Southwestern Homelands

by William Kittredge

  Intellectuals and artists began trying it out in utopian colonies like Carmel, Provincetown, and Woodstock. But homelands are cemented together by networks of story, as at Hopi and Zuni pueblos. True neighborhoods take a generation or so to evolve while grocers and schoolteachers and painters and poets and single mothers and buckaroo wives and Navajo medicine-men shop along the same streets, and argue out differences in the same cafés and city-council meetings. They aren’t often created, they happen. Utopian colonies tend to be a cooked-up paradise for the like-minded.

  The colony that developed in the Santa Fe/Taos area during the 1920s was inspired and orchestrated by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a monied idealist who came to New Mexico after years in Florence and Greenwich Village. Mabel found that the pure light across red-rock extrusions, timbered snow-topped mountain peaks behind them, combined with the “innocent” emotional honesty of the native people, formed an ideal physical and psychic setting for the new-age society she was determined see flower. In 1918 she built an adobe mansion on land near the Taos Pueblo, and took up with and eventually married Tony Luhan, a Taos Indian.

  Intent on promoting her paradise, Mabel began inviting writers and artists to come share what she’d found. The list of those who took her up on the offer over the next decades is testimony to the power of her vision (and money): Carl Jung, Willa Cather, Leopold Stokowski, Edmund Wilson, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Robinson Jeffers, Aldous Huxley, Martha Graham, Georgia O’Keeffe—and many, many others. Mabel put the famous people up, found them places of their own if they stayed on, and encouraged them to reflect on New Mexico in their work. I imagine her guests traveling dusty tracks over the deserts in rigid black 1920s touring cars.

  D. H. Lawrence was initially entranced. “I have never experienced anything like New Mexico…the fierce, proud silence of the Rockies…the desert sweeping grey-blue…the pine-dotted foothills…What splendor!…Never is the light more pure and overweaning than there…In New Mexico the heart is sacrificed to the sun and the human being is left stark, heartless, but undauntedly religious.”

  But Lawrence was soon reminded that homes weren’t so easily found. “It’s all rather like a comic opera played with solemn intensity. All the wildness and wooliness and westernity and motor-cars and art and sage and savage are so mixed up, so incongruous, that it is a farce, and everybody knows it.”

  Lawrence moved on. Frieda, his widow, came back, to inter his ashes on the little mountainside ranch that Mabel had traded for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Frieda lived out her life in New Mexico.

  Georgia O’Keeffe came to New Mexico in May 1929. She was forty-one years old and had once worked as a teacher in Amarillo on the Texas panhandle. An established painter, she was traveling without her husband, the enormously influential Alfred Stieglitz, a New York gallery owner and modernist photographer, to spend a summer painting.

  “No one told me it was like this,” she told Mabel. O’Keeffe soon bought a Model A and was gone exploring. She remembered thinking, looking back on that first summer, “This is my world, but how to get into it.” When time came to return to New York, she took with her a barrel of the bones she’d gathered from the desert. It was her habit to carry home pinecones and shells and weathered wood and feathers, mementos of a vitality which is both vividly surrealist and vanishing, vanishing, the core of emotion which emerges from her paintings. Which is hard to see until you forget about those god-awful framed posters.

  In 1940 she bought a few acres and an adobe house at a dude outfit called Ghost Ranch, sixty miles west of Taos, and had exterior walls torn out, to be replaced with windows from which she could gaze out to a forested flat-topped butte, the Pedernal, and to yellow, red, and coral cliffs behind the house. In 1945 she bought a house overlooking the Chama River in the little nearby town of Abiquiu. After Stieglitz died, in 1946, she moved to New Mexico to stay. She died there, aged 98, in 1986. Her life and work stand of course for themselves, but also as a validation of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s intentions, which otherwise went rather stale.

  Mabel visualized an oasis culture in which to escape repressive racial, sexual, and religious bigotry, and to a great degree what she got was all that. But she allowed wealth and high living to stand as a barricade between herself and her friends who came to visit, and the invention of a “new society.” What Mabel created, despite all her well-intended efforts, was a hide-out whose pleasures were there for the wealthy, and the well-connected, the artistically at least semi-talented, a society deeply concerned about style and manners. In the long run Mabel’s new society had more to do with privilege than New Mexico or Indians in their enduring pueblos. Georgia O’Keeffe, in the end, seems like a happy accident.

