Santa Fe, Forever (Part I)

The Welcome

Although this trip was planned spontaneously one February afternoon, the subliminal messaging telling us to go to New Mexico had been an undercurrent in our lives for about a year. When I told my coworkers that I was going to NM the first week of April, the most common response was not, “Oh cool!” but rather, “What even is there?” My answer: “Old people. Casinos. Aliens.”

The state is like the underdog of the southwest, rivaled by Arizona and its famous canyon (the Great Canyon? Best Canyon?), the flashier casinos of Nevada, and the snow of Colorado (do people know that it snows in NM too?). Having never been to the southwest for a sufficient amount of time to form complex thoughts about it, I was entirely unprepared for our week there.

From the crowd that boarded the flight, it was obvious that a certain type of person came and went to NM. About half had white hair; women dressed in drop crotch pants and sundresses in muted, earthy tones. Think luxurious tie-dye. The other half were people our own age (that is to say, under 30 and foolish-looking). This group was either very obviously going camping, had septum piercings, or looked like they had at one time fired a gun. More than a handful ticked all three boxes. Most amusingly, about ten passengers I had immediately clocked as being “oddballs” when boarding our flight from Boston to JFK loitered around the same food court vicinity during our four-hour layover and—to nobody’s surprise—crowded gate B24 for Albuquerque right along with us.

Regardless of who all these people were, every one of us deboarded into a desolate Sunport and were immediately split into two groups: locals and vermin. Locals had a ride, everyone else got onto the rental car shuttle. The rental car terminal was staffed by a maximum of three people, and so was functioning at peak efficiency. Upon receiving our car (do you choose the car or does the car choose you? Ford Escape it is, I guess) we drove to the nearest McDonald’s drive thru and lied to our poor Airbnb hostess who had asked if we would be arriving soon. We were in Albuquerque and we would be staying in Glorieta, a village of 511 people and roughly 1.5 hours away by empty, empty highway.

We drove in the dark. I am embarrassed to write that we did scream hysterically when we hit a tumbleweed at 70 mph. I read every billboard aloud to stay awake. After finally arriving at our exit, we drove very slowly and the road quickly became gravel, and the gravel quickly became dirt, and the dirt gave way to hard, red clay. At some point we drove through a narrow underpass, thinking finally! we had arrived! But we continued to drive down dirt road for another 15 minutes until we reached a giant white-sided jackrabbit. As though it was expecting us, it remained eerily calm in our headlights and after hesitating for a moment in front of our stopped vehicle, it lazily bounded up the bend of the road. We both expected it to run off into the underbrush but it didn’t waver from its course, and so we were forced to creep behind it. In the most apt way, it welcomed us to our temporary home.

The next morning, there was frost all of the car but the sun was hot against our faces. We briefly explored our new surroundings. To our surprise, there was a singular, well-worn leather boot, pressed against a large window in the kitchen. I tried to look this up to no avail: it was either some casual superstition, personal décor, or forgotten belonging. There were a few cabins near us (in the farmer’s sense—a mile down the road), but we did not see any cars or people. I suspected that we would not run into anyone for the rest of the week and I was largely correct. Walking trails, conifers, and a variety of dry grasses were littered across the property.

Museum Hill, Pueblo-fication, and Other Observations

We left for Museum Hill that morning. On the drive out we were able to see the many, silent features we had missed the previous night. The underpass was actually part of a railway, and that railway happened to be the BNSF—the same railroad I used to take into Chicago as a child. Along the train tracks were electrical wires that still sported glass insulators. There were a lot of ravens flying about and every other telephone pole had a giant, knotted raven’s nest built around its cross. We were barely over the edge of winter, but the landscape was deeply hued, with striking shades of blue that could only be found in prairie grasses and dessert shrubbery. They contrasted well against the soil, which was thick, burnt red. It almost seems pointless to describe the vastness I felt, driving through the valley into Santa Fe. It was inhumanly large and open. I felt like a hawk. I could see the slightest shake of a tree miles away. At no point did anything feel settled. Houses would appear and disappear. Every other structure was church or lean-to. And then all of a sudden, you were completely enveloped in developed city, fresh black roads, and chain restaurants.

We thoroughly enjoyed the absurdity of the strictly-enforced pueblo revival style. The pueblo-style Chase Bank was sat next to the pueblo-style Chick-fil-A, which was right behind the pueblo-style family dentist, which was down the street from the pueblo-style convenience store. The little brown homes were cute but monotonous. Nearer Museum Hill, outside the city center, the homes got larger (and by that, I mean wider and flatter). The walled yards distinguished themselves through expensive assortments of large, metal garden sculptures. Some sported Native American chiefs and spiritual animals (bears with big, sad eyes), others went for the more subdued look of laughing Buddhas and mandalas, yet others chose the bigger statement of extreme, abstract forms—enormous iron bars welded together to create towering, modern monstrosities.

