Millicent Rogers

 

Millicent Rogers

Born to Standard Oil money, and with a weakish heart, Millicent roved the world, loving art, marrying, divorcing, dabbling, and then she came to Taos.  As she came up the last leg of the road’s climb, and stopped at the pull out where it all is laid out, she said “ Why wasn’t’ I told about this?”.  This regal remark was the beginning of her life in Taos, where she collected Navajo and Zuni silver jewelry, rugs, and especially the amazing pottery made by the Martinez family of the Santa Clara Pueblo.

Today this collection is in an older Taos house, along with newer pieces and some wonderful paintings by local NA artists.  I visited the museum once before, about 10 years ago, but with a group that wasn’t as devoted to all these things, so I have always wanted to return and really look at everything and read all the labels and just absorb it.  It was great, I was in a trance for about 2 hours.

I bought a postcard of Millicent. She is dressed in the velvet tiered skirt and long sleeved blouse with tiny tucks that Navaho ladies wear on special occasions.  Millicent had these outfits made by locals and her dressmaker, and decked herself out in a fortunes worth of jewelry to go with it, concho belts, at least 6 clunky cuff bracelets on each arm, several necklaces, and many rings, and silver buttons of course.  She herself is tall and Brooke Astor thin, with the cheek bones of a model and carefully coiffed blond hair in a page boy cut, with waves over her face.  In this post card, she is standing on a chair, with an apron over her finery, dying velvet in a huge pot on an old enamel wood stove.

I like the idea of her finding a place and a culture that she could embrace.  She designed jewelry and eased happily into the artsy world of Taos in the 40’s.  Another woman from back east who took one look at this western world and saw that it was the place to be.

Saturday, I hitched up and headed up to Questa, the small town where we are doing the build.  It is the first town on the Enchanted Circle, a drive that takes you from Taos up to Eagle Lake and Angle Fire where there is skiing in the winter and spruce and pine mountains, and tiny mountain streams that cut ribbons through the open grassy parkland.  Questa and the next town up, Red River, only existed on the huge molybdenum mine that shows as an enormous yellow scar on the mountains. Used to make steel, the mine opened in 1917, boomed during WWI, and has worked only fitfully since 1930.  The ore is crushed and washed, and the tailings make a huge pile, probably containing arsenic and other evil chemicals, as well as just choking dust.  All this runs down into the Red River, but a super fund cleanup has moved the toxic stuff out to settling ponds to the west of Questa.  Red River now lives on skiing and Texans who come up to the Mountains to escape the heat.  Questa is living on not much, the closest jobs are in Taos, an hour away, or maybe even further.  We are at the edge of the mountains, on a sage brush plateau.

The house is smallish, three bedrooms, two baths and a living kitchen area, a mom and her 5 daughters are the family, but only two of the daughters are still at home.  The others are all off to college!  Mom lives in community housing, where she pays rent based on her income, so as she gets a better job, the rent goes up.  Her new house will make the difference to getting on up.  Habitat is a hand up, not a hand out.  The outside walls are up on the slab, but that’s it, so interior walls will be the first order of business.

We are parked in a line, Steve in his class C, me in the AS and Ray in his class C, a motor home with another couple will turn up later.  We have to combine all our hoses to get to water to fill our tanks, and if we have to dump tanks, we will have to move over to a manhole cover over the sewer. We do have electric, lots of it, as it is the main service for the new house. 

On Sunday, Steve took me on a hike down into the Rio Grande Gorge at a point called La Junta (the junction) where the Red River comes tumbling in from its own canyon.  The sign says difficult. I was ready to just wait on top, but Steve urged me on even though I told him I was poky going down, afeared of falling, and poky going up due to old age, emergency fat stores and general lack of conditioning.  The trail drops 800 feet in probably ¼ mile, so it is one narrow switchback after another, plus a section of metal stairs and even a bit of ladder.  Some scary parts where I needed to hug the wall with a death grip, but generally a good climb down and up, although I did have to stop and puff. The rocks are mostly black, either because they are basalt or because they are dark with desert varnish.  We looked hard for petroglyphs, but without the WPA work to make the trail, this would be an unstable rock pile of huge boulders, nearly impossible to climb.

Down below the Rio Grande and the Red River are fast and muddy with the beginnings of the snow melt, and we look up at the dark walls that are mostly a tumble of boulders that have fallen, or other spots where they might fall soon.  The gorge is a more manageable size than the impossible Grand Canyon, both to hike and to understand with your eyes, and it doesn’t sport the wild bands of color of those red rock canyons.  It is more austere, and much newer geologically.

I was very pleased that I managed the hike, me and the old dog, but my muscles are going to be sad for a few days..