White Sand

There are things you always say you’re going to do, and something always intervenes.

Every time I drive north towards Taos from Velarde I tell myself I really must pull over on the way back and look. Fallen lava boulders litter the right shoulder as you rise. By necessity, the turn offs are all on the other side. The road has too many blind spots to simply cross over.

But then, when you’re coming home, you’re, well, coming home. It’s a different mental state. There’s never time to pull over.

Well, I finally did it. When I was coming back from the Dixon area a few weeks ago, I pulled over in some of the places between Embudo and Velarde where the rift is narrow, the Rio Grande close to the road.

The look up towards Taos isn’t quite as dramatic as it was when I was driving north - but then it’s like the drive down La Bajada Hill - there are no turn offs when the rocks are the most menacing. The turn offs are only where there’s room, which, by definition, is not where it’s most exciting. Perspective is different from fifty feet across the road.

The river turns out to look like a river there, like any river anywhere in the country where water actually flows and doesn’t simply ripple around sand islands as it does in Española. Nice, unusual actually for New Mexico, but conventional still the same.

Then there’s the unexpected, the thing you didn’t know was there because you never stopped.

In this case, there was a patch of white sand near the river with Russian thistles and purple asters. You think, wait a minute, white sand? New Mexico?

The White Sands in the Tularosa Valley are gypsum dunes. This glittered in the sun. It had to be ground quartz, which of course is as much silica as sand. In fact ground pure quartz provided the material for Venetian glass makers.

Quartz has the greatest weather resistence of any of the rocks in the area. It’s often the last remaining eroded rock from the Sangre de Cristo. This “dune” looks suspiciously like how that sedimentary grey rock I saw earlier in the day beyond Dixon would look if everything soft disappeared and left only the quartz and shining mica. And it photographs the same way, too brown and out of focus, or all glare.

The Journey Begins

I finally talked back to my boss one too many times.

Or, he finally made me mad one too many times.

Take your choice.

Two weeks ago he came in angry about something, maybe the extra zero on an invoice. When he paused, I reminded him it really was time for him to find my replacement.

Besides, I added, now that I get social security, I didn’t want to pay taxes on it.

There’s nothing like a tax scam to motivate the man.

Within days the ad was in the paper, he was looking for the best qualified person he thought he could bully, and I was counting the days to freedom.

Of course, retirement is the great bluff caller.

All those things you’ve been saying you’d do, if only you had time.

Well, now you have time and no excuses.

My boss’s mother came in to see what I was going to do.

I told her that since I'd had to buy a new car in March, I wanted to drive around the state and look at places I hadn’t truly seen.

I reminded her that the Las Conchas fire this summer had gotten me started, those days when the smoke was so bad I climbed into the car and drove towards Taos just to get my lungs into air conditioning.

The first time I headed out I had no map, no plan. I only knew I couldn’t go south or west because of the smoke. I didn’t want to go east because the road to Chimayó is too treacherous. That left Taos.

I can’t say I had no map. When I pulled it out I discovered it was issued when Garrey Carruthers was governor. That was between 1987 and 1991. I moved to New Mexico in the fall of 1991. While I’ve seen little evidence of road construction in the past 20 years, I thought I really could do with something better.

A friend whom I’ll simply call the Rock Queen and I went scavenging in Borders, but it was early days and there were no bargains. However, they did have DeLorme’s atlas for the state, and it’s been worth every penny I overpaid.

The next time the smoke got bad, I took the Dixon cut off. Just as I passed the crest of the Sangre de Cristo and headed towards the Carson National Forest, the car’s warning system came up to tell me I had a tire going soft. Route 75 may be a state road, but it’s about as isolated as you want to get in this state.

The next day one of the tires was flat. The tow truck operator, the car dealer, the tire dealer - none could see any reason why. The only possible explanation is that the manufacturer used soft tires to get better car mileage, and such tires aren’t really good enough for driving on two lane roads in New Mexico where shoulders are rarer than the need to get out of the way of some hell hound riding your bumper.

So the next purchase was a new set of tires.

My next expeditions were still day trips into parts of Rio Arriba county. It soon became apparent that gas stations don’t exist once you leave Española. All many towns have left are convenience stores with slow turn over.

I was grateful that car does get good mileage.

I also learned to always throw ice and bottled water in the cooler and a bag of potato chips, just in case. I wasn’t going to do any better in those out of the way convenience stores, and the local ones were probably cheaper.

Last week, after my boss had narrowed his choice, I ordered a new camera, one so cheap I could replace it if it bounced off the car seat. I picked the Sony that advertised wide-angled landscape capabilities. That was the one thing my current camera didn’t do well, though I will admit expecting it to do close ups of a fire some 20 miles away is a bit much.

Again, I learned inexpensive is another way to provide quality by eliminating necessities. In this case, you have to remove the battery to recharge it. It’s possible to buy some kind of device to connect the charger to the car’s electric system, but it’s really cheaper just to buy more batteries and a surge suppressor for those times I expect to spend in some motel in some remote part of this state.

Photograph: The Las Conchas fire taken from my back porch on the first day just before 8pm when the flames were becoming visible in the smoke. I pushed the close-up focus beyond the capacity of the camera to handle both the foreground and the Los Alamos area some 20 miles away