home at last
the land of entrapment Once the allure of New Mexico and its spectacular vernacular seduces you, it can be mighty hard to leave. So don’t!
With surroundings like this, who would ever want to leave? New Mexico tends to develop a lasting hold on its residents.
She’s back! My daughter Amanda has returned to New Mexico after a year and a half of what she describes as “voluntary exile.” Her particular gulag was a state where food comes either very sweet or very fat—or a coronary-inducing combination of the two. As a petite New Mexican, my daughter had trouble blending in to what had become the land of the large, probably because she gave off some bizarre pheromone mix of piñon and good green chile. Needless to say, she was devoured by mosquitos, from which she had no natural immunity. She realized something was terribly wrong when she first entered a big box store and was dogged throughout it by an overzealous employee who, finding her unique, figured she must be some form of alien. My personal E.T. did phone home quite regularly with news from the land of giants. She took to haunting small hidden Mexican grocery stores, thrilling to the discovery of an edible tamale, living for frozen chile from home, and plotting—seriously plotting—how to get back home. Now she is back. Her temporary sojourn is a cautionary tale as well as a reminder of the plight of thousands stranded throughout the world, pitiful folks who strayed from New Mexico’s borders only to learn that finding the way back might not be as easy as the initial departure. Like a spurned lover, New Mexico doesn’t easily forgive rejection.
As a New Mexico native, my daughter was somewhat unaware of the enchanting, entrapping qualities of her state and hometown, Santa Fe. Although she had seen a good chunk of the world and had a healthy appreciation for all that her home territory had to offer, she had never experienced the agonizing feeling of separation that characterizes true homesickness. While she did miss us a tiny bit, what she really missed was New Mexico. I can understand this sense of loss because I missed New Mexico even before I moved here. When I first blew through the state on the obligatory road trip more than 35 years ago, I felt a little slap of, “Hello, what have we here?”—a recognition that something had been missing unbeknownst to me. This led to much circling around the state, trips back to school to beef up my prospects, and finally the not-so-triumphant return—the rest is history.
The fact that in the case of New Mexico, there really is “no place like home” is certainly lost on millions, which is just dandy with those of us who are in on the secret. We guard the borders from the insufficiently appreciative, those who have no understanding of the sacrifices that must be made to be a New Mexican, those who breeze in only to find it all too different, too unconnected, too hard to line up creature comforts, altogether a bit too out of the loop and off the grid. Like the best of secrets, its most elusive qualities are hidden in plain view, easily missed by those who are addicted to predictability, thus confirming New Mexico’s true state motto, penned by Lew Wallace, governor and Ben Hur author, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”
Defining elusive qualities and emotional bonds can be daunting. Much of the entrapping nature of our state has to do with the deep sense of well-being that it imparts. Those who have experienced this discover that nowhere else is likely to satisfy for very long—hence the entrapment. The ready availability of clean air, beautiful skies, and vast spaces is not so easily found elsewhere, nor are the green chile and all the rest that comes with our regional culture.
What finally elevates New Mexico above all other places for me is the nature of our homes. We live in a state of owner-built and hand-built homes that look rooted to place. Here the vernacular is truly spectacular, and we struggle to preserve our oldest, most fragile adobe buildings so we can continue to marvel at the tough ingenuity and elegant solutions to humanity’s most fundamental need, shelter. Here we can participate, as nowhere else, in an architecture and design that spans millennia and remains valiantly committed to ensuring that this place and this time is a reflection of all that came before. While architectural missteps abound, there are still the touchstones—ancient churches, native ruins, honest village houses, thoughtful new homes, old town plazas—that serve to inform the future.
My daughter has moved into a funky little house up the road in Pojoaque, very much on the edge of the grid, as indicated by the fact that you must stand in a field to get a cell phone signal. A freezer filled with game sits on her front porch and wood-burning stoves dot the house. The landlord’s chile field is bright new green, as are the grasshoppers. Out her bedroom window she can hear the gentle gurgle of the acequia, and her closet space is virtually nonexistent. She’s back. I think of her as I stand in my garden, a garden crazed with wanton hollyhocks, or as I wander through cool rooms with thick walls in my petite adobe. She has joined a not-so-secret society, a very non-elite sorority. Now she knows, as I know, what it feels like to miss New Mexico. Welcome back to the Land of Entrapment.
Christine Mather is a museum curator and an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.