Years ago, on our first trip with our children to visit Disneyland, we chose an unusual route through western New Mexico and eastern Arizona in order to make the drive faster. Our plan was to stay overnight in Phoenix, but we made such good time, we drove all the way to the outskirts of Los Angeles before crashing for the night and then heading to Disneyland a day earlier than we had planned.
Along the route, somewhere on the New Mexico-Arizona border northwest of Lordsburg, we stopped to stretch our legs. Our daughter (about six or seven at the time) had decided to keep a log of our trip and to explain where we had made a rest stop, she wrote in her log that we were “In the mittle (sic) of nowhere.”
I thought of this when a recent national news broadcast showed a map identifying three locations around the nation where there might be flash flooding. On the map was Kerrville in the Hill Country area of central Texas, Nashville and, to my great surprise, the town of “Omega” in New Mexico — somewhere near “the mittle of nowhere” where we had stopped years ago.
Having lived virtually all of my life in New Mexico, I had never heard of the town of Omega, so I looked it up on the map.
The TV production crew whhich created the map probably had no idea of what size of a community Omega was, but the National Weather Service listed it as a flood prone spot that day so it was mentioned. The town’s location on the map was not very accurate, but given the recent flooding events in Ruidoso, I suspect the network decided New Mexico should be given its prominence as a place where further disasters could occur.
I never heard another mention of whether flooding had actually occurred in Omega. I’m hoping it received nothing more than a brief heavy downpour in a typical New Mexico monsoon thunderstorm. The closest news outlet to that part of the state would be the El Defensor Chieftain, the local newspaper in Socorro — about 100 miles east. A quick check on the newspaper’s online site had no mention of a recent weather-related catastrophe in the area.
Curious about why a town would be named for the last letter of the Greek alphabet, I looked it up in the reference guide, New Mexico Place Names. Sure enough, it was in the book, but said only that it had a post office established in 1938 and referred me to another entry in the book, “Sweazeville.
I looked up Sweazeville and found this:
“Trading point, four miles east of Quemado, on U.S. 60. Formerly known as Rito, but a Mr. Sweaze or Swaze named it for his family when he established a store and filling station here. Later called Omega.”
The only explanation I can surmise about the name change to Omega is that it was considered to truly be at the very end, “in the mittle of nowhere.”
And if you’re curious, there was no place in New Mexico named “Alpha.”
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