Tuscon to Taos

I spent a happy week in Tucson, enjoying the warmth, and the good company.  I still find the traffic there kind of irritating.  People who live in one place, know where everything is, and more important in a town, which lane to be in for certain stores.  Tucson’s streets have complicated intersections, designed to handle a lot of traffic, but it sometimes means you have to go a ways around to get to your destination.  To get to other friends, who are only 13 miles away as the crow flies, it takes a solid 45 minutes drive.  There maybe shortcuts, next time.

Off to the interstate, through Deming, and Las Cruces, and up to near Albuquerque.  Following the Rio Grande, running full and muddy, there is a wide band of agriculture along the valley.  There are several wildlife sanctuaries along here, wide wet areas that fill with waterfowl.  Bosque Del Apache ( Apache Woods) is the largest, at certain times it has millions of wild flyers.  They take volunteers there, and I did apply this winter, but they have only 5 RV sites and folks keep returning every year.  I did get a call back, but, well, we’ll see.

The chocolate peaks of the desert and the wild flowers, bright orange desert mallows, and many cheerful yellow ones drift by, and as I go north, the rocks are blacker, dark ashpiles, and old cones of volcanoes show up. I remember up north of here, in Grants NM, where the lava is still black and crusty.  The breaks, I think that is the word, of the Rio Grande, deep arroyos where sudden storms have gouged out the land make the road swoop up and down.  We are paralleling the El Camino Real del Tierro Aldentro, the Spanish settlers came along this way to settle Santa Fe and Taos and on north.  We are reminded that it began bringing European settlers into NM 22 years before the Mayflower.  To avoid the breaks and the swamps (including quicksand), the settlers left the river at about Radium Springs, and struck off overland for 90 miles without water, until San Marcial where they returned to the river.  Known as the Journada del Muerto, this section was actually named for a disastrous retreat in 1680 from the Pueblo Revolt, although death was always there in a desert crossing.  The highway today stays close to the river, and the lakes at Elephant Butte and Caballo, but the breaks would have made this route in wagons impossible.

I stayed in a CG that is also a horse motel, so if you hitch up your trailer and go camping with your ponies, you will have somewhere to stay. Sounds like fun.  The place also does donkey rescue, and has a menagerie of ducks, goats and oddly, guinea pigs.  There must have been 40 of them, all brown and white in a pen like chickens.  Pepe and I visited with many of these critters, the donkeys were looking for snacks but settled for a scratch or two.  The wind has become fierce, and it was 90, but the 37 year old AC started right up and cooled us down quickly.

I had sort of hoped to stop at Petroglyph National Monument on my way through Albuquerque (probably after the Spanish town of that name, from white oak, or the dominant cork trees there, or maybe a corruption of the Arabic word for apricot), but the best walk allowed no pets, and it is too hot to leave Pepe in the truck.  Plus, this is pretty much downtown, and I was nervous about where to park the trailer.  Next time.

So up to Santa Fe, where I leave the Interstate, and dawdle my way past innumerable Casinos.  There is big money in Santa Fe, but once north of that, desperate poverty.  The many NA reservations seem to be doing well from the casinos, new schools, and new housing.  The casinos all seem bigger and snazzier then when I was last here, perhaps 10 years ago, and the traffic in Espanola is way worse than I remembered.  From there to Taos, you know you are off the main path, a narrow two lane road climbs up over the mountains, truck is puffed by the top, and then suddenly, the great wide plain of Taos is laid out before you.  The snow covered and magnificent Sangre di Christo Mountains tower over a wide, green valley.  The Rio Grande Gorge cuts through this, snaking its way north, a chocolate gash in the flat sagebrush and grass plain.  It is a stupendous panorama, hard to photograph, but we stop and look. I had forgotten how extraordinary this place is.

The City of Taos is a tangle of touristy shopping, and lo, the hippies are here, still. Well, not my hippies, they are all old and thinking of retiring from their jobs in the real world.  But the earnest, unshorn, creatively dressed, and hopefully healthy and artistic are still here, scaring the grown ups and dropping out.  I wasn’t really a hippie, I always had a job, and only went to one peace demonstration, and was not at Woodstock. We do have lots more natural and organic stuff these days, and more home schooling, but peace and love haven’t really arrived yet.  There is an apathetic quality to that life that never appealed to me.

I’m back at a favorite campground, on a knoll way out of town, with mountains all around, in the wide plain. The wind blew hard yesterday, raising a dust cloud that obscured the setting sun and veiled the mountains.  Dust in your teeth, dust on everything, the real west, need my bandana over my nose.