A Tale of Two Desert Towns

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Log Wagon Inn in Wickenburg,
where I stayed

Many a day on this journey I went to bed tired out in a little desert town in West Texas, still a long way from California.  Again and again in New Mexico and Arizona, I rode into small towns like a cowgirl on a thirsty horse looking for a place to sleep.  How small and brave the little towns look, standing there on the edge of vast openness.  

When you do anything enough times, patterns form in your mind and you start to categorize things that probably shouldn’t be categorized.  In the last two days, two towns typify for me trends of many places I've visited.

Wickenburg

Wickenburg

On the western deserts, towns have risen from the sand because people with needs decided to cluster there.  Miners gathered in Wickenburg, my home last night, because together they could make more money and be happier than those solitary old die-hards who discovered the ores that brought a lot of miners.  Today, miners don’t need Wickenburg, and it might be a ghost town or nearly so, if it had not reinvented itself as tourist destination.  It’s a place where visitors find the quaint old mining lifestyle preserved in a museum and in the historical decor of its buildings.  Visitors like to feel a part of some past. 

A lot of open country separates the little towns.  I pedaled this twenty-six-mile road from Wickenburg to my next example, Aguila.

Closed motel in Aguila

The only buisness still open in Aguila

Aguila didn’t start as a mining town.  It began as a community center for cotton farmers and all the people needed to support them.  Once it was a thriving center of optimistic futures and children happy to walk in parents footsteps.  After machinery came and took jobs and sent people away to find work, the town made an effort to recover.  It tried what Wickenburg tried.  But all the motels and restaurants are now closed in Aguila, and the only business still open is Woody’s gas station and store. 

They provided services that travelers want, but gave travelers no reason to stop.  Today, the cotton plantations have “Keep Out” signs, and nowhere is the story of early cotton farming preserved.  Not even an acre is preserved for harvest by dragging long bags behind you as you pick by hand, and no place for visitors to pick their own cotton. 

So I rode on through Aguila and stopped for the night in Salome, an in-between town which might survive and might die, it hasn’t taken a firm position either way.