Finding home in a news desert
- Adrian Hedden
- Nov 29, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 20, 2025
By Adrian Hedden
Dec. 24, 2020. Carlsbad, New Mexico
Pungent red chile vapors climbed into my nostrils from the wooden fire, giving off a heat at war with the cold winter air. Even in southeast New Mexico the cold gets in at 6 a.m. on a December morning.
But there we all were frigid, paralyzed statues in a driveway in Carlsbad, New Mexico. 2020.
My soon-to-be wife Cassie forced a smile.
Her sister and brother-in-law Krista and Josh stood behind, tensed by the cold.
My in-laws Charlie and Eileen: seconds from scurrying back to their warm bed next door.
Instead, we looked down into the red chile lava mixed in a pot that could have been buried with the pharaohs of Egypt. The ancient witch’s cauldron hammered out of cast iron is only brought out for Christmas Eve and the spicy, bubbling ooze before us.
The brew of peppers and pork lulls all who pass it through their chops into that relaxed trance only family gatherings bring on when you’re gorged with your favorite foods.
The leather of Cassie’s grandfather Adon Rodriguez’s face stretched into trenches of concentration and anxiety at the responsibility for several upcoming family dinners as he stirred the mixture.
Check out photos of the asado making.
“The best part is to clean the chile out of the pot,” he said, alluding to the practice of sopping up the sauce with a tortilla after the meat is removed.
This was one of several New Mexican customs that were new to me as a transplant from Michigan, relocating from Midwest to Southwest out of curiosity, in search of adventure, the next story and my dream of being a reporter.
It took a move through three states, but I was finally home. I was now a New Mexican, about four years after a road trip that snaked through the most barren parts of America with my father David Hedden.
The drive
Jerry Garcia’s guitar dripped out of the walls of my Jeep Patriot somewhere between Amarillo, Texas and the New Mexico State Line. It was 2016, and we were on the way to the mysterious southeast New Mexico.
The sunrays were lasers stinging my eyes, making my dad’s glasses opaque like two slices of onion as his caterpillar lips parted and Garcia’s words leaked out.
To his right, a sea of white and black. Manure danced defiantly through the vents necessarily cracked by the heat. I had never seen or smelled so many cows in my life.
We’d been on the road for about three days at that point, after leaving my dad’s home in Bristol, Tennessee on the 25-or-so hour’s drive to Carlsbad, New Mexico and my new job at the local paper in a town I’d never heard of.
I spent 26 years without venturing this far west or this far south. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan but was staying with my parents in Tennessee after graduating college in 2015. We set out about four days before my job at the Carlsbad Current-Argus was to start on Dec. 19, 2016, hopeful we’d get there in time.
The Cowboy Corner, a diner somewhere near Oklahoma City was where the emerald trees and grasses officially gave way to the sandpaper and steel-wool brush of the desert. My club sandwich was served with a side of TORTILLA CHIPS.
“Tortilla chips and salsa with a sandwich?!,” I exclaimed into my lunch, beginning to accept I was a universe away from home.
Amusement at the culinary curiosity soon wore thinner than the chips as we drove on. Boredom set in as the cows became an amorphous structure of fur and muscle, reaching for the horizon. It was impossible to tell where bovine flesh ended, and sky began.
Tough love
Although the distance seemed far physically, I’d come ever further mentally. I barely graduated high school in 2007 to become a local punk rock drummer and movie theater cashier in the urban sprawl of southeast Michigan near Detroit. Now I was driving across the country for a newspaper gig to a distant town with a population barely more than 30,000, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.
I did what I had to for a job in a field I’d found my passion in. Reporter jobs weren’t easy to come by, despite a nationwide search, until I landed on the Current-Argus. And it’s only going to get worse as about a third of U.S. newspapers in 2005 would be gone by 2024, according to Axios.
Since then, I’ve hung on dearly as the newsroom bled reporters, salespeople and its own printing press in 2021. I stuck to it with an adhesive created by a passion that started with tough love in a community college newsroom in 2011.
“If you can’t have fun in here, you’re lazy,” stammered a livid Keith Gave, adviser to the Washtenaw Voice.
The fur above Gave’s eyes bunched up in the middle. He crossed his arms, a paper cub threatening to spit black liquid into the air if it was squeezed any harder.
His sport coat was wrinkled almost as much as his face.
His shoes were concrete, blue jeans frozen against the carpet.
His attack stance only rivaled the teapot his face was becoming, a sharp screech seeming to issue from within as the heat rose.
As the managing editor I was also a punching bag he’d lay a good verbal haymaker or two into when stories fell through.
“I don’t think the story is coming in,” I reported pathetically to Gave.
“Well, why the fuck not?!,” Gave bellowed. “We need it for the B-Section!”
It wasn’t the first deadline I’d blow, but it happened less and less often in more than a decade since those early days.
I made that first deadline in Carlsbad, washing up ashore a day before my job started. Since then, Cavern City weaved its way into my identity, giving me the confidence to commit to my wife – and her close-knit family – in marriage on April 30, 2022.
At the wedding I was surrounded again by laughing faces pulling me back to that driveway in 2020.
Warm light drizzled over a wooden floor as rock music swam through the air on the wedding night.
Just like that driveway two years earlier, the family gathered to take part in an ancient tradition.
We are all together. All New Mexican. Even me.
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