Healing Waters Trail Part I, or, The Tourist

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. 

 Henry Miller

The secret was this: I did not know where the trail was and I was not about to ask. I had a map, but it still embarrassingly eluded me. I had attended board meetings and was writing a history of the trail for future promotion and distribution. But I had not been on it yet, and I could not find it. What kind of place ethnographer was I? My plan was to backtrack from Rotary Park and come up the hill by Carrie Tingley. In this way, I would end up at the start of the trail, and no one would be the wiser. But I had not gotten to it.
 

Last Tuesday I dropped off Emagen at the Apple Tree Learning Center. The school sits a mere 100 feet or so from where the trail begins, according to the working map where it was clearly marked. I knew it was right there. I did my usual visual scan heading back into town for an interview, and lo! there it was. Right where it should have been, next to the brown sign with the white rounded-stick couple carrying walking sticks and backpacks, day-hikers without a doubt. I had driven by that sign for weeks. I had driven by and parked and walked around, but not to the far back corner. Tucked neatly into the far northwest corner of the Veterans Memorial Center, the trail was a thing of tidy beauty, although the entrance, pictured at left with favorite tour guide Sherry Fletcher, who got let in on my secret early. The newly planted pine trees on one side and native Apache Plume on the other creates a great corridor effect as it sends hikers on their merry way. It is hard to spot, set along the far side of the big space and parking lot of the Veterans Memorial  Park. The trailhead will be up soon, and the entrance to the trail given additional sprucing up, so it will not be such a hard-to-find trail entrance. I planned to share my failure to locate the trail as funny 'field' story sometime in the future when my dissertation is finished and I am hiking the trail for pure pleasure, good clean air and exercise. 

My bad-place-ethnographer secret does provide a good illustration about tourists though, and that is where this short post will lead. It is not where-are-we-going and what-are-we-going-to-do-there kind of tourist story, or maybe it is. I am a tourist of sorts, a research tourist, not that the academy might ken to this idea. Part of my work as a 'critical' place scholar is to be aware of the ways that scholars themselves are consumers of places and people in their work. In other words, we act a lot like tourists. Thinking on it, I cannot see a whole lot of systematic differences in means. In ends perhaps, when all of that keen observation and documentation produces something of value. Too often, however, a humanities researcher will leave and leave nothing behind, like a good day hiker. We come, we record, we leave. We generate knowledge about an area, but mostly that knowledge is used by other scholars or lost in the endless vaults of unpublished academic production. Rarely is this knowledge the  kind of thing that locals get something out of directly. This may be changing. The work of scholars, like tourists, gets a potentially global audience these days, and even unpublished works can be disseminated. The same is true of tourists on trips. The slide show in the living room world is gone.

I keep talking about wanting to be useful to my research community. For example, writing a history of the trail I cannot find. Hysterical. But back to tourists, and the place makers who want them to tourist their way on over to whatever attraction is waiting. Tourists, like the world, are changing. There are lots of 'special' kinds of tourist these days. More and more people who are realizing that the great places these kinds of tourists are attracted to, and visit, and spend a lot of money on, cannot be created just for tourists. The spaceport theme park might get the old fashioned and still-plentiful theme-park tourists, but smaller places cannot compete here. Where can they compete? With the special tourists. Who are special tourists, you ask? All tourists are special! You betcha! This is true in so many ways, of course, because tourism is a global industry. It is the holy grail of so many places, because it is the only money, beside government money and grant money that is left in a lot of places. Tourism has replaced the base industries of manufacturing, mining, agriculture, ranching, and other ways people used to make a living. These jobs have migrated with global commodities markets and distant resource extraction. Our service jobs are headed that direction too. As the things we used to make, broadly, with our hands and the things we used to manage, broadly, with our heads have themselves traveled to different lands, what do we have left? The land remains, if we have taken good care of it. And the historic fabric in the environment remains, if we have not torn down to much of it. And the people will be here, if there is a living that can be made. And the fact is that tourism is part of how we make a living the world over. But it cannot be the only way.

http://www.unwto.org/facts/menu.html

I have been reading a lot about tourism. Mostly about the “trip adviser  tourist of modern times, although there are some great seminal works on tourism. I will post my bibliography sometime soon, but in the meantime let me describe the new kid on the tourist scene. She is into heritage tourism or ecotourism and cool funky places (hence the land comment and historic buildings comments above). She is equipped with a smart phone and laptop. She uses these to compare room prices and amenities as she drives through town. She can scan QT tags and link to websites at the push of a button for more information, and experiences exasperation at the lack of Wi Fi in rural places. Most importantly, she wants trips that are not about tourist attractions to look at and places to visit, but attractions and places to experience. She might be looking to bike and hike. She might be looking to dance the night away. She might have kids in tow she wants to educate about history in new and exciting ways, places where the history comes alive. Then again, she might want to experience the great amenities of an affordable place from the comfort of her Wi-Fi enabled RV, where she and the mister live now, following the sun across the states. It is hard market. But here we are.

http://jonkeegan.com/illo.php?id=33

Illustration by John Keegan

June 28, 2000

Time Out New York: 

The Tourist Issue

I want to be in the heritage tourist and historic preservation field someday as scholar and as a professional. I want to promote and enable random acts of art, culture, history and landscape celebration, so I am very interested in these trends. Tourists used to be travelers to places that were not home. Now even at home you can have a stay-cation, or a day-cation. What a grand idea. There is a lot of talk about tourism in the town of Truth or Consequences. It has always been a mainstay of the town. But as a part of something else, namely the healing properties of the water. There was also the kind of under-the-covers tourism ( prostitution and gambling remain ever-popular globally) that had a heyday when the first bust of mining and boom of government reclamation money came to town.  It was only in the 1950s and post-WWII landscape that the rise of leisure and tooling around the region in your cars getting some kicks, in addition to the town's name change, shifted away from the history of hot water.
 
Small towns cannot live on tourist dollars alone, so some other kind of industry must be available. While a new factory would be nice, especially a new eco-friendly manufacturer of  something or the other, the creation of a good place will build towards that kind of relocation. And in the meantime, the kinds of place making going on in town are pretty sharp. The Healing Waters Trail is a very visionary kind of place. It is a new kind of tourist attraction, a kind of place amenity that will please tourists and townies alike. Truth or Consequences is located in a beautiful landscape, and the very small part of the trail I have walked highlights this loveliness. I have only walked the first one hundred yards or so granted, so far, but so far I am delighted. The views are magnificent.  The interpretive signs are bright and fun. The Veterans Memorial Park is a deeply moving place, which I will write about next week in Part II. I will sign off with another cascade of photos, like last week, in the name of getting something published before I hit the road  back down to Truth or Consequences, camera in hand, eagerly tramping around like a tourist who just moved to town.