Last Frontier Tales
By Hank Nuwer
I write this week’s column from New Mexico, once my home state, and like Alaska, chosen by God for grandeur.
I’m here on a family vacation, showing my wife Gosia and daughter Natalia the haunts of my past life.
Here, in 1971, I earned a master’s degree in English from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I simultaneously taught composition courses and wrote articles for the Santa Fe New Mexican.
For one New Mexican front-page homicide story. I interviewed the killer before police charged him. He denied killing a fellow mental institution patient when I talked with him.
After graduation, I taught an experimental West Las Vegas High School class in English and drama. I directed performances of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Pinocchio, and the medieval morality play Everyman.
I checked the Internet for the address of favorite theater student and class cutup George Flores. Saddened, I found his obituary. George died at 70 on June 6, 2025.
The obit said this: George was the kind of man who could make anyone laugh, even on the hardest days. His sense of humor was unmatched — quick-witted, warm, and always just what you needed. But even more memorable than his laughter was his heart. He gave freely of his time, his wisdom, and his love.
At the same time I taught at West Las Vegas, I also tutored priests and seminarians from Mexico. Their campus was a castle on a property in Montezuma, New Mexico, that once had been a popular 19th and early 20th century resort. The priests once allowed me to thumb through the hand-colored pages of a Bible many hundreds of years old.
We ate in the dining room and used toilet paper as napkins. “We call it Mexican linen,” a prefect told me.
I made the mistake of telling them I had never eaten a jalapeno pepper. The priests made that my initiation. “Agua, agua!” I cried out to their delight.
I also trained to become a forest firefighter in 1972. I earned my orange qualification card. That summer of 1972 saw no devastating fires. I left Northern New Mexico that year to pursue graduate studies at the University of Nevada.
Seven years later, after a divorce, I came back and moved into a cabin on a cattle and horse ranch in El Porvenir, about 13 miles from Las Vegas.
There, I wrote books and articles for national magazines like GQ, The Nation, and Outside. I was away on story assignments as often as I was home. I headed for South Carolina and a job teaching English and journalism at Clemson University.
Coincidentally, in 1982, United World College (UWC), a preparatory high school, took over the former Mexican seminary and expanded the campus in subsequent years.
Flash forward to December 26, 2025. Gosia and I arrived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, via Alaska Airlines. Meeting us was our daughter Natalia who traveled safely from her job in Kua Lumpur, Malaysia.
In 2011, Gosia was a single mother in Warsaw, Poland. In 2015, Gosia and I met in Poland when she gave me a tour of my grandfather’s Warsaw. I fell in love at first sight. She took convincing.
Thus, I wanted to show my family that castle-turned-school in Montezuma, N.M. on this holiday vacation.
I chose The Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas as our home base. It’s a state and national treasure presiding over a beautiful plaza. In 1971, I was one of the Cinco de Maya speakers addressing a holiday crowd from a gazebo in that plaza.
The Plaza Hotel was in 1971 a bit rundown-at-the-heel. Now, we found it wonderfully restored. The lobby looks as it did in 1882 as wealthy tourists arrived by train and carriages. The rooms all have high ceilings and Southwest trimmings.
The hallways bear photos of famous and legendary Las Vegas figures and visitors. (Nope, I’m not on any walls. Sigh! Must be an oversight by the Plaza Hotel’s management—that’s a joke).
Thus, on a crispy New Mexico morning blessed with a brilliant blue sky, we three visited the castle in Montezuma.
The erection of many campus buildings and residences completely changed the site I once knew so well.
I said a silent prayer for those long-deceased priests and wondered if the seminarians I taught and played soccer with might still be alive in Mexico.
From here we drove eight miles from Montezuma along the winding road to El Porvenir. This was my first time back since I gave my landlord the keys to my cabin in El Porvenir back in 1981.
What greeted my family and me was a nightmare of the worst kind.
Here, where I once lived, worked and climbed to the top of majestic Hermit’s Creek, were the blackened remains of New Mexico’s worst wildfire on record. The conflagration of 2022 destroyed 341,725 acres.
Where I once admired flocks of thirty or more wild turkey were scorched fields. The former tree-rich cliff ridges resembled burnt match sticks as far as the eye could see. I shuddered to think of the wildlife and ranch stock that perished there in 2022.
The one consolation was that many ranches and homes remained standing thanks to the heroics of men and women trained (like me) as smoke-eating firefighters.
At last, as Gosia, Natalia and I departed, we by serendipity drove into the center of a mule deer herd. They watched warily as Gosia snapped their portraits. They did not flee.
At that moment, I experienced the solace of knowing time would change back that scarred landscape into its onetime glory.
If I visited again in a decade, aspen, cottonwood trees and ponderosa pine would once again return El Porvenir to the glorious area I once knew and loved.
I am happy my loved ones could, for a few hours, experience the land of my youth.
Columnist Hank Nuwer is a Fairbanks-based author and UAF adjunct professor. He has a master’s degree in English from New Mexico Highland University and is a member of Phi Kappa Phi national honorary society.