Tucumcari Tonight
I had first heard of Tucumcari in 1989. The movie Rain Man was on TV and Tom Cruise - even high school boys back then had a thing for him - making a phone call in the movie, said the words, “I’m in Tucumcari.” For whatever odd reason, that line stuck in my head.
As a teenager growing up in India before the economic reforms, I knew of NY, LA, DC, Chicago, Boston but Tucumcari? What is this place? Where is it? Google Maps would only come a couple of decades later. So, I laid open the world atlas (yes, those things) and tried to locate this funny sounding place but to no avail. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know where to actually look. Anyhow, I concluded with a fair degree of a credence that this was a made up place for the movie. Until decades later, when I had moved to the United States and read about it. My prior assumptions were proven wrong, since this place was real and still existed.
A few months ago, I drove through Tucumcari and even spent a night there. There is little to do here, but well worth a brief stop if one is driving along Route 40 on the New Mexico stretch. Route 66 is a pale shadow of its former glory, one that signified America’s post-war economic recovery and nation-wide optimism. Much of the transformation of the American West can be traced back to this iconic mother road and the many towns that were its proud beacons. Tucumcari is one of the very few remaining towns that still preserves some of that splendor.
