Guestward Ho!

by Patrick Dennis

  1. Guests of all shades of opinion are welcome as long as those opinions are not aired in the public rooms of Rancho del Monte. This is a dude ranch, not a debating society.

  2. If you are wildly pro anything, all well and good. We like enthusiasm. State what it is that you're for once and then spare us any further details.

  3. If you are violently anti anything, don't say a word about it. You will probably offend a nicer guest than you are and the management will undoubtedly throw you out into the night.

  4. If you expect Rancho del Monte to be restricted against those whose beliefs are different from yours, don't come at all. Because the place is only restricted against people like you.

  But it's pleasant to be able to say that no such precautions were ever necessary. We were blessed with our guests and never again was the evil voice of bigotry heard in outhouse.

  Our guests went right on voting Republican and Democratic and went right on talking government. They mourned the passage of Taft or they cursed McCarthy or they eulogized Truman or damned Roosevelt, but they did it without any help from us. Bill and I are conscientious voters, but when we go to the polls we close the curtain, cast our votes, and keep our mouths shut. After all, that's what the secret ballot is for.

  13. The killer

  During our first fall in New Mexico, Lucy Putnam was directed to the ranch. She had sinus trouble and asked nothing except a quiet, comfortable place where she wasn't expected to do anything other than sit peacefully with the sun beating down on the top of her head. She couldn't have chosen a better establishment than ours and we couldn't have chosen a more ideal guest than Mrs. Putnam. We took one look at one another and clicked.

  The love feast lasted for better than a week, but as Lucy was getting better and better, I was getting worse and worse. The doctor diagnosed my ailment as a strep throat and I was tossed into dry dock, so to speak, at the hospital in Santa Fe for the next four or five days.

  When I came back to the ranch, Lucy had been joined by a dog, a private airplane, and a husband. His name was Carleton Putnam, he was six feet six, chairman of the board of the airline he had started as a very young man, and a thing of pure delight.

  Bill and I had always entertained the dark suspicion that chairmen of boards were either superannuated go-getters who had dedicated every moment of their lives to Razzle Dazzle Light Bulbs or whatever, and knew nothing about anything else, or that they were retired statesmen, generals, or assorted celebrities who had been rocketed up to industrial pre-eminence to serve only as figureheads and didn't even know about Razzle Dazzle Light Bulbs. How wrong we were in the case of Carleton Putnam. Naturally he knew everything there was to be known about planes and flying, but he was also up on the world picture. He had made a thorough study of Theodore Roosevelt and was at work on a five-volume biography of his life. In addition, he had committed to memory thousands of lines of poetry and could quote marvelously almost any poet you cared to mention.

  Being both a businessman and a scientist, Carleton had a certain exactitude of thought and speech not shared by Lucy or by Bill and me. The three of us preferred fiction to fact and were prone to wild bursts of exaggeration that used to drive Carleton nearly out of his mind. But with the patience of a terrier at a gopher hole, Carleton could always trim us down to size. For example, if we'd come back from a luncheon at Frenchy's La Dona Luz in Taos,, pleasantly dazed by the superb food and wine, we'd burst in upon Carleton babbling our usual sweeping statements.

  BARBARA: You should have come with us, Carleton, Frenchy's was divine. There were at least a million people having lunch there.

  CARLETON: A million people, Barbara?

  LUCY: Oh, you know what we mean, Carleton. It was simply jammed. There were literally thousands of people.

  CARLETON: Thousands? It must be a much larger establishment than I remember.

  BILL: Well, Carleton, maybe not thousands, but it was thronged. There must have been hundreds there.

  CARLETON: Since the capacity there is seventy, Bill, how were they all seated—on each other's laps?

  BARBARA: Well, actually, Carleton, there were about thirty.

  LUCY: Twenty-eight. I counted.

  CARLETON: Thank you.

