Santa Fe after 20 years: In Search of Sense Memory
The afterglow from St. John’s Fine Arts Building
ERAT HORA
Thank you, whatever comes.' And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
—Ezra Pound
What happens when you go somewhere you haven’t been in 20 years and need to “hide” from anyone you still know there—including an old very beloved best friend and a beloved brother within driving distance?
Your goal is a solo writing trip, so desperately needed that you’ve taken to joking you want “A Room of One’s Own” engraved on your tombstone.
The avowed “hiding” is also a prerequisite for justifying the stolen time away from children and responsibilities at the never-a-good-time that was October 2024, what I suppose, if my genetics align with my choices and luck, could turn out to have been the approximate half-life of my body and/or mind. I hope I die on my 90th birthday and prove that my younger self was right to take this trip.
With my best friend visiting me in grad school, 2003, in front of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. (Shot on a disposable Kodak)
The place had to be Santa Fe, where I attended graduate school 2002-2004 and had only briefly visited once since, 15 years ago when newly pregnant with my first child. “The City Different” had begun to loom as large in my memory as did Greece and Provence when I hadn’t revisited those formative spots in as many years. It became an obsession, a distraction, an injustice, a tragedy that I hadn’t been back.
When I first laid eyes on Santa Fe in 2002, it was love at first sight. I remember having a funny feeling, pulling into my new adobe home at 420 Sunset Street, that I might never leave. The Midwesterner in me was thrilling to difference on every possible level. Two years later, when I left Santa Fe for New York 20 falls ago, I couldn’t believe I was pulling away. But I had finished graduate school, and there wasn’t a clear path for me there without St. John’s. I didn’t really consider trying to get a job in admin or stick around. Bret had invited me to New York, and after being in love with him for six years already, my compass was clear.
The primary goal of this trip was making headway on two writing projects, one for page and screen that has been preoccupying me for over a decade, and a newly conceived work for stage. I had to break ground or lose my mind.
The secondary goal was a little literary tourism at the intersection of Willa Cather and Rachel Cusk. Cather was famously inspired by the Southwest to write a number of her greatest works, most notably Death Comes to the Archbishop. And having just discovered Rachel Cusk via Daniel Mendelsohn last year and very much enjoyed her Second Place, inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos about D. H. Lawrence, I was determined to visit Dodge’s place in Taos. I had also booked a Willa Cather Walking Tour with historian Garrett Peck that I was about as excited for as my daughter was for The Eras Tour film.
The tertiary goal was to revisit St. John’s, first anonymously and then for a meeting with a professor I had studied with in 2002 and re-met when he, now retired, and his wife attended a Cather alumni seminar I led in New York this fall.
The final goal was sense memory. Mainly enchiladas. Covered Christmas-style in red and green chilis. And mole, which I have been reminded is Mexican NOT New Mexican but is still an abundant, varied, and marvelous part of my experience of Southwestern cuisine.
I also wanted to recover the smells in the air of juniper, piñons, and burning cedar, sharpened by the fall air and fires.
I needed to see the blue sky behind low peach buildings, a colorway I’ve sought to echo in our New York apartments, for the comforting contrast to steel and green.
And I needed to remember, to animate any sensations still simmering in nostalgia’s time capsule and thereby feel who I’d been, what it was like to be half the age I am now. Before I was married or a mother, before I learned to run or sing, before I had worked in publishing or beauty. Before I accidentally co-owned an historic restaurant with my husband that the post-pandemic saving of which almost broke us before it closed finally, recently, and set us, albeit heavy-hearted, free.
I lived in Santa Fe before smart phones, most notably before GPS, digital photos, and FaceTime. Vehicularly, I had a 1994 Ford Escort with roll-down windows. This time I had a Mazda with Texas plates. It was a good little car, but I had to force myself to not use GPS as an exercise in both remembering and being present, and it had too many bells and whistles. I never did figure out how to juggle the map, music, and call dials next to the shift without fearing for my life, so instead of good old radio, I was confined to silence or a cappella, its own change of pace.
For lodging I traded Sunset Street for storied Canyon Road, the heart of Santa Fe’s status as the country’s most densely populated gallery town, where a dizzying way of fine art leads you into town, in the studio of painter Jane Chermayeff. Relative to the four people in my New York apartment, I figure it was about eight times the space I am normally working with. I cooked and sang and started talking to myself. The nights were a black hole, causing city-slicker heebie-jeebies (or maybe altitude insomnia) the first half of the week, until I either got used to it or was so overtired I began sleeping through the night.
This was just downstairs!
