Litter Control

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His car map showed Reserve, New Mexico as a small black spot of a high mountain town stuck away in the Tu-larosa Mountains, halfway between the Zuni Reservation’s mesa land to the north and the deserts of Lords-burg well to the south. The road he drove offered only winding curves, tall ponderosa pines, red rock buttes, knife ridge mountains, and too much loneliness between exiled gas stations. But for a photojoumalist out to make a buck on sucker landscape views, the time saved in bypassing Albuquerque made up for the fact it wasn’t the Interstate.

No. Not by a long shot.

His last gas had been in Zuni. The pump station in Fence Lake had been closed, like the rest of that dying farm town. The two stations in still-alive Quemado both refused his plastic, insisting on scarce cash. The flyspeck single pump station in Apache Wells had been open, a grinning country boy type ready to pump. For cash. The man’s sun weathered face had even looked half-friendly as he pointed to an inside wooden desk lacking phone, fax or credit card imprint machine. Shit! He spit out the car’s open window, then tossed out a crumpled pop can for good measure. It clattered distantly against the cutbank arroyos of a dry creekbed running alongside State Highway 12. No echo came back from the high walls of the mountain canyon that funneled him towards Reserve. County seat of Catron County. Elevation 5,770 feet. Population—probably two goats, a few pinyon rats and some retired prostitutes.

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