Off The Grid in New Mexico

By necessity, Madrid stitched itself a grassroots safety net: There’s a community garden, a weekly food bank at the volunteer firehouse and fundraisers to help aging Madroids on hard times. Nafey chairs the town’s annual “He/She Bang,” a cross-dressing extravaganza to raise cash for local residents’ emergency medical bills.

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Ruth Aber, 63, a podiatrist who quit her practice in Connecticut 16 years ago and opened the art gallery Mostly Madrid, says this place is an “intentional community.”

“The purpose of Madrid is to create a community where there is no sense of judgment,” she says. “Vietnam veterans and artists are not two groups who should have been able to sit at the same table. Here, they had no choice.”

Madrid’s war vets tend to disappear when the crowds arrive, and many live well outside of town. But they too rely on the support of the greater community. “Every third Tuesday of the month, most of the veterans who live up in the hills around town get together and have lunch,” says James, a former submarine sailor who prefers not to give his last name. “They just talk and eat and make sure everyone’s still alive.”

Pete Bassin, better known as “Pistol Pete” (because, as he explains unnecessarily, “I always carry a pistol”), is at 77 among the oldest of these rugged individualists. As he tells it, his route to Madrid was circuitous: a childhood on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, a stint in the Army, a career as a stage designer in San Francisco. In 1989 he moved to this spread just outside of Madrid, and five heart attacks and a broken neck (a horse threw him) later he’s still here, living on Social Security in a dirt-floor cabin with a two-tiered interior that resembles an Old West stage set.

Why live out here? Sitting on a hay bale in a shed, Pistol Pete barks. “I’m not gonna die in a hospital! Screw it! I’ll die right here. Or out there. Or if I’m really lucky, I’ll end up in a gunfight.”

The barely marked dirt roads in and around Madrid lend themselves to lots of wrong turns. But if you’re lucky, one of those turns will take you up to the cemetery, on a mesa overlooking town. It’s the place Madroids expect to end up, a final declaration of their independence—and sometimes their interdependence.

Adobe architecture is standard among longtime residents and the newer, more affluent retirees.

Jen Judge

Les Reasonover shares a story: “Shortly after I came here, this one fellow died. He was a drifter, kind of a loner. Nobody really liked the old cuss. He never had anything good to say. The county was gonna bury him in an unmarked grave, but around town we started talking, and we said, ‘Well, we didn’t like him, but he was a Madroid.’ He deserved to be buried in our cemetery.”

A team of guys trudged up the hill with shovels and pickaxes to hack out a grave in the rocky soil. It took days. Meanwhile, someone built a coffin. An artist painted a likeness of the fellow on the lid.

“We buried him up there on the mesa,” Reasonover says. “And I thought, If Madroids treat someone they don’t particularly care for like that, what will they do for people they do like?”

Cactus Slim and the Goat Heads finish up their set, and the patrons start to spill out into the star-strewn night.

“That’s what I like about Madroids,” he says. “We’re all here because we’re not all there.”