The Journal of a Mud House, a continuation --4

[Illustration from "The Journal of A Mud House" by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Harper's Magazine, April 1922]

Like many other areas where the Spaniards went a-conquering, New Mexico is blessed with an abundance of penitentes who go about on pilgrimage, flagellating themselves, praying, and at one time nailing one another to crucifixes in imitation of the Passion of Christ. (Rumor has it, they still do that in their secret rites, but I wouldn't know.)

In fact, I'm not much into the Passion. It's a frankly ugly story that relies on credulity and faith to be transformed into... "beauty." Yes, yes, I understand about suffering and redemption and all that. Taking on the sins of the world, forgiveness, resurrection, choirs of angels at the right hand of the Father. Yes, yes, yes.

But what has happened with this story is that the Suffering of Christ to Redeem Mankind has been used as a sort of global justification for Believers (not just Catholics by any means) to impose such suffering as they wilt on Believers and Non-Believers alike if not in Imitation of Christ, then certainly in His Sacred Honor.

And that's disgusting. Immoral. Wrong.

It was this Imposition of Suffering -- by Men of God as well as civil authorities -- that in due time led to the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 here in New Mexico, the only time Indians successfully rebelled against the Conquest. Not only did they successfully rebel, they expelled the Spanish colonists and their hypocritical, devilish priests.

Of course, there was a Reconquista, there always is, isn't there? But in returning, the Spanish, wonder of wonders, were chastened and chastised and they promised to reform. Strangely enough, they weren't lying. They wanted to make peace with the Indians, promised to respect them and their culture, promised further that the Church would be restrained, the burdens of conversion lightened, encomienda ended, and cooperation between the peoples ensured. And so, more or less, it was.

Because of this rebellion and change of heart, both the Spanish and the Indians were surprisingly successful in maintaining their cultures here, while intermingling all the time, right up to the American Conquest.

And when the Americans came, they didn't know what to make of what they found here.

Americans had been coming down the Santa Fe Trail for a generation before the conquest, and most of those who made the trek were inclined to tolerate if not exactly favor the ways of the strange peoples who lived along the Rio Grande Valley, if only for the money they could make from them. Well, money such as it was.

These were poor people. Even the Grandest of Grandees in New Mexico was a poor man by American standards; even by Mexican standards. This was a backwater where people had to do for themselves or do without. They lived as simply as possible, sufficient unto their needs first and foremost, but within that stricture, they were surprisingly creative, artistic, and -- at least from time to time -- happy.

The story of the Spanish Conquest of these parts is complicated. Coronado came through in 1540 or so, and he made an unholy mess on his travels in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. Murder, rape, pillage, plunder, disease and destruction were all integral to his exploratory technique. The Coronado Monument up by Bernalillo is a pretty good representation of what his expedition left in its wake. It's a ruined pueblo on the banks of the Rio Grande, obviously a very fine place at one time. There is little left of it but some tumbled walls and a mural-painted kiva that astonished archeologists who excavated the ruin in the 1930's.

The theory is that Coronado stopped here in 1540, demanding supplies, killing and plundering at will, taking hostages and women, and otherwise behaving like a rampaging beast. The Indians were not amused.

Soon after Coronado moved on, perhaps as soon as the next spring, so the theory goes the pueblo was abandoned and fell to ruin. Where the people went is hard to say, but there were many other pueblos along the Rio Grande and elsewhere, so there was no lack of potential destinations. Eventually, the ruin was "discovered" and became what it is today.

In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate went on an expedition of Conquest, during which (as was the style of the Spaniards of the day) he committed numerous atrocities, perhaps the most egregious of which was the amputation of one foot from each of the adult male survivors of his reduction and conquest of the Pueblo of Acoma.

This was but one of his atrocities, but it came to symbolize just who these Spaniards were, and what they would do if they didn't get what they wanted.

It took some time to get over the shock, but more to the point, it took time to adapt the Spanish new arrivals to the rhythms and patterns of living in this harsh but beguiling land. As they adapted they imposed their own spiritual rhythms -- a very harsh form of Catholicism built from the practices of the Church Militant during the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors -- on the local Native Peoples. Up to a point, the Native Peoples were willing enough. But when the Church Militant commenced to destroy all the Native spiritual elements, as was their common practice throughout the conquered realms, the Indians resisted and eventually rebelled. Successfully.

