Ghosts of the Highway

LAS CRUCES, N.M., Sept. 1, 2014—Few things are harder to accept than the death of a child.

We found ourselves in the City of the Crosses as the result of a hasty, tear-stained journey. Our dear friend had lost his only son.

Never again will I think of a soft drink
in the same way

Jackson Carl Whelpley died at the tender age of 18—the result of a lightning bolt that flashed out of a mostly clear sky somewhere in Missouri, just as the boy was embarking on a new phase of life as a college student. We made the trip to attend a celebration of Jackson's life, though there really is no such thing as a "celebration" for something so terrible.

A small crowd of people gathered at a park, passed around Kleenex and shared stories of Jackson's life. We drank Dr. Pepper, the boy's favorite drink. In my mind, a fuzzy picture of the deceased began to emerge from the miasma of grief and confusion that had enveloped so many people in the days following his death. A razor-sharp image began to crystallize as I listened to the stories: Jackson was a kind, funny, conscientious boy with a lust for books and an unquenchable curiosity.

I had told his father that the thing about Jackson that always struck me was his "serenity." It's hard to explain, but other kids his age have a noisiness and a discord that seems to put them a little out of phase with the rest of the world. Not Jackson. Whenever I saw him, he seemed to glide around almost subliminally, as if his flow matched the flow of the rest of the world. He had a harmony about him, I guess. It was a rare thing to see in someone his age.

And perhaps it was just as rare as seeing a kid hanging around libraries and used book stores—haunting them like a wraith bent on conjuring up all the wisdom stored inside. I had always wondered why this kid that I barely knew felt like a kindred spirit or even like kin. I chocked it up to my very long friendship with his father. But after hearing people recount their memories of him, I realize now that Jackson, like me I suppose, was a philosopher in the true sense of the word—a lover of wisdom and a seeker of knowledge. We shared common ground without even knowing it, which in many ways makes his untimely passage even sadder to me. I never had the chance to really know him.

A few drops of rain can do marvelous things
to the desert

Without dwelling on the melancholy, it struck me that the road of life has so many sights to stop and see along the way. We often cavalierly pass by things that strike our fancy without pausing to take a gander, promising ourselves that we will stop and visit another time, "when we have the time." How often have we used that bogus little phrase to rationalize our unadventurous behavior?


We feign busyness to feign importance, and unfortunately, as life shows us time and time again, while we are off doing other "important" things, the landscape changes, the wrecking ball finds its mark, highways are rerouted, or things just inexplicably disappear from the face of the Earth. In the blink of an eye, we lose the opportunity to indulge ourselves with a fascinating side trip to a little-known roadside attraction.

Sadly, it is often those unexpected side trips that make life so rich and rewarding. 

 Desert communion

The desert in Las Cruces was green from a summer of rains. Temperatures hovered just below 100 degrees—wildly hot for mountain people such as ourselves. We rose at dawn the day after the memorial to try out our bikes on the fine desert trails north of town. A mottling of clouds obscured the rising sun as we readied our gear at the trailhead. As we made our way toward the foothills ahead, the merciless sun burned away our cloud cover. At a cairn we noticed a plastic figure from a kid's Cowboys and Indians play set peering out of a rock crevasse, his bow drawn and ready to unleash an assault upon us. Maybe he already had—our skin was turning red with sun bite and it felt as if we had suffered a thousand tiny stings. We hurried on our way before another arrow found its mark.

A trip wouldn't be a trip without a bicycle

In the old days in this area, people used to take a break during the hottest part of the day. Siesta was an accepted ritual that ground commerce to a halt and cleared the streets as people withdrew indoors or sought shade anyplace they could to curl up for a nap and wait out the unrelenting heat. Once the shadows began to grow long and the blast-furnace of the day no longer roared with such intensity, the world returned to normal. People awoke refreshed and ready to finish their daily routines. Supper came well after sunset, hours after afternoon tapas and bebidas had sated unsatisfied cravings nurtured during dreamtime.

