I got a room in the Timberline Motel, had a stroll around the town and a creditable meal at the Golden Burro Cafe-not the greatest food in the world, or even possibly in Leadville, but at six dollars for soup, salad, chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, coffee and pie, who's bitching?-followed by a moonlight stroll back to the motel, a hot shower and a little TV. If only life could always be so simple and serene. I was asleep by ten, dreaming happy dreams in which I manfully dealt with pouncing bobcats, swaying wooden bridges and windshields full of sticky insects. The heroine even let me see her with her clothes off. It was a night to remember.
CHAPTER 22
IN THE MORNING, the weatherman on the TV said that a 'frunnal system' was about to dump many inches of snow on the Rockies. This seemed to please him a lot. You could see it in his twinkling eyes. His map showed a band of unpleasantness sitting like a curse over almost the whole of the West. Roads would be shut, he said, a hint of grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, and travel advisories would be issued. Why are television weathermen always so malicious? Even when they are trying to be sincere, you can see that it's a front-that just under the surface there lurks a person who spent his childhood pulling the wings off insects and snickering whenever another child fell under the wheels of a passing vehicle.
Abruptly, I decided to head south for the arid mountains of New Mexico, over which the weather map showed nothing much in particular happening. I had a niece at a small, exclusive college in Santa Fe whom I hadn't seen for a long time and I was sure she would be delighted for all her friends on campus to witness a slobby, overweight man pull up in a cheap, dusty car, leap out and embrace her, so I decided to drive straight there.
I headed south on US 285, which runs along the line of the Continental Divide. All around me was the most incredible natural beauty, but the landscape was constantly blemished by human intrusions-ugly trailer parks, untidy homesteads, even junkyards. Every town was mostly a collection of fast-food places and gas stations, and all along the road for many miles stood signs the size of barns saying, CAMPGROUND, MOTEL, RAFTING.
The farther south I went the more barren the landscape grew, and after a while the signs disappeared. Beyond Saguache the wide plain between the mountains became a sweep of purple sage, interspersed with dead brown earth. Here and there a field of green had been snatched from the scrub with the aid of massive wheeled water sprinklers. In the middle of these oases would stand a neat farmhouse. But otherwise the landscape between the distant mountain ranges was as featureless as a dried seabed. Between Saguache and Monte Vista lies one of the ten or twelve longest stretches of straight road in America: almost forty miles without a single bend or kink. That may not sound such a lot on paper, but it feels endless on the road. There is nothing like a highway stretching off to an ever-receding vanishing point to make you feel as if you are going nowhere. At Monte Vista, the road takes a left turn-this makes you perk up and grip the wheel-and then there is another twenty-mile stretch as straight as a ruler's edge. And so it goes. Two or three times in an hour you zip through a dusty little town-a gas station, three houses, one tree, a dog-or encounter a fractional bend in the road which requires you to move the steering wheel an inch to the right or left for two seconds, and that's your excitement for the hour. The rest of the time you don't move a muscle. Your buttocks grow numb and begin to feel as if they belong to another person.
In the early afternoon I crossed over into New Mexico-one of the high points of the day-and sighed at the discovery that it was just as unstimulating as Colorado had been. I switched on the radio. I was so far from anywhere that I could pick up only scattered stations, and those were all Spanish-speaking ones playing that kind of aye-yi-yi Mexican music that's always sung by strolling musicians with droopy mustaches and big sombreros in the sort of restaurants where high-school teachers take their wives for their thirtieth wedding anniversaries-the sort of places where they like to set your food alight to impress you. It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer. There would then be a break for an advertisement, read by a man who sounded even more urgent and excited-he clearly was having his nuts repeatedly slammed in a drawer-and then there would be another song. Or rather, it would be the same song again, as far as I could tell. That is the unfortunate thing about Mexican musicians.
They seem to know only one tune. This may explain why they have difficulty finding work anywhere other than at second-rate restaurants.
At a hamlet called Tres Piedras-almost every place in New Mexico has a Spanish name-I took Highway 64 to Taos, and things began to improve. The hills grew darker and the sage became denser and lusher. Everyone always talks about the sky around Taos, and it is astonishing. I had never seen a sky so vivid and blue, so liquid. The air in this part of the desert is so clear you can sometimes see 180 miles, or so my guidebook said. In any case, you can certainly see why Taos has always attracted artists and writers-or at least you can until you get to Taos itself. I had expected it to be a sweet little artists' colony, full of people with smocks and easels, and it was just a tourist trap, with slowmoving traffic and stores selling ugly Indian pottery and big silver belt buckles and postcards. There were a couple of interesting galleries, but mostly it was hot and dusty and full of silver-haired hippies. It was mildly amusing to see that hippies still existedindeed were now grandparents-but it was scarcely worth the bother of getting there. So I drove on to Santa Fe, fearful that it would be much the same. But it was not. In fact, it was quite beautiful, and I was instantly charmed.
The first nice thing about Santa Fe is that it has trees. It has trees and grass and shade and cool plazas full of flowers and plants and the soothing burble of running water. After days of driving across the barren wastes of the West this is a treat beyond dimension. The air is warm and clean and the reddish Sangre de Cristo mountains at the city's back are just sensational, especially at sunset when they simply glow, as if lit from within, like jack-o'- lanterns. The town itself is just too rich and pretty for words. It is the oldest continuously inhabited city in America- it was founded in 16i0, a decade before the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth-and takes great pride in its age.
Everything in Santa Fe, and I mean everything, is made out of adobe. There's an adobe Woolworth's, an adobe multistory parking lot, an adobe six-story hotel. When you pass your first adobe gas station and adobe supermarket, you think, 'Hey, let's get out of here,' but then you realize that it isn't something laid on for the tourists. Adobe is simply the indigenous building material, and using it everywhere gives the town a uniformity of appearance few other places achieve. Besides, Santa Fe is filthy rich, so everything is done tastefully and well.
I drove up into the hills looking for St. John's College, where my niece was a student. It was four in the afternoon and the streets were full of long shadows. The sun was settling onto the mountains and the adobe houses on every hillside were lit with a rich orange-brown glow. St. John's is a small college perched high up in the hills, with the finest view in town, looking down over Santa Fe and the rolling mountains beyond. It has only 300 students on its sleepy campus, but my niece, on this fine spring afternoon, was not among them. No one knew where she was, but everyone promised to let her know that a slobby, overweight person with dusty shoes and tropical armpits had come looking for her and would call back in the morning.
I went back into town, got a room, had a deep, hot bath, changed into clean clothes and spent the evening shambling happily around the tranquil streets of downtown Santa Fe, gazing admiringly at the window displays in the expensive galleries and boutiques, savoring the warm evening air, and disconcerting people in the more exclusive restaurants by pressing my face up against the windows and looking critically at their food. The heart of Santa Fe is the Plaza, a Spanish-style square with white benches and a tall obelisk commemorating the battle of Valverde, whatever that was. On the base was an engraved inscription in which February had been misspelled as Febuary; this pleased me very much. Another pleasing thing about the Plaza was a place on the corner called the Ore House. Downstairs it is a restaurant, but upstairs there is a bar with an open porch where you can sitwhere indeed I did sit-for many tranquil hours drinking beers brought to your table by a pleasant waitress with a nice
