There's a pace to see northern New Mexico. It's somewhere between seventy-five in a rented minivan and the just above walking pace on the back of two burros, which is how Willa Cather thinks you should see it. She chose the notable period of the mid-1800s when New Mexico became American and then told a story where nothing notable happened, just two priests covering the red earth on Contento and Angelica. Kit Carson makes a few cameos and you read a little closer when he does, but Cather uses him the same way she does sand storms or the Sangre de Cristo mountains, as part of the main character that is New Mexico. And if you're going to do that, and tell me what the naked blue Sandia mountains look like when you're high on a ridge over the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, then I'll choose a paint brush over a pen. Or even the words of somebody who holds one. Because when I think of New Mexico and my first time there, it's the big blue skies I'll remember and my excitement as I think, tomorrow I'll be in Albuquerque or tomorrow, Ojo Caliente and the day after that, Taos.
Bobcat Bite, on the old road to Las Vegas (NM) from Santa Fe, where the green chile cheeseburgers are on the menu, but the blue sky still astounds.
Hiking outside Ojo Caliente...
....where Baleen was always looking down for snakes and jumped when she she saw this cheetah...
...and where we had fried green chiles for dinner, making it 3 for 3 with the green chiles.
On the road to Taos...
...where we listened as the current Father at San Francisco de Asis told us how brutal the local Indians were to each other...
...and found out what Georgia O'Keefe meant when she wrote to Alfred Stieglitz upon seeing Taos for the first time, "This really isn't like anything you ever saw - and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it."
Bobcat Bite, on the old road to Las Vegas (NM) from Santa Fe, where the green chile cheeseburgers are on the menu, but the blue sky still astounds.
Hiking outside Ojo Caliente...
....where Baleen was always looking down for snakes and jumped when she she saw this cheetah...
...and where we had fried green chiles for dinner, making it 3 for 3 with the green chiles.
On the road to Taos...
...where we listened as the current Father at San Francisco de Asis told us how brutal the local Indians were to each other...
...and found out what Georgia O'Keefe meant when she wrote to Alfred Stieglitz upon seeing Taos for the first time, "This really isn't like anything you ever saw - and no one who tells you about it gives any idea of it."
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