  Another run of accidents began in 1922 when a young man from the East, Robert Oppenheimer, took a pack trip into Frijoles Canyon (Bandelier). In 1937 Oppenheimer went back, and in 1942, when the United States was seeking to site the Manhattan Project, he proposed that the weapons laboratory be located at a school on a mesa north of Frijoles Canyon. The rest is Nagasaki, Hiroshima, ICBMs, public history.

  As a direct result, the central New Mexican corridor, along the Rio Grande, is said have the highest percentage of Ph.D’s of any population in the United States. Maybe that’s true, maybe not—point is, it’s plausible. Scientists continue to gather in and around Santa Fe and Los Alamos, for instance the Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark. Brains like to hang out with brains; they enjoy feedback and strong conversation as they attempt to unravel mysteries. And according to George Johnson, in Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, the mysteries under consideration lately, by a cadre of scientists in and around Santa Fe, are running at the highest possible level of likely irresolvable complexity.

  How could the universe arise from pure nothing?

  How does the hard-edged material world we experience arise from the indeterminacy of the quantum haze?

  How does life arise from the random jostling of dead molecules?

  How does the mind arise from the brain?

  And the greatest mystery:

  Are there really laws governing the universe?

  Or, is the order we see imposed by the prisms of our nervous systems a result of the way evolution wired our brains? Scientists don’t like that idea. For scientists, Johnson says, belief in natural law is “a deep though seldom stated hypothesis. In a way, it is the basis for their religion.”

  The cutting-edge group in Santa Fe is trying to fathom how chaos resolves into repetitive symmetries in the processes of nature. But they continue to find irresolvable mystery. Johnson links them to Penitentes at Truchas in their morada celebrating Holy Week, and to pilgrims who stream along the narrow highways toward Chimayó, and to ceremonial dancers in the various Tewa pueblos, like San Ildefonso, along the Rio Grande.

  Tribal peoples, Penitentes, and the scientists, cultures devoted to arcane knowledge and utter secrecy, resemble one another—humans responding to mysteries—who and what we are, where, and why? But the nature of things isn’t likely to reveal its ultimate secrets. That’s the oldest story, one we all know in our secretive hearts, told in so many forms. No answers. Not in this life. So we throng to versions of home.

  “Santa Fe style” is a “look.” It can be purchased in the form of silver and turquoise jewelry or homes with Saltillo tile floors, ceilings made with aspen vigas, and R. C. Gorman posters. That style has been attractive for three-quarters of a century, and defined much of life in Santa Fe and Taos, for the privileged and those who serve them.

  Seen from the outside, Santa Fe and environs can seem like a play-culture marketplace dedicated to maintaining status, a sort of interactive pseudomuseum peddling bogus authenticity and second-rate commodified art, nice design but not in exactly close contact with existential realities. The best of that style is hip, cool, and draws monied tourists like honey.

  And style, per se, isn’t necessarily bogus. The Santa Fe style is based on th
e colors and look of the deserts, native arts, and Hispanic cooking. The Santa Fe building code encourages an imitation of the pueblo architecture, natural forms ordered so as to create a staging ground for sacred rituals. And Santa Fe, after all, like most anywhere, is a place where people are trying to feel at home, in family and community. Why not stay connected to the best of what’s evolved locally?

  Recently I spent some time fondling books in a first-rate used and rare bookstore just up the block from the square, not a pleasure that can be often found in the West. It’s always engaging to beat around in Santa Fe if you’ve got some money in your pocket. There’s terrific food, fine wines, museums, opera, and vividly smart people, many of them dedicated to good-hearted work. Santa Fe at its worst seems stylish, exclusive, and self-absorbed. But seen another way, life there also can obviously be easily in touch with serenities while thick with information, a sweet deal if you’re not working for a living locally. Like any resort town, Santa Fe has a cold, hard-assed, and quite commercial side. No place to hang around with your hat in your hand. But then uptown New York and riverbank Paris are far more status-conscious and exclusive, and they can be enjoyed, and even admired, and learned from.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Spin We’re In

  Repetitions and variations, call and response, as in the blues, seem to lately be the running theme of our travels in the Southwest. As in life.

