Day 26: Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Lubbock, Texas

Friday 18 October – Another desert walk this morning, with R.L., who retired here after decades of dreaming and planning for that goal.  New Mexico calls itself the ‘land of enchantment.’  When I was in grad school I needed to research that word, ‘enchantment.’  Its antecedents are the French ‘chanter,’ ‘to sing’ (and whatever Latin roots the French).  To ‘enchant’ is to ‘sing against.’  The word originally had a malevolent connotation, not the dreamy, floating sense of ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’  I suspect R.L. would say the Albuquerque, high-desert landscape sings with her, resonates in her.  I’ll have to check on that, though.

Enchanting

Volunteer squash at front of photo

Certainly hers are insightful eyes through which to see this stretch of earth.  She pointed out that the pockets of light and shadow on the Jemez Mountains aren’t sunshine and shadow, but variation in leaf color.  In some pockets, the aspens have started to turn yellow, so that stand of trees looks as if it’s in a beam of light.  She also introduced the ‘volunteers’ that spot her neighborhood.  These are squash and sunflower plants that arise where birds have – ah – deposited seeds, after eating them from birdfeeders and compost piles.  Many flowers and fruits arise from this avian activity, and each one seems a small celebration of the natural world.  The sunflowers are what R.L. calls New Mexican sunflowers, with many saucer-sized blooms on each stem.  She’s an artist, and wants to paint or draw the spiral the seed bed creates in the central disc – but can’t decide whether to take a photo and work from that, or clip a flower and use the real-life model, and risk that very minor disruption to the natural order.

Volunteer sunflower

She also identified for me the bird with the distinctively lovely song, and the tree on which it was perched.  It was a lark on a juniper, and once I knew its name I noticed its relatives, again and again, on junipers.  I’ve often read about the beauty of larksong, but had never heard (knowingly) an actual lark before.  It warrants the praise of poets, and the simile “singing like a lark” will now always be more evocative for me.  And then there’s her side observation that ‘windshields go fast around here.’  I didn’t ask what that meant.  What could that mean?

R.L. also offers insightful conversation, over huevos rancheros Christmas-style, which means with red chile sauce and green chile sauce.  She holds her hands cupped over her breakfast briefly before starting to eat, and I’m reminded of grace before meals at several other friends’.  She talks about a ‘transfer of energy,’ which is surely one of the graces with which this world gifts us.  One of the qualities of this woman that I most admire is the way she pays attention to her life and her self, tries to act on what she learns from that observation.  To a significant degree, she understands and trusts herself, and doesn’t chase ‘what Madison Avenue is selling’ as the ex would put it – not without due consideration of whether that’s what’s right for her.

New Mexican sunflowers in the desert.

Driving away from Albuquerque, I was absorbing her inspiration (and the pleasure of gas for $2.99⁹/₁₀) when what should appear but  – a cornfield!  After four days of desert, a cornfield seems pretty exciting, although – maybe especially because – it’s a miniature one by Illinois standards.  There was still plenty of desert to see, but moving east there was more agriculture in the mix.  A few cows.  The plants conjured the term ‘rangeland,’ with the little juniper trees, scrubby bushes and occasional ponds, fed by barely- or in-visible creeks.

R.L. had mentioned that her neighborhood used to be grazing land, a century or so ago.  The grass is shorter now than it was then.  I wonder if the colors are the same; crazy to think it might have been more varied then.  The grasses I see in east New Mexico are silvery at the base, shading to pale green, like the inside of a lime, and then inky purple at the top, where the feathery seeds are.  There’s a wind farm on a distant hilltop, maybe 50 stark-white giant stalks rising from a puce and pink hill, pushing into a sky the color of English bluebells.