Coronado was bad, Oñate was bad, the Padres could be horrible.

And at least in my view, much of their badness was a result of their peculiar understanding of religious faith and what it justified them to do.

It took centuries and centuries to correct.

In the meantime, plenty of peculiar practices became inculcated into the Ways of the People in these parts, one of them being the Penitente Pilgrimages at Easter time.

Here we are.

And you know, as long as they don't try to impose their beliefs and practices on others, there is no problem and their should be none. But it took so many centuries for the notion of Live and Let Live to penetrate the minds of many Euro-Americans.

I was clearing brush this morning, specifically a frost bitten thorny pyracantha, and I thought for a time over saving some of it to make a Crown of Thorns in remembrance of Good Friday.

But what would I do with it?

The Journal of a Mud House, a continuation --3

[Illustration from "The Journal of a Mud House" by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Harper's Magazine, March, 1922]

The Edge of Santa Fe, hm? It still looks something like that -- the Edge is just farther out than it was in 1922 or whenever that picture was taken. The houses are probably fancier, though not necessarily (depending on which Edge you're looking at), and the area will probably be criss-crossed with telephone and electric lines. Other than that? Not a whole lot has changed.

I'm not sure exactly where this picture was taken, but while her house in Tesuque was being renovated -- or at least made habitable -- Sergeant and her "pardner" (as she was referred to by José who did much of the work on the Tesuque house) Gertrude lived in what sounds like a furnished casita on the Camino del Monte Sol, which runs more or less north and south from Canyon Road to the Old Santa Fe Trail. It is full of historic compounds, some of them dating back to the 18th Century, many of them very luxurious now. The picture above may have been taken from or just above Sergeant's digs in Santa Fe.

I remember the first time I was in Santa Fe, 1982, it was opening of Opera season, and there were many parties going on, all of them seemingly at guarded adobe walled compounds, armed guards no less in some cases. The compounds generally consisted of a main house and one or more guest houses, scattered at random over the property -- of perhaps an acre or so -- where very luxurious people lived (sometimes only in the summer) and entertained their guests. And this was "in town."

Many of these luxurious Opera lovers owned exquisite art and artifacts, much of it, of course, Native American, but certainly not all. There was plenty of contemporary work by artists who lived and worked in the area, there were paintings by some of Los Cinco Pintores and others from the early days of the Taos and Santa Fe artists colonies, and there was more than a smattering of Impressionist landscapes from as far away as such exotic locales as California and France.

When an artist friend moved out to New Mexico from California around 1990 he settled first in Albuquerque because he said he couldn't take the pretensions of the Santa Fe art patrons -- to say nothing of their petty obsessions and rivalries and feuds. Well. Yes. Where do you think you are?

He was eventually convinced to resettle in Santa Fe when some of his patrons found him appropriate digs -- a really nice though rather cramped compound not far from the Plaza -- where he could entertain the way he wanted to, which was very open, unguarded, and absolutely (well, maybe not absolutely) without pretension. He was a Native American artist (but of completely, and sometimes hilariously, mongrel ancestry) and he grew up living very simply. Even when he became Famous, he always stayed grounded in simplicity. He found, I think, the underlying simplicity of Santa Fe living, much as many artists before him had done and many still do, and he could watch -- and even play with -- the pretensions of the High-Style Art Lovers who proliferate in New Mexico to this day.

I've mentioned that Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant was part of the Taos Artists Colony which was spreading toward Santa Fe (actually, it had started from Santa Fe) when she was working on her little Mud House in Tesuque. But Santa Fe was then, as it had been for hundreds of years, a working town, not an Art Haven at all, and though it was the Capital of Nuevo Mexico under the Spanish and the Mexicans, and then under the Americans Capital of the Territory and later the State of New Mexico, its political status had little impact on most of the people who lived and worked there. In those days, Tesuque, which is now a suburban enclave for the very fancy indeed, including some of those (like the Stedmans) who regularized and popularized and continue the Santa Fe Style in the 1920's and '30's and now, when Sergeant was re-doing her Mud House, it was as it had long been a ranching outpost, a Spanish village and an Indian Pueblo. All of that heritage is still there, but it is overlain now with much of what Sergeant and others from Back East brought with them: a deep admiration for arts and letters and an abiding sense of Place, as in: This is the Place.