Such a thing makes good sense, unless you happen to be a bean counter someplace who never has to deal with the heat and only obsesses over productivity and the abstract potential of the Bottom Line. Numbers Men with soft hands and white skin whispered greedy promises into the ears of Captains of Industry, once and for all sealing the fate of the siesta. Air conditioning became less expensive than the opportunity costs that were wracked up while people snoozed happily in the middle of the day. Soon, siesta became a memory, a luxury to be enjoyed only by those with great wealth or power—or by vacationers with time on their hands.

A little man shoots arrows from the rock

We greeted the late afternoon following our siesta with a cool dip in the swimming pool. We watched the sun sink into the desert sands at the edge of town, igniting the horizon with a blaze of orange. Later we had dinner with our grieving friends, intending to talk about anything other than the recent sad events. But there's really no escaping the heat, even after sunset.

As we drove away from the restaurant, I wondered how my friends could even ponder waking up each day from now on when such a ragged hole had been torn into the fabric of their lives? But they have faced each day since with warm smiles and generous spirits. They are stronger people than we are, which is probably why we love and admire them so.

I know there are some people out there who say time allows people to forget. But such a thing seems so heartless. Why would anyone want to forget? We hoard and cherish our memories. Even the bad ones. Our experiences are the only things we truly own. God forbid anyone or anything should steal them from us.

 Artwork of the ancients

Some things get lost in translation

An hour before dawn the next day we pointed our car north. Almost three decades earlier, a wise old man had shown me a set of marvelous petroglyphs out in the desert. The rock drawings depict strange faces, mysterious markings ostensibly used for counting time and a host of marvelous creatures. One panel shows a fish with legs; a huge dragon with scales on its back and a human face adorns another. Not far away, the soft profile of a fawn stares out over the landscape.

For years I had promised my companion that I would show her these drawings under the condition that she would show no one else. A terrible thing about humans is their seemingly unending need to destroy or steal the works of those who came before them. Fortunately, this area remains unmolested. No modern men have crudely carved their names or obscenities into these rocks with the wanton strokes of pocketknife blades. There is no vandalism here of any kind, and if I could have one simple wish, it would be that this place remain unadulterated for at least another half millenium.

While harsh, the desert can be beautiful, too

I had always told my companion that we could see the site if we ever managed to get the time to do so. Of course, we had always been too busy. That is until we realized that there is no better time than today to do what needs to be done. Such wisdom comes courtesy of our departed friend, and others like him whose passings remind us that life is fragile and fleeting. Procrastination was no longer an option, despite the cruelness of the hour or the seeming inconvenience of the journey.

We respectfully enjoyed the area and exited the wash below just as the rattlesnakes were waking up and making their move toward wherever it is that snakes go during the heat of the day. Sweat glistened on our flesh as we trudged out of the desert under the unrelenting gaze of the rising sun.

Dumb as a box of rocks

A few hours later, midway between Truth or Consequences and Socorro, we detoured onto New Mexico Highway 1, an anachronism from those halcyon days of "Happy Motoring" that parallels Interstate 25. For decades driving on the interstate, a small brown sign with the words "Rock House" had always captured my attention after climbing out of La Cañada Alamosa. The words conjured an image in my head and my brain would play a jukebox selection of the Ernie Freeman Trio's song of the same name in my head.

Rock House and the Fray Cristóbal Mountains

On a whim, we followed the sign and found ourselves ducking under the interstate and then rumbling east on a crude dirt road. The sun was high and the air was hot despite the car's air conditioner. In the absolute middle of nowhere, some 10 miles away from the Highway, a small stone structure rose out of the desert landscape before us.

While we could find no history or information about the Rock House, it appeared to be a relatively modern structure built by the Army Corps of Engineers or some similar authority shortly after completion of the dam at Elephant Butte. In the small canyons and arroyos nearby, the arid landscape was bleached by a high-water mark that ended just below the small bluff where the Rock House had been erected. Ostensibly, this was the northernmost stretch of the new lake that existed during a now-forgotten period when water was plentiful and the Rio Grande was a river, not a trickle that bares ironic contradiction to its name.

