If you take I-25 south far enough you will eventually come to the small village of Wagon Mound.

First you will pass other landmarks of the old Santa Fe Trail, such as Huerfano Butte, The Spanish Peaks, and Raton Pass. You will pass over the Canadian River, and travel over long sweeps of prairie.

If, by chance, you decide to exit the freeway and explore a bit, you will find an old frontier town, with empty store fronts huddled below the butte that gave the town its' name. The freeway, speeding along just outside Wagon Mound, has seemingly passed it by.

There is a new school, looking a bit incongruous in such a place. Beyond that, on a sloping shoulder of the butte and commanding a view of the New Mexico prairie stretching off to the east, sit two cemeteries, their gated entrances facing each other, and separated by a wide dirt road.

I first noticed these two parallel graveyards a few months ago, on my way home from visiting my son in Roswell. The sun had set, a full moon was rising, and I was looking for a quiet spot to get some rest. I pulled up on the hill above and slept for a time in the back of my truck. It was very quiet, and very beautiful, with the lights of the highway stretching towards Raton to the east.

Last week Susan and I went back to Roswell to see Dan. We stopped in Wagon Mound so I could show her this sight, which to me seemed quite odd. The one to the south, named the Hillside Cemetery, was neatly trimmed. The one to the north, named the Santa Clara Cemetery, was more unkempt, with long grass and some gravesites marked only with rocks, or wooden crosses. Was this separation a financial thing?

We wandered about, trying to read some of the inscriptions chiseled into slabs of stone. Many children are buried there, some only a few days old. Many of the graves are adorned in the traditional Mexican style, with fences, plastic flowers, and other decorations. Neither cemetery was more than half full.

Still, the question remained. Why are there two, in such a small town?

A few days later and we were headed north again. We stopped at some hot springs outside of Las Vegas to soak, and struck up a conversation with a local fellow who looked to be about our age.

"I know those cemeteries, one is Catholic, the other is Protestant. It is pretty common in New Mexico. I buried a friend there recently."

Later we passed back through Wagon Mound, and stopped again at these two cemeteries. In the north, neatly trimmed one we found a fallen headstone. The words proclaimed the man resting there as the first ordained Protestant Mexican minister in the world. The stone was broken, and his last name was missing.

I have had a problem with organized religions for most of my life. The pomp and circumstance, the rituals, the ordaining of a man made of flesh and bones like me as Holy. A man in Rome instructing millions on how to behave. People in Third World countries have children they can't afford because the Pope says no birth control. It all makes little sense to me.

Protestants and Catholics have fought and argued for centuries. That is no secret. I grew up with stories in the daily papers of bloodshed between the two in Northern Ireland.

And now, on this windswept, peaceful bit of prairie I have found that even here, in this country, the animosity has existed. People who lived and struggled against the same harsh conditions of the frontier elected to have separate places to bury their dead. All because of their beliefs about God.

There are many people who have studied this issue more than me. I am just a middle aged fellow trying to understand his beliefs. I am not sure where my thoughts are leading me, but I am quite sure where they aren't.

If there is a God, and though I believe in a life force, I am not sure about a God, does he exclude one group for the other? Can some be right and some be wrong? Are you damned for eternity if you choose the wrong set of beliefs? Are you damned if someone doesn't proclaim you saved? And who has the right to proclaim these things on others?

What about jihad? If your God says it is okay, what about the commandment; thou shall not kill? What about all the commandments themselves, the words of some people's God, but written by men? They don't matter because that is not your God's words? What about priests molesting children? Where does that fit in?

It seems to me, if there is a thing such as eternal damnation, that molesting a child is a quicker ticket there than failing to be baptized.

What about our President, saying he prays every night for direction? I didn't ask him to do that, and it makes me a little uncomfortable to hear it. Keep our State and your church separate, will you please, George?

Am I making too much of all this? Probably. Let them put in 10, or 15, or 20 separate cemeteries, for crying out loud. Let everyone have their own, complete with a gate and a fence.

Still, if I were to request my earthly remains to be buried on that windswept hillside in New Mexico, where would I be put? I am not Catholic, I am not Protestant. I am just me.

That won't happen, because I would just as soon be cremated. I don't need a gravesite, and I'm not interested in leaving a plaque of stone saying I was alive.

I have often thought of asking for my ashes to be tossed to the wind from the top of Pike's Peak. Now I'm not so sure. Knowing my luck, my dust will settle on I-25, and get ground into the grime by some fool in a Hummer passing some other fool like me going too slow for those around him.

Of course, if there is a strong wind blowing out of the north, maybe a speck of my dust will sail south, over the Sangre de Cristo mountains ( which means "Blood of Christ" by the way), and land on that dusty track of road dividing those two cemeteries way down there in New Mexico, along the old Santa Fe trail, overlooking that vast prairie. And that wouldn't be such a bad thing.