I've also mentioned that people in New Mexico have private libraries (we certainly do!) and they read. Many write, too. In addition to the plethora of visual artists, performing artists, and would-be artists, Santa Fe, Taos and other parts of New Mexico boast all kinds of literary artists. The stories that this place has to tell! Well, the tales, anyway.

I think "true fiction" was invented here in New Mexico. I could be wrong of course. Much of Elizabeth Sergeant's story rings absolutely true, for example, and then parts of it don't. You just don't know. And the locals are well-known for, shall we say, "embroidery." Why not? There's no real harm done, and the record can always be corrected later. If need be.

In Sergeant's day, Santa Fe was a working town as it had been for hundreds of years, and as it still is in parts. The Santa Fe Trail, of course, terminated at the Santa Fe Plaza, and it was along the Santa Fe Trail that "America" and this distant, exotic land communicated with one another commercially and socially. Prior to the American Conquest, it was a somewhat limited communication, as the Spanish and later Mexican authorities were not particularly kindly disposed to Anglo penetration, but after the Conquest, there was a huge increase in traffic and penetration from the East. Well, "huge." Comparatively speaking.

New Mexico was still very much a backwater until the railroad came, and that wasn't until the 1880's; the Santa Fe itself never did get to Santa Fe, stopping 18 miles short at Lamy on the excuse that it was just too difficult to lay track to the ancient capital. But a spur was eventually built, the trains started arriving, and Modernity arrived. With Modernity came the Artists.

Ever since, the two have wrapped tightly around one another to create the contemporary spirit of New Mexico. It is deeply and permanently ground in the Past -- a Past which is ever-present. The Pueblos and their peoples are still here -- though the ones nearest me were abandoned centuries ago, their residents simply moved over the mountains. Their descendants still live in the Rio Grande Pueblos or the ones further West; or they live in the towns and cities round about or elsewhere in the country or the world. Wherever they live, they carry the spirit of the place they're from with them.

Literature based in New Mexico has had a profound impact on America's sense of the West, more so perhaps than any other Western genre, including that of my own California. In fact, California and New Mexico have long been linked through their shared remote-Spanish culture. But there are other linkages too, including the one of Perpetual Promise. Though linked, the Spirit of the two Places is not the same.

D. H. Lawrence and Frieda came out here in the early '20's and stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan up in Taos for a season, then set out for a more remote location at what is now the D. H. Lawrence Ranch., a National Historic Site. Aldous Huxley came to call -- after all, these Anglos stick together, especially if they're British! Huxley was profoundly influenced by his sojourn in the remoteness of New Mexico, as can be easily seen in his contrasting perspectives of the Future in "Brave New World." I think he was struck, as so many are, by the sense of permanence of the Pueblos compared to the harried, hurried impermanence of "civilization."

More than anything, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant seemed to be struck by the people she met here, people she'd been "told about" -- in the characteristic superior/inferior context of the day, but what she found was quite different than what she was told to expect from the Natives. That's the way it goes.

What you find, if you are open to it, is not what you imagine, not what you expect. It's not perfect, far from it. People still come from Back East trying their damnedest to make "perfection" here, but my question is always "why?" Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant found she didn't have to push for "perfection" in New Mexico. The reality and the Spirit of the Place was perfectly good enough.

But then, what do you want perfection for?



[Click image to embiggen text]

There you are then.

The Journal of a Mud House, a continuation --2

[Illustration from "The Journal of a Mud House", Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Harper's, May, 1922]

As you can see from the photo above, Ms Sergeant did get her Mud House into habitable condition before she had to leave Tesuque that summer, whatever summer it was, when she bought a couple of acres and its ruined adobe to have a place to stay out in the country.