Personally, I think if someone took the
time to dream it, then you should take
the time to look at it

A faded sign pockmarked with bullet holes recalled a time when the wet area was habitat to eagles. Nowadays, it seemed the parched landscape only supports snakes, spiders, assorted rodents and a handful of birds, including some species of a bright-yellow finch-like creature that flitted nearby. The structure was so lonesome and remote that only a single abandoned liquor bottle, a few halfhearted scratches of graffiti and a long-abandoned fire ring betrayed any recent human contact. Ours were the only visible tire tracks on the hot hardscrabble road. The landscape was as dry and barren as the route of the nearby Jornada del Muerto, the vestiges of which still remain on the other side  of the Fray Cristóbal Mountains that rose from the landscape east of the small structure.

A little farther north, near the village of San Antonio, we passed an imposing hunk of rusted metal rising out of the desert. I had seen the familiar arrowhead design many times previously on my trips to Las Cruces, but I could never seem to find the access road to reach it. This time, our route on NM Highway 1 passed right near the structure, so we took the opportunity to investigate.

Sculptor Greg E. Reiche created the monumental artwork, called Camino de Sueños (Road of Dreams), in 2005 to commemorate the El Camino Reál National Scenic Byway under the auspices of the Cultural Corridors Art Program.

Seeing the sculpture rising from the desert floor while whizzing by at 75 miles per hour on Interstate 25 hardly does it justice. Up close, the piece is a remarkable installation of steel and glass. A notch below the sculpture hides a strip of aluminum etched with the following:

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Immediately after discovering and reading that, I found the following carved into the rust on the backside of the strange desert colossus:

Sergio S is gay
11/05/13

The bird poop that had streaked parts of the sculpture like some kind of crazy gesso did not obscure the truths that had been so carefully recorded on this lonely hunk of steel. If this titan could be named, it might have been called Coeus. We smiled and got back on the road.

Route of the dead man

Desert Spider Beetle, a variety of blister beetle
(and a type of natural Viagra if you know what you’re
doing), in Doña Ana County, New Mexico

There is subtle irony in the fact that the Spaniards who looted New Mexico renamed the Jornada del Muerto to The Royal Road to the Interior Land, or El Camino Reál de Tierra Adentro, which sounds much less pompous when read in Spanish. The forbidding waterless route responsible for the parched and lonely death of a German "outlaw" fleeing the notorious Inquisition holds a legacy of death. A short distance beyond where the religious fugitive El Aleman succumbed to thirst, scientists from Los Alamos ushered in the Atomic Age with detonation of The Gadget in the shadows of the Oscuro Mountains. In between the brutal Spanish conquest and the nuclear era, the largest Civil War battle in New Mexico was waged along the Route of the Dead Man at Fort Craig.

While the fort was instrumental in beating the Confederacy back into Texas—where some say it remains in spirit to this day—like any military installation, it was not without its own horrors. The remaining historic site located a short distance away from San Antonio, home of the Owl Café and its legendary green chile cheeseburgers, tells hard-edged stories of negro prisoners being locked into confined spaces scarcely larger than coffins, where they were left to die of "colds or rheumatism." 

Fort Craig National Historic Site

But of course, there was one people who were treated even worse: The Indians. Raiding parties of, ironically, Buffalo Soldiers and other militiamen led by Kit Carson, Capt. Jack Crawford, Rafael Chacón and other notables hunted down and slaughtered countless Apache and Navajo people.

The remains of nearly 100 souls were excavated from Fort Craig, but not before looters and opportunists had defiled the graves of countless others who had been buried there. To say that such an epicenter of inhumanity might be haunted is an understatement, but on the day we visited, the temperature was way too hot and the sun way too high for even ghosts to overshadow. Whatever spirits happen to be lingering on the property had gone in search of shade for the afternoon. Fort Craig Historic Site prohibits visitations after dark or overnight camping. After visiting, it seems like sound policy.

We continued north toward home. Outside of Socorro, traffic was tied in a brief knot while emergency crews cleared the road of a motor home that had apparently burst into flames. As we drove by in a slow-moving line of rubberneckers, we saw the owners of the charred wreckage milling about the shoulder of the road, apparently trying to grasp what had just happened to them.

