I lived in NM for ten years, at one point living in an old mining crankshaft station in Madrid, NM.

It was a funny old building with brick floors, completely open with no walls inside, and a concrete base in the center of the floor that used to hold a huge crank shaft machine.

The machine used to be connected by enormous fat cables to the rail cars at the top of the mountainside across the little valley from me.

They’d pull on the crank to get the cars to tip over into the gigantic funnel that would pour the coal they mined into waiting box cars.

The entire town used to be centered around the coal industry until after WWII.

The town pretty much shut down after the war because natural gas had taken away the market for coal. Madrid became a ghost town until the early 80s, when artists and other odd people started coming to buy up and live in the ramshackle houses. The whole town smelled like sulfur. You couldn’t drink the water.

One day, I saw a little dog out walking back and forth on the street in front of my house that went right down the center of the valley. Someone had just dropped her off and abandoned her.

I could see her limping a bit, so I sent her a thought, “come over here and I’ll take that star-thistle out of your paw!” She stopped pacing, turned and looked at me, and came right up to me. We were inseparable for ten years. I still miss her.

This is GO FOR A WALK? oils on canvas – 12″ x 10″ NFS