Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The boss editor sent down a message to his minions last week with the tip that it had been 50 years since they cut the ribbon on the Kakawate Road. I drew the short straw and got the assignment of doing a column about the road.
I guess someone who has driven the road all that time should be able to write about it.
First, I want to relate that the road was there before Mayor James Kiker of Portales and the Muleshoe mayor met at the state line to snip the ribbon, it just wasn’t paved (at least on the New Mexico side). At least that is my recollection.
Portales folks thought it was going to be great to have that road paved and it would save time on the trip to Muleshoe or Lubbock. It worked good until a few trucks traveled its course and the chip seal road began to disintegrate.
They didn’t put much base work into the road and they were, after all, building the road upon the sand of Blackwater Draw. There’s a Vacation Bible School song about building things on the sand — they don’t last long.
A truck that needed to avoid the port–of-entry at Texico might have chosen to take the Kakawate instead. I’m not saying my dad drove an over-weight truck across that road, but it might have happened.
The pavement on the road got so bad that even those that regularly used the old dirt road quit using the “Muleshoe Cutoff.” I’m pretty sure it was closed every time we got a rain during that time frame. Road crews would go out and just blade the pavement off the road bed and we would have lots of small dirt road sections that were bladed out.
Eventually the state of New Mexico was persuaded and got the money together to redo the road. More work was done to get down to good ground for the base and real asphalt was added. It was nice and eventually became the only road used traveling from Portales to Muleshoe and beyond.
It was good enough it brought me safely back from Lubbock after my 18th birthday celebration at a disco dance hall. I in my platform shoes wound up as designated driver that night. I’m pretty sure it was the Kakawate that brought me home.
In a time when we usually named roads after the family that lived on it, this road managed to get the Spanish name for peanut or cacahuate. Of course Portalesanos messed up the spelling.
Back after the pavement began to hold well enough we could drive actual highway speeds, you rarely drove it without making road kill out of at least one jackrabbit. Deer were rarely seen. The other day as we drove across NM 202, as the state calls it, I remarked to my wife that there were sure a great number of road-killed deer. A friend said she counted them from the state line and totaled around two dozen.
We’ve definitely had a love/hate relationship with this little road over the years and it got to be so famous that my good friend Andy Mason wrote a song about it and recorded it with banker David Stone. The lyrics invite you to “Come ride that Kakawate road with me.” Ride it when you’re on the go and “it’ll take your heart from Texas into New Mexico.”
Chamber of Commerce lyrics if I do say so myself.
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