  In recent years, crossing out of Utah, Annick and I turn east and cross the headwaters of the Paria River. Ahead lies the watery grave of what was one of the most exquisite runs of landform on earth, the Glen Canyon of the Colorado—now so drowned under Lake Powell and so profoundly lost. What to say about glories most of us never saw and never will see except in photographs?

  Wallace Stegner wrote of Glen Canyon this way: “When cut by streams, the Navajo sandstone, which is the country rock, forms monolithic cliffs with rounded rims. In straight stretches the cliffs tend to be sheer, on the curves undercut, especially in the narrow side canyons. I have measured a six-hundred-foot wall that was undercut a good five hundred feet—not a cliff at all but a musical shell for the multiplication of echoes.”

  Of side canyons he said, “Hundreds of feet deep, sometimes only a few yards wide, they wove into the rock so sinuously that all sky was shut off. The floors were smooth sand or rounded stone pavement or stone pools linked by stone gutters, and nearly every gulch ran, except in flood season, a thin clear stream. Silt pockets out of reach of flood were gardens of fern and redbud; every talus and rockslide gave footing to cottonwood and willow and single-leafed ash; ponded places were solid with watercress; maidenhair hung from the seepage cracks in the cliffs.”

  Reading that, I recall the writer of guidebooks I encountered as he headed into the canyon of the Paria River from Lee’s Ferry, and wonder if it’s still like that up there, if he was going home to beauty, like the scientists in Santa Fe, to an addictive regard for the repetitive but coherent complexities which emerge from chaos.

  Ed Abbey was one of the last to go down Glen Canyon before the dam was completed. In Desert Solitaire he wrote, “I saw only part of it but enough to realize that here was an Eden, a portion of the earth’s original paradise. To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible.”

  Glen Canyon, Abbey wrote, “was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered through any human agency.” Oftentimes whimsical but on that occasion a furious empiricist, Abbey is profoundly missed in the Southwest. He was absolutely a thing, like Glen Canyon. And like the canyon, he’s so recently dead.

  Annick and I drove above “beaches” and houseboat marinas on the shores of the reservoir called Lake Powell and down through cliffs and across the concrete teardrop which is the abominable Glen Canyon Dam. We wondered how deep the water was, how dense the reefs of silt, and if the intricate canyons would wash clean even if the dam were torn out, if they would be luminous at daybreak or irrevocably tarnished.

  Exposure to ten thousand varieties of man-made entropy, the wrecking of phenomena like the remnants of ten-million-year-old sand dunes our genes tell us to regard as sublime, is an ongoing Southwestern experience these days, and this was more of the same. Do not, I tell myself, indulge in prolonged pouting. Transformations are real, process, verbs and not nouns. Canyons and species don’t last forever. So I tell myself. But lately, that dance has been proceeding at warp speed.

  Just south of the Glen Canyon Dam we came to the sprawling power-plant/tourist town called Page. I can’t think of a way to speak my mind about Page without probably estranging the hard-working folk who make livings there. Page is a striking example of what I call the monkeyed-up world—spastically alive and breeding. But out-of-control growth, to paraphrase Abbey, is the ideology of the cancer cell.

  There’s Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, and the transient flotsam of second-rate tourism, and there’s a gigantic coal-fired power plant on the hill back of town which belches a twenty-four-hour-a-day misery of gray haze, detectable for hundreds of miles, into what were mystically clean skies. Our sweet frantic species is overweaningly heedless and heartbreakingly destructive in the name of socioeconomic progress. Will our children forgive us this wreckage?

  Maybe I’m out of control. Are these anywhere close to primary considerations? In a steakhouse barroom just off the main drag in Page, I sat a couple of stools down from a fellow who looked like some sort of white-headed, blue-eyed angel from the deserts—clean and well-kempt, missing his front teeth, some sort of fanatic. Obsessional people gravitate to deserts, maybe just because the air is (or was) so clear and it’s possible to see so far. Maybe clean air is a metaphor for psychic clarity.

