Ode to Pools Past: Picacho Hills

Picacho Hills pool was the centerpiece at the club house for a relatively affluent golf course community in southern New Mexico. Such a pretentious recreational neighborhood seemed painfully out of place amid the desolate poverty of the dust-choked Spanish bad lands. Overlooking the Organ mountains from the West Mesa across the Chihuahuan Desert, the pool was located on the same heat-soaked stretch of brittle highway as another long-time favorite at an old, dilapidated water slide park. Any sun-dazed desperado could tell that Picacho Hills was a dying dream, a shriveling desert oasis even in its hey day. After all, Don Juan de Oñate himself had failed to find his cities of gold along the jornada del muerto. You think some pendejo with a golf course was gonna realize his gilt-edged dream here?

Lewcifer did rock back around 1989

Like the desperate region surrounding it, Picacho Hills had a long and violent skate history. Many, many veteranos skated here over its quarter-century run as one of the gold standards of pooldom in the area. In fact, the pool was a veritable goldmine--the lost Dutchman come to life--where only broken desert dreams and the dissipated haze of hopeless mirages once reigned. A posse of Pat Garretts couldn't keep Billy the Kid's gang of bullet-scarred banditos from blazing away at its shimmering walls. Victorio, Taza, Cochise and Geronimo himself were said to have skated here, too, trading their proud Appaloosas for plied maple and a few stout swigs of King Cobra.

Although this oasis rarely held water, the self-proclaimed upholders of law and order--such a foreign concept in this bleak borderland--guarded its gates with the utmost vigilance. Pitched battles determined who controlled this wind-blown desert town and, in the end, the lawless skate-toting men of fortune undid the moralizing missionaries, burying their crosses in the dusty drain beneath a solemn
death box. The law of the West ruled here: only the most daring outlaws survived.

How many riders' blood stained Picacho Hills' mythic walls? None can accurately say. Even amidst the very bowels of Western folklore, the pool's legend manages to loom tall, shading even the rattlesnake-lined banks of the trickling Río Grande. Its lore contains all the mythic elements: rich and poor, good and evil, though, like the best pistol-blazing oater, the lines delineating them are too blurred, too compromised to make much difference.

Tiger looks for lawmen while hanging on to a G carve

There were no morals here; only lawless, godless men content to find their fortunes in fool's gold. They'd scout the pool like thirst-maddened zopilotes and take their chances even if the scarecrows were still posted. After an evening's shootout at this parched arroyo they'd clink frothy cervezas under a silver-lit moon until they passed contentedly into a demon stupor, like dusty skeletons still clinging to their X-branded bottles.

But make no mistake about it, Picacho Hills was no myth. It may have been the fabled lost mine, forgotten city, and a treasure trove of glinted jewels all rolled into one, but the pool was as real as the sting of one hundred scorpions. And the riders were real, too. Their legends, like the pool's itself, remain etched somehow in the blowing desert sand. And it's rumored that on the darkest and loneliest of desert nights, when even the most cunning coyotes have given up their shrill yowl, if one listens closely enough, he can still make out the distant rumbling of wild cowboys and Indians on wooden horses, carving their own legends into the bullet-riddled walls of Picacho Hills.