GETTING AS GOOD AS IT GOT (Chapter 2 of a Novel by Louise Scott)

 

Chapter 2

GETTING AS GOOD AS IT GOT

 Espanola epitomized the worse of everything in so many poverty stricken places in the USA.  After choking down that morning’s cup of the watery motel coffee,  I mounted my trusty Toyota and drove over one last hill and there was Santa Fe spread out below in a broad valley with a stream flowing from the hills and running through the town, surrounded by flowering cottonwoods.  I had visited during my Hippie days when it was a small town, but now it had become the private property of the rich and famous. I could see how much it showed its recent years as the developers' delight, a Disneyesque city of Indian-style adobes with Mercedes Benzes or Jaguars on the driveways.  I noticed two Hummers. Now the place had grown in a sprawl of expensive cardboard-appearing- adobe houses, each dispersed on greedy plots of extensive acreage over the surrounding Juniper covered hillsides.

 When Woody Guthrie was busking around New Mexico in 1936 or so-- shortly after the wooden houses in the Texas Panhandle where he lived had been destroyed by a devastating freezing dust storm they still call Black Sunday--he had an epiphany concerning the New Mexican adobe homes.  Comfortably warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and inexpensive, using free materials found right at the building site.  The technique was simple; anyone could do it--but it did take a lot of labor.

 Mud and straw were mixed and poured into wooden forms--rather like putting a cake in a pan to bake.  Then the bricks were stacked up to dry completely before building up walls on rock foundations.  Windows could be framed; rooms could be circular or whatever, though most buildings used straight lines; beehive fireplaces could be made even by a child.  Using the same beehive shape, outside they made hornos to bake--great to make bread and especially useful during hot weather when they traditionally put up ramadas (outside kitchens) under a shade tree.

 Adobe was one of the first building materials ever.

 Guthrie even believed Jesus’ manger must have been such as these.  He was inspired to write a best-seller, House of Earth, as a way to teach the building techniques.  Now the Santa Fe ‘adobe’ houses were sheets of plywood nailed to two-by-fours bought from Home Depot, daubed with an adobe-appearing coating.

 I understood a bumper sticker that said DON’T CALIFORNICATE NEW MEXICO.

 The plaza area both surprised and charmed me—it had changed into rich men’s delight with all upscale shops displaying not only local artists but global work.  Indian artists were prominently displayed and a there were a lot of canvases where Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings were copied.

 I gorged on  breakfast at the rooftop dining room of the La Fonda Hotel, an elegant two-story adobe that sits on one corner of the square plaza as it has for four or five hundred years. This is right at the end of the fabled Santa Fe Trail.  La Fonda means ‘the end.’  Breakfast was delicious: eggs smothered with green chili served with fresh blue corn tortillas.  I admired the lobby’s hand-carved beamed ceiling done by the Spanish architects long ago, and the furnishings of beautiful antique pieces I assumed were mahogany.  Spanish architects were the best ever; they sure beat anything I see being built today out of concrete, steel, and plastic using noisy, polluting, power tools.

 I watched Indians unloading pickup trucks on one side of the plaza.  Under the portal of a one- story adobe building Indians spread displays of silver and turquoise jewelry and different styles of pottery on colorfully patterned Indian blankets. Without much ado, they settled themselves comfortably by using the building to rest against.  This was the governor’s palace, where once spread throughout the building there had been a festoon of Indian ears on strings that had been turned in from hunters to collect bounty money--during the days of Kit Carson, a bounty hunter himself.

 Muy triste.

 I window shopped at a few of the high end galleries.  It amazes me that there are enough rich people to support these shops.  Enough of Santa Fe.  I headed to Albuquerque.

The hour’s drive went through scenic escarpments of red rock, an elevated hill of tortured red clay outcrops with fantastic spiral forms chiseled by the winds and weather—something like Disneyworld advertises where a castle is shown on high.

 There were no houses.  Nothing marred the spectacle until off-ramps began and kept increasing, each with a Mobile or Exxon gas station and a McDonalds or Howard Johnsons offering the usual trans-fat high calorie unhealthy slop that would be good to fatten pigs for slaughter.  After the nightmare of the I-40 and I-25 interchanges I was through the city and past its blue scarf of smoke.

