King of the Road - August 2009
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The Home Stretch
Find inspiration in the Wyeth-Hurd family's Hondo Valley
Story and Photography by Lesley S. King
As I watch my garage door close, I’m a little teary-eyed. I’ve barely slept the past two nights—which is how I start most trips. That may seem odd for a travel writer, but it’s true: I have to drag myself away from home. Once on the road, however, my sense of adventure emerges. I begin to feel it grow as my mother and I head to the Hondo Valley, on U.S. 70, about 195 miles southeast of Albuquerque.
We’ll be staying in San Patricio, in the home of the late artists Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth. As we enter the valley, I see why it has inspired so much creativity in the past and still does today: Cottonwoods arch over the Río Ruidoso and meadows sprawl beyond, dotted with old, gnarled fruit trees. Framing the scene are the golden hills that Hurd made famous in his paintings.
Before we arrive at the Wyeth House, we turn off U.S. 70 and cruise along the dirt roads of San Patricio, a town of about 560 residents. We pass a long, pitched-roof adobe, once a dance hall, and come to the 1875 San Patricio Church, a narrow structure with a steepled bell tower. Stopping at the post office, we meet postmistress Priscilla Chavez, who grew up here in the valley among some 2,000 fruit trees that her ancestors planted in the 19th century. As a child, she worked in the orchards. “We picked apples and sold them from stands,” she says. The area is still renowned for its fruit, with vendors setting up along the roads to sell cherries, pears, and apples.
DAY-TRIP TIPS Where to Stay & Dine: Where to Stay: Where to Shop: Hurd-La Rinconada Gallery |
To the east, in Hondo, a village of about 250, we encounter yet more history. At the Hondo Iris Farm & Gallery, Alice Seely shows us through a place with thick adobe walls and viga ceilings. “In the late 1800s, it was a shepherd’s home,” she says. Today it’s her gallery, where she shows her own paintings, textiles, and jewelry. The art, which she sells in some 360 shops around the country, boasts bold designs in which Seely has woven together the Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo threads of her ancestry. She leads us outside to wander along an acequia that feeds some 400 irises in a park-like setting where visitors enjoy wandering the fields and picnicking near the fishpond. The fields are especially lovely each May, when the irises are in full bloom.
Saying goodbye to Seely, we head out again toward “home.” With its broad meadows and polo field, the Hurd Sentinel Ranch, which has five casitas to rent, including the Wyeth House, reminds me of where I grew up in northern New Mexico. But as nostalgia tries to overtake me, I remember that I’ve lived in many places—from a room in the apartment of a señora in Madrid, Spain, to officers’ quarters on a U.S. Army base in Korea—and have managed to make each of them “home.”
We check in at the Hurd–La Rinconada Gallery. This elegant adobe structure acts as the front desk for the ranch’s visitors, while the gallery itself offers a rich passage through the lives of a family of talented artists. I pause before an atmospheric landscape by N.C. Wyeth, best known as an illustrator for his work in the early 20th century that dramatized the Old West and depicted scenes from such adventure stories as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. “He was unbelievably skilled in rendering light,” says his grandson Michael Hurd, who joins me. With large brown eyes and a mischievous smile, Hurd has become a notable artist himself—he was named New Mexico Magazine’s distinguished calendar artist in 1995—realistically capturing, in oils and watercolors, the poetry of southern New Mexico’s landscapes.
As he guides me through the gallery, Hurd shares memories of his parents. “My mother had an unerring sense of the human core—not only the look, but the character and personality,” he says as we gaze at a portrait, painted by Henriette Wyeth, that captures a child’s curious nature. “My father favored egg tempera paint because he thought it conveyed New Mexico’s colors well,” Hurd adds as we study a landscape by his father, Peter Hurd, that depicts those memorable golden hills. The love story of Peter and Henriette is a sweet one: He, originally from Roswell, met her while apprenticing in Pennsylvania with her father, N.C. Wyeth. The budding artists fell in love, married, and returned to Peter’s homeland.
Leaving Michael Hurd and the gallery, my mother and I make our way along a dirt road and splash through the Río Ruidoso to the Wyeth House, where Henriette and Peter painted and where Michael grew up. The pink adobe structure, with a roof of red Mexican tile, has an Old World quality, and inside I find a visual feast of the family’s paintings and prints. Amid wood floors and early American antiques, I unpack the things I always bring along on trips: my pillow, my iPod, and a linen handkerchief. The comfort of their familiarity, and the kindness of the people we’ve met, suddenly make this place home.
We end the day at the historic Tinnie Silver Dollar, built in the 1870s. Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth used to enjoy time here with Robert O. Anderson, an oilman and rancher, who in 1959 purchased the building and turned it into a steakhouse. Recently, the Cattle Baron Restaurant Corporation restored it to its former charm—complete with a bell tower, stained-glass windows, and a rambling veranda. As I savor a thick filet, I feel completely at ease in the Hondo Valley, knowing that, really, I never have to leave home at all. Home is wherever I am right now.
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"King of the Road" columnist Lesley S. King visits another little-known community in New Mexico each month.
