by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
The story I am about to write is a strange one, although it is set in and around a seemingly ordinary place.
Most of its details come from interviews with the main subjects' family members.
In 1932, husband and wife Raymond and Vera Curtis moved to Tijeras Canyon - the mountainous, boulder-choked canyon just east of Albuquerque - leased an empty, stone building alongside Route 66 and turned it into a Conoco filling station they named the Oasis.
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Raymond had just finished serving about 15 years in a Colorado prison for bank fraud - perhaps as the scapegoat for two senior bank officials - and he and Vera were anxious to start over someplace new.
That someplace was the Oasis, and for 35 years - from 1932 to 1967 - the story of that little building was the simple saga of a family-owned gas station. It was a place to buy gas or to pick up a sandwich - a nice, uneventful, little place.
In 1967, however, startlingly bad things began happening around the station, and they didn't stop until almost everything about the world of the Oasis had been changed forever.
In 1967, on a black night choked with rain, Raymond and Vera's adult daughter Jan was crossing Route 66 - from the village of Tijeras to her home behind the Oasis - when an 18-wheel semi-truck slammed into her from out of the darkness. It put Jan into a coma lasting more than six months and a more than five-year hospitalization.
During that time, news came to the Curtis family that a freeway was going to be built through Tijeras Canyon - Interstate 40 - directly through the Oasis.
"New highway comes to our door," Raymond Curtis wrote in a late-1960s Christmas card. "So guess we are finished."
Raymond and Vera abandoned the Oasis, and the vacated building may have been used briefly as a whorehouse before being bulldozed into an arroyo, paved over and turned into just another stretch of a six-lane interstate.
Around that same time - after 1968 - Jan's mother, Vera, died tragically. Vera had consulted the world-famous Mayo Clinic about ways to lose weight, and they had told her to eat a small piece of candy before every meal and smoke cigarettes. One night, while Vera was smoking in bed in her home beside the freeway - beside where the Oasis used to be - she fell asleep. Her lit cigarette caught the house on fire, and Vera burnt to death where she slept.
Around 1972, after five years of hospitalization, Jan finally came home. Her father still had a small house back behind where the Oasis had been, but that was all. Jan's brain was permanently damaged from the accident. Her mother was burnt alive. Her father was left alone. The business that was her family's life was gone. The canyon that had been her home was flooded with traffic. To make matters worse, rumors proliferated that stolen silver, coins from Colorado and expensive diamonds owned by her mother were somewhere in the ashes of the old house, and treasure hunters from all around came to ransack what was left.
Today, the Oasis is gone - just a slow curve west of the freeway's exit to the village of Tijeras - but Jan is still alive and still troubled by memory problems.
When she thinks about the Oasis, or of how everything went so wrong - so bizarrely, horribly wrong - she inevitably grows melancholy.
During one such reverie she said, "It was so beautiful up there, and then - you know?"
