Su Libro

walking and wandering

Set yourself loose in the cultural, geographic, and literary landscapes of New Mexico—or contemplate them from a cabin in the woods.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Winter 2008 Su Casa

Walks in Literary Santa Fe: A Guide to Landmarks, Legends, and Lore, by Barbara Harrelson, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, paperback, $12.95.

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Backroads & Byways of New Mexico: Drives, Day Trips & Weekend Excursions, by Sally Moore, The Countryman Press, paperback, $16.95.

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Native New Mexican or newcomer? Either way, I bet I could name five great places within these 121,000 square miles—maybe even five in downtown Santa Fe—that you’ve never visited or at least haven’t visited lately. Unless you’ve campaigned with the tireless agenda of former Governor Bruce King, even you who have rambled extensively here (one thinks of Thoreau’s comment that he’d traveled a good deal in Concord) can’t have stopped at every great café, visited every museum, or checked out every architecturally significant county courthouse. Chances are you’ve missed—or forgotten—a few great spots within a tank of gas to visit.

Though these two recent guidebooks can help you fill in the gaps on the map, they take complementary approaches to touring New Mexico. Sally Moore’s Backroads & Byways of New Mexico covers car tours into the far reaches of the state while skipping the major tourist zones of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Barbara Harrelson’s Walks in Literary Santa Fe, meanwhile, puts boots to ground for a scholarly perambulation through the capital’s bibliographic landscape.

Few cities inhabit their own myths as thoroughly and unironically as Santa Fe. Living up to its self-applied moniker “the City Different” through temperament and legislation, Santa Fe built its reputation as a renegade cultural capital more than 100 years ago, perhaps as long ago as 1841 and the opening of the Santa Fe Trail from the United States. Through their work and lifestyles equally, artists and writers have long carried the flag proclaiming the town’s unique standing. On Harrelson’s walking tours—and she’s led them personally for more than a decade—she offers a peek over the fence, as it were, into the homes, lives, and works of Santa Fe writers, most of whom established their reputations decades before the Internet hit Starbucks on San Francisco Street.

Harrelson has done her homework. Walks in Literary Santa Fe is a great pocket companion for sunny-day ambling around the town’s historic district. Divided into two tours, one downtown and one up into the Canyon Road neighborhoods, Walks leads you through a maze of “popular landmarks assuming literary connotations.” Around the plaza, the literary links connect less to specific events at this place or that and more to the general cultural ambience. Still, it’s certainly provocative to imagine territorial governor Lew Wallace 120 years ago writing Ben-Hur in the Palace of the Governors while his wife, Susan Elston Wallace, immersed herself in the experiences that would shape her book, The Land of the Pueblos (see review below).

These landmarks launch Harrelson into anecdotes about authors, snippets of history, even an explication of Santa Fe style. Up Canyon Road and down the winding side streets and trails where writers and artists once lived thick as thieves, Harrelson assays the density of early-20th-century cultural life in Santa Fe. To name a few, she takes you past (but not into) homes and hangouts of writers like Mary Austin, Wytter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, and others with national and local reputations. It seems you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a writer.

Mostly Harrelson lingers on the great or at least the well-known authors or books of past generations, from the 1610 epic by Captain Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá through Wallace and Willa Cather to Paul Horgan, D. H. Lawrence (just passing through), and Richard Bradford. Contemporary giants like N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, earn the ink they deserve, but their homes aren’t on the tour because (A) they don’t live here and/or (B) it probably seemed creepy to send tourists past their hangouts. Maybe it also takes the distance of time to sort out who deserves a spot on the walk of fame. Surely somewhere along these routes, an unknown wordsmith is cranking out a stellar manuscript that might or might not one day achieve critical acclaim. But this book keeps its eyes on writers gleaming with the irresistible gloss of fame. Books and authors have long mattered in celebrity-conscious Santa Fe. At a recent literary gathering, someone told me about brushing up against Cormac McCarthy and son in Whole Foods. The author of too many great books to list and a 2007 Pulitzer winner, McCarthy’s reclusiveness fuels modern urban legend, like Garbo sightings in New York a generation ago. Everyone knows he works at the Santa Fe Institute, but I wonder where he lives . . .

Probably not on Canyon Road, Camino del Monte Sol, or Acequia Madre, but these are great, meandering trails to follow in any season, for any reason. The literary dimension only hones the mystique. In pitch-perfect tone, Harrelson lays out a trail of factoid bread crumbs that keeps you moving without ever bogging down in excessive detail. And you’ll come away with a fresh appreciation of one particular stratum of Santa Fe’s cultural geography. Strap on the walking shoes and get going!

Sally Moore’s Backroads & Byways of New Mexico, on the other hand, assumes a far more populist stance toward New Mexico. She often explores two-laners where the only writing you’ll see for an hour is the speed limit sign, punctuated by bullet holes. I wonder if D. H. Lawrence ever visited Artesia. I’m betting not, but Moore did. And she checked out a handful of delightful antique stores before finding the best meal in town.

