Intersections

Lenten thanks, Day 36

Somewhere out there, a little wilderness survives. Thank God.

Here’s an essay I came across while searching for something for my students. Short on ideas today and even shorter on time today, I offer this in lieu of anything even faintly related to personal finance. It was written a long time ago…

What happened the other day, I suppose, compares to meeting a coyote at ten paces. Your eyes touch the other’s impossibly yellow eyes, each of you at once shy and fascinated; neither of you can pull away, and you sink into each others’ gaze. When the spell lifts, you turn from each other, you go your own ways, and you wonder how much or how little time has passed.

It started as a routine day of idle exploration. I look at the photographs I took that afternoon, though—a gravestone marked “Epimento Martinez, Dec. 23, 1902—Jan. 18, 1991,” a wreath of red roses spelling out “DAD,” mist-gray clouds stacked over blue mountains—and they remind me that at rare moments we encounter extraordinary junctures of ordinary days, where one life intersects another. The connection is so short, the instant of a gnat’s wing brushing against your neck or a cicada’s song rising out of the brush. But that infinitesimal exchange subtly alters one life or the other, perhaps both. After that things are not the same.

People at the inn where I stayed in Santa Fe suggested I take the high road to Taos. A new friend, David Bandler, said he’d heard it called “the artist’s way”—for its scenic qualities, we imagined. Whatever the etymology, it sounded better than a freeway.

So that August morning I headed for Española in search of Highway 76. It wasn’t easy to find. Had to stop in Española’s photocopy-center-cum-bus-station to learn I’d overshot it at the Long John Silver’s. The counter clerk, a small-town girl not long out of high school, sent me back the way I had come. “You follow the signs to Chruchas,” she said. Pondering the AAA map in the car I realized that “Chruchas” is spelled “Truchas” and wondered whether the photocopy lady had a speech defect or whether the local version of Spanish has “tr” as “chr.”

Highway 76 made a tour of Española’s funkiest districts and then escaped into open pasturelands. Grassy vistas dotted with adobe structures spread on either side of the road to low cloud-mantled mountain ranges.  The road passed through rural villages whose main trade seemed to consist of farm produce stands and shops that bill themselves as “folk art galleries.”

As I climbed higher into the bucolic hills, I came across a tiny cemetery full of white crosses and concrete markers gaudy with plastic and silk flowers, each grave like those roadside shrines where someone’s memories of a daughter, a son, a parent, a spouse, a brother, or a sister are laid out for everyone to view. All together, the gathered stones made a place of striking beauty. If I came back this way, I decided, I would stop here and visit the dead.

At Chruchas I got lost again. I missed the main road and wandered down a lane where the people live. Narrow, old, and decrepit, the adobe-lined road looked medieval. You would imagine the common folk of thirteenth-century Spain lived in just such villages.

The place was populated by dogs. No people: only dogs, and they owned the town. Some, conservative burghers, promenaded along the roadside. Others sat in their front yards and watched their fellow citizens pass. Two delinquents hung out on a corner and played a game of bark-at-the-car. It came to me that Santa Fe, with its stucco-over-Styrofoam “adobes” mandated by law, is like a movie set: someone’s sanitized idea of how an adobe village ought to look.

When the single lane I was following dissolved into a narrow dirt path, I figured this couldn’t be the high road to Taos. So I turned around and passed back through the village.

The real high road ascended into the mountains, where a blue-black weather front was already beginning to spit rain. Part of me knows better than to drive into a Southwestern storm. Another part relishes the prospect—perhaps not so much the passage itself, but the bragging rights it’s likely to bring.

Before I reached Truchas, I had stopped at a tourist trap called Los Siete, where a family of artisans was selling woven rugs in colors a bit too bright for authenticity. But I bought a crudely made pottery Storyteller figure for only $35.00—a gift for my son’s new home.

A young man, the proprietor, told me how his family made the rugs—and that I believed. In the same sweet, relaxed tone he said the Storytellers were made by local people. Amazing, I thought unkindly, how close Taiwan can get to home. But he spoke gently and graciously, and he remarked that it looked like rain in the direction I was headed.

I’ve been wet before, I said, and I haven’t shrunk yet. After that trip from my Arizona ranch down Yarnell Hill—in those days something in excess of a 6 percent grade—when the rain sluiced down so hard I couldn’t see the end of my car’s hood, much less the void beyond the unfenced edge of the road, nothing much could faze me. So I decided to go on despite the dark clouds. Now in Truchas as the first raindrops fell, children spilled out of a slouching house and frisked in the early sprinkle. They danced, their arms spread wide to heaven, until someone called them inside.

Reassured that people lived in this place, that the population had not after all been enchanted into dogs by some rustic sorcerer, I started into the mountains. Passed a stretch where the grade rose sharply and the road twisted like a cord off its reel.