All hype aside, you really can get a fantastic
green-chile cheeseburger here

To say that life is full of mysteries is understatement of epic proportion. While nothing seems harder to accept than the death of a child, perhaps equally tragic is a long life spent sticking to the main road in a state of rote disinterest. Curiosity killed the cat, but maybe that isn't so bad.

We lock ourselves behind the screens of our smart phones, where we withdraw from the world through a constant barrage of social media posts. We stick to familiar routes to and from our customary daily destinations. We favor the Starbucks where we know the barista by name, but we eschew the corner coffee shop where everyone inside might be a stranger.

Perhaps Emerson is no longer relevant to modern society.

We carry what we believe we are around in our palms or in our pockets at all times, lest we lose ourselves to the realities that exist just beyond our front doors.

See you on down the road.

The Chemo Chronicles, Part IV: Uncharted Territory

Albuquerque, N.M., Aug. 7, 2014—Weighed down by an odd sense of trepidation and a congratulatory cake stashed in the cooler behind the seat, we drove out of Albuquerque with a weak, yet excited Henry dog, his faithful wiggly companion, Doodles, and the foreboding realization that we are now headed into unknown territory.

Like all good dogs, Henry waits patiently for permission before
attacking a cake, even if it is made especially for dogs.

After 20 weeks, Henry finally finished his last round of chemotherapy. It is a bittersweet relief. There is no doubt that the weekly treatments had been hard on him. At one point early on in his regimen, he had lost nearly 20 pounds—a quarter of his body weight—and we couldn't help but notice how, at the conclusion of each treatment, a marked lethargy and almost subliminal sadness would creep over our otherwise Gung-ho companion, leading us to question whether the monumental decision to put our six-year-old dog through an uncomfortable gauntlet of extremely costly biochemistry experiments was for his benefit or for ours?

When you can't see the forest for the trees, it's
always good to elevate your perspective to get a clear
view.

While chemotherapy has been shown to reliably poison the cancer cells within a host's body into submission—remission being the proper medical term for it—the collateral damage to the host can be monumental. The vet had told us that chemo for a dog is not nearly as horrible as chemo is for a human, but we're still not convinced. For days after each treatment, we could see real physical and emotional changes in our friend. His eyes would lose their shine, his shoulders would slump, and we could tell he had bad nausea and diarrhea. Thankfully, we noticed the latter early on, so adding some additional medications during the treatments made Henry feel better, and by the 10th week or so we were able to get the weight back on him.

 There ain't no cure for the summertime blues

As we headed into the Jemez mountains after Henry's final treatment in search of a scenic and serene spot where the doggies could enjoy the cake that the great folks at VCA Animal Hospital had given us upon Henry's "graduation" from treatment, we decided a dirt road to an unknown location would be a fitting adventure. Though 20 weeks of chemotherapy have led to "clinical remission"—no detectable cancer cells in Henry's body—there is nearly a mathematical certainty that somewhere inside Henry's 85-pound frame a lone cancer cell lurks. More than likely, there is a reservoir of such cells somewhere within his body. Like patients with HIV infections, disease cells retreat into parts of the body where they thrive despite the onslaught of therapeutic drugs. Once the chemo attack ends, the cells emerge again and begin doing their thing: reproducing and slowly robbing their host of life. Henry's cancer was extremely aggressive. If or when it returns, it probably will do so with a vengeance.

When feeling punky, it's best to go out and find flowers that are
taller than you are.

On the other hand, remission could last a year or two. Perhaps we could even see a miracle and Henry could live out the rest of his life. We just don't know, so we're treating every day as if it could be the last one for our dog. And that's not such a bad thing. I have grown convinced that dogs live their own lives with a similar spirit anyway. If you've ever seen a dog wake up after a night of sleep, you'll know what I'm talking about; they greet each new sunrise with what seems like a surprised exuberance that says, "Wow! I survived another night! How lucky I am!"

Living in the moment

 Even during the worst stretches of Chemo, Henry awoke with undiminished canine gusto. He was eager to see the sun, smell the events that had transpired during the night in our back yard, and taste his breakfast, even if it happened to be the same breakfast he's been eating over and over for six years. Dogs, it seems, rarely seem to dwell on what the future could bring, but instead live in the moment. If only we humans could embrace such unaffected appreciation of the joy of living.

