Even while we were apart, we stayed in touch by e-mail and telephone. Looking back, I realize that while Mark was facing ice storms in the west, while I sipped espresso in the east, we were still together in that invisible place where moth, rust and fire can’t go. Love conquered after all. At the end of January, I met Mark in Denver.
Home Is Where Your Dog Is
Mark and I were happy to see each other, but Marvin was nothing less than ecstatic to find the three of us reunited. Even two days later, he jumped into my lap every time I sat down. He was a little large to be a lapdog, but it didn’t matter. If he’d been a Great Dane, he would have been welcome to knock me down. I was in a mood for unbridled displays of affection, and Marvin was determined to provide them.
Marvin was a stray puppy when we first met him. A friend had discovered him howling near his door. Manny had tried to find his owners, but a month of searching had produced no results. The day he set out to take the puppy to the pound, he stopped by our house on the way.
“I just thought I’d show him to you,” Manny said to Mark. “I have to get rid of him before my kids get any more attached to him.” Manny never got to the pound that day, and that’s how Marvin embarked on a life that eventually turned him into a road dog.
“Marvin had a great adventure while you were gone,” said Mark. “He touched noses with a cow.”
I’d been with Marvin the day he first visited a beach, got chased by waves, tasted salt water. I often wondered what went on inside his shaggy head, what he really thought, what he really knew. He was even more inscrutable than Mark.
“I had an adventure with a cow, too,” Mark went on. “A mean one tried to gore me, and she came close to succeeding.”
“You should’ve touched noses first,” I said. “We could both learn lessons from Marvin.”
And the fact is, Marvin has taught us a lot. When he’s frightened by thunder, I comfort him and remember that I, too, waste energy fearing things that are better ignored. When he approaches other dogs with alacrity, I find myself following his example and greeting their owners with a smile. And Marvin knows the true meaning of home. It has nothing to do with house or address or even bed. Home is where the people who love you are, and even when he was an abandoned puppy, Marvin knew how to find one.
Rocky Mountain Catacomb
Denver is such a surprise. You expect the alpine meadows and bubbling streams and snow-capped peaks of beer advertisements and John Denver songs, but what you really get is a flat arid plain. Even though it wasn’t even February yet, there wasn’t any snow on the ground when I arrived. The air was so warm that most of the natives were wearing shorts. We headed west on Interstate 40, and drove until we caught sight of a sign that said “Indian Springs.”
“Hot springs!” exclaimed Mark. “Let’s stop.” I wasn’t about to argue. Hot springs are proof that God exists, that bathing antedates civilization, that luxury can be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Having just arrived from the gelid East, I thrilled to the thought of sliding into a steaming cauldron under a Rocky Mountain moon. Mark took the next exit off the highway, and we followed signs through the small town of Idaho Springs and up a hill.
The sun was just beginning to fall behind the mountains as we climbed the wooden steps of the old hotel. Warm lights glowed from every window, and an amiable clerk gave us a list of services and told us where we could park the Phoenix. As we stood at the desk, a door opened and out stepped a man and a woman, wrinkled and pink. Little wisps of steam still rose from their hair. It was then we realized that the hotel was built not near the springs, but right over them.
Beneath our feet were two gender-segregated, clothing-optional “caves” carved into the bedrock, and several “private baths,” concrete-walled rooms equipped with large square plastered tubs. We signed up for an hour in one of the latter. In the meantime, we strolled down the hallways of the old hotel looking at pictures of Sarah Bernhardt, Jesse James, and the other notables who’d soaked their bones here.
Geothermic activity draws humans the way candles attract moths, and people have been hovering around Indian Springs since a prospector named George Jackson noticed the creek was hot in 1859. The resort was built ten years later, after Idaho Springs had enjoyed a growth spurt begun by George’s other discovery, a good-sized gold nugget. The buildings we were walking through were first erected in 1905, and they’d been expanding ever since.
