NEW MEXICO DIARY – K
I felt invigorated. I had driven about 150 miles through desert and mountain, crossing high plateaus and sandy badlands. I had hiked to the top of the slot canyon at the Tent Rocks National Monument, and, then, above to the overlook on the bluff, a vertical gain of 630 feet including one four-foot high step that I had surmounted by wriggling forward on my belly – this hike had occurred at an altitude of 7500 feet in bright sun shine. I had returned to Santa Fe safely, my rental car undented, and it was still early enough in the afternoon to tour the State art museum near the downtown plaza – a short walk from our hotel, to be sure, but one complicated by a wrong turn that I took on a side streets, motivated, perhaps, by a desire to look into a store window or traipse pass a particularly colorful beggar.
Although New Mexico has been home to several artists of indisputable greatness, Bruce Nauman and Agnes Martin, the State’s official art museum is a miserable affair – a few gloomy galleries featuring kitsch landscapes of the Taos School, a scowling Indian courtesy of Fritz Scholder, and some brooding photographs of cliff dwellings interesting only for their subject matter. The dismal quality of the collection seemed some kind of joke – sub-Remington Western Art, not even any interesting pots or ceramic wares, no Kewa or Navajo textiles, nothing at all on which to cast an eye for more than an instant before moving on to the next canyon at sunset or pueblo in the snow. Needless to say, the place was empty and the air had the sickly sweet odor of decomposing art, a scent that is midway between rancid fat and funeral flowers gone bad.
Julie immediately recognized that the museum was worthless, excused herself from the gallery where I was dutifully looking at each and every objet d’ art, and headed for the gift shop. In an airless upper room, I found myself peering at a very strange photograph, an old albumen or silver print, no longer nor wider than my thumb. A caption said that the picture had been made by A. F. Daniels in January 1875. The image showed a woman seated in a throne-like wooden chair, turned three-quarters profile to the lens. For some inexplicable reason, a large white bird, sleek as a sculpture by Brancusi was perched atop her head. The bird was a little blurred, indistinct because of the long exposure required to make the print and, therefore, smoothed-out the way old photographs abstract flowing water to a pale, ethereal looking haze, a sort of ghostly ectoplasm. But despite the bird seeming very slightly out of focus, I could see the little winged being’s beady eye and, even, perhaps imagine it to be blood-red. The unsettling thing about this photograph was that the woman did not seem to be enjoying the picture-taking – there was nothing of a lark about the silver print. To the contrary, the woman seemed to wear the bird upright on her head as a badge of shame or dishonor. The woman was unsmiling with thin, slightly crooked lips and her eyes were deeply sunken into the pale, frozen mask of her face – she had the haggard look of a fresh corpse and, indeed, there was something eerie about her rigid pose, something uncanny and unsettling.
As I studied the picture, I began to sweat. More than sweat, I became diaphoretic – my vision swam and the picture receded into a purplish haze and, then, I thought that it was possible that I was about to faint, that something had seized me and was going cast me down. I edged away from the picture and sat down on a cold bench in the empty gallery. It was true that I had eaten nothing, with the exception of a bag of cheese curls, all day and that I had drank two 16 ounce bottles of water, then, purchased another 16 ounces of Diet Mountain Dew from the Indian service station at Pojoaque Pueblo, and so, perhaps, this was why I was feeling so odd, so uneasy on my feet and so out-of-balance. I was drenched with sweat, soaking in it, a strange experience to be wet on all surfaces of my body.
After a couple minutes, I decided that I didn’t want to die in the stagnant air of the art museum and that, if possible, I would perish on the street below, possibly in front of the stoic Indian vendors sitting with their backs to the Palace of Governors watching over their wares of turquoise and silver earrings. I made my way to the rather florid stairway, a marble affair grossly oversized for the building, got to the bottom and, then, found Julie in the Gift Shop. The Gift Shop was crammed with interesting items for sale and Julie was carefully studying the merchandise. I told her that I would go outside and sit down on a bench and, so, I went outdoors where it was cooler and a fine, autumnal wind was stirring but I couldn’t find any bench on which to rest and so I stepped into the shade of the art museum, into the niche of a door that was not open to the public and leaned on the wall there waiting for Julie to come out of the Museum.
When Julie appeared, we walked down the street. The sun was toiling overhead in the clear, luminous New Mexico sky and its light affronted me – I told Julie that I felt like I was about to faint and, so, we crossed a street in the middle of the block to get out of the sun. "You have to sit down somewhere," she said. We walked halfway down Burro Alley and I saw a bar that was open. "We’ll go in here," I said.
The bar was empty. "You need to get something to eat and a glass of water," Julie said. "I’m not sure," I replied, salt sweat was pouring off my head onto my nose and cheeks.
I ordered a tap beer and we sat outside, under the darkening sky, in a tiny courtyard that looked through some wrought iron gates into Burro Alley. A wonderfully expressive and ancient Spanish door was inset in a wall leading to God knows where. The beer went down smoothly and I felt faintly electric, my senses magnified. The sensation was not altogether unpleasant. I thought that I might have another beer, but the price had been absurd – eight bucks, I think, and after I had downed the drink, I stood up to leave.
"Should we get something to eat here?" Julie asked. "No," I said. We had seven pm reservations for dinner at the Coyote, a famous Santa Fe restaurant, and I thought it would be best not dampen our appetites in advance of that meal.
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- J (Bernallilo -- Arkansas travelers -- New Mexico landscapes -- Jemez pueblo and canyon -- a ruin -- an encounter with a Kachina -- Los Alamos and Pojoaque.)
1.
Bernalillo from West 550 is an interminable strip mall in treeless desert, fast food places and car dealerships and poisonous-looking little strip malls lined up along both sides of heavy traffic coming and going. No vegetation conceals the ugliness of this commerce and the bright sunlight is clinical, dispassionate, blazing off the chrome and the gaudy storefronts and the cars and trucks lined-up at the traffic lights. This seems an improbable place for a state park, but there is some open land tucked into the commercial property to the north of the highway, Coronado State Park, a historical site protecting the ruins of a large Tewa pueblo.
The place is as efficient in its blunt way as the fast foods joints and the gas stations ranked along 550. A parking lot huddles close to the visitor center. A high fence protects the site, but you can peer through the chain-links and see the wares on display – a tract of reconstructed pueblo consisting of cheerless little cells linked by crawlspaces, a kiva raised a six feet above the desert pavement where a burly-looking female park ranger is lecturing a dozen senior citizens, a loop trail running along the perimeter of fenced-in area with signs at interval identifying features worth scrutinizing; the enclosed area is barren and sun-blasted. A few Indian women are sitting in shade of a ramada on one side of the visitor center, trays turquoise jewels at their feet.
In the warm visitor center, a group of elderly tourists from Arkansas are joshing with the park ranger assigned desk-duty. She collects money for admission and repeats a little introductory spiel about the park. "There are no photos allowed in the Kiva," the woman says. "What’s a kiva?" an old guy with crooked teeth asks her. He grins; she grins. It’s complicated to explain, but she tries. These old retired men and woman are in no hurry – perhaps, they are snow-birds at a trailer park somewhere in the desolate wasteland between Albuquerque and Bernalillo. They fumble with their wallets and offer to pay for one another and talk about steak dinners at the local casinos while the park ranger says something the religion of the ancestral Pueblo and their Kivas. Coronado visited this pueblo, a thriving place in 1540, the so-called "Evergreen" village. The Spaniards were impressed by the orderly little city, its good governance, and prosperity. Someone wrote a report in which he said that "here the Indians live in complete equality."
In the fenced-in area, there’s nothing to see that you can’t view from the parking lot. The site of the old pueblo is a dusty plaza once enclosed by three-story adobe apartments. The nasty little mud-brick boxes on one side of the plaza simulate what the foundation level was like – it looks like a half-finished construction site. I stay away from the Kiva – too many old people are struggling with the wood-timber ladder that drops down through the vent on the top of the structure. I hear voices echoing from underground, inane questions, exclamations of joy or disappointment. At the edge of the plaza, I pause to look at a few adobe bricks, precariously piled heaps of adobe about two feet high, standing amid the tufts of soapweed and the agave. I’m strangely moved by fragmentary walls, so small and unprotected – it seems a kick might knock them over or effect a phase change from their solid form to drifting, wind-blown dust. The humble evidence of the past is passing away even as we watch, a fallne brick eroding into mere clotted clay.
Outside the enclosure, you can walk down to a low terrace overlooking the Rio Grande. The river’s closeness to the Pueblo was its raison d’etre – here the river makes a bend and the sun-stippled main channel, shedding glistening rivulets on both sides, pierces a windrow of water-polished pebbles. The cottonwood trees look soft from this vantage, almost wooly and, beyond, there is the mammoth silhouette of Sandia Mountain, timeless, I suppose, its lower ramparts spiked by shark’s tooth pinnacles.
A siren sounds on 550 an eighth mile away and I can see the moving red light carried like sprinter’s torch through the traffic.
2.
550 rises imperceptibly toward a ridge marked by small volcanic vents set at intervals like chimneys on the horizon, each occupying a dozen acres of black, chipped stone. The strip malls give way to housing developments, although the road remains commercial, lined with liquor stores and supper clubs and C-stores. It’s all very horizontal and disheartening and, then, the highway crests the ridge and Bernalillo vanishes. Ahead, the vista is empty, buttes like clouds floating over grey basins and the higher sierra of the Jemez mountains rising in blue, rippled ribbons up into the blue sky. On a nub of higher land, a flattened mesa like a pier rising over some pinkish badlands, I can see the Zia Pueblo. The Zia sun sign is the emblem for New Mexico and you can see that mark on each license plate, a circle from which four rays (short, long, long, short) emanate in each of the directions of the compass.
My plan is to drive a loop through the Jemez Mountains, north on highway 4 through Jemez Springs and, then, to Los Alamos and Pojoaque Pueblo, a place about 11 miles north of Santa Fe. On the map, the loop seems to encompass about sixty miles and so I assume that I will be able to make the drive, with a few short stops in ninety minutes or so. But the map is misleading. Highway 4 is posted 50 miles per hour, but, almost immediately, dives into a dusty, red-rock canyon, where the road twists and turns under barren eroded hills. Then, the highway passes through the Jemez Pueblo, a scatter of houses stretched out long the floor of the canyon for six or seven miles, the entire way marked 20 miles per hour. This Pueblo seems prosperous – the little dwellings are well-kept with neat gardens of cactus and the tight valley is radiant with resplendent golden cottonwoods gathered along the watercourse meandering beneath the bright sunny cliffs. Some of the houses climb up the sides of canyon, linked by dusty tracks in the dry arroyos. The tribe operates a friendly and very busy convenience store and gas station on the edge of the village – the restrooms are clean and the young people behind the counter are beaming. In the parking lot, smashed-up Indian cars, barely operable, snort like mules and little kids sucking on candy stand along the roadside waiting for an uncle or cousin to come along and give them a lift back home.
The canyon is deeper beyond the reservation with sheer granite heights where mica glitters in the sun. Apparently, the road runs uphill although it follows the course of river dropping in stages from the mountains above and so the change in elevation is not perceptible. Apparently, this part of the gorge is not zoned and the effect is a bit like Sedona – rich people have built cantilevered glass cottages improbably perched atop spires of rock and asphalt driveways zigzag up sheer hillsides to other houses shadowing the canyon. A sort of ersatz Cape Cod village occupies the belly of the canyon, stretched like salt-water taffy along the course of the river that now falls with increasing violence over steps and slides of boulders. It’s all resorts and campgrounds in shadowy depths of this canyon, most of the curves marked with crosswalks and posted 15 miles per hour and, as the road climbs, the way is increasingly nothing but curves, all of them blind as the road undulates and wraps in a braid around the rushing stream. The canyon walls are sheer on the heights above, rising up to pointed pyramids of rock that are the tops of the mountains. The congestion is unfortunate, although its quiet enough today – the Shady Nook campground, the Inn of the Leaping Lizard, the Bodhi Mindful Buddha Center, the Gypsy Springs Resort, each place stick-built with Queen Ann style adornments: dentils, painted balustrades, Dutch gables and filigree eaves and houses with Widow’s Walk turrets to look down the canyon or up to the rocky summits. It’s incongruous particularly since the gorge is wild and the watercourse, although mild today and sunlit with little spurts and flashes of white water, seems potentially deadly as evidenced by boulders and heaps of stone pushed here and there in the bottom of the canyon.