Nothing beats a quiet nap in the shade.

We were winding treacherously along a steep, rocky and rutted dirt road when we saw a juvenile cougar. The beautiful cat took a moment to stare us down as we gawked. Our city dogs, hypnotized by other unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells of the wilderness, apparently did not notice the predator, or if they did, they didn't bark. Moments later, the magnificent animal slunk silently away into the trees, becoming invisible as quickly and unexpectedly as his appearance moments earlier.

At the bottom of a lush canyon, we searched in vain for a stream recorded on maps and believed by land managers to be permanent. Despite the abundant summer rains, the stream bed was dry. The waters apparently had retreated below ground and out of sight, like the bad cells inside of Henry's body had done. We took this as an auspicious sign. Drunk with the desperation that comes with terminal sickness, it's much easier to fall under the spell of magical thinking, to imbue ordinary events with meaning or to see the future in a pile of runes.

Quiet resolve

Near a field of one-eyed Susans, Henry and Doodles feasted on the cake they had been given. It was so quiet that it felt as if we were the only people in the world. The next day we found similar silence on Cat Mesa, where Henry and Doodles camped for the first time in their lives, while the heavens ramped up for the second Super Moon of summer.

Night falls on Cat Mesa and all is well with the world.

The area was eerily quiet. It was as if every other creature had retreated to make way for the namesake mountain lions that have claimed the area as their own.

A small crackling fire, hot cocoa imbued with peppermint schnapps, and a tent with some good mosquito netting made the warm evening even more comfortable. The area was so quiet that it felt as if someone had clapped their hands over both of my ears and were squeezing my skull. It was a heavy silence, but not foreboding. Caroline remarked that it was as if we had popped into a different dimension created specifically for us—one where we could ponder our place in the world without interruption.

At midnight the moon was so bright that the world was still in full color. Instead of staring at the usual gloomy grays of evening, we were seeing the vivid reds, greens and yellows of dusk. This unexpected visual acuity stood in stark contrast to the sobering silence. It was as if we were dreaming.

Inside the tent, our novice-camper dogs were of two different mindsets. Doodles immediately figured out what was going on, so she curled up in her bed instantly. Henry, on the other hand, fidgeted from place to place, finally settling upon the crevice between us. A few moments later, sleep held us all captive until sunrise.

Once the chemo wears off, it's business as usual: Tug-o-war!

In the morning, Cat Mesa was alive again with the normal sounds of the world. Although the difference between the previous day and the morning was not lost on us, we wasted no time pondering the runes that had been tossed by an unseen hand so obviously in front of us. Sometimes things just happen, I guess, and what it really boils down to is whether you trust the road that lies ahead or not. 

Despite having to clear one dead-fall along the way, we found our way out of the mountains and back home. 

See you on down the road.

The Chemo Chronicles, Part III: Getting in Hot Water and Pulling the Pinkie

Los Alamos, N.M.—We celebrated the completion of round four of Henry's five-round, 20-week chemotherapy regimen by partying on a weeknight at San Antonio Hot Springs, a wonderful oasis of geothermal activity located right in our back yard in the Jemez Mountains.

A dog wary of the hot springs

We got the idea while driving back from Henry's chemo appointment a few days earlier. The fourth round of Henry's CHOP protocol—in which one of four extremely nasty drugs that destroy cellular DNA and suppress cell division are administered each week as a way to poison Henry's cancer into submission—is extremely difficult on Henry. The inter-venous toxin can destroy normal tissue or destroy the heart muscle if administered incorrectly, so you can imagine that if it's drubbing the shit out of cancer cells within the poor dog's body, what it must be doing to his normal cells at the same time.

Nevertheless, every time Henry gets out of the car at the VCA Hospital in Albuquerque, he gets a chemo-woody. As we sat in the waiting room before his therapy, a same-sex couple fussing over a Bichon Frise with some type of oozing-eye ailment suddenly went deathly quiet. They were staring, mouths agape, at Henry, who was reclining casually with his hind legs splayed out and his fully erect pink stick poking proudly out of its fur covered scabbard. I looked at the couple and shrugged; there's a reason someone coined the expression "behaving like dogs."