  This man’s eyes shone as he studied me over his gin and tonic. “Well,” he said in a grating sort of not-often-used voice, “have you got things straight?”

  “Straight” is a kind of code word. Obsessives are determined to get things clear and straight. No Keatsian holding of two conflicting ideas in the mind at the same time for them.

  “Not really,” I said. “Like what?” I was thinking about gulping my own gin and tonic and getting out of there, hunting up another joint to drink in.

  “Like gin.” He smiled, lips tight but smiling. “Like this goddamned entropy.”

  Another thing about clarity—it encourages long views.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “It’s what you get.”

  “I like it,” he said. “No bullshit about it.” We seemed to be in agreement.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Buy me another drink and I’ll shut up about philosophy.”

  So what the hell. I ordered us both another. “Now,” he said, “let’s you and me sit here and keep quiet. Pretty soon the sun will be going down and that will be one hell of a thing. Always is.”

  This was the other side of obsession. I keep wondering, do long views, across treeless and thinly populated landscapes, induce fatalism? Does isolation and distance lead us to focus on the fragility of our so-called dreams, the direction we’ve chosen to go. Is it possible to live without dreams? Would we want to? In any event, maybe we’d be better off if our dreams weren’t so entirely, always, centered on fulfilling desire.

  That fellow and I were taking pleasure in splendor as it was and not some other thing we thought it ought to be, just keeping quiet, sipping our drinks, studying the sunset out the barroom window. That blue-eyed man and I, strangers looking out a wide tavern window, we witnessed colors from orange to indigo to blue-white in faint drifts of cloud over the dark Vermilion Cliffs. We did not wish to avert our eyes. Or at least I didn’t.

  Much of what most of us ultimately yearn for—psychic freedom, contact with ineffable significance, dignity, escape—was there for a short moment. Taking comfort, we were comfortable with one another.

  The next morning, with Page in our rear-view mirror, Annick and I drove into the heart of the long plateau which consti
tutes northern Arizona. It’s tempting, undulating along on narrow asphalt, to freewheel at semi-ecstatic speeds. With Beethoven’s “Archduke Trio” rising and sighing from the CD deck, we lifted and fell in synchronization with the energies of sadnesses and recovery, memory and regret, going on with life anyway. Coherences and rhythms come to us as pleasure.

  About twenty-five miles south of Page, Highway 89 breaks through a deep cut in the knife-edged ridge of the Cedar Tree Hills to emerge high on the Echo Cliffs. Listening to cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, his weaving of counterpoint again reminding us that we are irrevocably sewn into the cloth of things, we pulled onto an overlook and got out, the CD deck still thrumming away. The landscape, west and far below, was slightly unreal, the undulating course of Marble Canyon cutting through House Rock Valley, the Vermilion Cliffs somber in the morning and the dark green of the forested Kaibab beyond, stratas that had lifted and fallen and turned sideways and upside down for millions of years, familiar but jarringly strange. Is it this we are seeking, complexities we can’t be rejected by or escape? Is this the homeland?

  Crossing northern Arizona, we were drifting and dreaming across flatland swales and washes, the San Francisco Peaks in the distance, cruising through horizontally striped badlands in shades of gray, black volcanic cones and sandstone bluffs on the route to Flagstaff, a college town on the Mogollon Rim where we watched an NFL playoff game in a jock tavern (the sacred 49ers lost to the dreaded Cowboys, a sign our culture was failing). Seeking solace, we drove down off the Mogollon Rim into the leafy depths of Oak Creek Canyon, to Sedona, taken by mystic devotees to be a center where energies gather, as I understand it, and influence the future.

  We enjoyed a Merlot we couldn’t really afford, and mesquite-fired lamb chops while a sliver of moon hung belly-down in the purple night. It was clear. We deserved any and all delux treatment. The Lux. So forget the Dallas Cowboys. We were in the land of those who seem to get away with lives focused on diet, exercise regimes, and long walks into the vortex.