Backroads assumes you’ve got a spare day or two, a comfortable road car, and a generous endowment of curiosity about this vast, peculiar, amazingly diverse state. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that, say, Hobbs and Abiquiú have in common is the blacktop connecting them. That’s the beauty of the Western road trip, the narrative written in gasoline.

Head out on the highway, and here’s what you’ll find in Moore’s book: 10 tours that include “A Jemez Journey”; “Georgia O’Keeffe Country”; “The Turquoise Trail”; “Gas, Oil, and Chaparral”; and “Billy the Kid Territory.” For each tour/chapter, Moore tells how to get there, skims the highlights, then drills into the area’s diversions, attractions, history, lodging and restaurants, museums and art galleries, and even a few low-heart-rate hikes.

Moore pointedly skips the well-documented centers of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Her book conspires to help you escape the familiar or at least drive over the rim of your home territory. Not that Moore takes you only into terra incognita. Old standards like Fort Union, Chaco Canyon, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, White Sands, and Ghost Ranch have also been thoroughly, exhaustively detailed elsewhere. Still, Moore writes fluently and delivers the right mix of narrative—for that long haul from Vaughn to Roswell—and just-the-facts listings so you can find a phone number or address while the driver makes a U-turn on Main Street.

A few quibbles about the book could be easily cured in a revised edition: the lack of maps for each tour makes it hard to instantly grasp the geography and estimate driving times. The sole map, an overview of New Mexico, omits key towns for navigation, such as Santa Rosa, Taos, and Alamogordo. Finally, a few too many place names are misspelled, which always galls the locals.

Small complaints, those. Backroads is a worthy guidebook for a winter getaway into the southern sunshine or a summer excursion into the northern Rockies of New Mexico. And bring along Walks in Literary Santa Fe if you want more intellectual stimulation from Santa Fe than the T-shirt store provides.

Modern Cabin, by Michelle Kodis, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardback, $39.95.

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The truly iconic log cabin, smoke curling up from its chimney, remains deeply embedded in the American psyche. The imagery conjures a complex myth: the journey into the wilderness, the individualistic struggle against nature, the unbounded freedom of action—elbow room, self-sufficiency, peace and quiet, a simpler life free from the irritants and distractions of the 21st century.

Modern Cabin, then, at first seems to present an oxymoron; it can’t be both, can it? Author Michelle Kodis sets that dichotomy to rest. In her view, “the cabin has broken free of its history to become an entirely new kind of building.” Yet it continues to offer “a reprieve from busy life and . . . the opportunity to connect with nature.”

Based on the 22 examples in Modern Cabin, I’d have to agree. While neither Daniel Boone nor Laura Ingalls Wilder would recognize their homesteads on these pages, these homes mostly ground themselves in their rustic surroundings, evoking at least an abstract essence of “cabin,” if not its literal frontier embodiment.

Nevertheless, in Kodis’ selections you will find homes with hewn timber, notched and chinked logs, cedar shingles; these make up the “Updated Rustic Charm” section, which shows homes that explicitly quote and reference the materials of traditional cabins. But that’s where the legacy trickles off. These places ease into modernity in a variety of expressions: open plans, dramatic angles, sinuously curving organic forms, lots of windows, a living roof, minimal overhangs, solar panels. Generally they retain the coziness and tactile rusticity of their forebears despite their highly evolved designs and construction methods. The homes in “Beyond the Traditional Cabin” and “Into the Future” explode the envelope past the breaking point. Now we see much more drama, more cubes and trusses and glass walls, more high-tech materials and construction techniques, more square footage.

Geographically, Kodis roams from Texas to Ontario, Washington to Wyoming to New Mexico—that’s quite a ski-in “cabin” on the high slopes at Angel Fire. Some of my favorites include the cedar-slat-sided lakeside guest house in Ontario, an absolutely you’re-kidding! Modernist rectangle literally perched above the Arkansas River in the Colorado Rockies, and a triad of reconstructed and grafted-together cabins in Texas, which are perhaps the most traditional in the book. I could list more, all drool-worthy.

Kodis has authored several high-quality and successful architecture and design books, each one seemingly better than the last. Modern Cabin stands out for the consistently high quality of the homes (and photographs), her clear and insightful writing, and the lovely book design. Buy it and you won’t be disappointed, if you dream of a getaway cabin. Be prepared to crib dozens of ideas for your next home project, anyhow.

Hacienda Courtyards, by Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, hardback, $29.95.

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The wife and husband, writer and photographer team of Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr is back with another installment in their Mexican design series of books from Gibbs Smith, Publisher. Hacienda Courtyards, their seventh title, might be the best yet. The photos and photo reproduction by the printer are generally very good, the selection of haciendas outstanding, and the writing unobtrusive as it draws the readers’ attention to the images. Essentially a behind-the-gates tour of Mexican upper-crust estates, the book revels in the lush visual wealth of colonial estates in Yucatán and venerable haciendas in Morelia, Alamos, and Oaxaca.