The vet assistant didn't miss a beat as she came into the waiting room and efficiently took the leash from my hand and led an eager Henry off toward the therapy room.

"Looks like someone's excited for his treatment," she chirped!

Detour

Excited dogs get to ride in the cab of the
truck instead of the way back!

A few hours later, Henry came back out into the waiting room, full of poison, bonerless, and a lot more lethargic than he had been just a few hours earlier. He was weak and thirsty, and the Duke City was hotter than a dancer at TD's Show Club on a Friday night after Pay Day. We decided that a drive through the Jemez and into the cooler shadows of the pines might perk the poor boy up a little. The afternoon rains had started in earnest, and a large anvil-shaped cloud was brewing above the mountains. After detouring toward Fenton Lake—only to find the area extremely crowded and trashed out by throngs of filthy city dwellers—we took a dirt road east. After a short rest in the cool green grass of a pine meadow, we all felt better. Instead of heading straight home, however, we thought a drive down toward San Antonio Hot Springs might be in order.

A few minutes down the road, we heard a strange whoosh, as if I had gone through a shallow puddle. But the road was dry. I stopped the car and we walked back up the road to see what we might have run over. We found a few odd-looking squares of a glassy material that looked like obsidian, a black volcanic glass that can be found easily in the Jemez if you know where to look. But there was no other obsidian on the road or nearby.

The scene of the crime.

"That's odd," I muttered to myself.

Suddenly, I was struck with a realization, and a terrifying one at that. I jogged over toward the camper shell and noticed that the rear window had shattered. All of the glass, except for the few morsels we found on the road, had landed in a pile inside the camper shell. Right next to the dogs.

We panicked.

After clearing them out and checking them over for damage, we realized how lucky we had gotten. They were fine. But there sure was a lot of sharp fine glass to pick up. We did our best, but there were enough shards left over that we didn't want to put the dogs back in. We moved our gear to the back of the truck and let the dogs hang out in the access cab. It was an exciting prospect for Henry's little friend, Doodles, who excitedly looked out the window as we drove. Henry settled in for a nap. A little ways down the road, we met a gate. The driving part of our journey was over. We walked a ways down the road past the gate and toward the hot springs, but we realized that the springs were still a ways away. It was late in the day, so we turned around, loaded up and made our way home.

Partying on a school night

You should play with a big, pink rubber
bone every chance you get.

But the thought of soaking in the warm waters of San Antonio hot springs beckoned us for the next few days, haunting our sleep and our daily conversation. I hadn't taken a dip in the those magical waters since my college days. We decided to head up after work mid-week. A steady drizzle and an American culture conditioned not to pursue leisure activities (other than drinking in bars or pubs, which is totally culturally accepted) after work ensured that we'd have the place to ourselves.

Sure enough, we were right. We doffed our clothes, giggled and jumped in the nice hot pool just as the sun disappeared over the ridge. The dogs were intrigued by the spectacle. Henry put his paws in the warm water and quickly retreated. He took a short taste. Disgusted and confused, the dogs stayed at bay while we soaked under the relentless rain.

As we drove home, the excitement in the vehicle was palpable. It had been another big adventure for a dog whose days are numbered. The nearly full moon was waxing into Super Moon status, so the woods were bright enough to navigate without headlights. 

When it's all said and done, a dog can
never get too much love—even if that dog
happens to be a hamburger thief.

 Spoiling the dog

Henry's lymphoma has gone into complete remission, and we've been trying to spoil him in a good way by taking him on adventures, giving him lots of pets and conversation, and surprising him with unexpected culinary delights.

He seems to have gotten used to the latter, because a few days after returning from our hot springs soak and in the company of dinner guests, Henry decided to help himself to an extra homemade cheeseburger that was up on the counter waiting to be claimed. Our dinner party guests spoke too late for a second burger, because before we knew it, Henry had put his paws on the counter—a stunt he's never pulled before—and gobbled down the cheeseburger before we could holler, "No!" (Early on, the vet had warned us that prednisone can give a dog an insatiable appetite that can inspire bad behavior, but Henry has always been a compliant little fellow, so we had been unconcerned about such things during the first 16 weeks of treatment.)