At the upper edge of Jemez Springs, huge ruins loom over a sandy hillside.
There’s a parking lot next to a sloping acreage studded with red walls and enclosed by a fence. On the nearby road, traffic crawling up the canyon passes intermittently. Across the highway, a big church obstructs half the gorge, a spray of mosaic above its tall doors.
Jemez State Historical Monument protects what remains of a huge church and convent compound built adjacent to a what was once a large and thriving pueblo. The mission was built before 1630, fifty years before the great Pueblo Rebellion overturned the encomienda system and, briefly, expelled the Europeans from north central New Mexico. Events occurring before the 1680 rebellion are obscure and very little seems to be known about these massive ruins – the great walls of chipped and flaking red sandstone are a looming, well-nigh ineradicable presence, a brute reminder of something although it isn’t clear what happened here. Apparently, Spanish missionaries exploring the canyon slicing through the Jemez Mountains encountered a large pueblo at this place, Giusewa or Hot Springs Village. The Indians must have been curious about the new religion and friendly and, so, with their labor, the mission was built around the church of San Jose de los Jemez. No one is sure when the site was abandoned or why. Similarly, no one knows what happened to the populous pueblo within a stone’s throw of the church. The entire enterprise drops off the written record before the Pueblo Revolt, but, of course, the absence of writing doesn’t necessarily mean that the mission had ceased to exist or lay in ruins. In fact, archaeological studies suggest that the Indians, probably much diminished by pestilence, may have run the Mission on their own for several years or, even, decades. All that is conclusively known is that the Anglo ranchers who came to this area in the 19th century found huge and silent ruins, crumbling walls of stone with corrals and granaries and, even, Convento buildings, all collapsed into great quarries of sandstone.
An Indian girl protects the site from a desk in the Visitor Center. For some reason, the small museum smells strongly of sewage – it’s a pungent, eye-watering odor. On the wall, there is a 19th century Penitente crucifix, a haggard image of torture carved in gnarled wood and, near the foul-smelling restrooms, a blow-up of a black and white photograph of the canyon, circa 1910, the pinon and sage dusted with snow and some bedraggled-looking cattle, also snow-bearded, a bull mounting a cow in the foreground.
I pass through the door onto the acreage and walk among the ruins. The ancient church was built as a fortress and its sandstone walls are, at least, six feet thick, heaps of boulders stacked together in the shape of the rock’s natural angle of repose – that is, the walls tapering upward, pyramidal-shaped and fundamentally immoveable. The roof forty or fifty feet above is long gone, but the outline of the tower remains, a jagged outcropping poised against the sky. Excavations suggest that the inside of the church was studded with local gem-stones, selenite and turquoise, and that there were richly colored murals painted on the packed-clay walls – none of this is visible today. Soaring overhead are sandstone pinnacles, natural rock towers guarding the ramparts of the canyon. The pueblo was more gently built, less monumental and more in accord with the clay and the mud at the river banks, and nothing remains of it, except some shadows on the hillside, a rebuilt kiva that you can enter if you are willing to navigate the ladder leading down into the darkness. Before the Pueblo Revolt, the priests tried to eradicate all traces of the old kivas, regarding them as Estufas (that is, altars) of idolatry. This kiva shows signs of having been burnt at some point. More ruins, also with cyclopean walls stand uphill from the big rectangular church.
It’s sunny on the hillside and, as I am walking among the big, broken walls, a winged being soars overhead, casting the shadow of its fringed pinion over the sandstone rubble.
It takes me another half-hour to ascend to the head of canyon. The top of the gorge is narrow with dark basalt jaws and the river rages in its deep, shadowy incision in the mountain side. There is a big soda dam of travertine impounding a lake, some waterfalls, and, then, the road tears itself free of the canyon now too narrow for the highway bed, and cuts curving through meadows and low rounded hills, actually the peaks of the Jemez Mountains – this is high sierra with bright meadows and snow-melt ponds full of cattails, boggy places between the stony ridges.
After eight or nine miles of bends and s-curves, highway 4 crests another ridge overlooking a huge oblong valley. The valley is lush with tall, autumn-brown grass and ringed with steep wooded hills rearing up over the basin six or seven-hundred feet. The big open amphitheater looks something like Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park and jeep trails drop down from the highway to crisscross in the vast grassy meadow. This is the Valley of the Caldera, the where the peak of an immense volcano collapsed into itself leaving a crater now healed with tall-grass prairie and ringed by the densely wooded hilltops that comprise the rim of the volcanic cauldron. Great forest fires burned in the area in 2002 and the east walls of the crater are charred and studded with stark black tree trunks. The old caldera, I suppose, was familiar with fire and understood that element well and, perhaps, the heart and soul of the big crater was pleased to see the flames surging and writhing in the forests on its rim. Once more the crater was misty with smoke and exhaling a great sooty plume over the mountains.
The road winding along the south rim of the Valles Caldera is relatively straight, riding in and out of the shadow of the cool forests the edge the open meadows. I can drive fairly fast, sometimes reaching 50 mph. Elk are supposed to be grazing in the huge grassland, but I don’t see any. People bottled up behind me on the narrow curving road, pass by – pickups and family sedans hustling toward the hilltop and, the hairpin curves dropping down to Los Alamos. Something shrieks overhead and, then, I see a shadow the size, it seems, of a helicopter, a great black wing dragged over the landscape, and I look up and see that the condor is passing, an immense winged being only a dozen feet or so above my windshield and, as I look up, I see that the being’s feet are not talons but human hands, two clenched human fists, raw and flayed, but, nonetheless, the hands of a man that are dangling down just a little above my vehicle. I’m alarmed and feel a wave of panic, swerving a little into the oncoming lane. The winged being soars up over the center of the caldera, a black speck immobile against the vast landscape.
The east-facing mountains rimming the caldera are all sooty, dust devils of ash among the pillars of seared trees. Because there is no underbrush, no undergrowth, I can see down into the canyons radiating away from the peaks surrounding the volcanic crater – the canyons are thousands of feet deep, black and stony, frightening abysses just to the right and left of highway. In the distance, I can see the sinister white roofs of the Los Alamos laboratories. (Apparently, the work in these places is highly explosive because each technical area with its small cooling towers and white-metal sheds is separated by a mile or more from other allied labs. The facilities are scattered across the high pine-covered plateau, linked by a network of narrow gravel roads.) The road bends around the mountain in alarming hairpin turns, descending the side of a burnt gorge to the pine forests on the plateau a thousand feet below.
At the intersections all signs in all directions point to Los Alamos. I pass some of the technical areas with their tall barbed fences and sentry posts, surveillance cameras mounted on steel poles pointing toward the LANS hangars backed up into tight, cliff-edged box canyons, and, ultimately, drive along a commercial strip at the edge of Los Alamos – there is a Swedish style walking and calisthenics trail next to the highway and some Nobel laureate physicists are marching there, bespectacled eyes glinting in the bright sun, sunburn on their forearms and necks and foreheads, pumping arms up and down vigorously for a good cardio-workout.
A four-lane highway speeds away from Los Alamos and that road drops thousands of feet into grey and yellow badlands at the foot of the mountains. I get gas at Pojoaque, a pueblo on the road to Santa Fe. The loop has taken me three and a half hours to drive.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- I (Lost in Santa Fe -- a mismatched couple -- dinner at Plazuela -- Secretary Clinton leads in the Polls)
The map showing downtown Santa Fe is too big to carry. It folds on seams that are inconveniently located. Therefore, it’s best to simply memorize the stroll from the hotel to the restaurant and leave the map on the table in the room. Plazuela, the restaurant at La Fonda Hotel, is only a few blocks away and it should not be hard to visualize the map to reach that place – it’s just a turn here and another turn. But, of course, the streets confuse me and I get lost, although this time, I have my phone engaged, ready to show me the way before I stray too far in the wrong way. No need to oppress Julie with misdirection – I pretend that I know where I am going, pause for a moment at a parking ramp where a couple of beggars are loitering by the entry, consult my phone and, then, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to the restaurant.
It’s busy at La Fonda. This is an elite hotel, the place where Christopher once outraged Shirley Maclaine by stepping on her dog. Movie stars and business magnates frequent the place and the lobby is full of people window-shopping at the stylish Dude gear in the shops next to the atrium. Life-size paintings of historical figures from New Mexico’s past grace the bright lobby with its turquoise-blue trim and dark Spanish tiles.
The table is not yet ready and so we sit in the heavy furniture outside the dining room. A young woman in a red dress is draped over a bespectacled older man – he’s at least thirty years her senior and sipping a martini, casually dressed and a little bemused. The young woman’s red dress is made to be slipped off her with the utmost ease and its pretty apparent that she isn’t wearing anything underneath that garment and she slinks around the older man, rubbing up against him, and, then, sprawling on his lap almost upsetting his drink. The olive in his drink looks wall-eyed at the proceedings and my wife says in a low voice: "That’s not all right, that’s not all right at all." I ask her what she means. "She keeps flashing her twat at him," Julie says, a spectacle that, unfortunately, I seem to have missed.
Between the hotel’s front desk and the street, a boutique sells Western Art: more technicolor canyons and cowboys riding the purple sage, sad-looking Indians in exodus across the prairies, bronze sculptures of noble and dignified Indian women wearing noble and dignified shawls that fall over their shoulders nobly and in a dignified fashion, eyes and beak-like nose something like the profile of an eagle or some other noble and dignified bird-of-prey. There is a magazine devoted to Western Art on the side-table next to chair where I am waiting and I flip through its pages. The young woman exerts herself with the old man, lolling against his belly, and I suppose he’s worrying about whether his Cialis or Viagra is up to the challenge. She isn’t wearing turquoise, a good thing, I suppose, because turquoise, at least according the Keresan-speaking Pueblo Indians, is a powerful love charm, an aphrodisiac, perhaps, more effective than the love-philters that this trim, nicely groomed older man has taken, and I can imagine nothing but ruination for this Fortune 500 executive, nothing but shame and dishonor and jealous rage if he were to perchance actually fall in love with this girl in her red dress and devote himself to her and invest in her faithfulness – she has no turquoise anywhere on her lithe body, not even inserted into the settings of her earrings and this, I think, is a good thing given the erotic power of that gemstone.
La Fonda is old Santa Fe and the paintings on the walls in the lobby are exemplars of the Taos School, regionalist works in a quasi-impressionistic style featuring the exotic features of the Southwest, canvases made during the twenties and thirties when people like D.H. Lawrence discovered New Mexico and came to this place. The dining room was once famous for flamenco dancing – some of greatest Spanish flamenco artists performed in this space with the room crowded with Hollywood movie stars and their consorts. The restaurant occupies the building’s atrium and the room’s upper reaches are giddy with Moorish tile and spidery arches with filigree work. At table level, the walls are comprised of innumerable panes of stained glass, decorated with southwestern motifs, slender red peppers and humming birds and stylized Indian pottery, thunderbirds and pictographs all lit from behind and shining radiantly over the diners.
I have carnitas, exquisite medallions of pork tenderloin in a hot, sweet sauce. My entree is enchiladas with a scoop of posole served as a stew, chunks of cheek meat from a pig with smoky-flavored hominy in a brown sauce. The enchiladas come with seasoned pinto beans and are covered with Christmas peppers, that is a mix of green and red chiles. The food is very good, just on the edge of being too hot for me. The room is loud and colorful and the people come and go in the crowded space and the older man with the young woman in the red dress have vanished, left our sphere of attention as if they were never there at all. We have Margaritas and, then, New Mexico Gruet, a local wine produced in a vineyard near Espanola, I think – a dry red wine, pinot noir, if I am not mistaken, not too heavy and bright with summery fruit flavors.
The city is a carnival in the early evening as we leave the restaurant. The air is crisp and clear, now about 45 degrees. The mountain rears up to nudge the sea of stars overhead. Election news on TV at our hotel assures us that Hillary Clinton will surely prevail in the election. One can be at ease. One can rest without fear – we are on vacation.
