Days One through Three

Day 1, February 18, 2008

A bit after seven in the morning, I began the drive to Grand Junction, Colorado and arrived without much incident. The car burned oil. I sighed resignedly. I ate a sandwich in Green River. The two women who assembled my sandwich were affable and motherly. One was actually grandmotherly and the register gave her trouble, but she overcame. She’s had trouble the register could never understand, never be able to approach. Children, a husband, meager property, her health, the high and hard-edged desert life—they could tie your life in knots only continual longsuffering could undo. That was the appeal of a job like that to a mature woman of rural experience. Trouble that really wasn’t trouble. A miscalculated sum that had only to be cleared and reentered and then smiled away.

As I ate, I enjoyed the banter between them about how their ages made them do unaccountable things. Like forgetting. And pressing wrong buttons when they knew very well which button they ought to push but not pushing it anyway. They laughed to show themselves and each other that they were not at all distressed by getting old. I laughed silently along with them, chewing my sandwich and grateful for the good-natured atmosphere of the Subway inside the Chevron station.

Because back in the tape player of my car was Wide Sargasso Sea, and young Antoinette was going mad and being ill-treated in Jamaica. The book jacket had warned me that she would go mad, but I wasn’t at all happy about it. Yes, she was pretty and charming with lots of vigor, and I didn’t like to hear of her decline no matter how inevitably foretold; but on top of that I couldn’t see a reason for it. Was madness truly the irrevocable result of colonial abandonment, of a tragic childhood, of a loveless marriage, of the dangerous and potent richness of tropical life? I can understand how an unlivable reality could engender an invented and more tolerable one, but not seeing the actual possibility of madness distressed me until the final spin of the final reel. I have invented for myself immense personal tragedy and along with it my range of reaction: depression, suicide, inconsolability, spontaneous and wanton extravagance, self-inflicted solitude, abandonment of important responsibilities, general moral decline, but madness has never occurred to me, and my reaction to this book makes me think that I may have missed the point. So in the end it was my failings in imagination and sympathy that kept me from receiving the story as much more than a fairy tale.

Grand Junction is thriving. A multi-million dollar hospital renovation, orange and black street construction with its deliberate pace, bustle at all hours, a traffic light added here and there, an ancient fenced pasture stamped, after all these years, with the foundation of an AutoZone or perhaps a Walgreens.

Willie and I helped move a family into their new home. Before that we went to the dump a minute or two before it closed. We unloaded in a frenzy. The steel blade of an idling bulldozer towered impatiently over us, curled and polished like a tidal wave with the sea rumbling close behind, preserving us by whim alone.

Day 2, February 19, 2008

Next day, I picked my way southeastward on small, two-lane state highways. South, then east, south, then east, a declining stairway. It was high plateau driving, the expanse convex and sloping down towards the base of the Rockies, an anti-valley.

Here, with everything familiar behind me, my trip began. I felt the thrill of unrecognition, of discovery, of the unknown path. Tired of sitting inert, I would stop and roam a parking lot and fill my eyes with newness. And the people of this new place attending to the business of their lives. I watching them as if from above. A non-participant of this place, taking up space, displacing this thin air, being of fixed volume but lacking any local significance, like an airplane passing overhead. A part of the place only by spatial necessity and then—gone.

But they shop and raise families and have addresses and work here. They assert their existence by being familiar; by causing receipts to be printed and having a local telephone number. And by, though not really knowing personally the cashier or station attendant or passerby, all the same seeming to know them, all of them sharing at the very least the kinship of place and, by extension, temperament and mind.

I slept in Taos, in the car. I heated soup on a stove and with it ate Cloud Cliff bread that was fine. Not the best I’d ever eaten.

Day 3, February 20, 2008

Waking early, I killed the time before my appointment in Questa (twenty minutes away) by eating bread and a banana and jogging in the surprising cold. At nine, I met Gonzalo Gallegos at the Phillips 66 station in northern Questa and followed him to the mill.

Mr. Gallegos is an organic wheat farmer and miller. He owns 80 acres on the Colorado-New Mexico border and must weed, if at all, by hand. The mill is his own, and he operates it on behalf of the coop he presidents. He is older than he sounds on the telephone, but his short, powerful, boulder-like build is not a surprise, nor is, once you see his eyes and shake his hand, his love of the fat wheat berries he cultivates, often at a loss. The climate only allows one crop per year and sometimes not even that. A few seasons ago, his young spring wheat was caught in a late freeze and all of it shriveled up and turned black.

Back to Taos, the alien mud city. Saturated absolutely with Subarus and art galleries—and dirt. The houses are, more exactly, dwellings, and the streets are dirt-washed. It is as if the whole town was not built but carved. Or that it stands now only because it has not yet been washed away, that it lies in the bed of a temporarily receded river. The buildings nothing more that than the stubborn resisters of erosion.

The effect of which is elemental. As if at their shops my money would not work and down the slots of their parking meters I should stuff, not a newly minted commemorative quarter, but earth and blood.

Which I wasn’t truly tempted to do after I parked in front of a bakery I thought I had an appointment at. But no one was there. And the adjacent shop said that the bakery had been closed since November, although they did see the owner come and go now and then with loads of bread. Where could he be found? At his restaurant in the plaza that didn’t open until nearly six in the evening. Out of curiosity only, with no real hope, I walked over to Joseph’s Table, the mid-morning sky low and flat gray, gently rattled the iron gate that had been pulled and locked over the door, and decided, as I read the menu stuffed with rabbit and fois gras and surprising reductions, to drive to Santa Fe.