted a dog named Milo who “is truly the best” he says. “But I still miss my old friend.” He recently passed the torch to a new owner but is still invested in Cuchillo through the ownership of several of the other houses in town (there’s only about 20), which he’s remodeling and preparing to welcome more artists.