Friday, November 11, 2016
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- G (Spukhafte Fernwirkung)
Someone had done him an injustice, but Dieter or Dieter’s cogito, or whatever you want to call it, couldn’t specify the harm he had suffered. Clearly, the injury had something to do with a loss of dimension, a diminution in Dieter’s material existence – he felt as if he had once been fully rounded, robust, stuffed to overflowing in all dimensions whereas now Dieter was much circumscribed in his physical being, limited, it seemed, to a glowing point somewhere adjacent to the merest fragment of desiccated flesh, hairy on one side and bald on the other. Dieter’s cogito bitterly resented this change in his corporeal circumstances – he couldn’t get over it and harbored an intense desire for revenge. But his desire for revenge was impotent because Dieter had neither hands nor feet, nor eyes, nor tongue with which to speak and call out for help – he had been reduced to some kind of essence and, therefore, wished that he had listened more closely to the Herr Professor in his Gymnasium philosophy class: certainly, the old fellow had said something that might help him in his presently straitened situation, but, for the life of him, Dieter couldn’t recall enough about those metaphysics lectures to achieve any solace with respect to these thoughts. Nagging worries afflicted him and a vague sense of guilt and he was embarrassed that he had somehow lost his body – his flesh was misplaced and he wondered where he had left it and the more he thought about his plight, the more angry he became at the injustice of things and the more his lust for revenge flared. Unfortunately, Dieter’s yearning for vengeance expressed itself as hunger and a burning thirst – he needed an infusion of some substance into his cogito that seemed in danger of shrinking into an ember of consciousness smaller than the eye of a gnat.
Sometimes, he smelled a sweet odor, tobacco burning, it seemed, almost as if a cigar were being smoked in his presence. He smelled this with his not-nose, not so much detecting the odor with his senses, but, rather, feeling the burning tobacco (and sage) as a kind of moral category, as a motion in his soul. He heard words spoken in a language that was most definitely not German, a kind of chant, also perceived not with his ears, since he no longer possessed that apparatus, but as another kind of fixed idea, an obsessional tendency in his cogito. Then, for a moment, his raging hunger was assuaged; he was no longer thirsty. A kind of moist, refreshing gruel seeped through the pores in his mind – Dieter felt gratitude and a sense of well-being and, then, he seemed to sleep for a time.
Did Dieter dream? Perhaps. He recalled the old town in Saxony where he had been raised, school-boy pranks, a ramble in the woods, Einsamkeit, certain lines from Goethe and Schiller, a girl in a white blouse that he had admired from afar, too shy to speak to her. He recalled the Christ child in His cradle, a Tannenbaum, some hymns fluttering in the air, half-heard among the cold December winds. Anger roused him from these pleasant memories. He had to be fed again. His slim and flimsy cogito twisted into a Moebius ring and his thoughts looped around and around: there were snipers in the trees someone said: snipers in the trees although how could this be since the trees were barren, leafless, and a sniper hiding in a tree would not be hidden at all? The intelligence was all wrong. Aus der Traum – this was the end: bomb-blasts against the horizon, a Himmelsfahrtskommando against the Ami who had snipers hoisted high into the trees – how could this be since the trees were leafless and a sniper hiding in a tree would not be hidden at all? Intelligence had this wrong. Dieter’s boots crushed down the snow which made a creaking sound underfoot. Somewhere the sap in a tree caused it to burst hurling wood shrapnel in all directions. Behind the advancing column, the tank floundered, gone mad, apparently, turret spinning aimlessly side-to-side. There were snipers in the trees someone said and, then, the Gefreiter standing at the head of the column went down, a torch of blood spraying out of him. Snipers in trees and a flash-bang and, then, Dieter wondered whether it could have been otherwise, had there been some other way out of the labyrinth. His rage increased and so he was ravenously hungry and thirsty although this was odd because he had neither mouth nor gullet nor belly. Then, someone whispered to him in an ingratiating tone, words in a language that didn’t recognize, and he was suffused with watery gruel and felt the tobacco as an inflection in the gruel and this dissolved his wrath for a time so that he fell asleep once more...
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- H (Drowned Trees -- Echo Amphitheater -- A Bad Dog -- Questions -- A Land Use Forum -- Culebra Peak -- Keys to the Mountain -- Kundlini Yoga and 3HO -- El Tigre's Rebellion)
NEW MEXICO DIARY – H
1.
In 1957, the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam across the Rio Chama north of Abiquiu. This dam impounded a body of water called Abiquiu lake and submerged several thousand river-bottom acres in the Piedra Lumbra basin. Inundated by the lake was the so-called River Ranch of Juan de Dios, one of the original haciendas in the area. In her excellent book on the Piedra Lumbra basin, Valley of Shining Stone, Leslie Poling-Kempes describes an old-timer rowing a boat over the featureless surface of the lake looking for signs of the old River Ranch. The woman in the boat couldn’t see any of the buildings submerged under more than 100 feet of water, but she was able to glimpse the ancient cottonwoods that had shaded the old stone buildings – the trees seemed to reach their branches up toward the hot sun reflecting off the surface of the lake, a sight that the witness recalled as something that would haunt her for the rest of her life. The Rio Chama is notoriously murky and the story seems more symbolic than factual – the lake with its devastating waters stands for change, for the modern world, for forces that would inevitably swamp and alter this remote part of the United States forever.
The lake was controversial. It brought water sports enthusiasts to Abiquiu, but destroyed eagle and beaver habitats and sprawled across formerly prime grazing lands. The lake demonstrated that the old families living in the basin had virtually no power over the lands that they regarded as ancestral. Ultimately, the lake combined with other forces active in the region to result in a conflict characteristic of New Mexico, the Range War, a conflict over scarce resources waged by men emboldened by the remote and wild terrain to imagine themselves as above the law.
2.
I drove north on the road to Jicarillo Apache reservation and its tribal capitol at Chama. The highway advances across the Piedra Lumbra basin toward an escarpment eight or nine-hundred feet high. The escarpment is wooded along its upper ramparts and there are higher cliffs and terraces rising up toward the high mesas to the north – it is a kind of escalante, a series of cliffs stacked on top of one another like stairs rising to the stony and barren heights of the sierra. As the highway approaches the escarpment, a deep canyon extends to the east, slashing through the cliff country – this is Navajo Canyon, the old slot through the northern mountains used by war parties raiding south the Pueblo villages on the upper Rio Grande. The canyon cuts through colored rock strata tilting up out of the basin.
As the highway veers to the east to follow the canyon away from the Rio Chama, the towering cliff front overhangs the llano and slabs of rock have collapsed from those overhangs, opening two water-stained cavities in the escarpment. The huge amphitheater-shaped indentations in the escarpment look vaguely like vast, empty eye-sockets. A narrow asphalt lane leads north a quarter mile to a pinon forest cupped in the hollow in the cliffside and affords a vantage of the north-east cave under the escarpment rim. This place is called Echo Amphitheater.
We are in terrain that is similar to the high island mesas in the Four Corners area – desert bottomlands lapping up around vast flat-topped mountains whose cool heights are heavily wooded. These mesas are riven by canyons, similar to the one in which Echo Amphitheater is located, and, where the four states intersect, the overhang shelters eroded in the cliffs often harbor abandoned masonry villages, elegant-looking habitations with circular watchtowers and lofty granaries inserted into crevasses in the chalky rock. These are the so-called cliff dwellings of the people once called Anasazi, but now named the "ancestral Puebloans." The dramatic shell-shaped hollow in the escarpment at Echo Amphitheater contains no ruins – by the time the Pueblo people reached this place, they were living in apartment-style walled towns similar to the Turquoise Pueblo on the hillside overlooking Abiquiu. I presume that excavations at the base of the vast overhang have uncovered ceremonial sites, hunting encampments, and other features of that sort, but there was no village here. Apparently, the sonic qualities of the amphitheater, the great smooth stone walls reflecting sound in complex reverberations, made the place attractive to orators – Pueblo speakers came here to practice their speeches, casting their words out against the huge reflective shell of the mountain wall. Indeed, the carved-out cliff-side is a natural landmark and has been a magnet for rabble-rousers of all kinds.
It costs two dollar to park inside the gate at Echo Amphitheater. An asphalt path leads among the dwarf pinon up to a point where there is a pulpit-shaped platform directly under the overhanging rock. There is a notch in the half-dome of pale salmon-colored rock rising up to the cliff-top. The notch is a pour-off where water falls in intermittent cascades down through the half-oculus of the half-dome. Falling rainwater has inscribed itself on the cliff-face as a tangle of hundred-foot long strands, black scuff marks that form a sort of scraggly horse-tail written on the stone high above. The tops of the cliff is amarillo, that is, a light saffron-colored hue, the tint of Spanish rice. The dark watermarks might be construed as a woman’s long hair, or a Medusa-tangle of snakes hanging head-down from the bright notched opening where the capstone of the arch should be – of course, that capstone has fallen, not once but innumerable times as the cliff-top has receded under the relentless force of gravity and house-sized boulders and talus are strewn around within the area sheltered by the overhang. In fact, there are cottage-shaped boulders rolled hundreds of feet downhill from the area beneath the overhang.
Some people on the trail with me had a bad dog with them. The dog was a puppy and had eaten a breakfast burrito designated for one of its owners. The dog trotted happily up the path to the pedestal-shaped outlook under the cliff-face. Voices resounded against the rock, echoing back and forth. The bad dog yipped once and heard that bark repeated by the echoing stone; this made the dog bark again, triggering another series of echos that seemed to taunt the hound into further outcries. Alarmed, the dog danced on the end of his leash and, then, lunged at the tormenting sky from which the echos came.
I climbed the steps up to the overlook. In front of me, there was a chaos of fallen rocks. The pour-off overhead pointed down at me with its thirty braided strands of water-mark. Your neck aches with craning and, looking skyward, to where the yellow cliff-top casts its shadow downward, you feel dizzy – its vertiginous to look up toward the cupped saffron hands of escarpment and see the void of the blue sky there, a hazy calligraphy of con-trails marking the firmament.
A Latino man with his wife was standing on the paved height of the vantage point. He approached me. The woman was wearing sunglasses and peering disdainfully at all of the geology exposed around her – most women aren’t too impressed with geological wonders unless they extrude turquoise and gold for their adornment. The man seemed moved to the point of tears. "Sir, sir..." he asked. "Can you tell me what happened here? How was this made? Please tell me if you know."
I could have told him, I suppose, that the lower layers of the cliff-face, appearing like salmon filets in the present light, were softer than the capstone and that this had resulted in differential rates of erosion and, therefore, the creation of a huge hollow place like this at the face of the escarpment, a phenomenon that if pressed to its natural conclusion results in the strange sandstone fins like breaching whales and arches of southwest Utah. I could have told him that the prevailing winds presumably scooped-out the hollow with the assistance of bores of water incising the soft stone from the pour-off above. I could have said that a god in the form of a mighty eagle fell in love with a Pueblo girl and pursued her across the barren plain to this rock rampart and that trapped there, her back to the cliff, the girl prayed that she might be saved and, then, the rock opened to embrace her and she entered into the stone and left only the traces of her long black hair as monument to her terror and the god’s lust.
"I don’t know," I said. "I guess the prevailing winds maybe scoop it out. You can see the pour-off up there." I pointed. The man seemed agitated. What immense and sinister phenomena could create a place this grandiose? "Could be," he said. "Could be."
3.
I wrote a series of short stories about a great white mountain in south-central Colorado. On a plane flight from Phoenix in May, the airplane soared over the white mountain and I could see it clearly, a wilderness of sand-dunes heaped up along its western slopes. The white mountain is the eastern of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo, Blanca Mountain or, in the Athabaskan dialect spoken by those Indians, Tsisnajiini – that is, "white shell of the dawn" mountain. However, for narrative reasons, I conflated Blanca Peak with Culebra Mountain. Culebra Mountain is the only one of the peaks in Colorado exceeding 14,000 feet – it’s 14,053 feet high – that is entirely on private land; in other words, a wealthy man owns this mountain. In my short stories, accordingly, Culebra and Blanca Peaks are confused with one another and the fictional mountain has attributes of both summits.