The wing to the left is her new kitchen that was added to the original three room house at her direction. Well, it was built then torn down then built again because the adobes were set wrong by her main worker, José, who was quite a character if her descriptions are in any way accurate -- which I'm sure they are.

Building and tearing down and building again is fairly routine in parts of New Mexico. It's just what you do, assuming you have the time and the inclination to do something like that in the first place.

Building and abandoning the project is not unknown, either.

Or building and staying a while, then abandoning the project...

You get the picture.

Got to get those ruins to renovate somehow.

Our own project took ten months to get the house into more or less complete enough condition to move in to, quite a good deal longer than Elizabeth Sergeant's project which only took a couple of months over a summer. But then, she only had three rooms plus one added. So it wasn't that much of a job.

Except...

It can be hard to get stuff here, which she found out over and over again. I look around this house today, and I consider what it must have been like for the pioneers who built it originally starting right around 1900 when this section of the East Mountains was opened for settlement.

(The court battles over ownership of the land went on and on, and finally, if I recall correctly, the court ruled none of the claimants had a valid claim, so it was open for homesteading. Whoo-hoo! But even then, people knew it wouldn't be easy.)

There was a railroad spur, though, the remnants of which are still visible, and a little town was laid out, and a handful of settlers moved in and built their scattered adobes, most of which are still standing... more or less. Some are ruins.

From the railroad, of course, you could get things to build with. And so it was. Much of what could be got through ordering it from Back East is still visible in our house -- the doors for example as well as some delightful cabinetry in one of the halls (that I'm sure was built on site but from finish lumber that was ordered in); quite likely the floors were made from pine lumber brought in by rail. The baseboards in some of the rooms, and the window casings -- though not the windows themselves in most cases -- also date from the early period and are obviously made of fancy finish lumber from elsewhere. But when I went up in the attics, I found rather randomly placed joists and beams made of rough finished pine which I figured came from more or less local sources, and their rather casual disposition is perfectly "New Mexico" in my view.
This house is obviously self-built, and some of the details are quite fancy. On the other hand, it's quite primitive, too. There was no indoor plumbing originally, no gas for heating (there are holes in the ceilings for the chimneys of wood stoves that would have been in each room though.)

Of course there was no electricity early on, but some of the wiring clearly dates from very early 20th century, and it appears that there was a wind-powered generator on top of what's now the garage.

Over the years, the house was expanded, most of the extensions built with adobe, and sometimes I think of expanding it again by finishing the attics and perhaps adding a new wing on the north to serve as a living room and transforming the current fairly cramped living room into a rather large dining room cum library. I've also thought about reconfiguring the two west side bedrooms (now used as small library and small workroom) into one larger room with a new bathroom. Adding portals.

But not changing the basic Victorian style of this house into a "Northern New Mexico" version of the Santa Fe Style.

That's the thing. Though this is an Old Adobe ranch house, it is frankly and forthrightly in the Late Victorian (simplified) Style, and so it sometimes strikes visitors as an oddity -- because it doesn't follow the conventions of Santa Fe Style, which -- to circle back to our story -- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant was in the process of helping to create with her renovation of a ruined adobe (that she figured dated from the 1870's) in Tesuque in the early 1920's.

It took ten months to get our place into good enough shape to move into in part because our contractor had so much trouble with his workers. Yes. Understood. They were mostly residents of the East Mountains, too, though the contractor himself lived in Albuquerque. Nevertheless, they all complained constantly about having to go clear out to our place to work on the house. It was so far, don't you know. Travel time took up so much of their day so they could only get so much done. Worse, it was so hard to get materials and supplies out there, and we such demanding owners, constantly wanting "authentic this or that" instead of what could be found or scrounged locally. In fact, I had to order quite a few things online or purchase them in California and have them sent out to New Mexico because there was nothing available locally that would fit the style of the house.

The things I wanted just weren't available locally. Picky, picky, picky!

Also, I was working in California most of the time the renovation was going on, only making periodic flights out to New Mexico to check on progress and get the contractor paid. So ten months was good time under the circumstances.

