Taos through Texas

No wonder Zach's parents moved to Taos. And no wonder they had to leave, eventually, "chewed up and spit out" as Zach put it.

It is an enchanted place. Everything seems to carry meaning. From the ancient adobe walls to the sagebrush burning on the hills, the place is a spiritual powerhouse. For that very reason, it seems to attract spiritually restless people. So many seekers, with not enough answers to go around. At least there is lots of chile. Each meal, you have to decide between red and green. This creates something of an existential crisis. I started out with the green, but by the time we left I was regularly choosing red.

We stayed in the Historic Taos Inn, whose former owner was a doctor ("Doc Martin" - like the shoes) who impressed the community with his willingness to help anyone in need. He accepted chickens and art for payment, and this seems to be what Taosians came to expect of their doctors, because a hundred years later Zach's parents routinely received the same compensation for their surgical and pediatric services. In any case, the Taos Inn is in the center of town and still a center of Taos nightlife. Our room happened to be right above the stage.

We stayed three nights, 2 1/2 days. The first morning we went to see Alyce Frank, a gifted artist who is a best friend of Zach's mother and a famous artist - one of her paintings has appeared on a Norton Anthology of Poetry. She raised her children in a morada next to a graveyard, where penitentes used to flagellate themselves (sometimes fatally, hence the convenient location). They own so many Santos de Cristos that they had to loan 250 of them to a museum. We visited her studio, and on the easels were resting some strikingly beautiful paintings (Alyce thinks they may be her best ever). While I was doing all I could to keep the kids from smearing the paint, I asked Alyce about her inspiration - Van Gogh - and pointed out that the way she always paints her canvas red before she covers it with an image echoes the blood theme evident in her choice of setting (morada, santos, sangre de cristo mountains behind her etc.). It seemed like an obvious comment, but Alyce didn't seem to see it as so.

We drove up Taos mountain to the ski resort, stopped for lunch at a hippie cafe where we had to wait for them to pick our salad from their garden, then headed down to the Rio Grande where we let the kids splash in a tributary from Taos mountain.

The next day we hiked around the back side of Zach's childhood home, which was the highest on the mountain. In addition to several abandoned modern items, we found two plant fossils, a finely chipped arrowhead, a piece of petrified wood and a bullet casing. Zora stumbled over a cactus and got poked superficially in the tummy. That night we visited a wonderful gemstone/rock store that Zach had visited as a child and which dramatically expanded Jonah's rock-hunting horizons. We ate sopapillas at a restaurant filled with locals. On our last day we visited the Taos Pueblo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblos in the country. Native Americans at the Pueblo still grow up speaking Tiwa as their primary language, and it was striking to see modern trucks parked amongst the pueblo walls. Most moving was the church and graveyard, carpeted in crosses. Resisting Spanish colonization, the natives initially destroyed the first church, only to be converted to Christianity later in the century. When they sympathized with the Spanish in the Spanish-American war, the women and children of the village retreated to the church (thinking it a sanctuary) and were slaughtered by American forces. As the tour guide told us this, I wondered what it would be like to live just feet away from such a powerful testament to human violence.

We had one last meal at the "Chow Cart". The rodeo had just arrived in town and I would have loved to see teenagers trying to catch a greased pig, but the road was calling and we had to get moving. Winding down the Rio Grande, we headed south through Espanola, past Santa Fe, through Roswell and down to the oil town of Artesia in southern New Mexico. It felt like we were already in Texas. Oil money had dressed up the two blocks that comprised downtown with statues of town luminaries herding longhorns. A prominent restaurant ("The Wellhead") had a sign that read: "Earth First! We'll drill the rest later." We left in the morning and headed on to Carlsbad Caverns. Somewhere on the way down I realized our family was on a Rock Tour. Mostly all we had done at this point was to look at rocks - big monumental ones in Utah, sparkly ones in New Mexico, and now underground ones.

Carlsbad caverns was truly spectacular. A huge cave with a 3-mile path winding amongst a garden of unusual calcite formations. After descending down the glass elevator through 300 feet of rock, we saw stalactites, stalagmites, columns, popcorn, cave pearls, draperies, bottomless pits and cave pools. Our inner Fraggles rejoiced in the cool, magical underground world. As we left, lightening was striking nearby and the caverns closed everything but the elevator entrance to the caves.

With the kids crashed out from their underground hike, we headed deep into the heart of Texas and straight into the storm. The land was dry, flat, and the eerie kind of empty that comes from the abandonment of an industry (oil) that came and went in a hollow flash of wealth. We made it as far as Sonora, where the kids enjoyed Texas-shaped waffles, then bolted east. We drove through the green hill country of Texas (supposedly one of the state's main draws). Instead of adobe, the old homes in the hill country were built with stone packed in between beams. Somewhere near Fredericksburg a lone man was carrying a heavy wooden cross down the road on his shoulder. We stopped at a stand to buy peaches and skirted south of Austin to Lockhart's Kreuz Market, which is rumored to have the best BBQ in Texas ("no forks, no sauce") and we weren't disappointed. With Texas-sized bellies we blew through Dallas and on to Louisiana, watching the trees grow greener, leafier, and closer together. When we crossed the border, we celebrated with music and cheering. The desert and the plains were finally behind us.