Out Here on the Edge of the Desert--

      ...so Santa Fe was far out.

      We flew from rain soaked and drizzling Nashville to St. Louis on the first leg west. It took maybe 50 minutes to get down to the flood plain of the Mississippi from the hills of Tennessee. Our tickets were on American Airlines, but the trip was contracted out, unbeknownst to us, to a tree top crop duster looking Chataugua airlines jet. The ride through the rough air of the storming could put the seat of your pants in the back of your throat.

      From the landing approach, St. Louis looked from my window seat as I've come to know it for many years now, dirty, windy, cold, and overcast. I never had anything to do with it. At other times I went to Kansas City before I ended up there. And I got caught staring at the Archway in freeway traffic as I dented the car in front of mine's fender only as much as wouldn't distort your face if you looked in it. The fellow charged me to replace the whole fender before we were through.

      Anyway, we deplaned, and made our way down the neon, mono colored concourse within striking distance of our next gate some shorter portion of an hour later. All the familiar airport accouterment, including a toilet in the men's room you didn't even flush, accented the impersonal. The Gateway to the West was just that. Like a turnstile, something to twirl on your way out.

      Below us on the tarmac, through the squeegeed polarizing glass of the terminal, a crew of airport roustabouts lined the area around a Port a Potty they motored over with a forklift. They carefully made considered marks with a neon orange can of spray paint at the four corners of some impending construction they were obviously going to dig out of the concrete. Lovely day for digging a hole in concrete. Then they huddled together, waving and pointing, before they broke to make more marks a few inches from the original ones. Then they huddled together, yet again against the chilly breeze, before they made marks a few inches further from the second ones. Committee rule, hourly wage.

      Behind us stood the gum chewing, and somewhat overweight, but comely waitress at a ragged looking concourse restaurant. She was detached, yet pleasant in a kind of "my bra doesn't fit" sort of way. She looked impatient, and sounded distant when she rarely spoke.

      Outside the work crew was still rocking on their heels with their hands in their pockets as their jacket lapels and their jeans fluttered in the stiff wind. Before they disappeared from my notice, with no small difficulty they laid an unwieldy metal tape measure out on the ground to the only fellow that seemed to be expending any energy. They continued waving their arms at one another and spraying more neon orange marks as they reeled it in, then played it out on a different tangent to the poor fellow chasing after it on the other end.

      I could anticipate their conversation as one fellow talking all the time motioned widely over to his right in large scooping gestures. A second shouting dude pantomimed a spray can leaving a mark. And then a no, no, no with his hands on his hips. And from a third shaking his head in a kind of surrender. Others looked on, shivered, and yawned, like "when's the coffee getting here". It was less complicated to order the Italian submarine sandwich. It distracted me from the action below at once because it tasted like it was from the midwest Mediterranean.

      The final part of the flight to New Mexico took two hours and broke into the sun for the rest of the five day trip about a hundred miles east of the Albuquerque "Sunport". The landscape from 30,000 feet till our wheels touched the ground was the desert in winter, and mountainous. As we blew in to the little airport, all the buildings in sight were adobe, or a facsimile of buff and tawny, or tan, or beige, or khaki, or sand colored...or brown. We disembarked into what was festively lit like a shopping mall decorated like out of doors. There were cool blues, and pinstripe greens across red and orange fields of the native art to accent the underlying pueblo decor. My instinctive retail reaction to the colliding colors, and the spit and polished smell of the terminal was to look for a shoe store.

      Sarah and I ducked into the wind outside and hopped a shuttle for the rent a car facility on the outskirts of the rather modest field of a very few runways. A sham of a negotiation later we were intimidated into buying several insurances against the fear of god, desert flood, and road runner damage. It sent our budget for transportation straight to hell, and we ended up paying maybe four times what the advertisement for the service cleverly implied when we made the reservation a week before on the internet back in that poky cowboytown. At least we had a full tank of gas to go an hour up the road. So it goes.

      Hooked it up I 25 for the 58 miles and 1000 foot climb to Santa Fe. There were road signs against the war. There were road signs to save water. There were road signs for the casinos. There were road signs for the pueblos and the reservations, and careers in the army, and the state government. Photovoltaic power arrays kept them glowing with their messages through the night. No shortage of marketing space in the desert. Tourist states.

      We arrived at our motel, and checked in in short order. Then got back into our expensive rent car to quizzically roam the parking lot only to realize we couldn't find where our motel room was exactly on the graphic we were given by the receptionist. After making the circuit a couple of times Sarah re-entered the foyer of the place at the courtesy desk and asked directions to go along with our "Twilight Zone" of a map.

