The Old Corral
Post Script:
I had forgotten to mention another of our neighbors, who came from "back east," and was on a disability pension, and how a rental car could be spotted on most afternoons parked across Route 66, across Interstate 40, on Rincon Loop Road, its occupant studying our neighbor's every movement via binoculars.
There was also a little bar up the highway, on the thin stretch of land between Old 66 and I-40, the Outrider Saloon, where many an evening was spent listening to local bands playing country music, but never really having learned the Cotton Eyed Joe or the Texas Two-Step, just an observant lurker. It's now a bare patch of land, used by the highway department for staging construction materials.
Then there was Woody's Truck Stop, further up Old 66 on Sedillo Hill, frequently visited for coffee late at night, especially on stormy nights, along with a few songs on the juke box, the kind that had those little stations at each booth. I could swear they put speed in the coffee pot, its jolt was that strong. Alas, it too is long gone, just a bare patch of dirt near the I-40 off ramp.
It's not the finery that we miss from our youth, but the ordinary things that meant so much to us at the time, in whose passing we lament not having documented them more fervently, now mere memories.
(Typecast via Remington Ten Forty, photos via Lumix G1, 14-45mm Lumix lens.)
posted by Joe V at 10:55 PM
3 Comments:
Very interesting post! Especially as my partner & I toured the US and Canada in an Airstream travel trailer for 12 years.
We quickly determined the difference between a mobile home park and an RV park. The two are really separate animals, tending to attract two distinct classes of people.
The mobile home parks have more permanent, long-term residents, while folks with travel trailers tend to stay in RV parks. Once in a while the two are combined. When this happens, the "locals" tend to look down on the transitory, overnight residents.
Was "The Old Corral" primarily a mobile home park, or were there travel trailers staying there "back in the day" when you lived there? And what is it like now?
Thanks for the comments, Cameron. I agree with your assessment of the differences between RV and mobile home parks.
The Old Corral, as long as I've been aware of it, was always a mobile home park, the only exception that I know of being the guy I mentioned on disability, being spied on by insurance investigators, once had a pretty affluent lifestyle and brought along his bus-style motor home, which he intended to sell. He didn't live in the motor home, just had it parked for sale. It had vacuum outlets in each room, very high end.
Right now, it appears like only some of the trailers are occupied by tenants. The second photo is the trailer I lived it. At the time, the storage sheds weren't there, neither were the trees between trailers and the paving stone walkway from the trailer to the gate. The rust and weeds look very familiar, however.
I can only surmise that, back in the Route 66 era, there might have been hookups for RVs, but I saw no evidence of that when I lived there, in the early 1980s.
You know, the first thing I noticed in that second photo was not the rust on the trailer or the weeds in the yard, but how the sky was so, so blue. And very open. It makes me a little nostalgic for a desert dirt road that I used to live on, staring up at an open, vividly blue, living sky with the hopes and dreams that accompany childhood.
For me, that took place on a ranch and not in a trailer park, but it makes me wonder what other dreams were sent into that blue sky above the rust and weeds. And how many of those dreams still linger there, decades later.
Great typecast. Thank you for sharing.
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