Days Four through Seven

(February 21 - February 24)

By late afternoon I was in Santa Fe. I remember really nothing from the drive now that a number of days have passed. It might have been very beautiful just the same.

I felt good at having a relative to stay with and I quickly, before even being bidden to, made myself at home. I showered. I dressed. I snacked and I lounged. I felt I could afford to indulge somewhat since my bakery appointments were not until the next morning.

And in the morning, after having driven with cousin Sonja to see the Plaza, the cathedral, the galleries (really too many galleries), and up into the snowy hills just outside of town to admire the wealth that could get you a house there and 'property', I began my investigations, not without some shyness.

But the caffeinated energy of the tall, gray-haired woman at Sage Bakehouse who identified herself as the manager set me at my ease. She gave me quick tour: the pallets of flour, the imported Spanish oven, the two oblique mixers, the pastry kitchen and the Mexicans who performed all the skilled labor.

Cloud Cliff Bakery is run by a German Zen monk, very modernly dressed, blond hair combed straight back and a wide grin the corners of which are nearly lost in the curve of his face. After quitting the monastery he had moved to Santa Fe and waited for "the money to arrive." I asked what he meant and he shrugged and smiled broadly. A Zen mystery. He had begun baking bread from his garage to support himself and then came, he said, grinning again and looking down at me with arms outstretched as if he intended to embrace me along with the entire bakery, "This."

"This" was not terribly impressive. The bread coming out of the decrepit and rust-marked oven looked decent enough, but things were in general disarray and there was a film of grease and old flour perceptible in the air and coating everything. Equipment was in visible disrepair and the large, high-ceilinged space was filled haphazardly, as if the stuff had been moved in with the intention to settle it in permanently in a moment, but then was just left where it was. The feeling was slightly medieval, not Zen but Franciscan.

But he was delighted with it all, shining his smile on the whole of it. Afterwards I thought, although I know almost nothing of the Zen discipline, that perhaps the preoccupation--the trouble--that would be necessary in order to regain the order and cleanliness he quite possibly wished for, would be to admit a level of worry unbecoming the Zen philosophy. I do not know. And, though I would not have asked, he soon vanished into his office, and for the hour or two I remained observing and helping out, he did not emerge.

The next couple of days I spent traveling to Phoenix. The near blizzard I crawled through in Flagstaff gave way, after only an hour of driving, to a warm, light drizzle, deepening the peach hue of the Arizona desert into a dull pink. And the next morning, it was summer. The summer of somewhere else--not a Phoenix summer, for sure--but a summer morning nonetheless. And the two days' drive of sitting immobile got me out of bed early, onto my feet, and into my shoes; out my host’s door and onto a dewy golf course, lined with rose-colored stucco houses, flat-roofed, almost windowless, with cactus and gravel yards. And the closely-cropped grass a dark, liquid green waddling with unspeaking ducks.

Or at least unheard. And how could they be heard? Other birds everywhere, flying in groups and alighting on roofs and wires and fences and fluttering around cacti. Squawking, chirping, squeaking like rusty wheels turning, the low scream of crows on lampposts. What is all of this? Has morning ever been silent? Or do we mean of human sounds? It is a school yard shouting match, a piercing morning ritual. Not pretty (or anyway it is last of all pretty) but distinctly wild, a call--who knows--a reminder, in the middle of this sprawling city, straight from the jungle.