After we parked the Phoenix, we returned for our appointed hour of bathing. The desk clerk handed us towels and, picking up a large jailer’s key ring, led us to the door downstairs. We descended in a cloud of sulfurous steam, feeling like two new denizens of the underworld. At the end of a dank hall, our guide unlocked a narrow door. Inside, water dripped steadily into the pool from the low ceiling, and the walls were crusted with a century of mineral deposits. The cubicle was dimly lit by a single naked bulb.
“Here you go,” said Mephistopheles. “If you need anything, I’m upstairs.” He departed, leaving us to our private catacomb. I didn’t get my Rocky Mountain moon, but hot water is great under any circumstances, and even better when you don’t have to wear a bathing suit.
All’s Right with the World
Is there another geologic phenomenon that has inspired such a variety of social and spiritual practice among humans than hot springs? Volcanos may have rivaled them in an earlier age, but hot springs are timeless in their ability to cause people of all persuasions to invent customs and practice ritual.
Hot springs improved by the hand of man offer an appealing menu of indulgences, but the best place for taking the waters is in the wild, in naturally heated water undisciplined by civilization. My favorite hot springs boast no rules, no mores, and no clothes. And where’s the best hot spring? Is it on the Rio Grande in Big Bend country or on a mountaintop in the Canadian Rockies? High in Montana’s Bitterroots, or in a palm grove in the California desert? Yes, yes, yes, but only under one simple circumstance. The best hot spring is the one you are floating in, half-submerged under a full moon.
And if the moon is invisible because you are fifty feet underground in a lime-encrusted chamber, all’s still right with the world. All was right with our world, anyway. Mark and I slipped into the healing water, and as it warmed our bodies, it thawed our hearts. The road stretched ahead of us, and we were fellow adventurers once more.
Chapter 11
A Perfect Juncture of Time and Space
On The Road Again
It’s exceedingly easy to laugh at country music, to sneer at a hayseed drawl and an admonishment to stand by your man. It’s so unsophisticated, so hillbilly, so twangy. Of all the music in the world, it’s the most incapable of being dressed in the emperor’s new clothes. Country music greets its audience unabashedly naked, free of complex harmonies, minor keys, leit motifs.
It’s the music of trucks and dogs and too much booze, of broken hearts and extra aces. It’s the music of Muskogee, Chattanooga and Fort Worth, broadcasted from Branson and Nashville and New York City.
Yes, New York. If Garth Brooks can draw a mob in Central Park, it’s proof indisputable that if Walt Whitman heard America singing in the nineties, the song would be “On the Road Again.”
And so it was that Kenny Rogers sang us south, and Willie Nelson got us all the way to Four Corners.
Four Corners would be nowhere at all if white folks hadn’t drawn two intersecting lines on a map over a century ago. That simple act turned a flat, dry plain into a tourist attraction, a place where we, like thousands of other visitors every year, paid two dollars to bend over and put one hand in Colorado, one hand in Utah, and a foot each in Arizona and New Mexico. The Navajo nation pockets the money, a charming irony. The Navajo care not a whit about state lines, but the marker happens to lie on their land.
South of Albuquerque is a town called Socorro, which is short for El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora del Socorro, the Village of O
ur Lady of Succor. Called Pilabó by its earlier residents, the settlement’s new name was bestowed in 1598 by members of the exploring cadre of Juan de Oñate. The town had appeared just when they needed it.
Migrating birds may well feel the same way about the place. The valley of the Rio Grande lies under the flyway of the avian nations that follow the call of the seasons. Every year a myriad of sandhill cranes, Arctic geese, and a wide variety of ducks wing their way south from the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Hudson Bay. Like Juan de Oñate and his cohorts, they stop at Socorro for sustenance.
Actually they put down a little to the south, at a place called Bosque del Apache. It’s a National Wildlife Preserve, where the natural food and water supplies get a little help from the hand of man. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages a network of dikes and canals, ensuring that when the birds arrive, the preserve will be able to support them.
