I arrive in Santa Fe on July 5.  Northern New Mexico reminds me of Tuscany: the art, the old families, the fresco colors, the great food.  There is something to be said for the mixture of sun and adobe, and light and shadow.  I have decided to treat myself to huevos rancheros every morning I awake in New Mexico.  This morning I am at one of the Village Inn franchises, and the “huevos” are “over easy” on a corn tortilla, smothered in green chili sauce, with pinto beans on side.  There are a lot of choices to be made when ordering.  Red or Green sauce?  How do you want the eggs?  Corn or flower tortillas?  Pinto beans, refried beans, or hash browns?  I ask for an extra order of flower tortillas to use as bread.  This is the traditional New Mexico style, with cheddar cheese melted in with the beans, and the whole ensemble running together when you break the yoke.  I am staying at a local secret, the El Rey Inn on Cerillos Road, an old-style, white painted, adobe motel straight out of the 1940s, but elegant, with lots of tile and shutters and graceful rooms which are more like suites.

After breakfast, I set out for the central Plaza, parking at the public garage on San Francisco Street.  I walk across the plaza and into the Palace of Governors and connecting Santa Fe Art Museum, which take up the northern side of the square.  Inside is a visiting exhibit from the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., of American Impressionism, like European Impressionism, but with a bit more diffused light and more realism.  The French is more two dimensional, using gray shading to provide perspective.  I enjoy Theodore Robinson, George Innes, J. Alden Weir, and especially Childe Hassam’s “Washington Arch in Spring,” expressing the new cosmopolitanism emerging in New York City in the 1890s.  Robert Spencer’s “A Women Ironing” reminded me of Millet.  There were some nice Taos Group painters from the early 1900s: Leon Gaspard’s “Taos Girl,” a bit abstract with lots of browns; Robert Henri’s “Maria in Wraps;” and a Gustave Baumann wood block with orange colors entitled “Frijoles Canyon.”  After the gallery, I explore the Plaza, browsing in the La Fonda Hotel gift shop.  I am attracted to their fossils, in particular, to a calcified turtle shell from South Dakota, chalky white.  I have been eyeing it for some time.   Leaving the La Fonda, I  wander over to Ortegas’ gift shop, also on the Plaza, buying a small, rectangular, silver Hopi belt buckle, before heading back to my room for a siesta.

Waking around three o’clock, I ask the desk clerk where I can find some good tacos.  He recommends a taco stand across the street, “The Burrito Stop,” which looks like a converted drive-in.   It is near two other stands that I know, “El Parasol” and “Felipes,”  also on Cerillos.   I ordered “carne adovada, shredded beef tacos, which they simply called “beef tacos.”  The tacos were, indeed, very good, large, and with a slightly smoky aroma, and the thin green taco sauce is not too spicy.  The shells were home made, dipped, still hot and only slightly oily, and irregularly shaped, with  a mixture of white and cheddar cheese sprinkled on top, covering a heaping pile of lettuce over the beef.  These were authentic Mexican, the new fad, rather than Tex Mex or New Mexican, tacos which we are used to.  The two employees, cook and waiter, were Mexicans, thin, like vaqueros, the real thing, serious, quiet, ranchero types.  Confirming my hunch,  I notice the only other car in the parking area is a Toyota Corolla parked at the side with Texas plates.  New immigrants perhaps, just in from the border.  I offer them thanks and get professional nods of appreciation in return.  The new immigrants are hard workers, entrepreneurs.

Knowing I have but one night in town, I decide to return to the Plaza.  I take Guadalupe Street, walking past the rail yards, Cowgirl Cafe, and Thomasitas Restaurant, my usual dinner stop.  That evening, I sit on a bench in the Plaza and do some people watching.  The streets are empty, unusually so, as a cowboy on his Appaloosa horse rides around the square, repeatedly.  I nod, and he nods back.  He is straight out of the 19th Century, full white mustache, tall hat, chaps, denim shirt, bandana, and a blue heeler dog trotting along beside, as he continues his nice pace, “clop, clop, clop,” on the pavement.  I notice the second time around that he has a cloth boot tied to the side of the horse, like a pouch, carrying an Australian shepherd pup, tan and white, its head sticking out.  They looked like a happy group, except the pup would like to be outside the boot.  Stretching my legs, I walk over to Don Gaspar street a couple of blocks away, admiring the photos in the Edward Curtis gallery.  I’m looking for my favorite, of native American horsemen riding through Canyon de Chelly, with its streaked gully walls as a backdrop.