My routine was to furiously wake and write before the East Coast rose or my brain alerted me to some high-stakes loose ends I was trying to put aside for the week, inclusive no less of moving in New York to our first three-bedroom apartment after five years at the small gem we found just before the pandemic. To get going I relied on my go-to instant coffee, which tastes like travel and independence to me now, and is an acceptable substitute in the interest of time.
I would then permit myself one nostalgic drive around town and errand combo (groceries, etc.) each day before an afternoon writing session then walk into town for dinner, notetaking, and an early bedtime given the two-hour time difference I never really got over.
It was a glorious routine during which I scratched the itch of driving past my old apartment, up to campus, and out to Santa Fe Opera, where I had worked summers in the gift shop. I could still hear Susan Graham singing Helen the summer of 2003 and see myself sitting on the steps during most of the show, when I was allowed to watch while potential shoppers were seated. Night after night I never tired of my chance to watch this opéra bouffe’s famous antics, beyond bemused by Offenbach’s hilarity in this spoof on Hellenism, La Belle Helene.
Sometimes I would make the correct turn intuitively, which made me feel younger and that life is longer than it can sometimes seem.
Just when the traveler in me might have gotten the better of the writer, the most inclement October weekend in Santa Fe history trapped me inside. Hail two days in a row, torrents of rain broken up by on-and-off showers. It was nutty. My middle day, 4 of 7, was the pressure cooker. The newer project was flowing seamlessly, the epic one something of a monster. Another act of remembering and a none-too-pleasant one (I shan’t divulge more now, but let’s just say it wasn’t pretty), it called for some unfortunate digging. The sun came out before my reminiscences turned too dark, and I bolted to town along with everyone else. Enchantment seekers, aghast by the unseasonable weather, poured out of every artery onto Canyon Road; it looked like a march on Santa Fe. We were well-rewarded in town.
The contrast made the spell of sun even sweeter, with the next round of rain en route. I did a little sniffing around before checking Gruet Winery off my list, New Mexico’s unlikely fine winery with its lovely tagline, “French Roots, American Dreams.” I couldn’t believe how elegant it was—most certainly not there in my day—and I picked up one of Bret’s souvenirs. On the nice uphill walk home, I stopped by Kakawa Chocolate House, mole-esque in the blending of cacao and chilis for its menu of spicy drinking chocolates, and got the children’ some sweets with a kick.
In the end, much as I wanted to visit Ojo Caliente and Ghost Ranch, and revisit Bandelier, I kept my tourism to town, which was correct for the goals of the trip. As it was I couldn’t spare more time—or time travel. It was enough emotionally to stumble on places I couldn’t have found on purpose, causing me to reel with sudden recognition. It was enough to seek out specific places where I had worked or played and to find them untouched or unrecognizable, but to be uncertain if the changes were to the places or to me.
A potentially positive change was cited by my Willa Cather tour guide Mr. Peck, who said the Native American middle-class was growing. I had taught at the Santa Fe Indian High School and was all too familiar with the separate and unequal lives being led there 20 years ago. This was wonderful to hear, and the culture overall did feel more integrated and balanced somehow, perhaps unified in its shared Santa Fe-ness and pride more than divided by an extreme privilege gap.
My Cather tour proved Eras-worthy, filling in many gaps in my knowledge of Santa Fe and New Mexican history while enlightening much about my dearest writer. 2025 will see the release of a new book by Mr. Peck, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, about Cather's travels to the Southwest between 1912 and 1926 and how they led to her self-described "best book," Death Comes for the Archbishop. I learned from him that Cather had spent time at Dodge’s, too, which cemented my commitment to driving the 90 minutes to and from Taos to Dodge’s in the ongoing questionable weather of the week.
A handful of blinding downpours were nail-biters, but it was worth the firsthand peek at the storied haven and scenery en route. I did inquire spontaneously if they had a room (mainly to avoid the drive back but also the hope of writerly osmosis). Alas, they were full with a retreat but generously let me look around and encouraged me to consider a future one. We’ll see. I do pretty well with an adobe of my own.
In defense of travels I can’t afford I have been known to say, “I go on missions, not vacations.” Usually the mission is to do with foreign language, a theatre pilgrimage, or people I need to see. This too was not a vacation, but I can’t say it falls into the category of a “reverse study abroad,” which is how I have written about going home, because I don’t come from Santa Fe. But I am proud to believe I can confidently speak for myself—and Willa Cather in more sentimental terms than she would have ever permitted herself—that part of my heart is buried there and only accessible on my return. With that I can pray it won’t be as long or, god forbid, the last time I lay eyes on the sunset from St. John’s campus over the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico.
The Well Dressed Man With a Beard
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
—Wallace Stevens