I expect to catch hell for this and probably should.
Carrizozo, NM is one of those places I’d never been to but always reserved somehow, tucked away for future reference and refuge. I tend to think like that, if we can call it thinking. But as a friend’s ancient Zen teacher yelled at him once, “Your life is none of your goddamned business!”
These days, I know just what she meant.
On my trip back from Austin, I made a wide swing west out of Texas to hit Roswell, Ruidoso, and Carrizozo before heading north. I got to see a huge swath of New Mexico I’d never visited before, and I don’t have a bad word to say about any of it. Living in this state has to be one of the greatest privileges in the known world. For example, there are magnificent stretches of West Texas that look remarkably like adjacent areas in eastern New Mexico, only in New Mexico the artifices of civilization tend to fall away: fewer signs along the backroads, no reflective markers, hardly any striping, basically nothing but road, land, and sky. Always the sky…
Even West Texas is full of Texans–in the middle of nowhere, a big pickup truck or semi roars by every couple of minutes or so. But in New Mexico, you could get a good night’s sleep camped out on some of the roads I used. There just isn’t anybody here. The net effect is that it’s more organic. More natural. Nature rules.
It certainly does in Carrizozo. Coming down from Ruidoso, you pass quickly through the town of Nogal, which has to be one of the best places to hide out in America today. (I’ll bet half the population is in the Witness Protection Program.) Having said that, Carrizozo might be second best–in other words, it’s almost perfect! If I were single, I might go there to wait out the Great Unwinding with a randy gallery owner bored out of her skull. And hey look, they have onion rings!
“If I were single,” hah. I’m not and have no wish to be. And having seen the wonders of Carrizozo first-hand–yes, I mean that, you’ll never see a shopping mall–I realize that if I lived in Carrizozo, I would be!
My honey has a few requirements, and so do I, but hers are of a different nature. She comes from Iowa, where smart kids learned to escape to cultured urban enclaves on the coasts, not realizing what they had. As a result, she pines for pavement now and then, a reassuring edifice, respected institutions, professional dialogue. I would just as soon scrape most of that into the gorge, but still: Carrizozo just won’t cut it for that log cabin home in the sky… Don’t get me wrong, though. I loved it, after a fashion, in that way I do.
There was a man my age (only in better shape) riding a bike south up to Nogal, and I immediately envied him–head maybe 12 miles out, a gentle climb, then coast all the way home, surrounded by sky and mountains and no damn traffic anywhere! Considered in this context, his presence demonstrated flaming genius. Good health in paradise! Space to think! Cheap, too. Since our lives are none of our goddamn business, I wonder just who put him there?
It’s all a puzzlement, it is. Everything considered, I already got away with murder, anyway.
Here in Taos (pavement? edifice? institutions?), the air is clean at 7,000 feet and the horizon scary-sharp. When the wind blows, my fingers grip deep down inside the rocks, and I hang on for all I’m worth.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s a good line about our lives not being any of our business, but you of all people can’t possibly subscribe to it. What the hell else do we have except our lives? Whose business is a life if not that of the one who lives it? “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. The world of rocks, plants and (non-human) animals is a beautiful and wondrous spectacle – but only as seen through OUR eyes. A tarantula or glacier or venus fly trap can’t see itself, much less its neighbors. Nature waits for us to christen it, not we for it to wake up and smell the coffee. And what is the most natural of all things for a human being? Another human being. That’s why all our greatest works of art are stories about ourselves and the people in our lives. Other people is where we go to find the really exotic and interesting stuff, not to mention little things like love and friendship. N’est-ce pas?
The river, Ken. The TORRENT. The inexpressible, irresistible power of it all. I get to examine my life, all right. Even so, I don’t know where it comes from.
I reckon that must be Ol’ Man River you’re referring to, the one who’s seen all that pointlessness, toil and trouble along his shores. Yeah, I know him all right. His assessment of your life and my life and the lives of all of us may be correct, but I’ll tell my story in my own way, dammit! He’ll get the last word, but in the meantime we ought to rage against all that tragic blind determinism. Nicht wahr?
Great writing– as usual.
I’ll skip the philosophy for now, I’m too tired and you guys are too intelligent for me to keep up.
You have to watch my old friend Ken. He’ll debate the paint off a fire hydrant, he will. I like to drop enigmatic crap behind me to trip up pursuers. But I don’t know if any of this involves intelligence!
BTW, this is the first test of threaded comments! Are they great, are they stupid, does anybody care?
I vote YES……(for the threaded comments….) it adds a nice touch and keeps things orderly…..some folks like that…..and others – as for me, it keeps things easy to follow…..which I suppose is all the same thing…..so as usual…I should have stopped with – “I like it!”
There.
Except that virtually everything is a “reply” to something, isn’t it? Anyway, they stay for now. Makes it look like a real blog!