The road to Mogollon
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The road to Mogollon is justly notorious. It is not a bad road…not especially rough. And it has been worked on recently. It is not even all that steep. (At least some of it isn’t.) However, with the exception of one flat stretch over the top of Whitewater Mesa a third of the way up, all of it is a grade. And all of it is narrow and twisty, with solid rock straight up on one side for hundreds of feet and straight down an equal or greater distance on the other side. The Mogollon Road rises about twenty-five hundred feet and then drops back about twelve hundred – all in the space of nine miles. It makes for wonderful views.
The solid rock is why the road does not fall off the side of the mountain, though piles of it do occasionally fall onto the road. There are numerous signs to warn the uninitiated of the hazards of the Mogollon Road.
The road is only one of the many reasons why nobody lives in Mogollon by accident. There are lots of reasons not to live in Mogollon. It does not get much sun in winter. It is far from most places to make a living. It is far from stores and hospitals. Cabin fever traditionally sets in sometime around the second week of September, to lift only when the tourists show up again – well into the following summer.
A couple of years ago, when there were about twenty people working at the mine, someone commented that the gold and silver mine here in Mogollon was the biggest private employer in Catron County. That says something about a county larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island put together, where the largest private employer is located in a ghost town. There are buildings in Connecticut with more people in them than there are in Catron County.
People out here tend to be ornery and individualistic. However, a hundred years ago, the priorities of remoteness and gold led to far more serious dissension than they do now. Back then, the Apaches were looking for someplace to keep out of the way. What is now the Gila Wilderness was one of the last places available. The gold and silver at Mogollon were bringing in lots of people. Modern disagreements are mild by comparison.
Living someplace like Mogollon is a popular fantasy. Not many people actually try it, and most of those who do rapidly discover that they really do not want to live a place so demanding and remote. Many of the few who stay, however, turn out to be unique and often exceptionally sensitive individuals who, with patience and effort, create a constructive niche for themselves in a setting where every individual counts. These are the special people who bless isolated communities in far greater proportion than is possible places where everyone is just a cypher. They are the real rugged individuals America was once famous for.
Mogollon
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In the fall of 1985, a new column appeared in The Silver City Enterprise, then New Mexico’s oldest continuously-published weekly newspaper, appearing regularly since 1882. The introductory material you have just read is taken from the columns of Oct. 10 and 17, 1985. The following summer, "The Mogollon News, from the heart of Catron County," began weekly broadcast on Public Radio Station KRWG in Las Cruces. The Silver City Enterprise shut down in Nov., 1987. But the "Mogollon News" continued, in Silver City’s El Reportero: New Mexico’s only bilingual newspaper, the Catron County Firestarter (Glenwood, N. M.), and the Big Water Times (Big Water, Utah). In the 90s, it became a regular feature in the award-winning British experimental Speculative Fiction magazine, BBR, and on SouthernNewMexico.com.
The "Mogollon News" enters with the Mogollon Road and exits with the Catron County Land Use Plan, both thoroughly real. History and geography are equally real. The stories and their characters are fiction. But the atmosphere is authentic. The time covered is 1985-95, a decade when Catron County ¾ New Mexico’s largest and least populous, in which Mogollon sets, became a national leader of the growing rural ferment over local say in land use issues. Perhaps these tales may contribute a bit of insight. Of course people, including the inhabitants of the "Mogollon News", mostly live their personal lives, with their many personal joys, sorrows, struggles and quirks, at any time. None of the people in these stories (except Uncle River) really have lived in Mogollon. But they could. If you would like to experience more of the view from one of America’s most spectacular and remote ghost towns, read on.
Winter
The Silver Creek Temperance Society
Blasting
The Balloon
Ice
Halley’s Comet
The Libyan Invasion
A Case of Religion
Politics
Contact SouthernNewMexico.com if you are interesting in publishing Uncle River’s "Mogollon News."
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Uncle has written 9 awesome articles for us. Uncle River's cultural speculative fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, the British Interzone, and Canada's Transversions, among many others. His story, "Love of the True God," published in Talebones #10, qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for a Nebula Award and was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. As of June, 2002, his "How We Know What Happened" is the cover story of the current Absolute Magnitude #18, and his "My Stolen Sabre" from the Dec. '01 Asimov's is due for reprint in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best Fantasy #2.
Uncle River is due to appear as a panelist at two SF conventions in Summer, 2002: ReaderCon in the Boston area, July 12-14, and ArmadilloCon in Austin, Aug. 16-18. Trained in Jungian Analysis and holding what he believes to be the world's only earned Ph.D. in Psychology of the Unconscious (Union Institute, 1974), Uncle River has lived as a hermit/writer in the mountain Southwest for the past 20 years.
MOGOLLON NEWS
Set in the real New Mexico ghost town of Mogollon where Uncle River lived for five years, the fictitious "Mogollon News" began as a column in the Silver City Enterprise, at the time New Mexico's oldest continuously published weekly paper, in 1985. The "Mogollon News" ran as a regular feature on Public Radio Station KRWG, Las Cruces, from 1986-90, and has appeared as a column in several regional newspapers. Through the 90s, it was a regular feature in the leading British experimental speculative fiction periodical, BBR. Sufficiently authentic to back-country life that Uncle River's local postmistress wondered why she didn't know the people whose tales appeared in the paper, the complete "Mogollon News" comprises over two hundred stories, like the ones posted here. (Available in book-manuscript format to interested publishers.)
THUNDER MOUNTAIN
Thunder Mountain, (Mother Bird Books, 1213 Durango, Silver City, NM 88061, 189 pp., trade papberback, $11 + $1.50 shipping.) Set in the fictitious Thunder Range of remote Southwestern New Mexico, Thunder Mountain "explores how the land can live and how human spirits can bond with the land" (BBR). Thunder Mountain will show you the difference between an outlaw and a criminal.
"Uncle River transcends mere authorship to become an authentic voice of the abused land." . . . Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's Science Fiction
". . . a new sort of creature, perhaps related to magical realism, which I hope gets positive notice in both of its home worlds - New Mexico regional writing and science fiction...The way the book is structured makes an important read, which is good since the story is pleasant and brings laughter and tears at the right places." . . . Don Webb, The New York Review of Science Fiction XIZQUIL
Speculative fiction, poetry, articles, and art, Uncle River edited XIZQUIL from 1989-98, through 16 issues, winning a Rhysling Award for Year's Best Long Poem from the Science Fiction Poetry Association and placing stories regularly on the Honorable Mention list in Gardner Dozois's annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies.
"What better place than the genre of the fantastic to explore new ways of telling stories? XIZQUIL, edited by Uncle River, is firmly pointed in this direction." . . . Michael P. Belfiore, Tangent.
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