The chimes are ringing at St. Francis Cathedral as walk along, reading the plaques on buildings, showing their 17th and 18th Century provenance.  If you are looking for place, next to Santa Barbara, Santa Fe may be the best place I have found.  After dark, I walk the deserted streets two blocks to the Cathedral and sit on a bench outside, admiring the structure, the tan stone, and Romanesque design.  Thee is a statue of St. Francis and the animals in front of the Cathedral, and a bird bath at the side, with an inscription from Aquinas saying birds are the most noble living things, clad in beautiful feathers, singing beautifully, and domiciled in the pure air.  On a wall next to the chapel, is a plaster cast of St. Francis, in white, lit by lights, just as the Cathedral facade is, leaving St. Francis’ prayer illuminated in the night: “may I be an instrument of your peace, sowing love, giving pardon, having faith, spreading light and joy.  I will not seek to be consoled as to console, to be loved as to love, to be understood as to understand.  For, it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born into eternal life.” The last clause is one of the more comforting things I have read about death, along with the Twenty Third Psalm, the Christian Science Scientific Statement of Being, and Anne Morrow Lindberg’s statement about being apart from life but part of it, in The Steep Ascent.   After sitting there, taking this in for a while, I walk back via Alameda Street, turning and paralleling the small canal and park which runs next to Paseo de Peralta street, backtracking to my motel.  On the way, I pass the Alameda Street bridge crossing to Canyon Road, the bridge where Klaus Fuchs passed the atomic bomb drawings to the Russians in 1945, while working at Los Alamos.  The things you can learn and see through travel.

The next morning I am on the road, seeing what may be the best part of New Mexico, the road north from Santa Fe to Taos, passing the Santa Fe Opera, and the villages of Pojaque and Arroyo Seco, branching off to the east through Nambe Pueblo to Chimayo, then onto the high back road to Taos that runs atop the pinon covered hills and mountains of the Sangre de Cristo foothills of the Rockies, pink soil amid the pinon trees, and with silver, billowing clouds above, and small casitas along the roads.  This is a magical high elevation vista: the sky lavender, the landscape coral and rust.  All the colors blend into a Hispanic and native American paradise, with buttes and bluffs in the near distance, and purple mountains far ahead behind Taos to the north.  I pass Ranchos de Chimayo, one of the best restaurants in the state, with tables on the vast lawn, the Hacienda Inn across the narrow road, and a few scattered adobe and territorial style houses, the latter with tin roofs.  There are state signs saying that certain native American villages are off limits.  At one point, I pass  over a washed out section of road.  I find myself driving along the high road above Lake Santa Cruz, on narrow winding roads lined with cottonwoods, and amid small unnamed towns which the road creeps and winds through, like in Spain.  I have to admit that I enjoy retirement now.

At one point, I  backtrack from the high road, winding back down to Espinola on the main highway.  Espinola is becoming Santa Fe’s north valley.  There are a lot of REMAX and Coldwell-Banker sings around.  But, it is still a lot of what New Mexico used to be, not yet a Santa Fe or Taos.  I pull into Blake’s Lotta Burger, a New Mexico drive in franchise, with burgers cooked on the grill.   There is a good feeling here.  It is a local hangout, with businessmen popping in for lunch.  A lot of cars are parked in the dirt lot, with customers waiting for the loud speaker to call their numbers.  Inside the drive in, elderly women are working the two windows, taking orders.  People in line are friendly with each other.  There is no hurry.  Everyone is nice.  Pigeons are everywhere in the lot.   After lunch, I am back on the highway to Taos, following the Rio Grande river the last ten miles, watching rafters in orange life vests aboard gray ten-person rafts running with the current, granite cliff walls in the background.   Emerging near Taos, on the Taos plateau, I can see miles of flat grassland, divided only by a narrow and deep  trench–the Rio Grande river gorge– winding is way northwest.