I am not now, have never been, and never will be a visual artist.  (I think, but then life, as I’ve recently realized, can take surprising turns.)  My drawings of horsies and doggies are not even laughable; they can inspire only a mild pathos.  Nonetheless, I am powerfully affected by color.  One of my artist friends once told me he hates brown.  Ugh!  Brown!  I cannot imagine how anyone can dismiss an entire color, especially when colors inherently combine well.  Redheads in lilac t-shirts; autumn-blue skies seen through pale yellow trellises covered with green leaves and pale red roses; dark brown chocolate cakes dusted with white sugar and dotted with raspberries and crystallized violets; C.J.’s deep red bathroom with the gold-bronze framed mirror, mahogany trim and brightly multicolored little Peruvian carvings.  Or the lamps in this motel room in South Africa, where I’m typing up these notes:  dark, dark brown bases, maybe ebony, decorated with etched metal in copper and bronze shades, topped with off-white lampshades with dark tan damask paisleys.  I think they’re beautiful.

So what is it in me that makes me notice these combinations?  I know there are people who see a wind farm and think about BTUs, or bird strikes, or returns on investments.  I see one, and I think about the puce and pink shades of its hill.  Mysterious.  Marvelous.  Sometimes confusing.

And not enough to dispel from my head the Little Feat song ‘Willin’.’  You know this song.  Lowell George singing, “I’ve been from Tucson to something-that-sounds-like-Tucumcari-but-that-can’t-be-right/Somewhere to la la laaaa/Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been maaaade/La la the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed,” except I always substitute ‘laid’ or ‘paid’ or ‘made’ for ‘weighed,’ I don’t know why.  Anyway, turns out Tucumcari is right; it’s a big enough city in northwest Texas that they start telling you to expect it about 300 miles before you get there.  So that’s like, Coeur d’Alene big.

Cline’s Corner, New Mexico, is a lot smaller than Tucumcari, and is on its own for civic boosting.  It’s done the job right, though, with dozens of billboards offering inducements like, “Ice.”  Or “Magnets;” “Hat Tacks;” “Homemade Fudge;” “CLEAN Restrooms;” each with the tagline, “Worth Stopping for Since 1934.”  These inducements were insufficient for me (I don’t know what a hat tack is), so you’ll have to check into it for yourself.  And while you’re there, note the size of the sky.  It’s really big around Santa Rosa and Cline’s Corner, New Mexico.  New Mexico, Montana:  kindred spirits.

Puzzled tourists on land; divers in hole.

Santa Rosa is where you’ll find The Blue Hole, according to Wikipedia one of the most popular destinations in the United States for scuba diving and training.  I thought it was just the third-least interesting tourist attraction on my mental list.

Also like Montana, New Mexico can get rather chilly at night; by 5:00pm I was in industrial-agricultural Clovis, New Mexico, seeing the sun just above the horizon in the rear-view mirror, and ready to close the sunroof to keep out the cold.  Then there was a sign for Texico, New Mexico, and then I bumped over some railroad tracks and into Palmer County, Texas, which was full of cotton fields.  Then I phoned A.T. to say I am so sorry but I thought west Texas would be mountain time but I just realized that’s it’s central so I’ll be an hour later than I thought.  Her husband pointed out that Arizona’s failure to move into daylight-saving time makes the whole thing that much more confusing, and he is so right.

It’s not too far to Lubbock, though – through cultivated land featuring cotton and dairy cows and much taller grass for them to graze.  There was a burnt chemical smell to Sudan, Texas, which hosts a water-tower-like structure, a black one, blazoned in bold white letters, “Central Compost.”  Littlefield, Texas, may be one of the suppliers, as it offered up a strong smell of manure amongst its many dairy farms.  And somewhere there was a pecan-tree orchard, which I know because they labeled it.  Otherwise I’d only have known the ‘tree’ part.

Sunset over Texas

Somewhere between Sedona and Albuquerque, my hair started to get all static-y, as it does in winter in New England and the mid-Atlantic.  About ten miles from Lubbock, I happened to notice it was about three times worse.  So I arrived at A.T. and R.T.’s with my hair sticking out every which way to stand the accusation that I’d brought this cold – it was 42 degrees Fahrenheit that night, and the day before they were still in summer.  It was the first time on the trip that I’d been guilty of bringing less-than-ideal weather.

Moonrise over Texas