It's Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day and our Dartmouth 65th birthday party is over. Santa Fe was an interesting place. It has four colleges, the state capital, and tourists.. This means that there is a lot of discretionary money around......and the local merchants know it. Santa Fe is not cheap. I was also told that the street layout of downtown Santa Fe was not modeled after Boston as previously reported. Santa Fe is older than Boston. Santa Fe used sheep and goat paths for their planning, whereas Boston used the more modern cattle paths .. We stayed just a few blocks from the center of town and the end of both the Santa Fe trail from Independence, Mo and the El Camino Real trail from Mexico City.. At the end of these trails is a monument dedicated to fallen Civil War soldiers.. For lawyer types, all surveys and real estate locations in New Mexico are referenced to this monument.. Around Santa Fe are lots of Pueblo Indian Casinos...
The color of the landscape is khaki. I think this is why Indian costumes, clothes, and jewelry is so colorful...
Sunday of Memorial Day weekend we had the first trip of our vacation in a non-motorcycle vehicle.. It was a tour bus to Bandelier National Monumment and Los Alamos National Laboratories... Bandelier is a pre-historic pueblo, not named after the Indians but named after a Swiss archeologist who discovered and excavated the Pueblo cliff dwellings there. For geology buffs, this cliff was part of a huge volcaninc eruption about a million years ago that left thousands of feet of volcanic dust even finer than pumice. This dust compacted into hundreds of feet of a sediment called "Tuff" which is like a very fine and frittable sandstone. Erosion from a stream exposed this layer on the sides of canyons and the Anasazi and later the Pueblo literally carved homes into the tuff in the sides of these cliffs. To give you an examble of how soft this stone is, in the 1930's the CCC workers cut up blocks of tuff using carpenter's saws to make bricks for their pueblo style buildings. While we were there we met two Pueblo Indians, a father and son, who were making Indian drums as a demo. The son was going to UNM studying environmental science. The "old man" was a really interesting character. He also graduated from UNM "years and years and years ago" majoring in psychology.He "lucked out" in the '60's and got a job at the New York world fair. !! He was telling me all this while he was carving out the inside of a log with a chisel and wooden mallet to make a drum. He got employed by the park service because he went to a meeting years ago between the park service and the Pueblo Indians who wanted some say in how Bandelier would be run and and not have their sacred places desecrated. He said they have a very excellent relationship. Anyway, the park service "expert" was showing a lot of Pueblo relic tools and asking how they worked etc. The other Indians were like bumps on a log, but he chirped up on what they were for... The guy asked how did he know all this and he said" Well, I grew up in that house over there and my mother and dad used a lot of these tools.. The park supervisor hired him... I think that crafty Indian learned something from his psychology classes.......
Los Alamos Museum and how the city of Los Alamos started was also very interesting.. During WWII the city of Los Alamos officially did not exist!! It was more secret than area 54 of 1960's fame.. It was identified only as P.O. box 1580, Sante Fe, NM. Even birth certificates of babies born in Los Alamos said "Born in: Box 1580, Sante Fe, New Mexico." There are also replicas of the two WWII bombs in the museum and also of some modern atomic bombs.. It is surprising how small these bombs are, especially considering the explosive power they have.
Yesterday afternoon (Memorial Day) we met with some friends and took a ride in their rental car to the north of Sante Fe to explore some Pueblos. We saw a sign for a pueblo and turned down the dirt road. We arrived at a real live pueblo, complete with the dirt streets, sagebrush "lawns", real Indian people, derelict cars, a lonely school bus, a "tobacco free" school and a very simple but very beautiful Roman Catholic Chapel. Now we know: Pueblo means "town", not "ancient Indian ruins".
In the spirit of things we decided to explore a little further down one of these dirt roads in the rental car.. The road followed a small river with beautiful vistas and scenery... But, the road got smaller, and bumpier, then so bumpy we had to get out of the car so it would clear the rocks... Well, our Garmin did say the road should come out at a small town just around the corner (it turns out correct, except for the lack of a bridge across the river)... We drove about four more miles with the road getting smaller and bumpier., Jeannine thought this was quite the adventure, but Cindy was of quite the opposite opinion. The driver Wally, who is a lawyer and also Cindy's husband, was having a grand time, and riding shotgun so was I, until we hit bottom pretty darned hard and there was this new and strange noise,.. So, Cindy pulled her trump card and it was decided to turn the car around. But how do you turn a Chrysler 300M around on a narrow dirt road with huge boulders all around ?? Well, finally we did it, and made it back out. When we got back to civilization we ran the car through a car wash because it was really, really covered in dust and dirt and mud. It was a little incriminating that we didn't stay on paved roads as the rental agreement required.. The evidence was erased... After dinner we decided this was truly a fun day to remember.
Harris and Jeannine.
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