[UPDATED: I added a few more photos on November 30th]

You can click on any of these photos to see larger versions.

Having driven 700 miles, we stopped at a small hotel in a desolate town about 2 hours east of Albuquerque. (I had drunk too much coffee while driving, so I ended up pacing around the parking lot for an hour or two. This is when I thought up the essay about the price of websites, which I mentioned in the first post on this weblog.)

In the morning I was struck by how intense the sunlight is in New Mexico. I could not go outside without wearing sunglasses, or the glare would hurt my eyes. I think the intensity of the light is because of the lack of trees, and the sand reflects more of the light than grass would.

In this area, Interstate 40 tracks parallel to the old, historic Route 66, which the Oakies took when they were escaping the Dust Bowl, and which later the Beats took when they were discovering life.  There are a lot of restaurants and hotels that play up the Route 66 angle, for the sake of tourism. We had breakfast at a place just down the road, which turned out to be better than we guessed.

We’d tied the office chair to the top of the Subaru, and the rope kept stretching out and becoming loose, so Laura and Dave had to re-tie it several times.

We drove west for an hour, then abandoned the Volvo in the parking lot of a gas station. We all wanted to go together to Madrid, New Mexico, which was 20 minutes north, up Route 14. Both cars were absolutely packed to the brim, so we had to take stuff out of the Subaru and store it in the Volvo, to create enough space so that I could come with them in the Subaru.

We managed to squeeze into just one car, in the end.

Madrid used to be a coal mining town. I’m told it was the only mine in the world that had both of the main types of coal (lignite and bituminous).  The mine ran out in the early to mid 20th cnetury and the town became a true ghost town, with no one living there. My folks lived in Flagstaff during the winter of 1962 to 1963, and during that time they stopped through Madrid. My dad took some shots of the abandoned buildings, with vines growing up over them. But Madrid is only 20 minutes south of Santa Fe, and in 1970s some of the artists, looking for low rent, discovered the town and began to move in. I’m told that at that time you could buy land for just a few hundred dollars. Nowadays the town lives on tourism, and is full of artists, such as Tatoo Tammy. She lived on an acre of land for 11 years and built art out of the debris she found. One local described it as “A monument and celebration of the excess of the American lifestyle.” The place is called Tiny Town, mostly because of a town in miniature that she assembled.

The photographer Jessica Claire stumbled upon Tiny Town back in early 2007. She had this to say:

Tiny Town is actually a small piece of property a couple miles north of Madrid, NM. An artist lives there, and her motto is, “If it’s not dead, broken or rusted, I just can’t use it!”. She has made a miniature town entirely out of bones and discarded things. It is very very strange. We did not meet the artist, but apparently she encourages passerby to bring her roadkill and scraps

Claire has posted some of the photos she took at that time.

Legends of America visted the place a few years back and had this to say:

[Tammy] Lange actively searches for road kill as a source of bones, so much so that she encourages area locals to alert of new finds, which she uses for her most “special” art. When alerted to a new “find,” she is happy to retrieve the animal carcass which she then buries so it can decompose, later digging it up to clean and bleach the bones.

Earlier reports by travel writers describe this acre as having its own saloon, church, courthouse and jail; rivers made of broken glass, and roads made of tarpaper, complete with yellow lines.  However, when Legends of America visited, there was little sign of the acre of haphazard material resembling a town.  Perhaps this is because several years ago an art scout came upon Lange’s town and arranged to have much of it boxed and shipped to the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Evidently, this was the jumping board for success, as the artist now sells many of her creations in local shops.

Laura spent the summer of 2007 living in Madrid and she got to be close friends with Tammy. In fact, for awhile, Laura lived in a school bus that was parked on Tammy’s land. Tammy and Laura are planning on building a website to showcase some of the work that Tammy has done.

Sad to say, Tammy is being evicted from her place. The local press had this write up:

The term “outsider art” does not begin to describe what’s on display at Tiny Town. Even so, the roadside attraction just north of Madrid just isn’t what it used to be.

Wind, weather, sun and the passing of time have turned the one-time sea of broken glass and artfully arranged bones into ramshackle, dilapidated outdoor display.

Now the mayor of Tiny Town is moving on.

Artist Tammy Jean Lange has been called a visionary and a “human firecracker” as well as a local icon in so-called outsider art, using roadkill, rusted objects and broken toys as her media. A discarded cigarette machine, rust-red iron cookstove, set of putt-put clubs and dozens of partially clothed dolls are among the current occupants.

“If it isn’t dead, broken or rusted, I just can’t use it,” Lange said during an interview at Tiny Town, where she stood in stockinged feet on the bare ground, sipping an icy beverage in the afternoon. “It’s ‘Better Bones and Gardens,’ Mother Nature’s natural art.”

Lange does not pay rent to use the 1 acre site, and over the last four years has done less and less to keep the place looking like the small wonder that it used to be, said longtime benefactor Bille Russell.

