When Beth and I arrive in a town we know nothing about, we go to the library and ask the librarian. It has never failed us.
Belen, New Mexico sits in the Rio Grande valley about thirty miles south of Albuquerque, and it is one of the busiest rail junctions in the American Southwest. The BNSF Southern Transcon corridor runs through it, and on any given day thousands of railcars from the California docks pass through Belen headed east—container loads of everything the country imports, rolling through a small New Mexico town that most travelers never stop to notice. We stopped.
The librarian was perhaps twenty-three, perky, and thoroughly informed about her town. She told us about the Harvey House, the old Santa Fe Railway hotel now preserved as a museum with hundreds of model trains—closed that day, as it happened. She told us about the rail yards, which are immense. And she told us about the orchards.
Outside of town, stretching for miles along the valley, are apple and peach and pear trees fed by irrigation from the Rio Grande. The main one is Costanza Apple Orchard on Padilla Road—a thousand apple trees, multiple varieties. Open in the fall, when the peaches and pears come in alongside. In the middle of the New Mexico desert, miles of fruit trees. You would not know to look for them if nobody told you.
The rail yards were next. The one in Belen is vast—long strings of locomotives and cars arranged on parallel tracks as far as you can see, the whole operation controlled from a dispatch center in Fort Worth. Beth and I swept past the STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO ENTER sign and attempted to position ourselves in front of a BNSF locomotive for a photograph.
A yard worker materialized. “You’re already on camera,” he said. He could have been considerably more abrupt about it, and he would have been within his rights. We backed out the way we had come.
Later we learned there is an official viewing platform at the Belen yard, built specifically for railfans. Railfans are known in the trade as foamers—enthusiasts so excited by trains that they are said to foam at the mouth. There is a platform for them. We had bypassed it entirely in favor of trespassing. This is not the recommended approach.
Driving away from the yards, we passed a field full of chickens. A woman was shoveling dirt along the fence line, building up a low dike to keep the irrigation water from running into the street during floods. The chickens were working the freshly turned earth behind her, eating worms. The woman was somewhere past seventy, and she was moving with the unhurried efficiency of someone who has been doing physical work her entire life.
We stopped. We talked. I mentioned my own rural past—four years on a Pennsylvania bee farm, mornings forking manure out of calf pens in exchange for having it spread on my garden.
After a while I suggested that she might consider hiring some strong men to do her digging for her.
She didn’t hesitate. “I’d rather be shoveling manure,” she said, “than do housework.”
The chickens kept working the dirt behind her. We drove on.