  As a rule, people with literal minds irritate me just as much as I irritate them, but not so Carleton Putnam. The four of us hit it off beautifully, and together we took lots of sight-seeing trips—but this time with a difference, because we did our rubbernecking by air. Carleton's plane was a lovely big, two-motored Aero-Commander. By that time Bill and I knew the territory pretty well, but only from the ground. With the Putnams we saw much more than even Bill and I had ever dreamed existed. We would fly low over our own mountains, vivid with their brightest colors, and then above the Rio Grande to Taos. We flew over to the Grand Canyon on a thrilling stormy day when the Canyon was just too dramatic for words. We flew off again to Monument Valley, which is just magnificent, and saw sights we never could have seen from the ground without spending days or weeks of solid plodding on burros. And once Carleton let Joe Vigil take the controls as they flew over the Tesuque Pueblo. None of the Tesuque Indians has ever forgotten that thrill. Then Carleton and Bill and Joe gained altitude and went over the hills to scout out the territory for their big mountain lion hunt.

  When a couple of our bird-watching guests came excitedly back to the ranch house and reported that, instead of the great auk, they had spotted a mountain lion through their binoculars, I didn't pay much attention. I secretly, suspected the bird watchers were just trying to find something exciting in our quiet bills, and if they'd told me that they'd sighted the Loch Ness Monster or the Snowman of the Himalayas I couldn't have scoffed any more airily. "You should concentrate on your birds," I said rather patronizingly, "and not on mountain lions that simply haven't existed around these parts for hundreds of centuries." Then I caught Carleton Putnam's accusatory eye and said, "At least, not for quite a few years."

  About a week later Sylvia Shaw, the sculptress, and her husband, Clay Judson, returned from a ride and also reported seeing a mountain lion. This time I was a lot less skeptical and a bit worried. In the first place, I wouldn't have recognized a mountain lion if we'd met on the street. I didn't even know what a mountain lion looked like, but I somehow got the picture of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Trademark wearing a lynx jacket and I felt rather unsettled about it. That night the dogs—ours, the cook's, and the Putnams'—set up such a howling that everyone was awakened. Armed with flashlights, all the guests set out in their dressing gowns to see what caused the commotion, and, sure enough, there were paw prints about the size of dinner plates in the gravel leading up to the swimming pool. For the next four nights the beast was a constant guest, coming up to lap water from our swimming pool while those four brave watchdogs wailed and cowered at the kitchen door, limp with fear. The mountain lion became known locally as The Killer, and for days Carleton peered through the telescopic sight of his rifle without spotting so much as a polecat. It was then that the big hunt was organized.

  Not only did Bill and Carleton plan to bring back The Killer—who really had only dropped in for a nightcap a few times and done nothing more offensive to us than scare the dogs—but there was also talk of deer and bear and wild turkey. Joe Vigil, who was to guide them and who was the only one who had ever had any hunting experience to speak of, was fairly pessimistic about what they'd bag. So was I, at first, but as the plans got underway I began to envision myself smartly enveloped in a stole of mountain lion (whatever mountain lion fur looked like) and I got my mouth set for a winter of rich venison dishes. (Bear, I knew, was like eating an inner sole and wild turkey lean, tough, gamey, and not nearly as good as the kind you get at the supermarket.)

  Admiral Byrd's expedition to Little America couldn't have required the preparation necessary for this hunting trip. Countless trips to Santa Fe Western Wear were made and poor Mark Campbell must have despaired of ever digging up long underwear that would fit a man who was six a
nd a half feet tall. Dear little knitted caps that tied under the chin were pronounced essential for sleeping out. ° They may have been useful, but Bill looked just like Baby Bunting in his. Boots for day, shoes for night, sleeping socks, walking socks—well, I can't even begin to list the wardrobes that went along with Bill and Carleton, but it was enough to last Lucius Beebe for a month.

  As for food, every meal was planned. Carleton was afraid of too much starch in the diet. "You've got to have protein," he kept saying.

  I had rather assumed that they were going to shoot their own proteins, but I didn't say anything.