 Fields of green alfalfa began to appear off to the left where I could tell by the abundance of cottonwoods in the distance that the Rio Grande flowed on.  I spied Texas Blue Bonnet, lupine and poppies, brilliant patches of mustard and little pink wild flowers showing themselves at the side of the road, where huge crows loitered waiting for the morning’s road kills. The big birds looked like hooded highway men or like the Zapatistas who wear black ski masks, the enmascarados (masked rebels from Chiapas). The black birds made such a straight line arrayed roadside they looked as formal as the Royal Guard standing at attention waiting for the Queen’s royal coach to pass, or masked participants in a medieval ball.  

 

It was past noon when, famished, I stopped in Socorro for a late lunch and devoured two tacos again using blue corn and  smothered with green chili. A Primrose path led to the tree-shaded plaza where I stretched out to rest on thick green grass under tall leafy elms.  I was traveling forward in time, going from earliest spring in the Colorado mountains to what now felt like mid-summer.  There were roses and pansies blooming in nuptial bliss, being impregnated by the pollen-coated proboscis of the buzzing bees.  A sprinkler was turned on in one corner of the plaza with children running through it, laughing and tumbling about.

 Water, blessed water.  God’s beverage.   I thought of water here in Socorro where once upon a time the stagecoaches arrived from El Paso, coming safely north through the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead, where there was not one drop of water. Not a drop, not even a mouthful to dampen parched lips.  Well named, Jornada del Muerto.  This is where White Sands is, where the fuckers exploded the first atomic bombs.

 Resting in the shade of the lofty elm trees, it was easy to see why they named this delightful little town, this oasis, Socorro--which means succor, which means relief when in difficulty or distress.  That’s how it must have been perceived by the people arriving by stagecoach or wagon train not so many years ago.  The gratitude, the relief that must have been felt for having survived the deadly desert without dying of thirst or heat prostration, without being overcome on the parched sands under the pitiless sun,  without a raid of outlaws or the dreaded Apaches.  Beautiful was the name of the town Socorro.  I thought of other pleasant Mexican names: smiling brown-eyed girls called Innocencia, Esperanza, Remedios, Salud.

 Well rested, I drove on down the dry tough cowhide of a plain that was split with cracks and dry arroyos and riverbeds whose banks were carved by their distant memory of water.  So much land, so good for nothing, so it was astonishing to see water by the roadside where the sign said it was the Bosque del Apache refuge. Lots of ducks were flying about.

 It wasn’t far until a huge lake appeared.  I mean huge!  There were piers and a harbor; there were  boats sailing around; there were  people fishing.  What appeared to be a big island in the middle I suppose was the remains of a volcano.

 I don’t recall whether this was before or after I stopped at a small town called Truth or Consequences by the chatty waitress.  She said it used to be called Radium Springs until Truth or Consequences, a radio program of the 40’s, paid the inhabitants to change the name. 

 I stopped early at a cheap hotel outside El Paso and paid what was asked by a surly attendant who had a bronchial wheeze and a belly pregnant with age and dissipation.  At its convenient restaurant I ate part of a wilted salad and didn't drink a glass of wine that was aged with something other than time.  In my dingy room, lit by a dangling flickering lightbulb, I studied the vocabulary sections in my Mexican tourist books and meditated on the roadmap of watermarked streaks from yesteryears’ rains that had dribbled down the motel walls.   In one corner I again watched a spider create its arbitrary world with a complicated web.  Echos of turbulent past days were trapped in those corners.

 I was wound up as tight as my travel clock that pounded on the silence; my mind continuously chewing its cud of worries about my grandsons.

 I tossed and turned wondering why the fuck I was on this trip.  Why Sally was so nuts; why my other daughters, Stacey and Marta, had moved away—left me and Sally living like strangers in Boulder. Why was my family scattered?--Stacey on the Florida coast; Marta on the Pacific West; me heading clear out of the friggin’ USA.

 Why?  Families weren’t meant to be scattered. This is a new phenomena of the 20^th century in industrialized countries.^. Now with cars that whiz 80 mph, new vistas have appeared. It’s conceivable that my grandsons could someday live on Mars.

‘See the USA in a Chevrolet, America’s favorite car.’

‘You can’t keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree.’

No shit! 

 Finally I slept well in spite of the images that were snarled in my head; finally lulled by rich memories of the day. But the next morning, knowing there would be no gourmet French Roasted coffee at that motel, wishing there was something better than McDonald's excuse for coffee, I continued south; excited to cross the border. 

(From a novel by Louise Pickering Scott)

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