Soaking it in at Faywood Hot Springs
- Karen Derrick-Davis
- May 17
- 3 min read
My great-grandmother Lillian Bedichek’s story of her marriage is one of my favorites.
Several months after arriving by bicycle (a 1,000-mile trek along the railroad from Eddy, Texas to Deming) in 1909, my great-grandfather, Roy Bedichek filed a homestead claim. For the next year and a half, he wrote desperate love letters to Lillian, trying to convince her to join him.
I have known...that with you life would not drivel down to the mean and commonplace--there's just that spiritual fire about you that elevates and ennobles--and I have in me the stuff that takes fire from it.
And there is between us also an intellectual companionship and we have youth and health and education, physical and mental strength--why we are favored with everything except money, and it is possible to make that.
And this, written from his homestead claim eight miles from Deming.
I have just been outside. There is a perfect half moon and the mountains are misty and blue in the moon light. A strange bird is making a strange fuss off somewhere and now and then a cow bawls. My tent is white, so white -- did you ever notice how white a tent is in the moonlight?
...If you were here tonight -- I enclose some verses I wrote last winter when the same thought occurred to me...
Have you still that infantine fresh look? how I long to see you!
His pleading and playful taunting worked and by September 1910 she boarded a train (alone!) from Waco, Texas to Deming, New Mexico to join him in his homesteading adventure. To sweeten the pot, he’d gone so far as to secure her a position as assistant principal of the Deming School.
On Christmas Eve of the same year, Roy told Lillian that the county clerk would be coming by to issue them a marriage license. She was caught off guard. From her story, The Jumping-off Place, she recounts…
“License?” My eyes must have inquired.
“Yes. We’re getting married in the morning. It’s the only way that we can go away and spend the holidays together,” he laughed. “The Edwards Act, you know, is a federal law devised to encourage marriage…”
“But I thought we were going to wait until June. You said—“ I protested.
“Now, honey, you’re not going to make me homestead that land all by myself, are you? We’re getting married tomorrow morning. Wear your warmest clothes: we’re going up in the mountains to Faywood Springs.”
We were married on Christmas morning in 1910, by an elderly justice of the peace in failing health. Although it was not quite seven o’clock, he was clean-shaven and neat in his Sunday clothes; but, as the train left at seven-thirty, we could not wait for him to put on his shoes, so he married us in his sock feet. His wife called two of the boarders to act as witnesses and herself wept as if Bedi had been an only son. She had never seen us before, never saw us again. Perhaps she was remembering her own wedding.
I always chuckle when my mind’s eye conjures them standing on the train platform hurriedly married by an elderly sock-footed man in a suit with a woman they had never met crying her eyes out on the sidelines.
After the platform wedding, they (along with their faithful black and white terrier, Bo) hopped the train for Faywood Hot Springs.
One hundred and fifteen years later, Faywood mineral waters still fill soaking pools, providing soothing solace and perhaps physical healing to travelers from near and far. For our 37th wedding anniversary (this year), my husband booked us a camping spot. After a two-day drive, we arrived at the desert oasis and rolled into our RV spot. The hotel in which Roy and Lillian stayed, “a two-story U-shaped adobe structure with a frontage of over a hundred feet” was torn down in 1951. The place has changed hands and configurations many times over the years, but the same hot mineral water is bubbling up from the earth. It is a place where relaxing families with young children mingle with old hippies aiming to become one with the universe, even if for a moment. Everyone is here to enjoy the magic of soaking in the desert.
As I walk the paths and soak in the baths, time slows — and the incredibly dark skies remind me of the vast universe and the speck that I am in it. I walk with an openness to glancing the ephemeral shadows of Roy, Lillian and Bo and feel their timeless presence in this desert they so dearly loved.
Nice.