The architecture and design connection between Mexico and New Mexico is centuries old—remember this was Mexico at one time. So it’s only natural for designers in the Land of Enchantment to periodically cast an eye south for new ideas, old ideas, and fresh inspiration from the Spanish Colonial genre and its architectural offspring. Any number of interior designers, store owners, and architects from Albuquerque and Santa Fe regularly travel to places like San Miguel de Allende on buying treks and design-appreciation pilgrimages. This book saves you the trip. Flipping through, you can borrow a hundred design ideas for your portal, patio, fountain, water feature, pool, deck, or zaguán. The Mexicans use stone, wood, adobe, brick, tile, iron, and colored stucco in unique and exciting ways, many of which look just as good here. And what could be finer on a cold January night than an armchair design tour of Mexico?

Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud, by Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, foreword by Marlene Sekaquaptewa, Rio Nuevo Publishers, paperback, $15.95.

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The Land of the Pueblos: Facsimile of the Original 1888 Edition, by Susan E. Wallace, with a new foreword, Sunstone Press, paperback, $26.95.

I chanced to read The Land of the Pueblos and Hopi Summer side by side. That coincidence let each book shed light on the other, illuminating how much perspective colors perception. Both preserve women’s voices from the past as they recall their experiences in a Native American Southwest far more remote from mainstream America, more exotic and unintelligible to the outsider than it is today. And both books personalize these now-distant times, letting us peer beyond the formalized recounting of “history” into the lives of real people, folks like you and me in some ways, yet impenetrably different, who walked this sandy land before us.

Susan Wallace published The Land of the Pueblos in 1888 after her stint in Santa Fe with her husband, territorial governor (1878–1881) and Ben-Hur author Lew Wallace. This facsimile edition of the book is but one of the many fine, classic books brought back to life by Santa Fe’s Sunstone Press in its Southwest Heritage Series. Other titles include standouts like Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, the rip-roaring Riata and Spurs cowboy memoir by Charles Angelo Siringo, and Winter in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Wallace’s book, originally compiled from her magazine writings, combines a mid-19th-century travelogue with historical ruminations. Her prose moves briskly, remarkably free of the period mannerisms that can congeal writing from that era into a hard-to-swallow mush. She takes us through Santa Fe, onto the neighboring pueblos, out to the turquoise mines at Cerrillos, and deep into unhinged digressions on the Spanish colonial legacy in New Mexico. The Land of the Pueblos intrigues the reader today, ultimately, both for the shimmering firsthand impressions of this place from 130 years ago and for its unsettling, even distasteful glimpses into the prevailing American prejudices of the day. Wallace is scathing—and often ill-informed—on the Spanish in the New World. And she is patronizingly, dismissively condescending toward Native Americans. You’ll have to sort through plenty of chaff to find the wholesome grains here, but the authenticity of her experience shines through.

Hopi Summer takes us to Hopiland 50 years later, beginning in the 1930s, a fascinating transitional time in the Southwest. The Hopi were living much as they had always lived, yet the automobile was bringing tourists to their remote mesas. Carolyn O’Bagy Davis bases her book on a series of letters from Ethel Muchvo, a Hopi woman, to one such tourist from the East, Maud Melville, after Melville and family visited in 1927. Although all of Melville’s correspondence to Muchvo has vanished, the 10 years of letters from Muchvo to her sketch the hardships, the highlights, and the quotidian details of life in this Native American community.

O’Bagy Davis builds a coherent narrative from the letters, which she sparingly excerpts, and from her own research into the time, place, and people. Thus she considerably broadens the view, giving a rounded portrait of the Muchvo family (with period photos) and a strong sense of Hopi life at the time. Muchvo emerges as a gentle, tough, pragmatic, eternally optimistic woman who survived the loss of 11 children—only 1, Vivian, survived—nursed a continually sick husband, and lost her own eyesight in middle age. Yet the tone of her letters and Davis’ narrative never descends into maudlin sentiment or self-pity.

When read along with The Land of the Pueblos, Davis’ empathetic Hopi Summer plays in striking counterpoint to Wallace’s acerbic condescension toward the native cultures. The Muchvo-Melville friendship embraces a variety of complications and ambiguities—lacking Melville’s letters, we only see one side, but elements of business and charity partly shaped the relationship. Yet below that, these two women of such widely disparate backgrounds shared a common sense of their own humanity. While it is unfair to judge Wallace’s attitudes by today’s standards, the bond formed one summer between Muchvo and Melville, by contrast, reveals the beauty of greeting an alien culture with an open heart. Their relationship proves that compassion and human dignity transcend the boundaries of culture and social acceptability.