False River by Paula Morris

Author:Paula Morris [Morris, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143771647
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

It took a day to drive down through wintry Missouri, across grey, emptied-out Oklahoma and on to the parched, windy plains of the Texas panhandle. We passed through places that once only existed for me in pop songs (‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’; ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo?’), trying to reach Albuquerque, New Mexico, by the second night.

Although New Mexico is America’s fifth-largest state by area, it’s one of the most sparsely populated, home to only two million people. Twenty-two tribes of Native Americans are represented there. The state has the highest proportion of Hispanic residents in the United States: one out of three New Mexicans speaks Spanish at home. A third of its inhabitants live squeezed between the mountains encircling Albuquerque. Although that city is famous to foreign TV viewers now, because of Breaking Bad, it’s not all that big — about the same size as Düsseldorf, or Newcastle in New South Wales, or Honcho in Japan.

New Mexico was admitted to the union as a state only in 1912, and when we drove around it in 2003 it still felt to me like a frontier, all long lonely roads, scruffy desert and dark mountains. Its wide open spaces have lured scientists (the first atomic bomb was developed and detonated here in 1945) and aliens (who allegedly crash-landed a UFO near Roswell in 1947). Buddy Holly hopped across the border from Texas in 1957 to record ‘Peggy Sue’. Georgia O’Keeffe moved here to paint, and D. H. Lawrence arrived hoping to stave off TB and founded a utopian community. Ansel Adams found the material for his first book, Taos Pueblo, with the help of Lawrence’s rich patron, Mabel Luhan Dodge, who fostered a ‘Paris West’ for modernist artists. These days there are big summer art fairs in Santa Fe, home to hundreds of galleries, but it’s primarily an expensive art market rather than a cutting-edge artistic location in the way Dodge envisaged. George R. R. Martin has a house there. Julia Roberts owns a ranch outside Taos.

When we crossed from the Texas panhandle into New Mexico we changed time zones, gaining an hour by driving into Mountain Time. But it felt like a move back into the past, the world of the early Pueblo Indian inhabitants, who built walled cities and farmed along the Rio Grande, and the conquistadors of imperial Spain, who arrived looking for gold, as ever, and founded a capital here in 1598. The first church ever built in North America still stands in New Mexico, as does the union’s oldest public building, Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors, built in 1610.

On the drive through eastern New Mexico it’s still possible to get a sense of the ragged edges, the desolate, dusty vastness of the Old West. In the plains east of the Sandia mountains, where the landscape blurs into an undulating sea of scrub, and cattle outnumber people, the wilderness of the past appears least changed. This is where I persuaded Tom we should take a detour, turning south on to a country road at Tucumcari.

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