The first white wave of birds is always greeted by a host of ornithophiles, heavily-equipped photographers, enthusiastic reporters, and scores of tourists. And then, as the birds settle into their daily routine, the people wander off. By February, which is when we appeared on the scene, we were among only a handful of two-legged interlopers.
“You have to get up before dawn,” Dee Brown had said. Dee, who lives in Albuquerque, is the person who’d told us about the Bosque, and admonished us not to miss it. “Drive into the preserve while it’s still dark, and park on one of the dikes, in between the marshes, where the birds spend the night, and the open fields, where they go to feed during the day. Then just sit there. Watch the sun come up. Watch what happens.”
We drove into the Bosque before four. No moon broke the darkness. We parked in a wide place on a dirt embankment, and turned out the lights. They seemed like a harsh intrusion in the stillness. I made coffee in the dark, and we sipped it silently. A warm breeze blew, and the leaves of a cottonwood brushed the roof of the Phoenix. Otherwise, all was quiet.
Softly, slowly, the sky lightened. Mingling with the gray, a pink tinge gradually stole over the horizon. We stepped outside to watch and feel the dry breeze against our faces. The sky turned orange as the sun broke the horizon, and, was it my imagination? I could swear a sound accompanied the sun’s arrival. Was it a collective coo, or the rustle of a thousand wings? It was gone on the breeze as quickly as it came to my ears, and the sun rose higher, spreading a blanket of purple and pink and orange over the landscape.
And then it wasn’t my imagination any more. Secret avian conversations rose from the marsh as its denizens greeted the day. Suddenly, without warning, a great white phalanx of wings burst over the trees. As the birds rose higher, they turned black against the sun and surged towards us.
The sound started as a quiet rush and quickly rose to a great flapping roar, its percussive rhythm encompassing us as we fumbled with our cameras. I snapped a few pictures and then gave up. A few blurred snapshots couldn’t begin to capture the sound, the wind, the raw beauty of a thousand birds soaring as one. I stood there, trying to soak up enough to last me the rest of my life.
I couldn’t, of course, but not for lack of trying. We stayed until the last duck had flown quacking to the feeding grounds and the sun was halfway overhead. We came back for the evening retreat, and we came back the next morning to watch the marshes awaken one more time before heading north.
I still think of those beating wings and the call of the cranes. Whenever my world collapses, whenever I withdraw into an ever-shrinking universe of self-absorption, I remember that there are galaxies not so far away, vast storms of wings riding on highways I’ll never know. They rise on the wind and beat their way to the ends of the earth. They don’t know me. They don’t care. And somehow, when I think of them, my cares vanish, too, on a great white phalanx of rushing wings.
Angel Fire
We drove north, following license plates that read “Land of Enchantment.” After the birds, I was beginning to think New Mexico wasn’t boasting, but just making an obvious comment. And I’d been thinking, ever since we first set wheel to road, that someday, somewhere, we’d probably want to stop, to—for desperate lack of a better word—settle. Why is it that when people set out on journeys, they immediately start thinking about their ends? We laugh at children who ask “Are we there yet?” But secretly we never stop asking the same thing ourselves.
I thought New Mexico might be my destination, the place that would say to me, “You’re home, sweetheart! Take your shoes off!” I was hoping, in fact. It seemed like we’d been traveling long enough. Hadn’t we said six months or a year?
Taos is a name of romance, of art, of gritty history. Kit Carson lived there, and scores of writers and artists. Might not some fanciful adobe call our names as we walked past? I thought all this, and hoped all this, as we drove up the mountainside and onto the high plain.
We parked in a dusty lot on the edge of town. A man was breaking wild ponies in the next field. We walked through the business district, looking in window after window of paintings and weavings and baskets and sculpture. We went inside Kit Carson’s house, and toured the erstwhile home of the painter Ernest Blumenschein. We had espresso in a coffee house founded by psychotherapists who’d emigrated from California.
