adobe :: piñon :: cielo
Sunday 21 August 2005 | I like a cookie
As film critics love to say about location in a film, “The sense of place is so distinctive and important in this filmmaker’s work that It Practically Becomes a Character in Its Own Right.”
But actually in the case of this place it really is true. Really. For example, I just opened a yogurt container—one of those ones with the foil lid—and it exploded all over my face. I’m wiping Wallaby maple lowfat yogurt from my face and laughing tiredly to myself. How can I even take myself seriously when I’m Harpo Marx? And here’s a great example of why you can’t trust me: it’s actually strawberry yogurt, not maple. Why did I say maple? Because I want you to think I’m the kind of person who likes maple yogurt? Because I know that I prefer maple but have run out and so saying I’m having maple is truly more representative of who I am, the authentic me within? And I want you to know me? To know that I would buy only maple and vanilla yogurts if left to my own devices, but I feel guilty and think I should have more variety and maybe some vitamins and so force myself to buy ones with fruit in them? And are we not all left to our own devices anyway, all the time?
The point, if there is one, which I am beginning to feel a bit concerned about myself, is that I live at altitude. 7,200 feet to be precise, so when the trucks haul up the groceries and for that matter toiletries, everything puffs up—cereal in its waxed paper bag, bottles of distilled water, moisturizer in tubes, yogurts in their plastic and foil. And so when you first open things, you usually get a little more than you wanted. Kind of like this post.
Yes, I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The City of Blessed Faith, the City Different, the city currently overrun by wealthy Texans and Californians all jostling for kachina dolls and Navajo tacos on the Plaza (please don’t call it “the square”). (More about the despised obelisk, below, in a future post.)
Here in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the southernmost tributary of the Rockies, it’s rarely hot, never humid, usually cool, often cold. But no matter how much it snows, it’s very rarely overcast—which is why I moved here, because when I lived in places like Massachusetts and England I became seasonally affected, which was absolutely horrid, like PMSing for five months a year. I live here because it’s more like Tuscany than anywhere else in the States, because you can hear Spanish and Tewa or Tiwa spoken almost as often as you hear English, and because there are three colors that make a triangular perfect shape in my mind, one echoed by the mountain I can see from the window over my desk—
—a mountain which I for about five years thought was Atalaya, but my umpteenth-generation Hispanic landlady La Reina tells me it’s Picacho. Also called Tayala, in Tewa I suppose; Atalaya’s kind of behind it and to the south, toward Monte Sol and Monte Luna.
When I was nineteen I very briefly attended St. John’s College here—just one semester, before I ran away from the great men and their great books, but not their pernicious influenza, diseases falling from the stars, suede elbow patches, corduroy and briar pipes, a trick of settling one’s glasses on one’s nose; they were my O’Brien and I loved them, weakly, from afar.
When I recovered, which was some decades and grad school later, I came back, and now I live here, on Cerro Gordo Road, which means Fat Mountain, but less so—maybe more like, Chubby Hill. I moved here in February of this year, into my one-bedroom dream casita apartment, and never want to leave. But may have to go, eventually. More about that later, too, as we trot or maybe trollope along.
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