Enchantment with the Mysteries of the Mesas

Expect to be mesmerized when in New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.

I first passed through New Mexico on the way from Virginia to Coronado, California in October of 1965. The Rambler my dad was driving ran out of gas 40 miles east of Albuquerque next to an ethereal windmill that clanked and shuddered as it pumped water in the wind. I will always remember the haunting sense of the mesas and the sound of the creaking pump that accompanied the feeling while the sun went down. I still have the picture I took of it.

Resourceful kid that I was, I dipped a glass into the gas tank under the hood of the Karmann Ghia my dad was towing behind the Rambler, and we limped into a lonely gas station owned by a family of Native Americans. Kachinas for sale lined the shelves. I was just a 13 years old and had no money. The attendant's wife was nursing their child in the back. I felt bad I couldn't buy anything in their store.

Once in Coronado I became a recluse in my parent's rented house, smitten, especially, by the high mesas of New Mexico. I curled up on a sofa in the den, surrounded by books about the national parks in the West, particularly Mesa Verde.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján and the members of his party of Conquistadors were the first white men to visit New Mexico. They sought a fancied city of great wealth called Cibola, thought to be made of gold and sitting high on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Since that time, their Latino descendants from Mexico and white conquerors from Europe have struck an uneasy truce with the resident descendants of their prehistoric pueblo ancestors who lived in the high canyons of the Mesa Verde.

Taos Pueblo, continuously occupied for over a thousand years

The event that celebrated the 400^th year of this truce, the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, was held in 1940. I bought the official brochure for the event “400 years in the making” on eBay for $5.

The state got Washington's Bureau of Printing and Engraving to make promotional postage stamps, which commemorated "Coronado and his captains," heads of the military aspect of his "conquest," but the vignette also depicts a friar wielding the weapon of a new ideology, Catholicism.

First day cover with plate block of Scott 898; cachet by Torkel Gundel

Entradas took place all over, which means "a grand entrance into a new land." It seemed as though every town had something special: rodeos, pioneer days, Indian ceremonies- although I question what Native Americans really thought about all this, especially Zuni and Tiguex, descendants of those who suffered either war or privation due to the demands for food that Coronado levied on their fragile economies.

Perhaps the most successful invaders in the state’s long history were the chambers of commerce who jumped on the bandwagon during that celebratory year. To accommodate the throngs of expected tourists with consumer dollars in their pockets, Albuquerque set out to open as many motels as it could. One reporter thought people might have to resort to sleeping in bedrolls and would hand down tales about "roughing it in the wilds of New Mexico." But with Route 66 just rerouted down Central Street and all the motels advertising, along with the brand new 1939 Hilton, its doubtful there was much sleeping under the stars. The El Vado, now in danger of demolition, advertised its tile showers and its "soundproof, fireproof" rooms.

Not to be left out, Santa Fe designed and published its own envelope to be used as first day covers on the commemorative postage stamp’s first day of issue, September 7th. Since the US Postal service  had designated only Albuquerque the official first day city, Santa Fe officials must have raced like the Pony Express back with stamps to put on them before the day ended. Today they’re worth more.

First day cover with plate block of Scott 898; cachet by city of Santa Fe

My father met my mother in Albuquerque in 1949. He was stationed there to learn about bomb delivery protocols for the Navy. She was enrolled at the University of New Mexico in a Counseling PhD program. They got married there.

In December of 1972 I headed to the east coast for Christmas, again passing through New Mexico. I drove with Harry Rockwell, a follower of the psychic Edgar Cayce, in his huge, white Chevy Impala two-door, nicknamed The White Whale. I persuaded him to veer off Interstate 40 in Gallup and head to Mesa Verde, the enchanted Green Table, permeated by the ghosts of the prehistoric Anasazi, a term given them by modern Navajo, which means "Ancient Ones," who built the cliff dwellings there.

First day cover hand-drawn by Georges Laffert with block of Scott 759

The vignette of the stamps on another first day cover in my collection, part of the 1935 National Parks series of imperforate issues, shows the queen of cliff dwellings, Cliff Palace. Hand-drawn by Georges Laffert in limited number, the first day covers for this series are rare and command a very high price.

 Author mesmerized by the mystery of Cliff Palace, the true golden city

While Rockwell stood across from Cliff Palace that windy December day, I scampered down to where the picture was taken for the vignette. He and I had slept in a pedestrian tunnel the night before during a blizzard. The snow was hard to get through to see the Palace, and I had to jump the fence, since it was officially closed for the winter. But I felt called by the enchantment of the ruins. Alone during those silent moments softened by the snow, I felt the powerful mystery of the mesas.

My girl friend back in Corvallis, Oregon, named Debra, ran off with Rockewell to California the next year. My heart had wandered. I’ll blame it on New Mexico.

While cleaning out some files last week, I found rules for using grammar properly, which date back to the English term paper I wrote as a high school freshman in Coronado. It was about the national parks, especially Mesa Verde. I had written it while that enchanted recluse, steeped in the mesa’s mysteries. I sent the rules to Marissa, star pupil in my freshman science class this past year. She’s an aspiring writer. She’s already written mystical poetry about blood passing through the veins of the bony winter landscape. The mysteries of New Mexico’s mesas and all other sacred landscapes must be transposed from one generation to the next.

On a trip once from Florida to Oregon, I attempted to cross the high valley of the Rio Grand. I had totaled my first Fiat in Florida visiting my brother. He lent me money for my second Fiat. The transmission blew on the ascent of the Sangre de Cristo’s, the Blood of Christ. I limped into Colorado Springs, borrowed money from an uncle to get it fixed, and got to Oregon by way of Wyoming. I crossed that high valley successfully on another trip in the same Fiat after a woman I chased for five years named Kaaren gave me the final boot in Urbana, IL. One must pay dues before entering the Land of Enchantment. I remember that the feeling I got in the valley was palpable.

That same feeling must have infected Georgia O’Keefe as she gazed out the window of her studio at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico in 1930.

And it gave to Ansel Adams one of his most mystical photographs, taken in 1941, of a moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico.

There is just something about wide open, dry expanses a mile high in that land of New Mexico. It got my parents married, without which there wouldn’t be me. And since then that high altitude air over those mesas just seems to mystify my soul every time I breathe it while passing through.

 At the bottom of an ocean of autumn air that’s driving a mill a mile high on the short grass prairie, fresh and wind-washed, east of Albuquerque