A Perfect Juncture of Time and Space
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 Our 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.
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.
The place was a visitors’ center for the sail, and the sail, we learned, was a chapel built by Victor Westphall. He started working on the project five days after his son David, a Marine infantry officer, was killed in Viet Nam in 1968.
After we looked at the pictures, we turned up our collars and faced the wind again. We followed a path down a slope to the chapel, which was small and round. Inside, narrow windows framed views of the mountains, and a photograph of David Westphall hung on one wall.
We weren’t alone. A man was sitting on one of the stone tiers that form benches facing the center of the sanctuary. We sat down next to him. As I turned to look, I saw a tear steal down his cheek. It was matched by a tear on my own, and when I looked at Mark, his eyes were glistening, too. And so we sat in silence, listening to the wind, letting it wail for the fallen, letting it howl for the pain of those who returned.
I can’t tell you what transcendent spirit lives at Angel Fire, and no one could tell us how the place got such a haunting name. I can’t tell you why being there evoked not only sorrow and despair, but also healing and hope. I can’t tell you why, as I write these words, tears again fill my eyes. It’s as though the absolute worst and best of humanity is distilled there, waiting to bestow comfort and light on those who are willing to embrace the shadow.
When we came down from the mountain, we returned to the campground by the frozen lake. When we drove in, we were greeted by a man wearing a hat adorned with an embroidered patch that identified him as a Viet Nam veteran. “I’m Tom,” he said. “I heard about your truck, and I was hoping you’d be back so I could see it.” After answering his questions about the Phoenix, Mark said, “We were just visiting the Angel Fire memorial. It’s quite a place.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Tom. “I discovered this valley by accident when I was driving across country three years ago. I lived in Pennsylvania, and I wasn’t really thinking about moving, but when I came over the hill, I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling that I was home. It didn’t go away, so I brought my family back to visit. They all decided, even my teen-age daughter, that they wanted to move here. As we settled in, I found out about the memorial, and I discovered that I wasn’t the only veteran who had felt the call of the place. There are lots of us here. I can’t explain it. It’s almost spooky.”
As we walked around the lake that evening, I looked out over the valley, and once again up at the mountains. I was hoping I’d hear the same call Tom had, but the mountains were stern and silent, and the lake lay frozen and still. Even the wind had died to a whisper, and no comforting voice emerged from the cold. It was beautiful and wild. It was easy to see why other people were drawn to settle here, and if I’d heard the slightest sigh of a suggestion that I might do the same, I’d have called a real estate agent.
But all was quiet. I wasn’t home, and I wasn’t wearing ruby slippers. We went to bed, and the next morning, following Tom’s suggestion, we took a narrow dirt road heading northeast out of the valley. It wasn’t on our map, and even Tom wasn’t sure exactly where it led, but we could see it winding up into the mountains, and that was enough. “After all,” Mark said, “We do have four-wheel drive.”
We made slow progress through the stones and ruts that formed the road bed, and, as usual, I couldn’t help fretting about whether we’d make it to civilization in one piece. Somehow, I was back on the cliff side, and I was still chafing against real-life adventure.
After an hour or so, we stopped in a wide spot to assess our progress. The valley lay behind and below us, serene and still. The air was cold, but the wind was no more than a breeze. A light winter sun hung above us, and the sky was pure cloudless blue. We just stood there looking, and suddenly a big bird flew between us and the sun, so close we could feel the beat of his wings. “It’s a hawk,” said Mark.
The hawk was gone as swiftly as it appeared, and we stood standing, gazing out at the huge vacant sky. I expected my familiar yearning to surface again, my longing for home. Is this the place? Should I stop here? I waited for the questions to rise, but, was it the view, the hawk, my recent terror of hurtling off a cliff in the middle of nowhere? I don’t know what happened, but somehow, up there in the Sangre de Cristos, that forbidding agglomeration of ancient stones, my questions blew away on a winter wind.
In their place was a simple answer. “You’re home already,” a quiet voice seemed to say. “You’re where you’re supposed to be, at this perfect juncture of time and space. That’s what home is, sweetheart.”
It really was as simple as that. I’ve been home ever since, no matter where my body is taking up space. The less stuff I own, and the less spread out it is, the bigger the area that feels like home. If that sounds like a paradox, well, I guess it is. But since that morning in the mountains above Angel Fire, I haven’t once wondered where my home was hiding. Since that day, it’s been always with me.
Do you have any idea how simply splendid it is to be always home? It had taken me a year, but suddenly I could revel in the blissful simplicity of existing in just one spot. All at once I understood how Jesus could enjoy living with only one coat. He wasn’t deprived. He had the luxury of needing no closet.
I had the luxury of needing no purse. Since purses are the security blankets of American women, this may seem more like punishment than privilege, but for me, it was a lovely freedom. For nearly three decades, I’d never been without my personal luggage, my portable repository for all the things I simply couldn’t do without while I was away from home. Of course, this invariably meant I was packing a bunch of trash along with the useful items: old receipts, ticket stubs, worn-out pens, candy wrappers, loose change, odd keys, the detritus of everyday life.
And I could never stop worrying about losing the damn thing. It was like a body part that wasn’t attached well enough, like a foot that you could leave in a bus if you weren’t careful. And losing it was a dreaded thing, especially if you happened to be far away from home. Purse loss was a major topic of conversation when I was a college student on a semester abroad in Italy. The repartee was always the same.
“I lost my boat ticket in Athens.”
“I can top that. I lost my passport in Naples.”
“That’s nothing. All my money and my train ticket back to London got stolen on the Paris Metro.”