One of the days that I spent in New Mexico, I drove north and made a loop through the high mountains around Wheeler Peak near the Colorado border above Taos. It was a beautiful and long drive. On the radio, I listened to a public-affairs station in Taos, an affiliate of the radio broadcasting from the campus of the University of Northern New Mexico in Santa Fe. To the extent that New Mexico is liberal, it is rabidly, vehemently Left-wing. Public radio in Taos and Santa Fe is not merely left-leaning – it is Maoist - Secessionist Left-wing. On one show, a public official from Venezuela berated American listeners for not supporting Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government. Astrologers pontificated upon Jung and America’s "daddy fantasies" in the context of the upcoming presidential election. Green party candidates discussed monkey-wrenching pipeline projects and other infra-structure on Federal land. And, for three hours, the university at Santa Fe broadcast a forum on land rights and community activism in the context of forty-four years of litigation involving a mountain somewhere in Colorado. Gradually, after about an hour, I recognized that the speakers who succeeded one another, each more strident than the last, were talking about Culebra Peak in Colorado. I heard names that I recognized, fabled bad guys in the fight over that private-property mountain, Jack Taylor and his son, Zachary Taylor, the Enron executives who bought the mountain from Taylor, and Judge Gaspar Perricone.
Culebra Peak was originally part of the Anza land grant from the Spanish crown in the early 18th century. Land grants of this kind vested an estate in a single individual, a sort of feudal lord, who, then, provided common water rights and other amenities to the villages living within his domain – the villagers are called Pobladores. The Pobladores have grazing and timber rights in the commons, can hunt there, extract mineral resources subject to supervision of the Spanish crown, and can gather medicinal herbs in the mountain meadows and forests. Several small Espanol villages were built on the plains surrounding the mountain and their inhabitants had Pobladore rights consistent with the Spanish land grant. The Spanish land grant was affirmed in 1806 when the Pobladore rights to the commons, the peak called "la Sierra", was reestablished by the Mexican government. The Espanol villages are to the west of the mountain and, culturally, New Mexican. Although Colorado’s first governor purchased the peak and the adjacent lands after the treaty of Guadulupe Hidalgo in 1848, in practice, no one tried to exploit the mountain and efforts to sell land to Anglos by the Costilla Land Company failed. The Pobladore villages declined in population – indeed, by 1960, several had become ghost-towns. Although a consortium of Denver businessmen owned the land, the place was remote, only seven miles from the New Mexico border, and no one paid much attention to the mountain. A local man named Delfino Salazar, the operator of a general store in Costilla, was regarded, informally, as the mountain’s proprietor. He was an easy-going fellow and anyone who wanted access was provided it.
In 1960, Jack Taylor, a North Carolina timber mogul, bought the mountain and environs and established a 77,000 acre ranch with the peak at its center. Taylor promptly closed the mountains to the Pobladores – the surviving Espanol villagers were barred from the land, told that they couldn’t venture onto the ranch, and lost their economic base, sheep herding and cattle grazing on the slopes of La Sierra. A lawsuit to re-establish Pobladore rights began in 1981. (An earlier lawsuit brought by Delfino Salazar and his family was lost in the early ‘sixties.) Denver lawyers appearing pro bono publicum initiated litigation asserting that the villagers had enforceable legal rights by prescription – that is, long history granted them all rights exercised between 1806 and 1960 on the basis of adverse possession: since certain rights had been exercised historically, those rights were prescribed to the present-day successors of the original Pobladores.
The fight over Culebra Mountain was intense and not without violence. Night-riders fired volleys of rifle shots into Taylor’s ranch buildings and his hunting lodge was burned several times. Jack Taylor died during the lawsuit and his son, Zachary Taylor, acceded to ownership. Pickup trucks and outbuildings were pierced by sniper fire. Fence-lines were cut and more buildings burned. The La Sierra movement cited Malcolm X – a woman speaking at the land forum in 2005 said that she was determined to recover her traditional rights to the mountain "by any means necessary" and, ultimately, the legal battle became a test of Latino power in the new West. During the protracted litigation, the Taylor family leased much of the mountain to a timber harvesting company and began to systematically despoil the property. The State of Colorado repeatedly tried to end the lawsuit by acquiring the land but the Taylor family declined all offers. In 1997, Lou Pai, an Enron executive, bought the ranch from the Taylors – he paid for the ranch with money that he was later ordered to pay to the Securities and Exchange Commission for wrongdong at Enron. By 2001, the ranch was tied-up in litigation between claimants who had lost money in the Enron debacle and Pai. That litigation seems to be ongoing. La Sierra’s case to enforce a prescriptive easement running to the benefit of the Pobladores ended in June of 2004. The District Judge, the Hon. Gaspar Perricone, sitting in Costilla decreed that the descendants of the original Spanish settlers in the area had rights to use the mountain by prescriptive easement – these included sheep and cattle grazing rights, a right to collect and cut timber on the mountain, a right to hike and otherwise enter the property for religious and recreational purposes, and the right to collect medicinal herbs on the peak.
The Latina woman who acted as chair of the land rights forum didn’t exactly understand the legal issues. The rights of the fee-title holders on the land, the successors to Pai and Taylor, are servient to the traditional rights granted to the Pobladores by prescriptive easement. The lady-activist repeatedly said that "the Judge ruled that Pai and Taylor are subservient to us and that we don’t have to be subservient to them." She said that she was now 64 and that the lawsuit had been initiated by her father, a relative of Delfino Salazar, when she was a young woman, only twenty years old, and studying Chicano rights on scholarship at Berkeley in California. "I am old now," she said in heavily accented English, "but God willing, I am going to climb Culebra this summer. I am going to drag myself to that summit even if it kills me so that I can look down at this mountain that has been our mother and our guardian during all the time our people lived in this valley." She pronounced "Culebra", a word meaning "harmless snake" with an "l" and "br" so swallowed that, at first, I couldn’t recognize the name, although I had previously spent some hours learning about the history of the mountain. The Court did not grant hunting rights to the Pobladores – presumably this omission was because Taylor and his successors had used La Sierra for big-game hunting and had stocked the ranch with antelope and big horn rams for that purpose. (It seems Judge Perricone’s ruling was reached on compromise grounds.)
The woman said that each family named in the class action lawsuit had been granted a key that could be used to unlock ranch gates and afford access to the peak. But issuance of these keys had created further divisions in the Espanol community – a number of families initiated suit in 1960 when the mountain was first closed. These families lost their lawsuit and, accordingly, their members were barred from participation in the second, protracted, but successful lawsuit, begun in 1981. As a result of this litigation history, involving res judicata preclusion of some of the families from access to the mountain, tensions arose in the community. The woman speaking on the radio said that this was a tragedy. But, she said, "you must use your keys." "If you don’t exercise your key-holder rights, you will lose those rights," she proclaimed
The program ended and the announcer said that the forum just broadcast had occurred in 2005. This was the year after the victory in the Costilla County Courthouse. I wondered whether the outspoken and strident community activist had reached the mountain peak. Was she still alive? Were the key-holders still hiking the mountain meadows in search of medicinal plants? Did community sheep and cattle graze on the heights now?
I reached the crest of the pass near Angel Fire, only a six-hundred foot climb through a chilly pine-forest to the hilltop overlooking the mountain meadows, an ascent by highway of two miles, but, then, another 15 long serpentine miles down to Taos. I descended through different climactic zones: the tall, aromatic Douglas fir became shorter denser pines trees, then, chaparral with scattered pinon, then, raw and dusty arroyos studded with cactus. A woman came on the air and made this announcement: "I am Cellist. I am in recovery from western civilization." She spoke for an hour about being a Luddite and monkey-wrencher. It was a little before noon. The next half-hour was devoted to a presentation about narcissism, followed by an hour-long show about the use hallucinogens and mediation to achieve inner peace.
I ended up in Espanola where all roads in north-central New Mexico converge. For a time, I drove on State Highway 106, the so-called Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway. The Yogi was a Sikh holy man who took up residence in Espanola and became a close adviser to New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson. Yogi Bhajan was a practitioner of Kundalini Yoga and the spiritual founder of the 3HO Foundation. 3HO means Healthy, Holy, Happy Organization.
5.
The Latino activism swirling around Culebra Peak had its analog in the Piedra Lumbra. The Range War in Rio Arriba county arose from a heady mixture of Civil Rights protest with a classic New Mexico clash over grazing rights, the latter th e same sort of dispute that ignited the famous, and deadly, Lincoln County War (and that made Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid famous).
Beginning in 1947, the National Forest began issuing grazing permits. These permits seem to be granted primarily to Anglo ranchers with large, industrialized cattle operations. Local communities asserted that grazing rights were being provided to the rich and powerful, but not to the Espanol shepherds and cowboys who had used the land for hundreds of years. Things came to a head around 1964, when a mysterious organization called the Abiquiu Corporation began posting no trespassing signs on National Forest Service land. The Abiquiu Corporation was a group of Latino pobladores living in the area, people who felt that they had been discriminated against by the Forest Service with respect to grazing permits. Members of the Abiquiu Corporation cut fences and barricaded forest roads. Cattle went missing and everyone armed themselves for a fight.
In October 1967, another militant group closely aligned with the Abiquiu Corporation, the Alianza Federale de las Mercedes ("the Federal Alliance of Land Grants") set up a tent city in the campground at Echo Amphitheater. The Alianza Federale was led by Reias Lopez Tijerina, nicknamed "El Tigre" or "the Tiger." Tijerina called for the restoration Spanish land grant rights to the pobladores in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest. The Alianza Federale was heavily armed and its members arrested the two Forest Service rangers sent to investigate and collect camping fees at the Echo Amphitheater campground. The two men were hauled under the huge resounding arch of the rock overhang where they were charged with all sorts of crimes and publicly put on trial for "illegally trespassing" on Spanish land grant property. Armed federal marshals invaded the camp, evicted the Alianza members, and rescued to the two Forest Service workers. El Tigre withdrew from Echo Amphitheater but, then, issued a declaration that the Alianza had formed an army 2000 strong and that the militants intended to annex over 600,000 acres of land allegedly stolen from the pobladores. On June 3, 1967 El Tigre hosted a barbecue at the tiny hamlet of Coyote on the south side of the Piedra Lumbra basin – the Alianza had declared that it was seceding from the United States to establish its own government on the Land Grant territory. Law enforcement surrounded the village and arrested ten members of the Alianza on charges of illegal assembly. The captured Alianza activists were locked up at the Rio Arriba county jail in Tierra Amarillo, the county seat. El Tigre deputized about 20 men as soldiers of the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin, the People’s Republic of San Joaquin, as the new, secessionist nation was called. On June 5, 1967, the twenty soldiers comprising the army of the People’s Republic attached the Tierra Amarillo courthouse. Two deputies were shot, but the attack failed – the Judge and his staff locked themselves in the Judge’s chambers and wouldn’t come out. There was a desultory exchange of gunfire for a few hours and, then, at sunset the militants fled the Courthouse not having rescued their members but with two hostages in tow.
Two-thousand law enforcment officers, including the New Mexico National Guard, were summoned to the Piedra Lumbra. Headquarters were established at Ghost Ranch and machine gun posts were planted on the bluffs overlooking the basin. M-42 tanks rolled into Tierra Amarillo and Alianza sympathizers were rounded up and forced into a sheep pen at the hamlet of Canjilon. The interred men, women, and children were supposed to be bait to lure the militants with El Tigre down from the mountains where they were hiding – it was an old technique that the US army had developed to force Apache warriors to engage with troops pursing them. El Tigre and his men didn’t take the bait and so the hostages were released after spending a cold night in the open in the sheep pen. Helicopters searched the mountain ranges for the 20 armed men comprising the Republic of San Joaquin’s army. Although news imagery showing the dispute was intensely exciting – men with cowboy hats and machine guns riding horseback through the brush – most of the country was never aware of the Rio Arriba war. War had also broken out in the Middle East and everyone’s attention was directed to that conflict between Egypt and Israel – the so-called Six Day War.
