Life is a highway

Before I left Austin, I was sitting at the table in the dining room at my sister and brother-in-law’s house, poring over my atlas and pulling my hair out ever so slightly. I was not sure where to go from there. I knew that I had a whole route of people waiting to see me in California, starting with Irvine and working up. I also knew that I had a friend in Phoenix, Ariz., who wanted me to stop in, but she was going to be out of town for the next 10 days, which left a whole lot of empty space and about a week to fill.

My sister walked into the room and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder at what was happening. Forget Marfa, she said, because I was trying to make it work to stop in the little Texas artist community near the border with Mexico and it was clearly being forced. With a dog along for the ride, she said, it was going to be hard to see what needed to be seen there. Besides, once I cleared the state line at Arizona, there was a barrage of wild fires nearly blocking my path. Save Marfa for another day and go north, she said; go see my people in Colorado instead. It would be cooler up there and on the way, I could stop and see all sorts of amazing, dog-friendly national and state parks.

“And,” she added, “you get to see the transition from Texas into New Mexico.”

See it I did.

From the wide streets of Lubbock out to the even broader, open ranch lands, nothing but fields and fields of golden yellow, dotted by scrubby little bushes, all along the railroad tracks and through the tiny towns, grain elevator after grain elevator in Sweetwater, Sudan, Muleshoe and Farwell.

And then, just like that, no warning at all, I was in New Mexico, where the land ever so slightly changed, undulating up and down, taking me down to low spots and then thrusting me up again, laying out before me a huge bowl of colors and textures, the distant mesas no longer so distant. Shooting through tiny, pointed hills that crowded right up to the highway— the empty highway that cut right through it all, a ribbon of gray in a sea of mustard and pink and mauve and green. And the great blue sky overhead, once barely blemished by a single cloud, now covered in them.

Then out onto the interstate I went, and oh, it was unpleasant. I held my breath and chewed, like I used to do with Brussels sprouts when I was six, and an hour later, I had flown past all the semi trucks that crowded the right lane, and I had cleared it, finally merging off the expressway again and out onto the sweeping landscape, back onto the deserted highway. By now, the land was rising right up, no longer a subtle change from flat fields. There were actual mountains on the horizon, purple and gray and blue, and the heavens were filled with great massive shapes of white, some of them smeared on like paint, others barely stuck there, like cotton balls on velcro, and from the flat-bottomed ones dripped rain, falling down to the earth like tinsel

But I was still under the sun, driving in and out of shadows, watching how their patterns lined the valley floor like paisley, and thunder rumbled somewhere overhead and a wind blew and not too far away, just over that peak and around that bend, I knew, lay Santa Fe.