I have found since then that indeed a lot of things you might take for granted elsewhere aren't easily available in New Mexico, and if you can get or find them, they cost a lot more than they do wherever you're from. Local materials aren't necessarily cheap; in fact, sometimes they are a good deal more costly than "imports." Thus, for example, there are considerable quantities of East Indian imported building materials available -- doors and columns and quaint things of all kinds -- and they are used as substitutes for Old Spanish stuff (which can be had either as antiquities or contemporary re-creations) because they are considerably less expensive than the "authentic" Spanish materials.

It's quite a sight to see a brand new Santa Fe Style house built with and full of East Indian antiquities. But it would cost a third more or even half again as much to build or renovate your adobe with "authentic" Spanish and/or Spanish style materials. So people go with the East Indian substitutes, which are quite nice in their own right, but seem somehow... foreign!

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant would never even have thought of doing that. In her day it was possible, "even for a woman" (which was part of what she was writing about) to renovate a house in the truly authentic style of New Mexico, using local labor and materials, and adapting what was needed to what was on hand. She needed adobes, she got adobes -- from a building that had fallen to ruin. Her renovated roof was new-fangled asphalt instead of the piled-on dirt and debris that had been put on top of the authentic vigas and latillas back in the day. She had windows put in, casements no less, still the Style around these parts but harder to get now than they were then. She had a kitchen built and a cast iron stove put in. She furnished her house with locally made furniture and objects, much of it inexpensive by her standards. Anything like it now would cost a fortune.

She had -- and apparently needed -- no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no heat except for the corner "kiva" fireplaces that were already part of the house when she bought it, and the wood burning cook stove she installed in her new kitchen. But it sounds like she only intended to use the house in summer, and though there might be rain, it's not cold in the summertime in Tesuque. Up in Taos, though, it would be frigid as the North Pole in the wintertime. As the locals there found out again -- if they didn't remember -- when the gas supplies failed during the coldest part of the winter this year.

But her story is about so much more than the house she renovated.




And that's the thing. Ultimately, it's a spiritual journey.

To Be Continued

The Journal of a Mud House, a continuation

[Illustration from "The Journal of a Mud House" by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Harper's, April 1922]

Yes, well. Mrs. O'Bryan's porch in Tesuque represents a vision as well as an actual house, c. 1922. One can tell by the somewhat inexpertly handled proportions and details -- particularly the itty-bitty vigas poking through the walls -- that this is not an "authentic" New Mexican adobe house in the then newly fashionable Pueblo Style which would within a decade morph into the still-fashionable Santa Fe Style.

The vision, of course is represented by the scrubby hillside against which Mrs O'Bryan has had her adobe built and by the yard full of flowers in front. In fact, it is still one of the hallmarks of Santa Fe Style housing that there be an abundance of flowers bursting out of yards and spilling out of hanging planters.

It's a vision of Paradise.

Up to a point.

New Mexico is no easy Paradise to be sure. The locals, of course, have known the facts of the matter for as long as there have been locals here -- which could be many tens of thousands of years.

Water is the most problematic supply need in the region. New Mexico is mostly desert after all, some of it -- like the White Sands region -- spectacular sand desert, but most of it is the kind of scrub desert that draws you in. But be careful.

Tesuque has a "river" flowing through it, so it is not quite as dry as many other areas. Santa Fe, too, has a "river". These "rivers" would be classified as creeks or intermittent streams anywhere else, but in New Mexico, any flowing water at all is something of a miracle.

These "rivers" are often diverted by canals called acequias. Through means of these acequias, water is brought to many who otherwise might not have access to it. Control of the acequia water is in the hands of a mayordomo who determines how much water each user can take from the canal and what kind of service and maintenance the acequia requires. The acequias at one time were essential to crops in the region, and you can still see land use patterns based on the locations of the acequias throughout New Mexico, but especially in the Rio Grande Valley.

These days, access to water is considered critical, but reliance on the acequia system is much less as wells and civic and commercial diversions from the Rio Grande itself have made water somewhat easier to get -- and have made a much larger population possible.

The population is mostly concentrated in Albuquerque, though. The city has a population of something over 500,000 with as many as 750,000 or more in the metro area -- which is enormous in New Mexico -- and it is striking to see how the city has been shaped by the landscape and by the Indians.