El Tigre was captured sleeping in a parked car in Albuquerque. Some of his army were arrested; other valientes couldn’t be found. Two years later, in 1969, El Tigre mobilized again, sending a posse to occupy the Ghost Ranch. The Alianza claimed the Ghost Ranch was originally an Espanol enterprise and that the Presbyterian Church, now in control of the facility, should surrender it to the Alianza. The director of the Ghost Ranch camp, Reverend Jim Hall met with militants and placated them with home-cooked cookies He reinforced himself with the two Catholic priests from Abiquiu. After a tense meeting, the Ghost Ranch enterprise offered to pay $50,000 compensation in the form of underwriting a local medical clinic and, further, donated a feed lot on the premises to a local ranchers cooperative. These measures satisfied most the Alianza member and, in fact, the large and nicely maintained Los Clinicas del Norte next to the Abiquiu Inn attests to the success of the settlement. The feed lot was also profitable and conflict was averted. El Tigre was not satisfied with these measures and he was arrested a month later burning down National Forest Service signs. The militant had been released on bail pending trial for his other misdeeds. Bail was revoked and El Tigre was sent to a Federal Penitentiary.
Ultimately, Ghost Ranch was donated lock, stock, and barrel to the National Forest Service, the authority that now manages the premises. In 1975, the U. S. Government distributed deeds to Pobladores living near the Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu – land was carved out of the Kit Carson National Forest to be given to these people as homesteads. Two moradas built in the 19th century by the Penitente Hermanos, but completely abandoned in the sixties and seventies were renovated and are now functioning.
1.
In 1957, the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam across the Rio Chama north of Abiquiu. This dam impounded a body of water called Abiquiu lake and submerged several thousand river-bottom acres in the Piedra Lumbra basin. Inundated by the lake was the so-called River Ranch of Juan de Dios, one of the original haciendas in the area. In her excellent book on the Piedra Lumbra basin, Valley of Shining Stone, Leslie Poling-Kempes describes an old-timer rowing a boat over the featureless surface of the lake looking for signs of the old River Ranch. The woman in the boat couldn’t see any of the buildings submerged under more than 100 feet of water, but she was able to glimpse the ancient cottonwoods that had shaded the old stone buildings – the trees seemed to reach their branches up toward the hot sun reflecting off the surface of the lake, a sight that the witness recalled as something that would haunt her for the rest of her life. The Rio Chama is notoriously murky and the story seems more symbolic than factual – the lake with its devastating waters stands for change, for the modern world, for forces that would inevitably swamp and alter this remote part of the United States forever.
The lake was controversial. It brought water sports enthusiasts to Abiquiu, but destroyed eagle and beaver habitats and sprawled across formerly prime grazing lands. The lake demonstrated that the old families living in the basin had virtually no power over the lands that they regarded as ancestral. Ultimately, the lake combined with other forces active in the region to result in a conflict characteristic of New Mexico, the Range War, a conflict over scarce resources waged by men emboldened by the remote and wild terrain to imagine themselves as above the law.
2.
I drove north on the road to Jicarillo Apache reservation and its tribal capitol at Chama. The highway advances across the Piedra Lumbra basin toward an escarpment eight or nine-hundred feet high. The escarpment is wooded along its upper ramparts and there are higher cliffs and terraces rising up toward the high mesas to the north – it is a kind of escalante, a series of cliffs stacked on top of one another like stairs rising to the stony and barren heights of the sierra. As the highway approaches the escarpment, a deep canyon extends to the east, slashing through the cliff country – this is Navajo Canyon, the old slot through the northern mountains used by war parties raiding south the Pueblo villages on the upper Rio Grande. The canyon cuts through colored rock strata tilting up out of the basin.
As the highway veers to the east to follow the canyon away from the Rio Chama, the towering cliff front overhangs the llano and slabs of rock have collapsed from those overhangs, opening two water-stained cavities in the escarpment. The huge amphitheater-shaped indentations in the escarpment look vaguely like vast, empty eye-sockets. A narrow asphalt lane leads north a quarter mile to a pinon forest cupped in the hollow in the cliffside and affords a vantage of the north-east cave under the escarpment rim. This place is called Echo Amphitheater.
We are in terrain that is similar to the high island mesas in the Four Corners area – desert bottomlands lapping up around vast flat-topped mountains whose cool heights are heavily wooded. These mesas are riven by canyons, similar to the one in which Echo Amphitheater is located, and, where the four states intersect, the overhang shelters eroded in the cliffs often harbor abandoned masonry villages, elegant-looking habitations with circular watchtowers and lofty granaries inserted into crevasses in the chalky rock. These are the so-called cliff dwellings of the people once called Anasazi, but now named the "ancestral Puebloans." The dramatic shell-shaped hollow in the escarpment at Echo Amphitheater contains no ruins – by the time the Pueblo people reached this place, they were living in apartment-style walled towns similar to the Turquoise Pueblo on the hillside overlooking Abiquiu. I presume that excavations at the base of the vast overhang have uncovered ceremonial sites, hunting encampments, and other features of that sort, but there was no village here. Apparently, the sonic qualities of the amphitheater, the great smooth stone walls reflecting sound in complex reverberations, made the place attractive to orators – Pueblo speakers came here to practice their speeches, casting their words out against the huge reflective shell of the mountain wall. Indeed, the carved-out cliff-side is a natural landmark and has been a magnet for rabble-rousers of all kinds.
It costs two dollar to park inside the gate at Echo Amphitheater. An asphalt path leads among the dwarf pinon up to a point where there is a pulpit-shaped platform directly under the overhanging rock. There is a notch in the half-dome of pale salmon-colored rock rising up to the cliff-top. The notch is a pour-off where water falls in intermittent cascades down through the half-oculus of the half-dome. Falling rainwater has inscribed itself on the cliff-face as a tangle of hundred-foot long strands, black scuff marks that form a sort of scraggly horse-tail written on the stone high above. The tops of the cliff is amarillo, that is, a light saffron-colored hue, the tint of Spanish rice. The dark watermarks might be construed as a woman’s long hair, or a Medusa-tangle of snakes hanging head-down from the bright notched opening where the capstone of the arch should be – of course, that capstone has fallen, not once but innumerable times as the cliff-top has receded under the relentless force of gravity and house-sized boulders and talus are strewn around within the area sheltered by the overhang. In fact, there are cottage-shaped boulders rolled hundreds of feet downhill from the area beneath the overhang.
Some people on the trail with me had a bad dog with them. The dog was a puppy and had eaten a breakfast burrito designated for one of its owners. The dog trotted happily up the path to the pedestal-shaped outlook under the cliff-face. Voices resounded against the rock, echoing back and forth. The bad dog yipped once and heard that bark repeated by the echoing stone; this made the dog bark again, triggering another series of echos that seemed to taunt the hound into further outcries. Alarmed, the dog danced on the end of his leash and, then, lunged at the tormenting sky from which the echos came.
I climbed the steps up to the overlook. In front of me, there was a chaos of fallen rocks. The pour-off overhead pointed down at me with its thirty braided strands of water-mark. Your neck aches with craning and, looking skyward, to where the yellow cliff-top casts its shadow downward, you feel dizzy – its vertiginous to look up toward the cupped saffron hands of escarpment and see the void of the blue sky there, a hazy calligraphy of con-trails marking the firmament.
A Latino man with his wife was standing on the paved height of the vantage point. He approached me. The woman was wearing sunglasses and peering disdainfully at all of the geology exposed around her – most women aren’t too impressed with geological wonders unless they extrude turquoise and gold for their adornment. The man seemed moved to the point of tears. "Sir, sir..." he asked. "Can you tell me what happened here? How was this made? Please tell me if you know."
I could have told him, I suppose, that the lower layers of the cliff-face, appearing like salmon filets in the present light, were softer than the capstone and that this had resulted in differential rates of erosion and, therefore, the creation of a huge hollow place like this at the face of the escarpment, a phenomenon that if pressed to its natural conclusion results in the strange sandstone fins like breaching whales and arches of southwest Utah. I could have told him that the prevailing winds presumably scooped-out the hollow with the assistance of bores of water incising the soft stone from the pour-off above. I could have said that a god in the form of a mighty eagle fell in love with a Pueblo girl and pursued her across the barren plain to this rock rampart and that trapped there, her back to the cliff, the girl prayed that she might be saved and, then, the rock opened to embrace her and she entered into the stone and left only the traces of her long black hair as monument to her terror and the god’s lust.
"I don’t know," I said. "I guess the prevailing winds maybe scoop it out. You can see the pour-off up there." I pointed. The man seemed agitated. What immense and sinister phenomena could create a place this grandiose? "Could be," he said. "Could be."
3.
I wrote a series of short stories about a great white mountain in south-central Colorado. On a plane flight from Phoenix in May, the airplane soared over the white mountain and I could see it clearly, a wilderness of sand-dunes heaped up along its western slopes. The white mountain is the eastern of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo, Blanca Mountain or, in the Athabaskan dialect spoken by those Indians, Tsisnajiini – that is, "white shell of the dawn" mountain. However, for narrative reasons, I conflated Blanca Peak with Culebra Mountain. Culebra Mountain is the only one of the peaks in Colorado exceeding 14,000 feet – it’s 14,053 feet high – that is entirely on private land; in other words, a wealthy man owns this mountain. In my short stories, accordingly, Culebra and Blanca Peaks are confused with one another and the fictional mountain has attributes of both summits.
One of the days that I spent in New Mexico, I drove north and made a loop through the high mountains around Wheeler Peak near the Colorado border above Taos. It was a beautiful and long drive. On the radio, I listened to a public-affairs station in Taos, an affiliate of the radio broadcasting from the campus of the University of Northern New Mexico in Santa Fe. To the extent that New Mexico is liberal, it is rabidly, vehemently Left-wing. Public radio in Taos and Santa Fe is not merely left-leaning – it is Maoist - Secessionist Left-wing. On one show, a public official from Venezuela berated American listeners for not supporting Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government. Astrologers pontificated upon Jung and America’s "daddy fantasies" in the context of the upcoming presidential election. Green party candidates discussed monkey-wrenching pipeline projects and other infra-structure on Federal land. And, for three hours, the university at Santa Fe broadcast a forum on land rights and community activism in the context of forty-four years of litigation involving a mountain somewhere in Colorado. Gradually, after about an hour, I recognized that the speakers who succeeded one another, each more strident than the last, were talking about Culebra Peak in Colorado. I heard names that I recognized, fabled bad guys in the fight over that private-property mountain, Jack Taylor and his son, Zachary Taylor, the Enron executives who bought the mountain from Taylor, and Judge Gaspar Perricone.
Culebra Peak was originally part of the Anza land grant from the Spanish crown in the early 18th century. Land grants of this kind vested an estate in a single individual, a sort of feudal lord, who, then, provided common water rights and other amenities to the villages living within his domain – the villagers are called Pobladores. The Pobladores have grazing and timber rights in the commons, can hunt there, extract mineral resources subject to supervision of the Spanish crown, and can gather medicinal herbs in the mountain meadows and forests. Several small Espanol villages were built on the plains surrounding the mountain and their inhabitants had Pobladore rights consistent with the Spanish land grant. The Spanish land grant was affirmed in 1806 when the Pobladore rights to the commons, the peak called "la Sierra", was reestablished by the Mexican government. The Espanol villages are to the west of the mountain and, culturally, New Mexican. Although Colorado’s first governor purchased the peak and the adjacent lands after the treaty of Guadulupe Hidalgo in 1848, in practice, no one tried to exploit the mountain and efforts to sell land to Anglos by the Costilla Land Company failed. The Pobladore villages declined in population – indeed, by 1960, several had become ghost-towns. Although a consortium of Denver businessmen owned the land, the place was remote, only seven miles from the New Mexico border, and no one paid much attention to the mountain. A local man named Delfino Salazar, the operator of a general store in Costilla, was regarded, informally, as the mountain’s proprietor. He was an easy-going fellow and anyone who wanted access was provided it.
In 1960, Jack Taylor, a North Carolina timber mogul, bought the mountain and environs and established a 77,000 acre ranch with the peak at its center. Taylor promptly closed the mountains to the Pobladores – the surviving Espanol villagers were barred from the land, told that they couldn’t venture onto the ranch, and lost their economic base, sheep herding and cattle grazing on the slopes of La Sierra. A lawsuit to re-establish Pobladore rights began in 1981. (An earlier lawsuit brought by Delfino Salazar and his family was lost in the early ‘sixties.) Denver lawyers appearing pro bono publicum initiated litigation asserting that the villagers had enforceable legal rights by prescription – that is, long history granted them all rights exercised between 1806 and 1960 on the basis of adverse possession: since certain rights had been exercised historically, those rights were prescribed to the present-day successors of the original Pobladores.
