The Redemption of New Mexico

Seven months ago, we traveled across a barren, gray wasteland called New Mexico. I don't know what I had expected from New Mexico; it's one of those states that I just don't consider all that often. It's the center of Southwestern style, a land of Native Americans, and...well...that's about what I knew of New Mexico.

What we were presented with was hideously boring, and we simply wanted to be across it as quickly as possible and into our new home state of
Texas. The only nice part of New Mexico that we experienced at the time were the Carlsbad Caverns, which rest at the top of a mesa, far from the buzz of civilization. The silence at the top of that mesa is what I remember the most. It was beautiful.

Tonight, we're staying in a hotel in Albuquerque, and I am happy to say that over the last several hours, as we've driven westward across New Mexico on I-40, the Land of Enchantment has totally and utterly redeemed itself.

I will try to describe what I saw, but it was so magnificent, every turn presented such an amazing vista, that it is hard to put it into words; so many images fill my mind, and now they are all forming into one magical image that I have to try and sort through in order to extract the reality of what I saw.

First, there is the land. It is a silver-green ocean of grass with peaks of dark green conifers. It undulates softly, occasionally rising to a tumult of red and gray crests of shattered rock. I-40 rises up and down over the waves; downward into dark valleys of pine as the sky beyond the next hill quickly repaints itself so that when you climb to the top of the hill you are presented with a new stunning vista, a child of the one before, bearing its remnants but presenting some new twist on the theme, some new show of light, or some new shape of cloud.

So there is then the sky, the real star of the show on our journey through New Mexico. It is filled with clouds that have rested over this land for millennia in a constant cycle of reincarnation, taking moisture from the land, building into thunderheads, and then raining the moisture back down to the land below. These clouds have gone through that process a million times, and they are old pros.

The real show lies straight ahead of us. The clouds are a dark wall, and the Sun is behind them. Its light is bursting forth, trying to reach the land below. It presses on the clouds with all its might until brilliant golden fissures appear stretching North to South across the dark wall; light bursts forth from these in every direction, shooting down to the green land below, trailing golden streamers behind.

Cut into the bottom part of this dark wall of clouds is a huge portal into which we are driving. Hundreds of miles from end to end, and thousands of feet from top to bottom, it is a windows into the sky beyond, which is a color that is hard to describe; it is blue, but it is mixed with the yellow gold of the Sun's rays to form some complex opalescent mixture: a pool of golden sky blue.

The Southern end of this window is framed by a lintel of rainfall that has captured and reflects the Sun's light. The Painter has filled his brush from the waters of the sky pool, pressed the bristles against the top of this lintel, and let the colors run in rivulets down to the Earth.

We stopped for dinner then. After several Dr. Peppers and a few fried nuggets, I needed something substantial. We ate at Denny's, taking a break from the road. It was dark and cool inside, and relaxing. The waiter was about the kindest I've come across. I had a steak, a baked potato, some cole slaw, and a milkshake, and I was ready to hit the road again, only a couple of hours left until Albuquerque.

During this intermission, the old pros had repositioned themselves and moved some scenery around. The second act opened with those magnificent golden rays having conquered all other colors in the sky, save for the dark gray of the clouds. Gold has an amazing effect on land - I think I've mentioned that elsewhere before. It touches every color just right; the colors feed off of the golden light, and become rich and abundant. Greens are greener, reds are redder, and grays become silver with veins of patina.

We turned off the DVD player in favor of some guitar music, good folk music from Tennessee and Ireland, airs and reels and square dances. It was a perfect soundtrack for the scene being played out before us as the Sun slowly moved downward behind those dark gray clouds until it peeked out below their lower edge. The waves of land began to rise and fall more powerfully now like a nighttime storm at sea.

Without warning, we found ourselves thrust into the midst of the storm, waves of dark green on either side rising high to scratch the bottom of those dark clouds, now directly overhead. Before us spread the waves of forestland, and the Sun was hidden somewhere beyond. Its light was bouncing between these waves, highlighting the greens, and the reds and grays of the rock walls through which I-40 has been cut.

Then we rounded a bend and looked down a long slope with the final waves of our foresty storm rushing downward on either side. The sky burst into brilliant yellow flame streaming down from above and setting the world aflame. What had once been dark gray clouds now appeared as trails of smoke billowing into the sky.

We were in Albuquerque now, looking down the long I-40 descending straight ahead into a desert that we will traverse tomorrow, mesas silhouetted in the distance. The falling firelight lit up the world behind us. These New Mexicans know the color of the sky at sunset and capture it in the paint on their walls. As gold turned to that purple pink that marks a perfect sunset, buildings and freeway overpasses harmonized, capturing the light's tune, reverberating and singing it back.

We turned South on I-25 towards our hotel, resting on the last edge of that amazing, enchanting land of green, silver, red, gray, blue and gold that we had traveled through all afternoon. Here, the land crashes into the shore of the desert, and breaks itself into pink and gray boulders that - like the paint that they so cleverly use here - captures the fading sunset to perfection. We traveled down this corridor of pink and purple and gray, until we came to our hotel.

Now it is night. Ben is asleep on the bed; Joshua on the floor; and Joseph is roaming the room in nothing but his skivvies. I can't imagine that the road tomorrow could possibly be anywhere near as magical as the road today, but I've been surprised before.