The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 7: Winfield Townley Scott

Spring, Cloudcroft, New Mexico

Winfield Townley Scott was a poet. In his essay for The Spell of New Mexico, he considered each month and season of this state, as I have been doing.

Autumn, Near Percha Dam State Park, New Mexico

He asks:

... what is there about this land which sets travelers to altering their schedules and overstaying? What is there, more forcefully still, that has seized upon astonishing numbers of people who came to look, and then put down their luggage and remained?

Summer, Ocotillo and hummingbird, Leasburg Dam State Park, New Mexico

... and notes:

The breadth and height of the land, its huge self and its huge sky, strike you like a blow. There are those who at once dislike it .... there are more who at first can do nothing but stand and stare.

 

Spring, Angel Peak, New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 5: D.H. Lawrence

White Sands, New Mexico

D.H. Lawrence spent a number of months in Taos, New Mexico, between 1923-1925.

State Road 325, near Capulin Volcano, New Mexico

His essay in The Spell of New Mexico is like a song. 

... The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. ...In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new. 

Dripping Springs, near Las Cruces, New Mexico

  

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 3: Oliver La Farge

White Sands, Alamogordo, New Mexico

An essay on New Mexico, written by Oliver La Farge, comprises Chapter 3 of the book, The Spell of New Mexico. Written before 1952, almost everything Mr. La Farge writes about New Mexico still holds true. Some excerpts from his detailed, loving description of New Mexico: 

A New Mexican native never ceases to be surprised to hear visitors .... ask the tariff on a purchase they are contemplating "when we take it back to the States." 

Indeed, a former colleague of mine on the east coast sent me a card, upon which she had affixed postage for international mailing. 

Sunset at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico

...You can be camping up in the northern mountains, and in the morning break up your camp under blue spruce and fir ... By noon you can take your break under cottonwoods in an irrigated section of orchards and corn and chili fields, and camp that night in desert where you are lucky, and distinctly relieved, when you find a water hole. 

Upper Karr Canyon Recreation Area, New Mexico

Being based in Alamogordo, I never get tired of living in the high desert but being able to reach 9000 feet of cool green forest in less than an hour, and to smell the pine. It is a wonder. 

An amiable sort of running feud goes on between the people of [Texas] and [New Mexico], keeping both on their toes. When a Texan told me one time that he was a real old timer, and that he personally had dug out the bed of the Pecos River, he Lord gave it to me to answer that, while he was doing that, I was up in the Sangre de Cristo [Mountains] melting snow to run in his ditch. 

Rio Grande, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

... on the Fourth of July, .... it is worth going to the [Mescalero Apache] celebration to see their renowned Crown Dance, a masked dance unlike any other, portraying the mountain spirits. 

Ga'an dancers. Credit: SFMOMA

Having gone to this very event, I can attest to its magic more than 50 years after Mr. La Farge wrote the above. 

... on a Sunday a Pueblo Indian, having spent the preceding week cultivating his red, blue, and yellow corn in his ancestral field, will put on his Indian clothes to sing in the chorus of a dance in which his daughter, who during the week works at Los Alamos, will take the part of the Buffalo Maiden, that during the performance Spanish-American neighbors will kneel in the bower at one side of the pueblo's plaza to sing alabados before the image of its patron saint, while artists, scientists (both anthropologists and nuclear physicists), tourists, and plain businessmen, watch the performance with appreciation and respect. 

Our Lady of Guadelupe Fiesta, Tortugas, New Mexico

[New Mexico] is ..... a land that draws and holds men and women with ties that cannot be explained or submitted to reason. 

Dilia, New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter I: Tony Hillerman

Tularosa Basin and Valley of Fires view from Highway 380, New Mexico

Awhile back, Josh, a thoughtful reader, recommended The Spell of New Mexico to me. Edited by Tony Hillerman, and published in 1976, it is a collection of essays by famous creatives who lived in or visited New Mexico.

My local library had the book, but it was missing until now. 

From Mr. Hillerman's introduction in Chapter 1: 

[Oliver] La Farge treasured New Mexico because it offered - probably more than any place in America - a rich variety of human cultures, religions, and value systems, and because it attracted and held an interesting variety of immigrants. ...

'The breadth and height of the land, its huge self and its huge sky, strike you like a blow,' [poet Winfield Townley] Scott wrote ...

To the above, I say check and check.

Angel Peak, New Mexico

Mr Hillerman described one of his special places in New Mexico:

...Those places that stir me have features in common. All are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.

One such place is east of U.S. 54 near the old Three Rivers service station north of Tularosa. The road jolts across the Southern Pacific tracks toward the foothills of the Sierra Blanca and passes a high, grassy ridge. On a July afternoon, the view from there suggests a hostile planet. The ragged stone ridgeline of the Sierra Oscura rises fifty miles to the west, and the Tularaso Basin below is lost in a haze of heat. If you climb high enough and the light is right, you can see to the southwest the glittering line formed by the gypsum dunes of White Sands and below the Oscuras the Black smudge of the lava-bed badlands. 

For me, this is one of many of New Mexico's magic places. 

This place Mr. Hillerman describes is within a Bureau of Land Management site, the Three Rivers Petroglyphs. The old service station is an art gallery, gift and coffee shop.

I have stood exactly where Mr. Hillerman describes, and looked out toward that "glittering line" that is White Sands. This place that Mr. Hillerman found magical is less than an hour from where I live in Alamogordo.


Every time I see that line of White Sands - or the distinctive Organ Mountains between Alamogordo and Las Cruces - I imagine people of centuries ago returning from a long trip, and when they see that glittering line, think, "we're almost home."

Bisti Wilderness, New Mexico