The mission that morning was to visit the Museum of International Folk Art. This was other people’s mission too, since the parking lot was packed (mostly the cars of retirees, as we later discovered by the groups of white heads inside the galleries). The work in this museum was fantastic in quality, but what truly impressed us was its immense quantity. Imagine a heavily embroidered doll with a beaded costume, and a little, painted face. Now imagine one hundred of these dolls. And they were all made by one woman. And the dolls are all situated in a not-to-scale replica cathedral, which is made from decorated plaster and plastic jewels. And now imagine at least fifty of these large-scale installations, filling up a room from floor to ceiling with tiny dioramas, and tiny furniture, and tiny burning hearts, and tiny Christs nailed to tiny crosses. The most overwhelming part was the lack of museum tags. Everything could be taken in with a wondrous naivete without any regard for century, place, author, or maker (there was a gallery handbook but only the very, very old opted to carry one lamely through the galleries). In the most idealistic sense, this was a global cabinet of curiosities that beautifully showcased the extremes of culture and tradition (both through craftsmanship and subject). To elaborate on this seems a disservice to the collection. Much like I struggle to put the feeling of “vastness” into words, how do I describe the nauseating thrill of encountering a room with ten thousand objects?

As tourists do, we visited the Kakawa chocolate house afterwards, and pointedly failed to order any elixirs, truffles, or chiles (you know, the famous touristy stuff). Instead, we chose the Aztec chili chocolate ice-cream. We would tell people that this was, “Interesting!” and, “Fresh!” but eating a creamy, sweet dairy product only to feel the inside of your mouth burn like you just ate a Taki was, in reality, a little bit off-putting. We made our best attempts at the enormous servings we had received before giving up a quarter of the way through. With enormous shame, we returned our plates and threw away the remains in a dumpster behind the building.

The afternoon was less exciting, as we realized that our main task was to find provisions for dinner. The local Trader Joe’s was like all other Trader Joe’s I had every visited—sporting a small, inconveniently placed parking lot and completely filled with white people. The only catch here was that we were the youngest people in the store by 40 years (I will stop mentioning this, as you can safely assume this is true of most places for the remainder of the trip). At check out, we chatted with our cashier and we confessed that we were visiting NM for the first time. He delightedly told us that, prior to moving here, he had never even been to the state, much less the city. His wife had only previously stayed here for two business days, before the both of them decided to drop everything and everyone they knew in California and move to Santa Fe. And now he was a Trader Joe’s cashier. The land of enchantment! And they never looked back! And they’ll die here! We mused over this brief story on the drive home, thinking this was just a hippie, live-and-let-live couple--but to our surprise, this was a greater denominator in the population than we had thought. Over the course of the trip, we would hear a story eerily similar to that of the cashier’s, of people dropping everything mid-life and moving to the pueblo-fied desert, often knowing no one and having little more than a vague, deep calling.

The Great Outdoors

The next day we drove northwest. Here laid Bandelier National Monument, hidden in the side of the Jemez Mountains. It was quiet and well-kept and a little bit spooky. A paved sidewalk led us straight to the ruins, which were in an amphitheater formation. Many of the dwellings were closed due to public defacement. Although we had arrived within thirty minutes of the park opening, there were already crowds of people and we waited in lines to climb up the stairs into the caves. The other visitors did not look like us. They were outfitted in intense REI gear, with heavy-soled shoes, hiking poles, those backpacks with a tube to drink water out of, and gore-tex sunhats. The cars they arrived in were covered in mud. In contrast, I was wearing Adidas sneakers and a turtleneck sweater, with a pair of dangling silver earrings to match. Between the two of us, we had our phones, car keys, and a singular water bottle. It was not a difficult hike (a light stroll, really), especially with the convenient sidewalk that ran along the canyon wall. There was also little dirt and debris. It was early in the morning and we were in the shade of the mountain; it was sufficiently chilly. We began to climb up the Frey trail, which was a steep 500-ft ascent to the top of the Frijoles Canyon. None of the hikers—although heavily suited for a steep climb—joined us here and we were the only ones both ascending and descending the face of the canyon that morning.

On the drive out of the canyon, we made a detour to the Los Alamos project main gate—the iconic, white guardpost that kept scientists in and spies out (or was it the other way around?). We were excited to visit this landmark having recently watched Oppenheimer (2023). But as we pulled up next to the small structure (conveniently situated on an ample parking lot) we noticed that it had been converted to a pair of standard-issue, side-of-the-highway public restrooms (nothing is sacred anymore). On the inner wall, all the typical tourist-friendly guides and maps had been replaced with pamphlets advertising the “Oppenheimer Film Tour”, with a picture of an awkward Matt Damon dressed in military movie garb, standing next to a statue of his character in downtown Los Alamos. “Walk with Oppenheimer…” the pamphlet read. However, we were sun-burnt and sun-exhausted. We would not be walking with anyone, anywhere. We got back into the Ford Escape and drove home.

AS 5/20/24