Learn more about Tim Amsden's 'Love Letter to Ramah'

Small towns are filled with their own individual qualities.

A new book reveals the striking character of the small New Mexico community of Ramah.

The book is titled “Love Letter to Ramah: Living Beside New Mexico’s Trail of the Ancients.”

A strong sense of place: Author Tim Amsden writes a 'Love Letter to Ramah'

The author is Tim Amsden, who lived in Ramah with his wife, Lucia, for about 20 years. They had been longtime residents of Kansas City, Kansas, before moving to Ramah, a town on New Mexico State Highway 53, down the road from El Morro National Monument. Ramah is in part bordered by Zuni Pueblo, the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation and the Cibola National Forest.

The Amsdens built a home off of gravel and dirt roads four miles outside of town, moving there in 1998 without doing much due diligence on what to expect. They didn’t know about the politics of the homeowners association nor about how bad roads get during rainstorms, the author said.

They didn’t regret their decision to relocate. Indeed, as Amsden put it, “It was the best thing that happened to us.”

Amsden’s writing — more like chatting — rambles, though it’s lucid and inviting. Topics sometimes quickly shift after one paragraph or two.

Some of the more interesting topics are recollections about being neighborly, making friends, learning families’ histories, and ranging into descriptions of the area’s geology, weather and topography. Readers are drawn to Amsden’s awe of the night sky.

In one chapter, we learn about two locals, Paul and Dorn, both of whom independently make caskets. Dorn was able to make his own casket “because he died slowly … He was buried in it beneath a stone monument” that he himself had made. Before the burial there was a proper send-off for Dorn with barbecue, beer, music and friends.

Amsden writes that several other friends and neighbors had similar send-offs. And for years before their passing, locals cared for them, making sure they had food and transportation to medical appointments in Gallup and Albuquerque.

In the chapter “Horses Coming Home,” Amsden writes about wild horses, and in particular the Spanish mustang in the Southwest. That segues to a brief profile of Joty, an Amsden neighbor “who so loved mustangs that he developed a herd of them as genetically close as he could to those brought over centuries ago.”

An early chapter talks about the creative spirit of many of Ramah’s residents. That spirit isn’t limited to making music or art but extends to the neighbors who might be raising bees or gardening organically or stacking cairns.

The book says Ramah is “home to a Mormon church, a post office, one restaurant, and a couple of stores.” Down the road in El Morro is the Old School Gallery, an art gallery and concert venue that also serves as the base of El Morro Area Arts Council.

Another chapter, “Fire and Ice,” discusses New Mexico as the center of the largest, youngest and most diverse number of volcanoes in North America. Who knew?

In El Malpais National Monument, east from Ramah on N.M. 53, are volcanic structures called lava tubes. After the outside of the tube has cooled and hardened, it leaves behind long, dark tunnels. Amsden says the tunnels are a major roost for bats.

Some chapters take readers far beyond Ramah in the 21st century. It offers a taste of New Mexico’s multicultural history — the Shalako and the Santo Niño ceremonies at Zuni Pueblo, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, a brief history of the Navajo presence, references to the Penitente brotherhood and a visit with an Abiquiú resident, who is a descendant of the Genízaros. Genízaros, Amsden writes, were mostly Plains Indians captured several centuries ago by other Plains tribes and sold to Spaniards, who took them as indentured servants.

The 79-year-old Amsden believes New Mexico in general has a strong sense of place, and the Ramah area “fairly exudes it.”

Amsden, a native of Wichita, Kansas, was a lawyer with the Kansas City regional office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for many years. His wife Lucia was a family therapist. Both were looking for new experiences to replace “the old and the familiar” when they decided to head for Ramah. Maybe it was not unlike the way fellow Kansan Dorothy Gale felt about finding the alternate world of Oz.

The Amsdens have been living in Albuquerque for the last four years.