Getting into Taos, itself, I run into tall pine, rather than the stubbier pinon.  I drive through town on the single two lane street, passing Kit Carson city park, and continuing on north of town, to the outskirts, to Taos Pueblo, which I discover is about to close, at 5 p.m.   I backtrack along the main street, past the Taos Inn and Fechin House, on to the Quality Inn, a Desert Inn type motel of  the 1960s, low and spreading, built of sandy colored tan brick, and glass sliding doors, with a large pool and Elm trees covering the back lawn.  After checking in, I go out by the pool and sit on some metal chairs on the grass, under a metal awning in the light rain.  The mountains seem close.  I am reading A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, his 1920s Paris memoirs, preparing for my class in Helena.  The book transforms me back into Paris of the 1920s, just like the first time I read it as an undergraduate: the Left Bank cafes, Luxembourg Gardens, Cafe des Lillas, Deux Magots.  The air has a  fresh, pine smell in the rain.  There are some gray clouds directly above, and a high mountain in visible to the north, the Taos Ski Basin.  At 7,000 feet, I notice that Taos is cooler than Santa Fe.   The Taos light is gradually changing.  There are now clear blue openings in the clouds and more sunshine, which is diffused through the Elm trees giving me shade.

I go back up to the room to plan tomorrow’s gallery itinerary, then drive out to the downtown Plaza area to reconnoiter the route to the Harwood Gallery. In the distance, beyond the nearby pine trees, I can see pink adobe condos.  I remember to say a prayer for a brown dog I saw when driving through Espinola.  It was in the back of an old pickup, and was just skin and bones, its ribs outlined.  I pray it will be provided for and know love.  Seeing the Ernest Blumenschein museum is still open for half an hour, I park in the downpour on the narrow street in front, waiting till the rain subsides for a minute, then dodge the rain drops to run inside.  The museum is Blumenschein’s adobe house, and is typical of the vernacular, with lots of built on rooms, curved archways, wooden “niches,” “viga” cross beam timbers under the ceiling, and thick adobe walls throughout.  Sitting on an easel in the artists’s studio is his original painting, “Ranchos de Taos Church,” with gold tones and large brush strokes.  His “Mountains in Arizona,” on the dining room wall, has lots of reds, from his later period.  “The Portal” has vivid colors.  There is a Leon Gaspard painting on the living room wall, with its more post-impressionistic, abstract New Mexico scene.  I chat with the ladies who run the museum, and buy a small print of Walter Ufer’s “Where the Mountains Meet the Desert,” now in my Helena study, with its distinctive bluish mountains, tan arroyos, and predominant medium greens, then go back to the motel to have dinner in the dining room, looking out at the pool.

I return to my room, which has a small writing desk next to the window, and jot down notes on the Blumenschein Gallery, calling my wife and leaving a message, then scanning the television for baseball game.  As it gets dark, I do my Taos routine, driving south outside of town, then turning left off the highway, just beyond the city limits, continuing up a hill past a new hospital, past the new housing developments of  Ranchos de Taos, and finally turning on to an empty side road.  I switch off the headlights, cut the engine, and get out,  enjoying the evening as it turns into night, the bright stars close above in the foothills, the air cool and light.  Taos, a small town still, remains old New Mexico, like the Ansel Adams “moonrise” photo of Hernandez, 1943.  It is now totally dark except for the stars and a few lights sparkling in the distance, coming from small adobe houses and farms scattered over the plateau landscape below.  The smell of pine and pinon is stronger.  It is a night I won’t forget, like the one in Las Cruces, standing in Veterans Park, with orange and turquoise streaks in the sky to the west, or in Santa Barbara, on East Beach, with white lights of sailboats bobbing in the dark waters.  In all three cases, the beauty of the world is inspiring.  It is hard to pull myself away and go back to the room.  Three evenings to remember: desert, ocean, and mountains.   Life is a smorgasbord: the Taos night, Santa Fe Plaza in the evening, good tacos, Blumenschein’s art, even Lotta Burger in Espinola.

