Owen Baertlein is a photographer, Aurora artist, and University of Maine student. As he travels the world, his journey with photojournalism nets him some truly phenomenal stories. We are excited to share some of these stories with you.
Owen Baertlein
Another night brings me into town, a short five-minute walk from my family’s old home high on a hill, overlooking town and the Santa Fe reservoir. The night is brightened by warm neon lights, splashing absurd and obscene colors across the facades of old sandstone-brick buildings, worn by years in the unpredictable elements of the Mogollon Rim. I’ve come too late, however. The streets are mostly empty, only dotted by a few locals returning home from their day jobs on this warm Sunday night. Music drifts up from doors kept open to run air through dry, hot interiors, keeping the inside cool for the few that remain, picking up beer bottles, mopping up stains and glass shards left by the many international tourists here to visit (and pollute) Grand Canyon Country. To outsiders, this entire town is a charade. Warm welcomes into over-visited tourist traps are often followed up by disdainful sideways whispers to coworkers; not hateful, but enough to let one know that they were not born and bred into this dusty land like the dry, sun-browned shopkeepers were. At night, though, this mask falls away. The locals call out to each other from across the street, rehashing the day’s hardships of dealing with interlopers that speak little or no English, haggling over the price of a small steel Route 66 sign (the town’s main artery and lifeblood), coping with waves upon waves of people, stumbling in from the day’s scorching heat or pouring rain, depending on the temperament of whatever deities the Hualapai invented to keep them alive in this here high desert.
Downtown Lights by Owen Baertlein
The days now, late in the summer, are marked by cloud-mottled skies. These well-defined, sharp-edged, fish-scale shaped clouds early in the day are sure portents of catastrophic rainfall to come later in the day. Thunder peals like grumbles of angry gods, lightning bolts crash down like artillery, engulfing acres of poorly maintained ponderosa forest in sheets of flame, the Forest Service’s understaffed and overworked fire crew’s best nightmare. These dirty, greasy, sooty men and women pray for flame, smoke, and devastation, a promise of long hours, hazard pay, and time away from home. They are regarded as strange and unrelatable heroes. What kind of person yearns for destruction in their heart? Who can face weeks away from friends and family at a time in exchange for burned flesh and smoke-plagued lungs?
The town is empty now. No cars on the roads, only the occasional sunbaked local seeking shelter from the bright moonlight in the abandoned doorway, usually smoking, more often drunk. From the only bars in town, the Sultana and the Canyon Club (both oft frequented by Grandpa Dan, who tells me he has girlfriends at each), drift cheerful music and loud voices. Through the glass brick walls of the Canyon Club, I see an empty barroom, occupied by one poor barmaid and three young men, gleefully shouting the lines to an old cowboy country song into a microphone. The Sultana is less cheerful, more of a local establishment. Worn-down cattlemen, sundried ranchers, and gravel-gutted desert shepherds crowd around the bar. The music is lonesome, sorrowful, to help these men pity themselves and those around them. But why not? They work hard and often, for little money, and come away at the end of the day with little to show for their hard work. They deserve a little pity when they come home, and in many cases, there is no one waiting for them. They come here, to The World-Famous Sultana Bar, to gather, to gripe, to drink.
For now, that’s all. By tomorrow morning, 9 A.M, the streets will again be crawling with those who have come to hike, tour, explore, and degrade this Mogollon Rim High Desert Ranch and Farm town. They will be loud, cheerful, ignorant of the contempt that so many others here hold for them. They will be disliked, mocked, dreaded, and they will bring to this town the spirit it would not have without them.