Then it began to rain.

No. It began to fire-hose.

Water gushed onto the road. Ahead, a dun mist rose from the pavement: rain was bouncing off the asphalt and blending back into the new water falling from the sky. A three-foot-deep tide of fog coated the highway. I could barely see the ground. Thank god, not many cars were coming my way.

The rain started to hammer the car’s sheet-metal shell, and I knew some of it was hail. The bounce-mist, impossibly, thickened. I groped for the defrost button as the windows fogged, fearful to take my eyes off the road or my hands off the wheel. Ice began to gather on the road, rivulets of rain braiding across it like water twisting down an arroyo. Quickly, though, the little streams froze, and beneath the vibrating haze a sheet of white, solid ice formed. As far as I could see through the forest—forest! Where had all those trees come from?—the ground looked like three inches of new snow had fallen.

Now hail was crashing onto the car. The windshield, already cracked, rattled and banged like a kettleful of popcorn. Been here before, done this before, I reminded myself. No more cars came down the mountain, nor was anyone coming up behind me. I shifted into low gear and crawled uphill as slowly as the car would go. My mood oscillated between artificially bored calm and the nausea of suppressed panic.

When a yellow “steep grade” sign materialized out of the falling ice, its toy truck rolling down an ironing board propped at a 45-degree angle, I knew the time had come to turn back. The last car that had passed coming down the mountain was running with its parking lights on; I didn’t see it until it was almost at my front bumper. But a fair stretch of uncurved road lay before me, and my car is white. I hoped any comer would spot it as I backed and filled to turn around without sliding off the slick pavement. Mercifully, no one came along. That was scary, too. What if my car broke down here? What if it slipped on the wet ice and careened off the mountainside? Who would place a cross by the road for me? Who would drape it with plastic flowers?

By the time I reached Truchas again, the hail had stopped and the rain slacked off, though the bruise-blue clouds were sliding down the mountain toward the town. Relieved, I headed back in the direction of Santa Fe.

Not a mile beyond the village, I came upon the cemetery again. A pickup sat by the gate, the kind of gate a rancher builds into his stock corral, and I could see a figure in the graveyard. A mourner, no doubt, or another tourist. I parked the car on the south-bound shoulder, grabbed my camera, and, leaving the engine running, crossed the road.

About when I reached the grass, a second truck hissed up the road and bounced across the oncoming lane and onto the margin. The driver seemed to take aim at a puddle, where his tires came to rest and sank up to their hubcaps.

He spun his wheels. His tires dug in. He threw it into reverse, gunned the motor, and rocked the vehicle back and forth. For a moment it looked like he was rocking himself toward the earth’s core. I worried: Was I going to have to help this clown?

Happily, not. He roared himself free. Then he took off down the road, as though wallowing in the mud were all he had in mind.

The bright graves beckoned. I stretched, stood on Birkenstocked tiptoe to clear the top strand of the barbed-wire fence, and snapped a couple of pictures. Inside the cemetery, a man watched. He started to walk toward me.

Must be the caretaker, I thought.

“I just about landed myself in a cemetery,” I said. “So I thought I should visit this place.” My word-sounds made excuses: surely he would think it disrespectful to snap souvenir shots of some family’s graves.

“Did you almost have an accident?” he asked. His voice was friendly. He had already reached the wire fence and stood, half a foot taller than me, looking amiable enough.

“No. Just got into a really bad hailstorm. I’ve been in some weather before, but that was a man’s hailstorm.”

He smiled. “It looks like rain,” he said redundantly. Slender as a cowboy, he carried himself like a working man. His face bore the carvings of maybe 50 years. His hair was still dark and thick, and he had eyes the color of strong black coffee.

“My name is Fred Martinez,” he said. He reached across the wire to shake my hand. His grip was firm, but gentler than most men’s. “I came over here to clean up,” he continued. “Going to clean off the graves, run a weed whacker.” Grass clumped knee-high around the markers. The uneven ground heaved too violently for any lawnmower.

“That’s going to be quite a job,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It will take me about two days.” He spoke with a Latin cadence.

Cold air sank out of the rolling blue clouds. “You’ll get wet before then,” I said.

“I take pictures, too. I like to take pictures of this country. Been doing it for years. Let me show you some.” He stepped easily between the strands of barbed wire. “I have some in my truck.”

He walked the few feet to the pickup and opened the passenger door. I followed him, as though that were not an insane thing to do. He had a little album full of photographs, color Kodachrome shots, neatly packaged in the book’s plastic pockets. He also had several developer’s envelopes full of unorganized pictures.

“You must be cold,” he said. A crisp wind ran down from the clouded mountains like Coyote trotting across the bajada. He gestured in a way that suggested I should take shelter behind the truck’s open door. I must have responded with some other gesture that said that although I was insane, I wasn’t crazy enough to climb into his truck, because he walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and spoke to me across the chaste distance of the cluttered plastic-covered bench seat.