Albuquerque was founded over 300 years ago near the banks of the Rio Grande at the base of the Sandia Mountains in the vicinity of an occupied -- or was it abandoned? I forget -- Indian pueblo. The Sandias are an astonishing geological formation, basically a section of crust that has been forced up from below. The effect is to present a west face of the mountains that is practically a sheer cliff more than a mile high; the eastern side of the Sandias is a relatively gentle slope. The formation runs about 30 miles north to south, as does the spread of the city.

From the West Mesa of the Rio Grande, you can see the abrupt cut off of the city's spread both to the north -- where the Sandia Pueblo lands are a sharp barrier -- and to the south -- where the Isleta Pueblo lands perform the same function.

Albuquerque has spread as far up the Sandias as it reasonably can; it is a very steep climb up from Tramway. So the only direction Albuquerque has been able to grow of late is to the west, and sure enough, Albuquerque has metastasized onto the high plains and volcanic ridges west of the city.

There is something of Los Angeles in it, but with a very distinctive style. Albuquerque is both older and newer than LA, and it is forthrightly Anglo, Spanish, and Indian, adopting this tricultural image of New Mexico as its own identity, but rejecting the Santa Fe tendency toward kitsch on the one hand and its somewhat irritating historicism on the other. Albuquerque shows a very distinctive and polished contemporary style that may -- or may not -- evoke the past, but which seems to fit the place remarkably well.

Santa Fe, on the other hand, though the capital of the state, is a small town with only about 75,000 people. That's still considered large and quite fancy by local standards, because you can go out to Tesuque where Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant did back in her day, and find a few hundred at best. In Sergeant's day the number was probably no more than dozens, and I'm sure Sergeant knew every one of them.

Or think of Taos, where Ms Sergeant also apparently had a domicile. In those days, it was becoming a prominent artist's colony. Somewhat like Tesuque, it consisted of a scattering of ranches, mostly in Anglo hands, a "Mexican" village (Rancho de Taos) and the famous Indian Pueblo, partially rebuilt after the US Army destroyed most of it during its conquest of the region. (There had been a rebellion by the locals during which the appointed US Territorial Governor Charles Bent was killed along with a number of others, so "punishment" was mandatory. Something like 250 Taoseños and others were slaughtered and much of the pueblo was destroyed in 1847. Captured rebels -- mostly Indians -- were then hanged by the dozen. It's the way things were done in those days.)

Today, there are perhaps 30,000 people in the Taos area, but in the 1920's there may have been no more than 1,500 or 2,000.

Many other towns in New Mexico still have a few hundred or perhaps a thousand or so people living in them. Albuquerque's bloat is practically unique.

Like other adventurous souls looking for Paradise, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant came out to New Mexico from Back East -- in her case, Massachusetts, about as far East as you can get in this country.

A colony of artists and literary lights had formed in Taos and had spread to Santa Fe, beguiled by the history and seduced by the Light -- the incredible Light of this region.

Just as a sidenote, I'm used to arising just before dawn, and yet this morning I decided to sleep in a bit and let the sunrise Light illuminate my bedroom before I got up. Oh. My. What a moment. The curtains in the bedroom don't block all the light, but they do cut the glare signifcantly. There are lace glass curtains and overcurtains of a fairly light weight but dark red cotton. The room filled with both white and red light as the sun rose, really quite joyous appearing against the yellow painted adobe walls. It was beautiful and inspiring. What the Light does around here seems unlike that of any other region, and it is because of what the Light does that so many romantics and artists are attracted to New Mexico.

As Ms. Sergeant so rightly put it:



Indeed. "Mere vision." Seeing. Exploring. Abiding.

To Be Continued

The Journal of a Mud House

[Illustration from Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant's "The Journal of a Mud House," Harper's Magazine, March 1922]

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant wrote "The Journal of a Mud House" for Harper's Magazine which serialized it in 1922, and I was struck on reading it this past week at both how much and how very little has changed in New Mexico ever since.

Not that I know that much about it, understand.