  When they set out in their cute little red hunting caps they were toting enough junk to keep them for a year. Five minutes later they were back. They'd forgotten their blankets. Then they were off for good, and Lucy and I had no definite expectations of ever seeing our husbands again after tangling with The Killer.

  We needn't have worried. Three days later they were home, red-eyed, bearded, miserable-looking, and absolutely empty-handed; Only Joe Vigil, who had set out with just a blanket roll and a toothbrush, looked as he did at the beginning. There was no mountain lion, no deer lashed to the front fender; no bear and no wild turkey.

  Still, Bill and Carleton swore up and down that they wouldn't have missed the hunt for a million dollars.

  I wonder.

  But as a consolation prize for the gameless game hunt, Joe Vigil invited us all to the Feast Day at the Tesuque Pueblo. And it really was a deeply touching and flattering tribute to be invited.

  By and large, the American red man resents the American white man and not without good and sufficient reason. I'll be happy to outline just a few of them here.

  First of all, the Indians took a terrible pushing around from the minute the first white man set foot upon the continental United States. Indians were cheated, hoodwinked, dragged back to Europe as freaks or slaves, forced into religious conversions they didn't want, raped and terrorized, and finally driven from lands that had been theirs for unknown generations.

  When they attempted a retaliation, which would seem only natural, more than two hundred years of bloody, sporadic wars ensued until the poor Indians were driven out of their fertile hunting grounds, stripped of the vast majority of their finest young men in battles that were one-sided and unfair to begin with, and finally thrust out onto barren lands to live or die.

  What little consideration the Indians did get was usually a fairly calculated kind of charity. If they happened to wind up on reservations that proved to be arable, and if a gang of white settlers took a fancy to the land, the chances were pretty good that the Indians would be moved on to a bit of real estate so eroded that nothing more than sand would grow on it. I get an enormous thrill every time some miserable tribe strikes oil or discovers uranium out in the middle of the gravelly reservation to which they've been shunted, but that happens only once in a blue moon.

  The Indians around Santa Fe have fared a good deal better than some of their brothers. They are not forced to live in pueblos unless they wish to. They can vote, buy liquor any day except Sunday (when nobody can), send their children to public, private, or parochial schools.

  True, most of them are not well off, and many Indians exist solely on the sale of souvenirs to tourists. Much of the merchandise—such as the pottery of San Ildefonso, the antique fetishes, the silver and turquoise jewelry—is valuable, exquisite, and accordingly expensive. The rest is just about what you'd expect. But since it keeps right on selling, there must be a healthy demand for it. As small businessmen, dependent on migratory and seasonal trade, the Indians are anxious to please the tourists. But are the tourists always as considerate of the sensibilities of the Indians? I think not.

  Most of the New Mexico Indians are either Catholic or Presbyterian, but numbers of them set a great store by their native traditions and still observe them seriously. Now, when tourists are invited to tribal ceremonies, they are warned that these are religious rites. And how do great bunches of them act? Like children at the circus. We were very strict with our guests, and if any of them had so much as whispered, I would have cracked him with a ruler like a schoolmarm. After all, they were never forced to attend. But many tourists behaved abominably, and I couldn't help wondering how they would have felt if a pack of Indians in shorts and sport shirts had shown up at a Christmas Eve cathedral service armed with Coca-Cola and popcorn, snapping pictures, walking out noisily in the middle of the ceremony, and calling out things like "Yoo-hoo, Laughing Eyes, meet me back at the car as soon as this thing is over."

  Another thing Indians hate is the person who is interested in Indians. "Anthropologist" is a dirty word in most tribes. These men of learning may be solely interested in giving the world at large as much information as possible about the poor redskin, but they certainly go about their work in preemptory, not to say cavalier, manner.

