You can go home again

May 29, 2013

By Wally Gordon

Last week I spent six days in a city that almost seemed to live in a different continent that Albuquerque. What follows are some random musings on my visit to Indianapolis.

With much of the country's midsection buffeted by tornadoes and thunderstorms, the Midwest isn't an easy place to get to. With Dallas, Houston and other parts of Texas airspace closed, my plane, which had to get to Albuquerque from Florida, arrives in Albuquerque 2 ½ hours late.

We fly back to Houston just in time for me to run to a gate to catch my connecting flight to Indianapolis, which is still loading only because it too was late. Because this is the last plane out that night, I have visions, or rather nightmares, of sleeping on the floor of the airport.

When something, almost anything, goes wrong anywhere in the United States, our airplane-based transportation system verges on collapse. It is not a good way to run a country. In the past, trains served as at least a potential backup, that option has almost disappeared. It takes the better part of two days to travel the 1,200 miles from Albuquerque to Indianapolis by train.

Last year it didn't rain in Indianapolis for two months. Flowers didn't bloom. Crops didn't grow. Trees died and had to be cut down. This year, it rains off and on the entire week I am there. The lushness of lawns and meadows is awe inspiring.

The contrast with New Mexico couldn't be greater. Here, the state is deeply ensconced in officially its third year of drought (but in the East Mountains it seems to me the climate hasn't been “normal” since 1997; this is what they are calling the new normal).

At Elephant Butte Lake, traditionally the venue for creating the state's second largest city over Memorial Day weekend, the water level, 11 percent of capacity, is at its lowest on record, and the 30-mile-long lake is 12 miles.
Even in the mountains, where we live, the oaks are leafing out later than usual, there are few rabbits and squirrels, the woodpeckers have almost disappeared, and in long walks in the national forest, the woods seemed eerily silent.

A forest ranger said there is a good chance the entire Cibola National Forest will be closed around June 1 if we don't get any rain by then. Since that conversation two weeks ago there has been no rain.

Indianapolis is home ground for the Lilly pharmaceutical company, which does many things for the city. It is one of Albuquerque's unfortunate failings that it has no comparable national headquarters.

One of Lilly's most spectacular undertakings is the privately owned and financed Indianapolis Museum of Art, a magnificent piece of architecture filled with one of the country's outstanding collections of African, Asian, Native American, European and contemporary art as well as crafts and antiques.

A highlight of my time in Indianapolis is a visit to the museum for a special exhibit of photographs and artwork by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident who is probably the world's most famous living artist as well as one of its most courageous advocates, and activists, for individual freedom. Time and again he has confronted, singlehandedly, the brutality of the Chinese government. He has been beaten and imprisoned, his studio destroyed, his money, property and art confiscated. And still he persists, unbowed, a magnificent man.

Indianapolis seems to be recovering from the recession in a way that Albuquerque is not. The emphasis in that sentence is on the slippery little word “seems.”

The big box stores are huge and very crowded. “Help Wanted” signs, which have almost disappeared from Albuquerque, are common.

Real estate and construction are doing well. My brother, a Realtor, said business is brisker than at any time during his 13 years in the business. He says that it is not unusual of late for him to submit a bid for a house that is 100 percent of the asking price, and for it to be turned down for a higher offer. “I never heard of such a thing,” he says. My brother-in-law's Indianapolis construction business is prospering, too.

And yet...and yet.

The unemployment rate in the 1.7 million Indianapolis metro area is higher than in Albuquerque or New Mexico or the nation at large. The size of the workforce is shrinking as is the number of people employed. The jobless rate is actually increasing.

What is going on? Why, with better job statistics, is New Mexico in the doldrums or perhaps even in outright recession, while Indianapolis gives every indication of prospering, with people seeming happy, businesses hiring and houses selling?

My theory is that it is all more about the future than the present. Indianapolis is an optimistic kind of place. Things in general are better than they were two or three years ago even though there has been a blip this year. More important, people seem to feel things will get better, later this year and next year and the year after.

In Albuquerque and generally in New Mexico, I sense a bleak pessimism about the future.

The distinction is especially powerful when you contrast the two economies. The Indianapolis economy is based on private business, especially highly paid manufacturing. In New Mexico, about all we have is government employment, and it is heavily focused on the fading field of nuclear weapons. Remember telephone operators, secretaries and kids who pumped gas? A lot of people looking at the world now are adding nuclear weapons scientists and engineers to that list.

But without our bomb makers, where is the New Mexico economy? Without them, we have a Walmart economy. With 14,000 employees in the state, the discount stores are New Mexico's largest private employer. Meanwhile, probably our best private employer, Intel, has cut its Rio Rancho workforce by nearly half over the past decade or so.

If Indy residents see the glass as half full and slowly filling up, we see ours as half empty and slowly emptying completely.

Returning Sunday from Indianapolis, the flights are all on time and the flying is smooth. The lush flatness of the Midwest gives way to the mountains of New Mexico, green islands in the brown desert. The gray clouds become azure skies. The sun shines brightly.

We are trapped amid drought and recession, politics with no purpose or agenda, and economics with no hope or plan. But the state that Charles F. Lummis called the Land of Poco Tiempo is my home, and I am glad to be back.

This piece was written by:

Wally Gordon

Wally Gordon, who was for 12 years owner and editor of The Independent in Edgewood, began his career with three summer jobs at The New York Times while he was a student at Brown University. He spent a decade with the Baltimore Sun, including stints as national investigative reporter and Washington Bureau manager. He has freelanced or been a staff writer and editor for dozens of newspapers and magazines all over the United States.

Extensive travels have taken him to all 50 states and more than 60 foreign countries. He wrote a novel in Spain, edited a newspaper in American Samoa, served in the U.S. Army in Iran and taught for two years at a university in West Africa.

He is the author of A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People. The new nonfiction book is a collection of essays, columns, and magazine and newspaper stories published during his journalistic career spanning more than half a century. Many of the pieces were first published in The Independent or in other New Mexico newspapers and magazines. The book includes profiles of the famous, the infamous and the anonymous, travel and adventure yarns, and essays on the major issues and emotions of our times.

A native of Atlanta, he has lived in New Mexico since 1978 and in the East Mountains since 1990. He has been married for 28 years to Thelma Bowles, a native New Mexican who is a photographer and French teacher. They have one son, Sergei.