According to the biographies I've found, Sergeant was a wounded war correspondent who went out to New Mexico from her Massachusetts home in 1920, perching up at Taos where she became part of the Taos artist community then becoming a force in the world of both visual and literary arts. D. H. Lawrence and all that.

Well, but this story is about her purchase and rehab of a "mud house" -- apparently it was just a three room adobe ruin -- on a couple of acres in Tesuque, which is just north of Santa Fe, not Taos at all. And very fashionable now Tesuque is too. Even more so than Taos.

About six years ago, we purchased a six/seven room adobe ruin a good deal south of Santa Fe, in what's known as the East Mountains, not at all fashionable -- at least not to those who worry about those things. But then, neither was Tesuque in those days when Sergeant and her friend Gertrude bought their place in the '20's!

No, Tesuque was a handful of scattered ranches, mostly in Anglo hands, a "Mexican" village, and an off-the-beaten-track Indian pueblo back then. All of which, to a greater or lesser degree it still is.

In those days, Tesuque is described as six miles from the Santa Fe Plaza, which ought to have made it very close in, but it was not easy to get around back then. Sergeant bought a Ford to get from place to place on the few graded or paved roads there were, but she also had a couple of horses just in case, and most of the Native people (both Indian and Spanish) used the ubiquitous burros to carry loads; they walked beside their burros most of the time.

So six miles from the Plaza was a much-of-the-day trek out to Tesuque or back into Town. It's now a really nice 45 minute drive on a nearly empty road through some of the most gorgeous high plains and mountain territory on the continent from our place to the Plaza in Santa Fe, or in the other direction (that is to say west) about the same length of time, much of it on the remnants of Route 66, to the Albuquerque Plaza -- which isn't quite as old (a hundred years newer! But still more than 300 years old), which is if anything even more pleasant than Santa Fe's ancient Plaza.

The difficulty of getting from place to place has an effect on the way you see the world around you. In New Mexico, in the 1920's -- as well as long before that -- it was not impossible by any means to move around, to go places, to do things and see the sights. Not at all. On the other hand, it was a challenge to get from here to there, and once you got to wherever it was you were going, it was not an easy thing to just pick up and go somewhere else.

Thus, once you were wherever your destination might be, you tended to stay put. At least for a while. Typically a good long while!

Of course there are freeways and really very fine state highways through New Mexico now, so it's not that hard at all to move around and to see the sights if one wants to and has a car or a truck as the case may be. And can afford gas. Insurance. The usual impediments. But once you get off the main highways, the roads in New Mexico are often unpaved, sometimes barely graded tracks through the wilderness, and in Santa Fe particularly the custom is not to pave the local roads and streets, not even to name them in many cases -- "you just have to know your way around" -- which leads to clouds of dust and puzzled confusion, but also to slow travel, or even staying put, rather than peripatetically driving around. As one would do, say, in Los Angeles. Or most of the rest of California for that matter.

I find myself being rooted in place when I'm in New Mexico. Our place is not on a main road, but it is on a paved street, one that even gets plowed in the winter time (whoo-hoo!) and it is no great distance from the front door to the street on our gravel drive way. Yes, these were all considerations when time was. You grow up in California and you expect certain conveniences.

But then when Sergeant went out to New Mexico in the 1920's, you didn't have a choice. There weren't any conveniences to speak of except for the railroad -- which was of course how you got out to New Mexico in the first place. But once there -- and it wasn't necessarily all that easy to get there even with the railroad, as Sergeant documents from the "Chicago Train" which faces a washout near Pueblo, CO, and so travelers must be diverted through Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas to get to Albuquerque and thence up to Santa Fe. Well, Lamy. And thence the 18 miles to Santa Fe. Good luck!

There's a new train these days called the Railrunner (with a wonderful roadrunner logo emblazoned on its side) that runs from Belen in the south to Santa Fe's Railyard District in the north passing through Albuquerque on its way. There is talk of extending it every which of a way because it is really such a nice ride for one thing, and it is such a Green travel mode for another. But New Mexico is now in thrall to a Republican administration, so the likelihood of doing anything to extend the Railrunner is approximately none for the foreseeable future. But that's as may be. One learns to wait.

To Be Continued