Finally, alone, crunching footsteps on gravel, I walk back to the car and turn on the engine.  The instrument panel lights up red in the night.  I go back to the motel, and lay out my clothes for the next day, a long sleeve maroon knit shirt, Wrangler jeans, black belt with my new Hopi buckle, and cordovan penny loafers, the same Bass Weejuns I have been wearing since 1965.  I read some Hemingway from A Moveable Feast, the chapter about a good cafe on the Place St. Michel, about Hemingway, the young man, writing about writing and about a girl he sees there.  “You’re mine forever, beauty,” he tells himself as he writes of her in his moleskin notebook using sharpened pencil.  I turn off the light, say a prayer, think about the White Sox lineup, my usual sheep, as I drift off.  I am like Jake Barnes in Hendaye, on the Spanish-French coast, in The Sun Also Rises.  Or, trying to be like Jake, enjoying the small things, folding his comb into his towel, laying out his clothes, and going into the ocean for a swim before retiring.  What a life, Hemingway had.

I awake in the morning about 8:30, take a long, hot shower to fully wake up, dress, and go downstairs to the dining room for breakfast, two eggs over easy, hash browns, two strips of bacon, and whole wheat toast with black coffee.  It came with the room.  Outside, there is a cloudless white sky telling me it is going to be hot.  I am the first to get into the Fechin House, known as the Taos Art Museum, the only person there when they open the doors. I take my time, strolling from room to room, admiring Fechin’s early Russian phase, his paintings of women, reminding me of Repin, his tutor, and of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.  Fechin’s style, however, is more abstract than Repin and Serov’s.  Fechin used wonderful red colors on his Taos portraits.  His “Manicured Lady,” in the dining room, is gray and impressionistic.  You can see see the knife scrapes on the canvas.  I also notice two very good Bert Reynolds paintings, “The Buffalo Hunter’s Son,” of a native American, plus “War Bonnet Shadows.”  Phillips was one of the founders of the Taos Art Colony.  There are also Martin Hennings, “Sunlit Foothills,” in green and tan, of pinon trees  and green mountains, and “Thinning Aspens.”  I have a large Hennnings’ poster on my bedroom wall in Helena.  Oscar Berningshaus’ “Crossing the Arroyo” is remarkable for its soft tones and hazy atmosphere, with just one bright color, of a gold saddle blanket.  Walter Ufer’s  “In a Pea Field” and “Kit Carson’s House” are my overall favorites.  The Fechin House, itself, now the museum, is impressive, a mixture of Russian and Hispanic decoration, with wood carvings, wrought iron, tiled bathrooms, and bulky wooden furniture, but with “international style” smooth white stucco exterior, cubist, and with square black metal window frames reminiscent of the Bauhaus.   From the Fechin House, I swing by the Harwood Museum, near the Plaza, where my favorites are E.I. Crouse’s firelight figures and his silver plate photographs, and J.H. Sharp’s “Body in a Teeepee,” of a native American asleep, rolled in a hammock, impressionistic and gray.

As I leave for Montana, I realize I missed a few of my regular haunts this visit.  In Santa Fe, I didn’t have breakfast at Tia Sophia’s, or blue corn enchiladas at the Shed, or visit Museum Hill and St. John’s College, or take in the Geogia O’Keefe Museum.  In Taos, I missed the Taos Inn and Taos Pueblo, the later so interesting with its famous church an communal style dwellings.  But, I have a lot to look forward on the road back: Four Corners and Moab, and Salt Lake City.  Life is indeed a smorgasbord, a  lesson  I learned from that great romantic and traveler, my Uncle Bob.   His spirit is suggesting I go back the long way through Phoenix, just so I can have bagels and lox at “Cocos.” (2009)