The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

For nine years in the 1980s and ‘90s I lived and worked in Albuquerque, N.M. It’s a big sprawling city with a large Air Force base and a large university.

Traveling north from Albuquerque will take you into some of the most beautiful country in America: an area that includes Santa Fe, Taos and Los Alamos.

In 1994, two years before I moved to Dayton, a guy named Gary Johnson ran for governor of New Mexico as a Republican. I voted for him and he won, though those two facts must surely be unconnected. Right?

Johnson had never run for elected office before; he was just a really rich guy who ran hi...