  Bill and I have always promised Joe Vigil that as soon as we can afford it, we're going to buy him a gray flannel suit and a shirt with a button-down collar. Then we're going to send him to New York, taxi him up to the Columbia University area, and turn him loose to spend the the whole summer bursting in the apartments of anthropologists, unannounced and uninvited, and deluging them with questions such as "How many people sleep in this bed?" “Are you on relief?" "Do you own a toothbrush?" "What are your most vivid racial memories?" "Are you faithful to your spouse?" "What contraceptive devices, if any, do you employ?" It's going to be the Tesuques' revenge.

  I could go on indefinitely with my inventory of Indian gripes, but I think you can probably understand why they are a little miffed at us and why we felt so honored to be invited to their feast. So much so, in fact, that the Putnams delayed their departure in order to attend.

  The Feast Day of the Tesuque Indians amounts to the tribe's Saint's Day and it is the big occasion of the year. Their houses, which are spotless all year round, are given a thorough cleaning just for good measure and are repainted in honor of the event. For weeks ahead all you can smell at the pueblo is scouring powder, whitewash, and Dutch Boy. We were invited specifically by Joe Vigil and his beautiful wife Veronica—or Ronnie, as she is almost exclusively known—and honorarily by Joe's parents. The difference in the two generations w,as a marked one. Joe and Ronnie were about our age and they were very modern. They spoke fluent English and Spanish as well as Tewa, their tribal language. They dressed just like anybody else in America, only better. Joe was six feet tall and wore his hair trimmed in regular barber-shop fashion. Ronnie looked like an unusually smart Mexico City woman in her clothes and wore her long straight black hair in about ten different styles—the bun, the coronet, the pony tail, the upsweep—each more becoming than the other. (I could have slapped her when she followed fashion's folly and had it all lopped off. After that, whenever she moaned about the bondage of curlers and bobby pins, I said nastily, "Serves you right for cutting it off. But never mind, it'll grow back.") The senior Vigils, however, were less influenced by the white man. The father made certain concessions to Occidental clothing, but not many, and his gray hair was worn in a short, Dutch bob and bound with a fillet of colorful yarn. He spoke Tewa, Spanish, and English, but in that order of proficiency. The mother barely spoke at all.

  The Feast Day traditionally begins at sunrise and ends at sunset. One of the special treats of this one was the Buffalo Dance, which hadn't been performed at the pueblo for thirty years. As the day went on, more and more dancers joined in until nearly a hundred men, women and children were dancing. The costumes were lovely to see, the drum music and the chanting haunting and authentic, and the smell of burning piñon wood delicious.

  We were especially interested in what the meal would consist of. Carleton had been particularly apprehensive. "I know it'll be highly seasoned, Lucy," he had said, "and you know I can't eat things like that. I’ll begin to perspire and have to get up and leave and that will embarrass us all."

  "It won't be hot at all," I said comfortingly, not knowing one thing about Tes
uque cooking. "You're just going to love it."

  The menu consisted of homemade Indian bread, a kind of stew, which, while it did contain a little chili, wasn't at all over-seasoned, a traditional kind of bread pudding, and, of all unexpected things, Jello! Everything was delicious, and we had second helpings of it all.

  Since then we have learned that the Feast Day is also a day of open house, and we have been back to drop in on all of our Tesuque friends and to feast in each of their houses.

  Lots of people who had lived in the Southwest far longer then we had said to us, "But what do you have to do to get so friendly with the Indians?"

  "Nothing," was the answer. And it was the only answer. We treated our Indian friends just like any other friends and they accepted us. They were so accustomed to special treatment—either like dogs or else like utterly fascinating and unique case histories—that they naturally didn't choose to make fast friends with the outsiders and became rather "special" and aloof. But treated like nothing out of the ordinary they became nothing out of the ordinary, and I'm glad we made the effort not to make any effort. As we left the first Tesuque feast—four among the very few white people who had been invited—I felt very warm and proud and awfully glad that Bill and Carleton hadn't bagged the mountain lion, or anything else, and that I had been included in on the consolation prize.

  But to get back to that elusive beast of prey, the mountain lion. . . . He achieved a certain notoriety, because he started showing up everywhere just as soon as the Putnams flew back to Washington.