      The room we belatedly discovered was in bold, and angular pueblo decor minus some of the blues and greens. A bible was under the phone, and a bucket for ice stood dryly ringed with empty glasses collared in faded paper. It was like a still life depiction of the local drought. Even the ice machine outside the door was broken. With bags unloaded, coats and shirts hung, toothbrushes and combs arranged in the bathroom, we made a pot of coffee. We turned the hair dryer on one another and laughed about it till we found that the laptop we brought was all but useless because the digital phone system could fry the circuitry. Oh, well.

      A hair dryer, a free cup of coffee in the morning, and a restaurant that hardly seemed open for business with a fantastic elevated view of Santa Fe would just have to do. We paid less for a week of that spooky eatery and the room with the clean sheets and a heater than we did for the Pontiac sitting outside in the snow.

      Our first foray into this desert mountain town began off Agua Fria road. Agua Fria, cold water, is kind of misleading. Nothing flows in, or out of, Santa Fe county, but the Pecos. Nevertheless, the southwest part of town is adobe with private courtyards, vigas marking the roof lines, and trellises of vines and flowers over cedar, and pinon covered patio spaces. Wooden gates with mailboxes front adobe wall enclosures. All these places are on top, abutting, behind, and corralling one another along narrow lanes punctuated by the outlines of wood burning kivas running up the side of each residence. Whatever. Left off Agua Fria, left on Don Felix, and left to Tom's up on the right.

      Tom is a friend for several years now, and a few of those ago he brought me to Santa Fe to perform at "Tribes" just off the plaza, while on a swing through the west for Sarah, Katy, and me. He is an excellent guitarist as well. The first night I was there he showed me, lined up in cases, six guitars I could've played for a lifetime. But I had come up for air for the last time in my third airport of the day, so I was pretty crunchy. I was trapezoidal like a Picasso.

      So we exhaustedly hit the sheets in that yellowing Aztec paradise from Home Depot of a motel room. I was so spacey and worn down, it took me half the night to turn out the bathroom light after I collapsed in one of the beds.

      The next day Sarah and I stumbled into the motel restaurant. It looked eerily abandoned like a set from a Betty Davis horror flick. It was classy in a day past its prime way, but it was weird. Everything was in it's place. But there were no people, no waitstaff. Thought I would meet someone in a tie and a smile with an axe. I self consciously charged through the odd quiet past a roomful of tables set with elegant napkins, glasses, and silverware, but no people. I went straight to the table with the view over Santa Fe to the snowcapped Sangre De Christo mountains behind. In art school they call that a perspective.

      I pulled out Sarahís chair. It was Hitchcock. You never saw his face, but our waiter appeared out of nowhere with a couple of Summer menus to go along with the morning dusting of snow outside the large picture windows. In this queer, slow motion, albeit friendly place the only thing that resembled a similarity with any other restaurant experience I've had was we actually got a check for the charges at the end. Everything else was "the final frontier" down to us seeming to know more about the menu than any waitperson did. It was as if the people didn't know where they were, or what to do. I thought they acted like they didn't want to be talked to, and were escaping a local prison facility.

      I left a good tip for the classy absence of ambiance and the panorama up the mountainside, and we went downstairs to the foyer and waited for Gary, the real estate agent. We were introduced by Tom weeks earlier on the internet. Gary was a violin player in Tom's band on the side. So comfortably enough, our agent was another one of us musicians we had been talking to for weeks.

      He poked his head around a stucco wall a moment later, "we're outta here. Today you'll see more of Santa Fe than the locals know is here. C'mon I got a dozen listings to show you". And with the charm of a grin, "you'll sleep tonight". Outside idled his All Wheel Drive.

      Sarah kept the listings in a folder on the back seat as we would race to them. I was the navigator with the collection of maps in the rider's seat up front, and Gary assumed the hell bent for leather position behind the wheel as our trusty, all knowing, fearless guide.

      "I can get really lost, but I'm great going backwards." Looking like a biplane pilot minus the muffler, he was constantly in motion for the rest of the day.

      "I love this job. I get to see all the stuff that no one else around here does".

      At each location we stopped he would leave a business card signifying that he really did come by and show the house to someone. He said as we pulled up to one that was obviously not in the running for our buck, "don't know what I was thinking about on this one. But I promised I would come by and show their home. You just sit here. I'm going to the lock box, leave a card, and we're outta here. They cleaned this place up just for us. It's a karma thing, you know". Musicians have much, including good karma. We never failed to leave a card all day.

      After a couple of properties that were half way perfect, but with unfortunate other sides, Gary turned around, gritting his teeth, and atmospherically pronounced while pulling the car into a lower gear, "hold on, we're gonna see the Œoff the grid' place you saw on the internet.". After fifteen miles of moonscape driveway I had a deep appreciation of that four wheel drive. The little station wagon climbed up and over terrain like a Hummer with 17 inch tires. When we arrived I was just about seasick, but composed myself enough to shake the hand of the owner. He looked wore a railroad train engineers cap like the Captain Kangaroo of the Grateful Dead.