Russell has for more than a decade allowed Lange to set up her found art on about an acre of her 112-acre Lodestar Ranch.

When Lange, 49, also known as Tatt2 Tammy, started using the area as her primary residence and drifted away from what Russell called “brilliant things,” Russell said she reluctantly took steps to change the situation.

“I think her art has a right to exist,” said Russell, who met Lange when a friend helped get her art into the Mineshaft Tavern gift shop. “So the initial deal was that Tiny Town could be there and she could work there, but she could not live there.”

Russell said she was worn down by neighboring landowners who called the project an eyesore and wanted it cleaned up.

“It had its peaks, but in four years it’s taken quite a dive,” she said. “It became more like a dump instead of her working her art.”

Although she’s requiring Lange to move out and dispose of piles of debris that have grown up outside the fence that marks the borders of Tiny Town, Russell said the artwork is welcome to stay and Lange is welcome to keep working on it.

Sad to say, something has changed since the last paragraph of that article was written. Now Tammy is not only evicted, but her art is also being evicted. Much of it is the kind of sculptural art that exists in its place, and can not easily be moved. Some of it is likely to be destroyed.

When we arrived, the place was in disarray.

Tammy has been packing the place up, and most of what remains behind is suffering from neglect.

Tammy has been selling what she can to raise money for her move. She even sold the siding off her trailer.

What is, I think, difficult to explain, is the sense of creativity and humor that pervades the place.

From what Laura tells me, the vibrancy of Tiny Town arose, at least in part, due to the many other interesting and odd characters that spent time there. What the place was is not something that can be captured in a photo. Actors, artists and misfits passed through the place and contributed to it with their personalities.

We didn’t find Tammy. Not on Saturday.

On our way out, Laura snapped a picture of me.

That night we stayed with Melany, another old friend of Laura’s. Melany had actually been Laura’s landlady for a month in the summer of 2007. Laura had rented one of the guest cottages outside of Melany’s house.

Sunday morning we left Melany’s and went looking for other old friends of Laura’s. Up in Cerrilos, north of Madrid, we found her friend Neil.

Cerillos has seen very little change over the last several decades. It feels like an authentic old town, and because it has changed so little, Hollywood has used it in some ol’ Western movies. In fact, The Quick And The Dead did some filming here and in Madrid.

Neil suggested we all get coffee, so we started to drive back to Madrid to get coffee. On the way, we drove past Tiny Town, and we saw that Tatt2 Tammy was there. We stopped to say hello to her.

We all went into town to get coffee. Madrid has only one street with stores on it, and it is only about 4 or 5 blocks long. It has a few restaurants, but only one coffee shop, which is also a bed-n-breakfast.

Tammy’s dogs had just given birth to a new puppy, about whom Tammy was delighted.

Madrid is one of those small villages where everyone congregates at a single point. Tristan pulled up on his motorcycle. Back in the summer of 2007, he’d been helpful to Laura as she learned about the town. Things worked out rather wonderfully this Sunday - Laura had hoped to find some of her old friends, and here we had Neil and Tammy and Tristan all gathered at a table.

In the summer of 2007, when Laura headed west, she’d arranged to housesit for a woman named Adele. They’d met when Laura looked up Adele through Couchsurfing.com the year before. Adele is an artist and, though she lives in Albuquerque, her work is featured at a gallery in Madrid. The gallery is a joint effort of several artists, Adele being one of them, and each artist works certain days of the week. We were lucky in that Adele happened to be working the day we stopped through.

Madrid has an official population of just 400 people. It has about 20 art galleries. I do not know of any other town with such a high ratio of art galleries to population. On the weekends, tourists come out from both Sante Fe and Albuquerque. The area seems popular with motorcyclists. There is just one bar in town, and its parking lot is constantly full of parked motorcycles.

Tourism is just one half of the Madrid experience. On the other side, there are the folks who live off the grid. There is an abundance of land out here, vast tracts of it that is not in use. There is too little water here for agriculture, and only in some places can the land even be used  grazing. Some folks pitch their tents on the hill tops, and live without water or electricity.

After we left the gallery, we paid one more brief visit to Tiny Town.

Tammy had some video footage she wanted to show us. She was also concerned about losing all her footage, because she had no backup and the video camera was old and broken and would not let the tape out. Laura ended up taking the video camera and promising to download the footage to her computer and burn it to DVD for Tammy. This, in part, ensured that we’d have a good reason to come back to Madrid (which we did, 3 weeks later).

We still had an 8 hour drive in front of us, and Dave needed to be back at school the next day. We left Tiny Town at 3:30 PM and we got to the house in Phoenix around 1 AM.

For me, the visit to Madrid was a fascinating chance to finally meet all these people about whom I’d heard so many stories.

Barack Obama talks about jump starting the “Green Economy”. Here is some evidence of the new energy industry that is now coming into existence:

Click the image to see a larger version of the image.

This was in the entrance of the restaurant where we had breakfast in New Mexico.