New Mexico – Silent Spaces and Vibrant Art

Having just returned from New Mexico, and no longer young, the sentence now means more than it ever did. New Mexico, with its broad land and endless sky, but most of all, its pure air will make any of us feel young again — at least while we’re there.

I’d flown to New Mexico landing in Albuquerque, a calm city of about 535,000. I picked up my luggage, then a van took me a couple of hours north to the state capital, Santa Fe, whose streets whisper of an ageless past.

I settled in Hotel Chimayo, where the courtyards and corridors are open to the sky and lined by hanging chile ristras, glistening red by day and wine dark as evening comes.

My plan was to see Northern New Mexico, first Santa Fe, then move through the vast and silent land to Taos, a town with profound cultural history, then board a steam train for a journey beneath rust red mountains and deep valleys to Chama, a village of 1,100. I did all of this. And it’s carved in memory forever.

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Santa Fe, the small capital city of 70,000, is not just preserving a profound past, but honouring it, in particular the legacy of the Pueblo, the Najavo, and then the Spanish who came in the early 17th century. It doesn’t take long to sense this deep regard for history.

First, I went to the city’s New Mexico History Museum, standing beside an elegant adobe building, called the oldest public building in the U.S. It’s The Palace of the Governors and dates to the 1600s.

So as Frances Levine, its director says of her city: “We were 200 years old, when the White House was being built.”

Strolling in the building with Levine and her colleague, Kate Nelson, I not only saw the past, but felt it, in the palace’s four foot thick adobe walls and museum exhibits provoking reminders of conflicts on the way to today’s relative understanding between European and native culture.

But that past is certainly memorable. “It’s good to have people come here,” Dr. Levine says, “to understand our special history: part of Spain from 1598 to 1821; part of Mexico from 1821 to 1846; a U.S. territory from 1846 to 1911; then in 1912, we became the 47th state of the U.S. We are truly an historic landmark.”

In the plaza, a minute on foot from my hotel, I met Barbara Harrelson, an engaging woman who grew up in New Mexico, had a career that included teaching, then time as a docent at the renowned Smithsonian in Washington. In time, she returned to Santa Fe and became a guide specializing in art and literary history in her city.

She’s excellent. In fact, she’s author of Walks in Literary Santa Fe. It was natural we began on a street renowned for art and art galleries : Canyon Road. It, like the plaza, was a brief stroll in time but a deep stroll into history. Santa Fe has about 200 art galleries and half are on Canyon Rd.

As early as 1910, artists from all over the U.S. began migrating to Santa Fe, forming a colony on Canyon Road where often they’d rent a house, do painting in the back, do selling in the front. As we strolled past gallery after gallery, Ms. Hallerson spoke of how Sante Fe art was first influenced by a colony in the legendary northern New Mexico town of Taos. It focused on native people, with lots of cowboys and wide lands. “You can still find that kind of art,” she said, “often very beautiful and sometimes, depending on quality, going for as much as half a million.”

But the most memorable visit, came when we left Canyon Road and reached Buena Vista street and what was once home to a man regarded as the finest of the minor — hence respected — poets in the U.S. Witter Bynner’s home is now an elegant inn, (Inn of the Turquoise Bear) with a past that was free thinking and high living. Anyone in the arts, I was told, who came to Santa Fe in the 1920s to 1940s, called to see Witter Bynner.

They often attended parties, some lasting three or four days: Thornton Wilder, John Galsworthy, Aldous Huxley, D.H Lawrence, Rebecca West, Carl Sandburg. (The story goes that one of the women got very drunk and got engaged to Bynner for 24 hours. Once they sobered up, both realized it was a very bad idea so called it off.) Today, many rooms carry names of the renowned who came: Igor Stravinsky, Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe.

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Taking the train north

“It’s my private mountain,” Georgia O’Keeffe, the late, much-revered artist said about a mountain near Taos.

“God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.”

I’d driven north to Taos, which has about 5,000 citizens and the greatest air I’ll probably ever breathe. Its elevation is roughly 10,000 feet. From Taos, a full of light, I drove to tiny Antonito, boarding one of the most remarkable trains I’ll ever be on: the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, a narrow gauge steam locomotive, to ride to the northern village of Chama, 64 miles northward.

The train, one of the world’s greatest attractions for train buffs, had the sound and sense of the trains of childhood.

Beyond the windows were scenes that may never be surpassed in my traveling life: red mountains so jagged and high they truly pierce the sky, valleys so deep I could barely make out cowboys on their horses, dogs at their sides alongside herds they tended.

That evening, in the small village of Chama, a rustic place of meadows carpeted in flowers and bordered by pine, they held a reception. The train staff served wine and I talked with a lot of friendly, interesting people. But, beyond all that I’ll remember my visit a long time, for that wonderful air, the air Willa Cather knew and I breathed so deeply that like her Bishop, I too, woke up in New Mexico a younger man.

Kenneth Bagnell’s visit was assisted by New Mexico’s tourism.

 If you go

For information on travel and accommodation in New Mexico: www.newmexico.org.