“No, wait. I lost my whole purse in Vienna.”
“Oh my God.”
For American women, and the fear starts young, losing a purse is far worse than losing a boyfriend, bone mass, or an ozone layer.
And now I’d lost mine permanently, and I was thrilled. I still don’t own one, don’t carry one, don’t want one. It’s my truest symbol of freedom. Maybe someday I won’t even need pockets. It’s something to strive for, but right now I still need a place for loose change.
But I’m hardly a Buddha. Enlightened souls don’t tote toilets. That’s reserved for people like Queen Elizabeth, who, I’ve been told, brings her own loo wherever she goes. It’s not that she’s hoity toity. It’s just that she’s not amused by the notion of seeing a toilet seat hanging on a wall someday, bearing the label, “Queen Elizabeth sat here.”
It’s comforting to know that I’m protected from similar embarrassment. I, too, carry a loo of my own. For people who don’t know better, my lifestyle may not seem privileged, but consider this. In the last five years, I’ve warmed far fewer strange commodes than your typical suburban BMW owner. I ask you, who’s more aristocratic, a woman with her own private water closet in tow, or a guy in an Armani suit who stops to pee at McDonald’s?
And I’m not selfish about it. I share my facilities with those less fortunate. Come to think of it, my own toilet seat has been graced by derrieres glamorous enough to warrant my hanging it on a wall. But don’t you worry, oh noted ones. You’re lucky that I have better taste in home decor, and no wall space to spare anyway.
Lots of people who choose the mobile life tow cars behind their motorhomes, or pull trailers with pick-up trucks. They arrive at preselected destinations, set up housekeeping, and use the smaller vehicles as satellites. “Why don’t you tow a car?” these well-wheeled ones often ask. “It’s so handy for errands.”
Errands. The word alone is enough to make me foreswear cars forever, just like purses. It reeks of endless aisles and dull routine. Errands wear ruts in your life, the same way commutes do. Errands and commutes mean going back as often as you go forward. They rack up miles, but at the end of a thousand, you still haven’t gotten anywhere.
In our first four years, Mark, Marvin, and I covered 115,000 miles. The odometers of most Los Angeles professionals would reflect the same number in the same amount of time. The difference is that the wheels of the commuter run over familiar tracks, back and forth, to and fro.
I know. For ten years, I was the quintessence of the Southern California job holder. I drove thirty miles each way to work, crawling in the same direction as thousands of other coffee- drinking minions each morning. Every evening I’d crawl back with the same horde, and on Saturdays we all went on the same errands, filling giant suburban parking lots with row after glistening row of our four-wheeled exoskeletons.
I never minded “to”, but I got sick unto death of “fro.” “Forth” would have been fine, but “back” became anathema. Life in the Phoenix was all tos and forths. Our paths drew triangles and squares and circles on maps, but we never created the heavy over-and-over lines of our former lives. Why, when it had been so blissful to give it up, would I want to set up a place to which I had to wear a path? And why, in the name of all I held good, would I want to require myself to own a purse?
You need a purse only if you have a here and a there. I want only a here, with no such word as errand necessary. If, as the road unrolls beneath me, I need food or raiment, I know I’ll find it along the way. There is no dearth of shops and grocers on the road to the horizon.
So no car follows the Phoenix as we ply the road. As Mark says, “With a car back there, we might as well not have four- wheel-drive. We’d have to leave it somewhere if we wanted to go off-road. And then we’d have to go back and get it.”
Neither of us wanted back or there or then. We wanted forth and here and now. One truck was enough, and there are times when even it seems excessive. There are times I’d like to travel even lighter, with one coat, one pair of shoes. There are times when, having found the pleasure of owning no purse, I’d like to plumb the possibilities inherent in needing no closet.
But you know, I really have nothing against commutes and errands and daily routine. It’s never the action that wears the rut in your soul. It’s whether the action is getting you where you want to go. The deed is only dull when it isn’t cutting its way to your heart’s desire.
Our life had its full complement of routine. If you travel with a toilet, you can’t ignore the inexorably expanding contents of your holding tank. If you want to make tracks, you can’t ignore the inexorably shrinking contents of your gas tank. If your heart’s desire is to send e-mail from the hinterlands, you try and try and try again.
I was, as ever, filing a story every week with the newspaper in California, and digital communion was still an elaborate ritual. If we were in the mountains, we’d drive from ridge to ridge, watching the cellular phone all the while. When the signal strength reached the minimum necessary for a successful connection, we’d screech to a halt. There was no such thing as logging on while rolling.
And success wasn’t dictated merely by signal. Back in 1994, cellular telephone companies were still figuring out how to offer nationwide service, which, since it required cooperation among a score of local companies, took as much negotiation and diplomacy as it took to create Yugoslavia. Customers paid for the whole enterprise in the form of ‘roam’ charges. If you wanted the luxury of using a cellular telephone outside of your access provider’s bailiwick, you had to pay through the nose. A human operator was often employed to make connections, and payment by credit card was required.
Making a single telephone call could take as much as twenty minutes of negotiation, which would have been inconvenience enough, but for our purposes, it spelled disaster. It had taken all my powers to pummel my software into working with the cellular phone under optimal conditions. I hadn’t the faintest idea how to figure the interruption of a human voice into the equation, and, lest you think I’m above asking for help from superior beings, no computer whiz I could find knew what to do either.
All of this meant that in New Mexico, our cellular telephone was a useless hunk of black plastic. It wouldn’t work at all, and no ancient magic could help. To file my story in the land of enchantment, I had to hire the services of an antediluvian fax machine. The deed accomplished, we went to Texas.