The fight over Culebra Mountain was intense and not without violence. Night-riders fired volleys of rifle shots into Taylor’s ranch buildings and his hunting lodge was burned several times. Jack Taylor died during the lawsuit and his son, Zachary Taylor, acceded to ownership. Pickup trucks and outbuildings were pierced by sniper fire. Fence-lines were cut and more buildings burned. The La Sierra movement cited Malcolm X – a woman speaking at the land forum in 2005 said that she was determined to recover her traditional rights to the mountain "by any means necessary" and, ultimately, the legal battle became a test of Latino power in the new West. During the protracted litigation, the Taylor family leased much of the mountain to a timber harvesting company and began to systematically despoil the property. The State of Colorado repeatedly tried to end the lawsuit by acquiring the land but the Taylor family declined all offers. In 1997, Lou Pai, an Enron executive, bought the ranch from the Taylors – he paid for the ranch with money that he was later ordered to pay to the Securities and Exchange Commission for wrongdong at Enron. By 2001, the ranch was tied-up in litigation between claimants who had lost money in the Enron debacle and Pai. That litigation seems to be ongoing. La Sierra’s case to enforce a prescriptive easement running to the benefit of the Pobladores ended in June of 2004. The District Judge, the Hon. Gaspar Perricone, sitting in Costilla decreed that the descendants of the original Spanish settlers in the area had rights to use the mountain by prescriptive easement – these included sheep and cattle grazing rights, a right to collect and cut timber on the mountain, a right to hike and otherwise enter the property for religious and recreational purposes, and the right to collect medicinal herbs on the peak.
The Latina woman who acted as chair of the land rights forum didn’t exactly understand the legal issues. The rights of the fee-title holders on the land, the successors to Pai and Taylor, are servient to the traditional rights granted to the Pobladores by prescriptive easement. The lady-activist repeatedly said that "the Judge ruled that Pai and Taylor are subservient to us and that we don’t have to be subservient to them." She said that she was now 64 and that the lawsuit had been initiated by her father, a relative of Delfino Salazar, when she was a young woman, only twenty years old, and studying Chicano rights on scholarship at Berkeley in California. "I am old now," she said in heavily accented English, "but God willing, I am going to climb Culebra this summer. I am going to drag myself to that summit even if it kills me so that I can look down at this mountain that has been our mother and our guardian during all the time our people lived in this valley." She pronounced "Culebra", a word meaning "harmless snake" with an "l" and "br" so swallowed that, at first, I couldn’t recognize the name, although I had previously spent some hours learning about the history of the mountain. The Court did not grant hunting rights to the Pobladores – presumably this omission was because Taylor and his successors had used La Sierra for big-game hunting and had stocked the ranch with antelope and big horn rams for that purpose. (It seems Judge Perricone’s ruling was reached on compromise grounds.)
The woman said that each family named in the class action lawsuit had been granted a key that could be used to unlock ranch gates and afford access to the peak. But issuance of these keys had created further divisions in the Espanol community – a number of families initiated suit in 1960 when the mountain was first closed. These families lost their lawsuit and, accordingly, their members were barred from participation in the second, protracted, but successful lawsuit, begun in 1981. As a result of this litigation history, involving res judicata preclusion of some of the families from access to the mountain, tensions arose in the community. The woman speaking on the radio said that this was a tragedy. But, she said, "you must use your keys." "If you don’t exercise your key-holder rights, you will lose those rights," she proclaimed
The program ended and the announcer said that the forum just broadcast had occurred in 2005. This was the year after the victory in the Costilla County Courthouse. I wondered whether the outspoken and strident community activist had reached the mountain peak. Was she still alive? Were the key-holders still hiking the mountain meadows in search of medicinal plants? Did community sheep and cattle graze on the heights now?
I reached the crest of the pass near Angel Fire, only a six-hundred foot climb through a chilly pine-forest to the hilltop overlooking the mountain meadows, an ascent by highway of two miles, but, then, another 15 long serpentine miles down to Taos. I descended through different climactic zones: the tall, aromatic Douglas fir became shorter denser pines trees, then, chaparral with scattered pinon, then, raw and dusty arroyos studded with cactus. A woman came on the air and made this announcement: "I am Cellist. I am in recovery from western civilization." She spoke for an hour about being a Luddite and monkey-wrencher. It was a little before noon. The next half-hour was devoted to a presentation about narcissism, followed by an hour-long show about the use hallucinogens and mediation to achieve inner peace.
I ended up in Espanola where all roads in north-central New Mexico converge. For a time, I drove on State Highway 106, the so-called Yogi Bhajan Memorial Highway. The Yogi was a Sikh holy man who took up residence in Espanola and became a close adviser to New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson. Yogi Bhajan was a practitioner of Kundalini Yoga and the spiritual founder of the 3HO Foundation. 3HO means Healthy, Holy, Happy Organization.
5.
The Latino activism swirling around Culebra Peak had its analog in the Piedra Lumbra. The Range War in Rio Arriba county arose from a heady mixture of Civil Rights protest with a classic New Mexico clash over grazing rights, the latter th e same sort of dispute that ignited the famous, and deadly, Lincoln County War (and that made Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid famous).
Beginning in 1947, the National Forest began issuing grazing permits. These permits seem to be granted primarily to Anglo ranchers with large, industrialized cattle operations. Local communities asserted that grazing rights were being provided to the rich and powerful, but not to the Espanol shepherds and cowboys who had used the land for hundreds of years. Things came to a head around 1964, when a mysterious organization called the Abiquiu Corporation began posting no trespassing signs on National Forest Service land. The Abiquiu Corporation was a group of Latino pobladores living in the area, people who felt that they had been discriminated against by the Forest Service with respect to grazing permits. Members of the Abiquiu Corporation cut fences and barricaded forest roads. Cattle went missing and everyone armed themselves for a fight.
In October 1967, another militant group closely aligned with the Abiquiu Corporation, the Alianza Federale de las Mercedes ("the Federal Alliance of Land Grants") set up a tent city in the campground at Echo Amphitheater. The Alianza Federale was led by Reias Lopez Tijerina, nicknamed "El Tigre" or "the Tiger." Tijerina called for the restoration Spanish land grant rights to the pobladores in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest. The Alianza Federale was heavily armed and its members arrested the two Forest Service rangers sent to investigate and collect camping fees at the Echo Amphitheater campground. The two men were hauled under the huge resounding arch of the rock overhang where they were charged with all sorts of crimes and publicly put on trial for "illegally trespassing" on Spanish land grant property. Armed federal marshals invaded the camp, evicted the Alianza members, and rescued to the two Forest Service workers. El Tigre withdrew from Echo Amphitheater but, then, issued a declaration that the Alianza had formed an army 2000 strong and that the militants intended to annex over 600,000 acres of land allegedly stolen from the pobladores. On June 3, 1967 El Tigre hosted a barbecue at the tiny hamlet of Coyote on the south side of the Piedra Lumbra basin – the Alianza had declared that it was seceding from the United States to establish its own government on the Land Grant territory. Law enforcement surrounded the village and arrested ten members of the Alianza on charges of illegal assembly. The captured Alianza activists were locked up at the Rio Arriba county jail in Tierra Amarillo, the county seat. El Tigre deputized about 20 men as soldiers of the Pueblo Republica de San Joaquin, the People’s Republic of San Joaquin, as the new, secessionist nation was called. On June 5, 1967, the twenty soldiers comprising the army of the People’s Republic attached the Tierra Amarillo courthouse. Two deputies were shot, but the attack failed – the Judge and his staff locked themselves in the Judge’s chambers and wouldn’t come out. There was a desultory exchange of gunfire for a few hours and, then, at sunset the militants fled the Courthouse not having rescued their members but with two hostages in tow.
Two-thousand law enforcment officers, including the New Mexico National Guard, were summoned to the Piedra Lumbra. Headquarters were established at Ghost Ranch and machine gun posts were planted on the bluffs overlooking the basin. M-42 tanks rolled into Tierra Amarillo and Alianza sympathizers were rounded up and forced into a sheep pen at the hamlet of Canjilon. The interred men, women, and children were supposed to be bait to lure the militants with El Tigre down from the mountains where they were hiding – it was an old technique that the US army had developed to force Apache warriors to engage with troops pursing them. El Tigre and his men didn’t take the bait and so the hostages were released after spending a cold night in the open in the sheep pen. Helicopters searched the mountain ranges for the 20 armed men comprising the Republic of San Joaquin’s army. Although news imagery showing the dispute was intensely exciting – men with cowboy hats and machine guns riding horseback through the brush – most of the country was never aware of the Rio Arriba war. War had also broken out in the Middle East and everyone’s attention was directed to that conflict between Egypt and Israel – the so-called Six Day War.
El Tigre was captured sleeping in a parked car in Albuquerque. Some of his army were arrested; other valientes couldn’t be found. Two years later, in 1969, El Tigre mobilized again, sending a posse to occupy the Ghost Ranch. The Alianza claimed the Ghost Ranch was originally an Espanol enterprise and that the Presbyterian Church, now in control of the facility, should surrender it to the Alianza. The director of the Ghost Ranch camp, Reverend Jim Hall met with militants and placated them with home-cooked cookies He reinforced himself with the two Catholic priests from Abiquiu. After a tense meeting, the Ghost Ranch enterprise offered to pay $50,000 compensation in the form of underwriting a local medical clinic and, further, donated a feed lot on the premises to a local ranchers cooperative. These measures satisfied most the Alianza member and, in fact, the large and nicely maintained Los Clinicas del Norte next to the Abiquiu Inn attests to the success of the settlement. The feed lot was also profitable and conflict was averted. El Tigre was not satisfied with these measures and he was arrested a month later burning down National Forest Service signs. The militant had been released on bail pending trial for his other misdeeds. Bail was revoked and El Tigre was sent to a Federal Penitentiary.
Ultimately, Ghost Ranch was donated lock, stock, and barrel to the National Forest Service, the authority that now manages the premises. In 1975, the U. S. Government distributed deeds to Pobladores living near the Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu – land was carved out of the Kit Carson National Forest to be given to these people as homesteads. Two moradas built in the 19th century by the Penitente Hermanos, but completely abandoned in the sixties and seventies were renovated and are now functioning.
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- F (A Customary Inconvenience -- La Casa Sena -- Comestible dirt -- Santa Fe Zoning Ordinances and a Concentration Camp Riot)
1.
Lost again? How is this possible?
The downtown Santa Fe map was very clear – the way to the restaurant, La Casa Sena, was a combination of two chess moves: simple enough - traverse three blocks like a knight and, then, a pawn’s move, just one square diagonally on the game board of city streets. This should pose no problems of any kind. But, in fact, knights in the game of chess can move in two ways: two squares forward and one square to the side or one square forward and two squares to the side, and, if you haven’t taken care, to memorize the exact configuration of that move, that is, which of the two possibilities applies, then, you may well walk one block too far in the wrong direction and a block too far in the wrong direction in an unfamiliar city can be a calamitous error.
So the sun is setting and Julie is hungry and her shoes are uncomfortable and we are now walking down a street that seems dominated by government offices, the bureaucracy of Santa Fe, such as it is – everything shuttered and still and, even, the parking lots empty. How can this even be the same vibrant city full of low-riders cruising the streets and drunken tourists and adobe arcades lined with restaurants and turquoise vendors? In the distance, a streetlight quivers. There are even trees growing in a boulevard and a couple intersections to the north a noisy road where trucks are rumbling by. The trucks shudder, heavily laden, as if they are going to Espanola or Albuquerque or, perhaps, one of the secret military installations at Los Alamos or by Alamagordo. None of this looks familiar. Ivy covers a wall as if we were suddenly in some New England village. A stable smelling of horse-dung shows exterior timbers like a Tudor building. Beyond the rumbling road to the north, we can see a steel gate – perhaps, there is a cemetery beyond that gate and its watchtowers.
"Where is it?" Julie says. "I don’t know, it seems, different from the map," I reply. "Where is the map?" "I left the map in the room – I mean how hard should it be to go five city blocks?"
"Pretty hard, apparently," Julie says.