“I lost my father. He died in 1966, when I was in the military,” he was saying. “Then my mother died, in 1976.” Thoughtless as a puppy, I neglected to ask if they lay in the graveyard. “I have seven brothers and sisters,” he added.

“At least you have them—brothers and sisters,” I remarked, thinking less of his sorrow than of my own aloneness.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “I was never that close to them.”

I wondered what it must be like to have a brother or a sister—let alone seven of them.

He opened the little album to display his artwork. “This is my cousin.” A late-thirtyish woman going to flab smiled self-consciously and lounged in a lawn chair. After a couple more shots of her, he turned to a series of pictures showing two or three men working on the footing and slab of a building.

“This is my brother’s house,” he said. “I built it. I built it for him in three months.” The pictures traced the birth of the adobe-look house, from the concrete slab to the raising of the pressboard walls and finally to the neatly stuccoed and painted finished structure. “My brother likes to hunt. We built two rooms for him, they have 24-foot-high ceilings. He uses them both, you know, to hang the meat. He calls them his game rooms.”

“Are you a contractor?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. I have a piece of property in Colorado, near Durango.” He spoke the city’s name with a rolled “r” and a Spanish a. “I put this little building on it.” A snapshot showed a tiny but professionally finished shed-like structure. “It’s 24 acres. This is very small—but I can stay there for a few days.

“Here’s another house. It belongs to a friend,” he continued. “I built it, like my brother’s; they’re here in Truchas, and in Chimayó. It’s thirty-three hundred fifty square feet.” The early pictures in this series showed an enormous slab, the two men walking around on it at sea in a concrete prairie. “These are his children, his little son and daughter.” Two pretty children, about five and seven years old, peered curiously into a flashbulb glare.

“He lost his daughter,” he added. “She died in an accident.”

“Oh, no. You mean this little girl?”

“No. Her sister. She was driving a car.”

Was she a flowered cross by the roadside? Did she rest in the cemetery? Again I failed to ask. I could offer only a commonplace, pancake-flat: “I can’t imagine anything worse than losing a child.”

“You hope not to,” he said.

He turned to some pictures of the house’s finished interior. You could smell its newness: viga and latilla ceilings; a heavy, solid wood front door; light pouring through wood-framed windows. The house looked as magnificent as the $425,000 condo I had seen for sale on the north side of Santa Fe. Behind him, silver and white clouds mantled a range of forested peaks; long meadow grass bent to the clean wind.

What a wealthy man, rich in dignity, pride, and community, I thought, and then, no—awful cliché! He probably goes home and beats his wife. Then again, Does urban cynicism know no bounds? He showed me a snapshot of himself troweling the final touches on a long sidewalk that flanked his friend’s house, and he was saying that he had been a union cement-layer, worked with a union team in Arizona. Spreading the photos across the pickup’s worn seat, he let me peer through a kind of window into his life and the lives of his family. How caring he was of his family and his loved ones. Even the dead: coming here to tend the graves of parents gone 25 and 35 years. In my life, I never look back; I’ve never seen the mausoleum niches where my mother and father’s ashes reside. To do so would risk loss of control. Free as a wild animal on the desert, I have no cousins, no family but a son living far away, and if I did, I haven’t the generosity to build for them some lasting reminder of me. He imbued his labor with a kind of love. His hands caressed the photographs reverently. That sidewalk was a work of art, and something more. He talked on, explaining that it didn’t cost much to build the house.

“I collect the materials from old building sites.” He pointed to a picture that detailed beautifully variegated planks herringboned above a set of vigas, big peeled-log beams. The boards appeared to be made of different woods—walnut, maybe, or mahogany and teak mixed with pine. “You see that dark, like that?” A few boards were almost black. “You get that by laying the wood out, wetting it down, and letting it dry. You wet it and dry it outside, over and over. And it turns that color.”

“Doesn’t it warp?”

“No. You make sure to keep it flat.”

Fred showed me more pictures, photos of his family, of his building projects, of mountains and clouds and sunsets, and a couple of himself fishing. Finally, I remarked that I had to be going.

“Bueno!” he said. He reached across the truck’s cab to shake my hand again. “Drive carefully.”

“And you, too,” I replied. “Take care of yourself.”

He climbed back through the fence into the graveyard. I returned to my car, whose engine was still running. A rain-chilled gust of wind crossed the road, and I thought it was a good thing I’d brought my fleece jacket, which lay in the car’s back seat. Then I realized I’d never felt a need to put it on.

—30—

Images:
Sunset over Wheeler Peak, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Kbh3rd. GNU Free Documentation License.
Truchas, New Mexico. Bobak Ha’Eri. .Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Flowering cactus at Southwestern cemetery. Jan Kronsell. Public domain.