For Sale: Deep, Spacious Roswell Property, Once Occupied by a Missile

If you really value remoteness and open space it's good. I live on a hill on some acreage outside of town and can see nearly 40 miles off my back patio without a houses or building in view. I can (and sometimes do) shoot guns from my back porch.

But, If you want to be near decent restaurants, stores with clothes you might actually wear, and people you can hold a conversation with.... it's probably not the best place.

Oh, don't let me forget the wind and dust-storms. It's blazing hot in the summer, but the winters are fairly mild. The economy is not good (except during oil booms)... wages are very severely depressed, there is not a lot of educated people nor people with ambition as they have left for the most part. The general culture reflects this degeneration. Lazy and slow and non-curious is a way of life.

So why am I here? (I'm not from here). Well... you should see the night sky for one. Far away from big cities in the desert.... you feel like you are right there in the universe and the milky way is a river of light. But truly, the desert to the south (Carlsbad to South Texas) or west of here (Arizona) is a lot more amazing as far as plants and scenery. This is is really the very far Southwestern edge of the Great Plains. (Actually... its a girlfriend thing, that's the real reason. But the sky is nice.).

This site is about 20 minutes outside town. Not too far away are the mountains.. an hour or so from a ski resort (Ruidoso... a pretty little town but not much there). It's on the very edge of the foothills as the plains start turning into the Rockies. The drive up the canyon to Ruidoso is quite pretty. The site is right off the highway (power close or right to site) and has BLM ground surrounding it. There are no trees nor large cactus... it's arid grassland with cholla and prickly pear cactus and low scrubby mesquite. There are lots of coyotes, hawks, antelope, foxes, porcupine and skunks. And rattlesnakes. I found 7 of them on the property over last summer. The soil is caliche... old ocean bed reef, and hard as a rock. You would have trouble growing anything between the critters and poor soil. A decent well would probably be around 300 feet deep and the water very very hard. I'm not sure it would be an acceptable place to live for anyone but the most hermit minded.....

5Mbps is about as fast as you can reasonably get and runs about $80/month. It lags very slightly, and the receiver better stay pointing right at their tower. The winds sometimes shift the receiver a little, and it has to be adjusted or speed really drops.

It's still hard to explain to people what living in a place like Roswell or Farmington is like. Both places swing up and down according to oil prices. both are big enough to have just barely what you might want or need, but not much more. More importantly, they are their own big cities. And that's the thing that people don't get: When the nearest (modest) cultural mass is at least three hours away, you don't live anywhere near an interstate, and every other town is an order of magnitude smaller, everybody tends to stay put and things get insular (not necessarily in a bad way though) and weird.

I've gotten in arguments about this before from people who claimed they grew up in smaller towns, but the key difference is those small towns aren't their own isolated islands. I liked growing up there as a kid, but I'd take a small town of 2000 people an hour away from a major city over the Ruidosos and Farmingtons in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, the desert was literally our playground as a kid, and that's an amazing thing to grow up with.

BTW: Lots of great astronomy still happens around Cloudcroft if you ever get up there.

Of course, this is still merely a fantasy in my head at this time ;)