      After getting the dog and pony show indoors we ambled back out the front with the extraordinary man. Behind honestly big, wondering, bespeckled eyes he locked on to mine and whistled excitedly out from under a handlebar mustache, "all I can say is it's just bitchin'. I got a computer indoors powered by solar arrays that plays some monster games. Ya wanna see?"

      Already down the driveway to another house on the property with Sarah, Gary howled after me, "OK Vince, c'mon, you're holding us up". I forced myself to look away from the man's entrancing eyes just long enough to feel my legs underneath me again. Saved. The compound of two houses and outbuildings was extremely together on a hill. If it wasn't for some of the toughest sledding in the solar system just to get out of there, we'd probably have felt right at home and bought it.

      After lurching over the dreaded driveway back to civilization, we lunched at a highway 14 roadstop that had a long, gray haired, stetson and boot wearing fellow playing a Stratocaster. He was on a stool plugged into a Fender Princeton amplifier at his feet, mic stand in front of him. I brushed past him offering my hand between songs on the way to a table in another room and said like an afterthought, "howzagig?"

      He responded atmospherically, and under his breath, "I got a couple of tunes before I quit". We smiled at one another. Nuff said. Lotta people gigging in the mountains. Lotta gigs in the mountains.

      That afternoon we saw the southwest of Santa Fe. Sarah asked, "who lives in the places we've been?"

      Gary responded, "oh, could be a musician, or a painter is your neighbor. Or a truck driver, or a doctor, or a lawyer...or a physicist from Los Alamos. Now the next thing we're gonna see is Madrid (Pronounced MA-drid)".

      Madrid is full of hippies from the sixties. A whole town. And sure enough, as we trawled down the main street there was a chaos of colorful tanktopped and braless graying ponytails and biker jackets, jeans, tye dye, and indian jewelry. This place was seriously on vacation and selling it to the sightseers. Armies of tourist hippies from other American towns, milled about the vegetarian, or headshop looking retailers. As we came out the other side of town you could almost smell the Dr. Bronner's.

      Completed the circuit back to the motel by 4:00 in the afternoon. Sarah had an armful of papers. Gary went on to collect his children and we went to looking for a rent house so we could get "on the ground" in this little western town. Armed with a few pages of 80 internet listings from the local paper we began bright and early the next day.

      As it turns out a phone call I made to a buddy in New York netted us our first, and only stop. I'd contacted him before we left dank old Nashville which led to a person in Santa Fe, which led to yet another person in Los Angeles who had a furnished house on a lot next to a 30,000 acre ranch back in...New Mexico. There was plenty of room for the button eyed dog and the border collie to run. Hell, I couldn't throw a frisbee that far.

      So we stopped looking. The impressive decor, a dog yard with a coyote (tall, sometimes of cedar post construction) fence, and a "move in and leave the furniture in storage till we find a place" rationale made it the right place for us while we were looking for another we could call our own. Like a tune of mine says, "you gotta give chance a chance." Get a place to rent so you can come to the mountains and find a place to live. One stop shopping. Woah!

      We spent another day of this trip with Gary, but we never found the joint, the one we'd like to have seen. Saw radiantly heated Saltillo tile floors. Saw the kitchen and a dining area down by the railroad tracks in Lamy. Saw the view from the wraparound porch at Blue Corn. Saw the kiva fireplace in a couple of places. The hot lick in sleuthing a home is to find these attractions between the same walls.

      Oh well. That's why they call it tomorrow. And most every now and again we saw Tom, who made our trip as good as it was. He and I ended up in his adobe trading tunes with a couple of dreadnaughts facing each other. There again we met another one of our new buddies in the area, Kathleen.

      Otherwise, Sarah and I expanded our search to include some museums, and the blocks around the plaza. We stayed busy. When we were off we went to a kalidescope of Mexican restaurants at breakfast, lunch and dinner all over town from the La Fonda Hotel to Cowgirls. Quite frankly, never had anything less than a great feed. One night toward the end I pledged to myself that I wasn't going to have Mexican food. But the menu was so compelling that when the order came to the table it was, Mexican food. I was out of control. I thought I had died and gone to hell, or Texas. By the by, the best chicken fried steak in Texas is in Santa Fe.

      Time to go back and put it all together with whiskey boxes from the liquor store. On the plane back to the continuing rainstorm that blanketed Tennessee for over two weeks Sarah said somewhere over Muhlenberg county, Kentucky, "just think, if we were coming home from a vacation it would be so depressing".

Ridin' that pony,
Vince

Copyright ©2003 Vince Bell