It was obvious from the moment we stepped inside the door that Elizabeth and Richard had become fixtures in their community. They greeted everyone except us by name, and when we left, we knew we’d be remembered if we came back. The Taos Coffee Company was a village in itself. Elizabeth and Richard had created a home. I envied them. I want a home, too, I thought.
As we walked the streets of Taos, I longed for it to feel like something more. But it didn’t. It was just beautiful and dusty and not mine. With a sigh and one last cappuccino from the Taos Coffee Company, we drove north again, high into a valley surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo range.
Named for the blood of Christ, these mountains have a forbidding harshness about them. In a good winter, they soften under some of the best snow in the world, but in dry times, they stand sharp and bare all year, and the people suffer. They need a heavy influx of skiers every year to survive.
The nearer slopes were bare as we drew near Eagle Nest, and the sun was getting ready to slide down behind the range to the west. It was windy and cold, and we had the road to ourselves. As I surveyed the landscape, I caught sight of what looked like a white sail rising from a nearby ridge. “What is that thing?” I asked Mark, but it was already behind us.
We drove to a small campground on the edge of Eagle Nest Lake, which, being frozen, was almost indistinguishable from dry land. As we drove off the road, we sank into gravelly slush and snow, and Mark shifted into four-wheel drive to get across the parking lot. In spite of the hostile weather, the campground was open for business, and a pleasant man greeted us inside the office. “Do you sell propane?” asked Mark as we registered. “We’re nearly out.” The Phoenix One has high clearance, but the price is a tiny propane tank. The furnace can suck it dry in one day if the weather demands that we run it nonstop.
“No, I don’t, but you’ll need your furnace tonight,” the man said. “There’s a place down the road. Hold on, though, because it’s close to quittin’ time. Let me call and make sure they’ll wait for you.”
Soon we were headed back down the road we’d just traveled. Again the white sail on the hillside caught my eye. This time Mark saw it, too. “What is that thing?” we cried in unison. It vanished behind us. We arrived at the propane place after it had officially closed, but thanks to our intercessor’s telephone call, someone was waiting to fill up our tank. He was swathed in a large muffler, and he pointed to a thermometer hanging on the wall of the office. “27 and falling,” he said over the wind. “It’s gonna be a brisk one.”
For the third time, we passed the white sail. This time, Mark slowed down, and, looking carefully, we saw that a road wound down from the hillside to meet the one we were on, and at the
intersection, there was a sign. D.A.V. Viet Nam Memorial, it read.
“Let’s go up there tomorrow,” I said, and Mark agreed. “It’s called to us three times,” he said. “That means we have to answer.”
The morning dawned cold and clear, and we headed straight for the little road up to the sail. At the top of the hill we found an empty parking lot and a low edifice. A few hundred feet away was the sail. “It’s a building,” I said, but the wind whipped my words away over the valley.
The structure in front of us seemed deserted, but when we neared the door, a woman appeared. “Come on in,” she said. “We’re working on the floor in here, but if you don’t mind the mess, you’re more than welcome.” We stepped inside, and as our eyes adjusted to the interior dimness, we skirted the mop buckets and saw that we were in a sort of museum.
Large photographs hung on the walls. They were images of Viet Nam, of soldiers and children and girls in pretty dresses, of guns and mines and hand grenades. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was drawn back into the war that never really ended, that still sears wounds into the souls of those who served.
It was never my own conflict. I wasn’t draftable, nor did I have a friend, a father, a brother, a lover who was. No one close to me perished, and those veterans I did know spoke little. It was a newspaper story to me, a catalyst for campus unrest, a political stance. It was distant, impersonal, somebody else’s war.
The photographs in that room changed all that. In that quiet space, surrounded by images of intensity, of fatigue-clad youths laughing and staring and dying, I could no longer distance myself. Viet Nam was no longer thousands of miles away. It was here in the mountains named for the blood of Christ. It was now.
Roads From the Ashes Page 13