I am looking for signs of life at the end of the avenues. What happened to the loud, profane crowds of bar-hoppers, the retired people with bolo ties, the desert rats begging on the street corners?
I remember that I am carrying a smart phone and so I stop and lean against a wall. How can the city change character so rapidly? It seems that we are in a residential neighborhood, among apartment units, condominiums, perhaps, with a couple of lunch places closed for the day, at the street corners. We have gone two blocks too far to the north. We cut across a parking lot filled with slumbrous cars and come into the Plaza Sena through a back alley and, then, a narrow slot in the facade that runs past stairways climbing above the courtyard to the law offices of sole practitioners, herbal healers, a yoga practitioner, several insurance agents. A half-dozen ancient trees rise from the center of the plaza and they are lit by track-lighting that exposes the corrugation in their bark and the withered underside of the leaves – the trees glow with a radioactive green hue and there are tables set among the shrubs and bushes in the plaza, strings of Christmas tree lights dangling from overhead branches, the basin of a small fountain splashing with water purling down over the rim of a big, overflowing terracotta vase. Women’s clothing shops featuring expensive leather goods and elaborate bead-work purses lean into the plaza and a couple of pots like skulls glint in a curio store.
Julie and I sit at a wrought iron table. Fifteen feet away, a torch sprouts blue fire blossoms overhead to warm the plaza but this is unnecessary so far as we are concerned – it is about 55 degrees and the air is scented with fruit and flowers and the steel bush emitting fire doesn’t do anything but impart a faint chemical stink to the air.
Julie orders prime rib and Andean potatoes in flan. I have duck confit and a beet salad with edible soil. We drink wine and eavesdrop on our neighbors. Two elderly widows, faces artificially taut with plastic surgery, discuss a man that they know, possibly a friend’s ex-husband. The man has a new girlfriend, a much younger woman and someone that the two widows agree is a deplorable person, ill-suited for the man, although he is, it seems, nothing more than an old fool himself. The women are uncertain as to the younger woman’s motives – she is, also, a widow apparently and fantastically wealthy. "She has more than he will ever have," one of the women says. They are drinking wine and waiting for their meal. The women seem to be from southern California – the old fool and his mistress live in Palm Springs, possibly in the environs of the two glamorous widows who are now reviewing the situation.
The waitress has the dark eyes and black hair of the pueblos. She brings us a small black seed bowl containing pollen and dried corn meal and says something in Spanish-accented Keresan. We tell her we are from Minnesota and she nods and takes our order.
My duck confit arrives, overdone and leathery. The duck’s liver is served raw and bloody on a slab of salty polenta. The salad is colorful with various kinds of beets – some are red, others deep blue, or cherry-tomato orange. A tangle of arugula sprinkled with feta cheese provides a thicket where the little round beets lie like the tiny eggs of some exotic species of bird – each beet is about the size of a grape, neatly halved, and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Of course, the piece de resistance is the heap of edible dirt piled on one edge of the garland of feta-dusted arugula and beets.
I wet my finger and sample my dirt. I assume this is someone’s idea of a sinister joke. The dirt is granular, a mixture of silica grit with powdery sand. It is abrasive to my tongue and tasteless, an experience of texture not flavor. I have about a tablespoon of dirt and so I scatter it like salt on the salad, sprinkling the sandy stuff atop the beets and the feta cheese. Then, I dutifully swallow the whole mess: dirt, sweet-tasting beets, the bitter arugula, and tangy, humid-tasting feta cheese. The beets are excellent, sweet and starchy at the same time, but the dirt is a disappointment.
Of course, I have eaten lots of dirt in my life. I don’t ever wash fresh mushrooms – the mixture of soil and horse excrement caking them is part of the flavor experience and imparts to the mushrooms a rich, dense earthiness as it were. And I have eaten many spoonfuls of premium black dirt from the New Richland area – it’s as rich and dark as chocolate and must be enjoyed in moderation. The best New Richland, Minnesota black dirt has a taste like earthworms – in other words, an odor and a flavor like slightly rotten fish – and, before you swallow, you have to spit out the chitinous parts of the tiny beetles that you have been grinding up between your teeth. This is all pretty standard, familiar to all of us who like to eat a few spoonfuls of dirt with our dinner and I had expected the New Mexico soil to be, if not moist and flavorful, at least slightly spicy, with a squash and Hatch chili finish. Further, I expected the New Mexico dirt to have been sieved and processed and to be fine as bentonite, a dense dust that congeals into a kind of piquant mole on the tongue and between the teeth. This sort of dust can be imagined as a the source of fine pottery, a ceramic dust with an aftertaste like fine Meissner china (if you have ever had the chance in Saxony to sample this excellent earthware in its unkilned form), that is, tart and very, very faintly medicinal with something of the taste you experience if you lick a brass door-knob. I had hoped that the edible dirt served at the La Casa Sena would taste like the sand at Acoma (sea-salted sand soaked with blood) or would have the odor of freshly cooked pottery, hauled forth from the blazing kiln, a taste like spring-water pumped from some immeasurably deep and dark aquifer, cavern water from the depths of the earth with the slightest fizz of limestone and carbolic acid. But this New Mexico dirt served ala Casa Sena could have been sweepings of filth off some parking lot – it was just sand and minute particles of gravel and a little pearly white dust, probably mostly organic in nature, the dried skin particles of dead men, mummy filtered through cemetery gravel, macerated by the harsh desert winds, and, then, flung across an alkali basis to be gathered with a sprinkle of sand and gritty obsidian particles. Even heavily salted, the New Mexico edible dirt was tasteless – it didn’t even have the flavor of bleach.
Julie’s flan with Andean potatoes was like an omelet browned with a blowtorch embedded with slivers of french fry. It was good. I asked Julie if she wanted to season her prime rib with a little dirt. She declined. We drank another glass of wine and found our way back to the hotel.
2.
When you wander Santa Fe at nighttime, the ghosts of another city sometimes appear. Between the faux-dobe houses in the subdivisions, you can see old stick-built structures, corrals full of ghost cattle, eighteen-foot tall fences and guard towers, a sprawl of wooden shacks and Victorian houses with turrets and Tudor-timbered stables, ravines dotted with gaunt-looking timber structures. All of these apparitions are evanescent and will vanish if you look too closely at them, but they crowd the periphery of the eye and we glimpsed them in fragments when lost and looking for La Casa Sena. There are different layers of reality and interstices where the remnants of things demolished and lost still lurk between the walls and courtyards visible today.
After the Mexican revolution and the liberation from Spain, Santa Fe was designated the provincial capitol of the northernmost province of Mexico. At that time, the city was remote and desperately poor. An Anglo visitor recalled that the town was drab, occupying a sandy ravine. Mexican peasants might walk around town all day carrying bundles of grass for sale and earn, maybe, a nickel or a dime for his efforts. Things didn’t much improve after the defeat of the Mexicans in the 1836 war and the annexation of their northwestern territories in 1848. The inhabitants of the town were described as "the poorest people...ever seen" and said to subsist on "muttons, onion, and chili peppers."
Throughout the latter part of the 19th century, the town remained poor and without charm. The principal railroads in the vicinity drove their lines to other cities – a train came down from Denver to Espanola but stopped there; the last leg was by narrow-gage track, the so-called Chili Line. On the south, trains came as far as Lamy, a place in Santa Fe county but still a number of miles from the capitol. Growth was slow. In 1912, when New Mexico became a State, Santa Fe had 5,000 inhabitants.
But beginning with statehood, Santa Fe’s city fathers developed a comprehensive plan for rebuilding the town. This plan derived from the City Beautiful movement, an impulse toward urban beautification resulting in centralizing zoning and building code enforcement in places like Chicago and Washington D. C. In broad terms, the notion was to tear down congested tenements and slums, create green zones, restore existing parks, and build impressive public spaces. In Santa Fe, renovation began at the Plaza of the Governors, the ancient Mexican territorial palace located a block from the central Cathedral. The timber and wood-frame shacks comprising most of the city were zoned out of existence. It was decreed that all new construction would comply with building codes requiring facades to be erected in Spanish Revival Pueblo style. Before 1912, Santa Fe was a typical Western city, a melange of old buildings and new wooden houses and stables radiating away from a grid of a half-dozen streets and a central plaza. After 1912, the city was rebuilt as a tourist destination – adobe construction was substituted for the former wood structures and, during the next decade, the appearance of the town changed radically. In effect, Santa Fe was re-imagined as a charming Spanish village and, then, rebuilt in that image. The concept was to create an urban ambience attractive to travelers in search of something different – tourist brochures from the first part of the 20th century described the town as the City Incongruous.
To a great extent, this scheme worked. Nonetheless, Santa Fe remained sufficiently isolated and austere that it could serve as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. A little to the north of downtown, a large camp was built on a bare hill overlooking the city. The camp’s regime was harsh and there were uprisings – in 1945, the so-called Santa Fe Riots resulted in the death of several internees.
To this day, Santa Fe’s building code enforces uniform building techniques throughout the city. Even the suburban housing is generally built to look like adobe construction – split-levels have ornamental vigas on their facades, fake beams that don’t support anything, and walls are brown stucco mostly without windows. The Santa Fe Hilton on the Plaza, formerly the Ortiz family hacienda, clad now in functional vinyl and metal siding, doesn’t look particularly Spanish – apparently, this structure was allowed substantial modern renovations on its exterior because the core of the building, the wing containing the casitas is, in fact, authentically ancient, incorporating actual weight-bearing vigas and adobe brick several hundred years old. Across the street from the Santa Fe Hilton, there is the El Dorado hotel – this structure is a hulking ziggurat of faux-dobe, a huge mud-pile that is so far from the actual proportions of authentic adobe and Spanish pueblo revival that it is grotesque – the building complies, I suppose, with the letter of the zoning law, but the effect is all wrong, a huge heap of a building on a monumental scale that suggests more an Aztec altar for human sacrifice than an upscale hotel.
Friday, November 4, 2016
NEW MEXICO DIARY -- E Georgia O'Keefe -- the history of a Dude Ranch -- an abandoned cabin in the wilderness -- "Off with their Heads! -- a 1991 Oscar-Winning comedy (Best supporting Actor)
1.
I’m not really a fan of Georgia O’Keefe. In my view, her paintings are ornamental, for the most part, colorful things that would grace an expensive interior in the Santa Monica mountains or hang well in the conference room of a corporation that makes brand-name jeans or cross-training shoes. There is no doubt that some of her paintings are persuasive and have great authority – but, in those cases, the originals of the objects painted (cow skulls or massive calla lilies) would also possess significant visual appeal.
My coolness toward O’Keefe’s work results, in part, from early and casual familiarity with a number of her paintings. In the seventies, when I attended the university, O’Keefe’s star was in eclipse: figurative art of the kind that she produced was thought to be naive, sentimental, uninteresting. (Even a figurative artist as great as Max Beckmann was pretty much disregarded.) The University had a small art gallery located in one of the upper loges in Northrup Auditorium, a dowdy collection of small canvases, most of them by regional artists. At least, a half-dozen paintings by Georgia O’Keefe were in that collection keeping company with minor Adirondack impressionists and murky ashcan-school paintings by people like George Bellows and Robert Henri. A gallery displayed some paintings of farm and prairie scenes by John Steuert Curry and Thomas Hart Benton and, there were pictures by Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper, then, also regarded as anomalies, artists with merely regional appeal. (I have since concluded that Hopper and Hartley occupy the first-rank of American painters and have international significance.) O’Keefe’s pictures of eroded hills, bones, and flowers were pretty but didn’t really speak to me. This may be due to the fact that I walked past those pictures a hundred times, iconic examples of her work, without more than a glance in their direction. In effect, her canvases were tainted by their proximity to other works in the gallery that I knew to be sententious, obvious, and ineptly crafted. In those days, markedly more sexist than now, O’Keefe was also regarded as adjunct to her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz – and a number of his camera-works were also in the collection. (These works included nude studies of Miss O’Keefe – thus, her cachet as a painter was further diminished by the sophomoric, but significant, sense that we had all seen her naked.)
In Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keefe occupies a role midway between muse and saint. New Mexico likes its Santos and, so, O’Keefe is regarded as a kind of holy woman, someone who labored in sacred isolation for her art. In this respect, O’Keefe’s role in the popular imagination is similar to that of Frida Kahlo. Both women worked in a fussy and colorful precisionist style, were resolutely figurative in their paintings, and had domineering, larger-than-life husbands – both are associated with the old Southwest. Both painters were striking, unusually beautiful women with a stormy fashion sense – we think of them sweeping across the sage and dunes in their black cloaks. But there is a one significant difference. Copyright law is uncertain and only indifferently enforced in old Mexico. Accordingly, there are a million different images of Kahlo and her works on-sale south of the border, reproductions both fine and tawdry, tee-shirts, souvenir crockery, parodies and knock-offs and knock-offs of knock-offs. In Mexico City, it seems, that you can’t walk a dozen yards without encountering ten reproductions of Kahlo images or pictures of the artist herself. O’Keefe’s estate keeps a much tighter rein on the images that she made. (For instance, the emblem for the Ghost Ranch, a white, minutely rendered cow’s skull in a arrowhead-shaped cartouche is copyrighted – the logo appears only with the permission of the O’Keefe estate.) Furthermore, O’Keefe’s paintings didn’t enjoy much respect even a quarter century ago – accordingly, the pictures are held by second- and third-tier museums since they could be acquired within the rather limited budgets of those places. Now, the canvases are very valuable and museums like the Des Moines Center for Fine Arts or the Indianapolis Art Museum aren’t likely to part with them. This results in a paradox: in Georgia O’Keefe country, that is, Santa Fe and Taos, there are almost no paintings by this artist anywhere in evidence. (An exception is the overpriced and under-stocked O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe.) Photographs of the severe-looking O’Keefe in her trademark black shawl are ubiquitous, but we don’t have access to the reason that she is so famous – that is, the paintings on which her reputation is built.
2.
Promotional materials imply that the Ghost Ranch, where O’Keefe lived for half of the year after Stieglitz’ death, is a kind of sacred pilgrimage site, a holy place akin to a monastery or convent. This is profoundly misleading. Ghost Ranch, during the time it was O’Keefe’s place of hermitage, was a Dude Ranch. And the Wisconsin-raised O’Keefe, although rooted in northern New Mexico when she died, began her connections with Abiquiu and the Ghost Ranch as a dude – or, I suppose, I should say "dudette." (Another term for a female dude is "dudine.")
Carol Stanley was a wealthy young woman from Massachusetts, related to international diplomats and an accomplished concert pianist. Accordingly to legend, she fell in love with violinist employed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was a poor judge of men, a trait that dogged her all her life long. The love affair was disastrous and Miss Stanley traveled west in 1910, supposedly to put as much mileage as possible between herself and the venue of the unhappy liaison. In the deserts of northern Arizona, she met the Wetherill family, the ranchers who had first explored, and discovered, the cave dwellings at Mesa Verde and the ruins at Chaco Canyon. Stanley stayed as a guest at the hotel and dude ranch that the Wetherills operated at Kayenta. She learned to ride and traveled long distances on horseback, riding into the canyons and sandstone arch country near Moab, meeting the Navajo in Monument Valley, and venturing into the Grand Canyon. It soon became apparent that Stanley was, in some ways, more intrepid and enterprising than the guides assigned to lead her through the wilderness.
In 1916, Stanley stayed at a Dude Ranch in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico. With a cowboy guide, Richard Pfafferle, she rode to some of the most remote canyons in the southwest, Canyon de Chelley in Northeast Arizona and the Canyon de los Muertos in New Mexico. Stanley and Pffafferle fell in love and were married. Together, they established a Dude Ranch called San Gabriel midway between Taos and Santa Fe. At this place, they met the formidable Mabel Dodge Luhan, the doyenne of the art’s community at Taos (herself married to a Native American) and artists like Willa Cather. Pffafferle had a taste of whiskey and gambling. Most of the time, he lost money but, according to a story often told, he won the Ghost Ranch property from its owner, one of Salazar family members, in a poker game. (The Salazar family had grazed a herd as large as 3000 sheep on the ranch.) Around 1930, Carol Stanley filed for divorce from Pffaferle, left the San Gabriel ranch at Alcalde, and, with her baby grand piano and maid, moved north to the Ghost Ranch in the Piedra Lumbra basin.
Southwestern Dude Ranches were located in the canyons and mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado but they were, for all intents and purposes, eastern establishments, associated with the old money in New York and Boston. A successful Dude Ranch had a patron on the eastern seaboard who referred his or her wealthy friends and associates to the business. In the case of Carol Stanley’s Ghost Ranch, the eastern patron was an old family friend from Massachusetts, Arthur Pack. Pack’s wife and daughters suffered from respiratory complaints and their doctors prescribed th dry clear air of the New Mexico high desert for them. Pack, who was involved in the foundation of the Sierra Club, moved from the East Coast to Ghost Ranch and became a co-owner in that enterprise with Carol Stanley. Pack’s close friend from his Harvard days, Robert Wood Johnson, an heir to Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, built a cottage on Ghost Ranch and spent his summer months in that place. Robert Wood Johnson had lived in the same neighborhood with Charles Lindbergh and he had many other famous friends. His son-in-law was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski. There is a story about some guests at the Ghost Ranch hiking to the Chimney Rock. One of the hikers, a man named Bennett noticed that a fellow dude, "looked just like Stokowski." Finally, Bennett said to the man: "I bet people tell you that you look like Leopold Stokowski. You must get that all the time." Stokowski admitted that people made that comment to him frequently. Robert Wood Johnson had a grand piano in his adobe cottage and, at night, Stokowski played for guests – people recall hearing the sound the piano coming from the open window of the mud-brick house. Indians from the local pueblo were imported to sing and dance at evening bonfires. When the large herd of wild horses living in the basin, over 200 animals led by a ferocious black stallion, began to entice the pack horses away from their corrals at the Ranch, Stanley hired sharpshooters to set up sniper stations on the buttes and gun down the horses as they came to the water holes. (For years afterwards, heaps of bleaching horse bones lay around the oozes and seeps of water in the valley and those skeletal remains are featured in some paintings later made by Georgia O’Keefe.)
Beginning around 1930, Georgia O’Keefe began to spend her summers in Santa Fe and Taos, away from her husband, Alfried Stieglitz. In 1931, she stayed in Abiquiu but didn’t venture north into the Piedra Lumbra basin of the Rio Chama. One afternoon, she traveled on the bad roads north of Abiquiu with a guide looking for the gate to the Ghost Ranch, a place about which she had heard when staying at Stanley’s dude ranch at San Gabriel. After three hours of searching, O’Keefe couldn’t find the gate to the property and returned to Abiquiu. A couple days later, she saw a pick-up truck at the general store in Abiquiu bearing the insignia GR. She followed the pick-up truck back through the red-rock canyon to the lllano of the basin and, in that way, arrived at the Ghost Ranch. She visited a number of times that summer, impressed by the stark vermillion cliffs overlooking the canyons and, in the following years, came so frequently that an adobe cottage was built for her use. Beginning in 1934, O’Keefe lived at the Ghost Ranch half of each year. (An exception was 1939, when O’Keefe spent the summer in Hawaii as a guest of the Dole Fruit Company.)
O’Keefe had an imperious, difficult personality. She was devoted to her art to the exclusion of most human concerns and could be enormously rude. She didn’t tolerate interruptions when she was working and offended many of the other guests, and regulars, at the Ghost Ranch. She wandered around the gullies and ravines at the ranch collecting bones, some of which she sent to her studios at Lake George, New York. In October 1940, O’Keefe bought the cottage and eight acres of adjacent land at Ghost Ranch where she had been spending most summers for the last six years. The house where O’Keefe lived in Abiquiu was owned by the Archdiocese in Santa Fe and had been the priest’s residence in that village. O’Keefe pestered the Archdiocese for years and, finally, was able to buy that place in 1945. Her husband, Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946 and, after settling his affairs, O’Keefe moved permanently to New Mexico – she spent six months annually in Abiquiu and six months on the Ghost Ranch.
During World War II and, in the years thereafter, dude ranches went out of style. Paying guests at the Ghost Ranch were few and far between. Carol Stanley had sold her share in the Ghost Ranch to Arthur Pack in 1936 and, shortly, afterward remarried – her second husband was a flim-flam man and defrauded her of what remained of her wealth; he persuaded her to invest in owning and training thoroughbreds for horse-racing, a thinly disguised scheme to part Stanley from her money. Impoverished Stanley left New Mexico with her husband, fleeing on horseback ahead of creditors. She ended up running a five and dime store in Alamosa, Colorado, living in a two-room apartment above the business. When she died, she was buried in the high country near Pagosa Springs at a ceremony attended only by cowboys.
In the mid-fifties, Arthur Pack donated the Ghost Ranch to the Presbyterian Church. O’Keefe was enraged – she demanded to know why Pack had not given her an opportunity to buy the premises. O’Keefe lived to be 98 years old. Although she was famous in some circles, others didn’t know who she was. In her old age, dressed in a black cape and shawl, the artist who had been born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin was often mistaken for an elderly Indian woman or a Spanish-speaking Abuela. The children who lived in Abiquiu pueblo were afraid of her: "she looked like a devil or an apparition," one of them later said. But she was wealthy and a benefactor to the community – she paid for a new water system in the town, provided bats, gloves, and balls for the local children’s baseball team, and, when a fire devastated part of the Presbyterian-owned Ghost Ranch conference center, she donated $50,000 for the restoration of the building.
O’Keefe believed that if she painted the Pedernal summit enough times, it would belong to her. The image appears again and again in her work. When she died, her ashes were scattered atop the high, angular mesa of that mountain.
3.
The entrance to Ghost Ranch, once almost impossible to find, is now marked with the familiar (trade-marked) emblem of the steer’s skull, bleached white, in an arrowhead-shaped cartouche. State Highway 84 is paved and runs straight across the flat plain, now and then, affording views of a lake impounded behind a dam on the Rio Chama – the lake is in lowest trough of the basin. As the water gathered behind the dam, archaeologists struggled against time to catalog and index the sites drowned under the lake – more than 194 places with archaeological significance were so catalogued. The lake lies like quicksilver in the low part of the basin, a tub of water surrounded on all sides by barren, treeless hills. A turning lane has been dedicated to the Ghost Ranch exit. The property is posted as jointly controlled by the Presbyterian Church and the BLM (Bureau of Land Managment).
Near Highway 84, on a windy knoll, there is an old cabin. The cabin is now windowless and doorless, open to the elements, and it seems battered, a stick-built shack posing against the glamorous backdrop of shadowy red canyons and looming escarpments clad in pinon trees. As I drove by, a SUV ahead of me, pulled to the side of the gravel road, and people emerged with their cameras to take pictures.
4.
It’s recess at the Men’s Wellness Conference at the Ghost Ranch Conference Center of the Presbyterian Church. The men are casually dressed, wearing jeans and flannel western shirts, and they stand in tight little groups on the lawn of the conference center. The gleaming cliffs rise in steps above us. Across the valley, the buttes are still casting long shadows across the brown and golden plain.
The men begin to chant together. "Off with their heads!" they cry. "Off with their heads!" Then, they should "Hallelujah!" It’s one common cry raised to the crystalline blue skies overhead.
"Off with their heads!" they shout again. Then, saluting one another, the men file back into the low-slung brown building next to the dinosaur museum, the conference center where they are learning how to be better men.
5.
I didn’t recognize the stick-built and ancient cabin near the entrance to Ghost Ranch when I was on the site. And I didn’t recognize the ramshackle structure when I thought about it in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or, at any time, when I was in New Mexico. Later, I looked at my map of Ghost Ranch and now understand that the old cabin on the windy knoll is a movie set – it’s the cabin featured in the movie City Slickers starring Jack Palance and Billy Crystal. In several ways, this is appropriate and fitting. City Slickers is about a man reclaiming his masculinity by spending part of his summer at a Dude Ranch. Of course, Ghost Ranch has been the model for all dude ranches since the mid-1930's. Second, the theme of City Slickers is that the alienated East Coast dude, played by Billy Crystal, comes to New Mexico to "follow his bliss" – a theme that has been central to this place since the railroads made Santa Fe a tourist destination around the turn of the 20th century.
Many movies have been shot at Ghost Ranch. The landscape is probably more famous on screen than in Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings.
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