On Visiting Roswell

The second time Heather and I drove across the country together—after I’d finished my MFA and after the both of us had finished summer gigs in California, before we got married or either one of us actually had jobs on the east coast that we were moving back to, I was excited to see Roswell.

My first cross country drive, I’d seen friends and crossed off states in an ongoing quest to see all fifty. I picked a landmark or two to hit each day and, in so doing, went on a leisurely two week quest across America. This second pass through wasn’t so different, but whereas the first time had been more northerly, concentrated on seeing Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone before hitting Oregon, this was a more southerly route.

We’d hit beautiful spots like Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, and found better food in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Lubbock, Texas. But Roswell represented a curiosity—exactly the kind of place I’d always been intrigued to see in my younger years, but never knew if I would, because growing up in Upstate New York, New Mexico felt as though it might as well have been another planet.

I’m not sure which came first: my fascination with aliens or The X-Files, but I knew that these overlapping interests synergized and pushed one another. I never studied extraterrestrial encounters in any meaningful way, but there was a period as adolescence gave way to my teenage years when the adventures of Scully and Mulder represented my favorite television.

Along the cross country drive, Heather and I had budgeted an afternoon into an overnight stay in Roswell, prepared for some mix of kitsch, oddball characters, and maybe an encounter with sights or information that genuinely felt like mystery.

We were underwhelmed.

It’s not that what we came upon in Roswell was a surprise. If anything, the museum chock full of detailed documentation about UFO reports and alien sightings, paired with information on space travel was a more credible representation of the town and its points of interest than I might have anticipated. The gift shops and the pseud-museum with over-sized alien statues and figurines ready for tourists’ selfies serviced the kind of kitsch I would have expected.

But that was it.

Aside from the occasional sign, and a McDonald’s with a flying saucer protruding from its side (too tasteful and subtle to even be certain that’s what it was had we not read about it before coming), it was just a small city where we’d booked a barebones hotel room. I felt a little bit poorly about my fervor for the stop and insistence that we get the hotel to be certain we could experience Roswell. It was a fun enough stop for an afternoon, but that was ample time to see everything of interest.

The road was wearing on us both. We weren’t really arguing per se, but Heather’s insistence that one of our tires looked under-inflated was silly to me, and all I could muster was a roll of the eyes when she pulled over after we gassed up, to put air in it.

That’s when we hit the curb.

There was a jagged outcropping of cement curb that, to be fair, it really was difficult to see, that bumped our front driver’s side tire, instantly crumpling it.

It was after hours. Too late to hit a garage or tire shop. The car would have to wait until morning, prolonging our stay in Roswell.

Afterward, we hypothesized that aliens sabotaged the tire—after the two of us goofily posed for all of those selfies that turned alien statues into the stuff of comedy, and after we’d mutually expressed our disappointment in Roswell as an attraction, might a flat tire be our comeuppance?

That the mechanic who worked on the car the next day would botch the new tire installation—leaving us stranded between quiet towns, then continuing down the highway slowly on a spare before shifting plans to spend the night in Lubbock and get the tire worked on again—it’s the kind of bad luck that, in the end, I felt compelled to chock up to the stuff of comedy. It was an annoyance, and we missed seeing friends we had intended to visit deeper into Texas, but no one got hurt and we didn’t see our journey meaningfully held up otherwise.

It’s telling that my fondest memories from Roswell, though, didn’t come from any wacky characters, odd sightings, or joy found in the tourist attractions. On the contrary, the highlight of the visit came back to the dingy hotel room where we sat side by side in bed to watch two or three episodes of Stranger Things on a laptop. The first season had dropped that summer, and its monster mystery, good humor, and intrigue probably embodied what I was hoping for from Roswell better than the city itself. We surrendered ourselves to scrappy kids, a Demogorgon, and Winona Ryder. Add in some good company, and the quiet night in worked out just fine.