As we looked at him sternly, we could see a little smile creep across his face. He must have thought, "you won't do anything to me because I have cancer." He is a smart dog.

Shortly after the hamburglary, we were out playing tug of war with a ridiculous pink bone. Life is good for Henry right now and I suddenly understand why going to the vet gives him a boner. I guess I'd have one, too, if I felt as good after being on Death's doorstep.

See you on down the road! 

The Chemo Chronicles, Part II: Solstice Sunset and the Trials of Time Travel

LA BAJADA MESA, N.M., June 21, 2014—The Summer Solstice is a time of chances—an opportunity for renewal and new growth. In some cultures it marked the beginning of the year; in others, people celebrated the day in brilliant white robes and headdresses of flowers, dancing carefree until the last drop of daylight evaporated from the sky and ushered in the nurturing warmth of summer.

Henry, left, loves adventure; Doodles, on the other hand, gets nervous

 With the knowledge that this year could possibly be the final summer for our dog, Henry, we set off to find a new location for our annual ritual of toasting in the summer season at sunset on the longest day of the year. Our past solstice celebrations have included climbing to the top of a water tank where we had precisely inscribed the sun's point of departure along the horizon, hiking to natural landmarks that capture a glint of sunlight and project them onto symbols pecked into stone, or simply gazing at Earth's one and only mysterious life-giving orb as it dove deep into the Pacific Ocean.

Life and beauty are tenacious

Our home in the mountains is not optimal for viewing the solstice sunset, so I had thought for several days about a location that would allow us to watch the sun traverse the sky and set majestically in the west after illuminating our little part of the world for more than 14 hours. Unfortunately for us, mankind's thirst for "progress" has made suitable spots harder to find over the years: the water tower has been torn down, we are a long way from the ocean, and many sacred calendar sites have been eradicated to make way for development. As the day drew near, I finally came up with a grand idea—a spot that would provide Henry with the cat-bird's seat for the Sun's traverse along the Tropic of Cancer.

Bright Idea

About 20 miles southwest of Santa Fe, the desert landscape suddenly plunges some 700 feet to the bottom of a formidable escarpment of volcanic rock. The landmark is so well known in the state and in Spanish legend, that it became the demarcation point of two distinct regions of New Mexico: the Rio Arriba, or upper river section; and the Rio Abajo, the lower river section of the state. This dividing line is known as La Bajada, or "The Descent," and it seemed a perfect place to watch the transition of spring into summer.

At the Edge of the Cochiti reservation, an alignment of the old Route 66 winds its way up the lava cliffs from the lowlands to the mesa above. Three miles to the south, a never-ending line of cars whizzes to the top of the escarpment along a kinder, now modern path now known as Interstate 25.

The old Route 66 bridge still exists near Cochiti Reservoir

Tradition says the original serpentine road spiraling up the cliff face has been in use for more than 800 years and dates back to the days of the Camino Real. The same road used by invading Spaniards later became a route for Model T Fords to drive up backward (a necessity of gravity-fed gas tanks) during trips along the Mother Road. Hospitality maven Fred Harvey called for improvements to the road to bolster the burgeoning tourist trade as Americans became fascinated with The West and Harvey Motor Coaches transported curious Easterners from the Territorial Capital of Santa Fe to the mysterious pueblos of nearby Native Americans.

The relatively recent basalt ledges upon which the 18-foot-wide road grade rests were constructed by prison inmates and laborers from nearby pueblos. The road remained in use until about 1924, when it received a gentler alignment that became obsolete 13 years later when the current route became the official highway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

 Magic in the Air

We held out hope that the power of the Solstice could help transport us back in time to the days of Route 66 and the heyday of New Mexico culture if we gathered atop La Bajada for our annual ritual this year. Perhaps, if luck and the Old Gods were with us, if we viewed the solstice from such a sacrosanct vantage point, we would be transported into the past and to an era before the cancer cells had taken root in Henry's lymph nodes, and we would be able to return to present day along a parallel route in the time-space continuum to good health and restoration.

The beginning of our journey was auspicious. As we wound out of Los Alamos toward Totavi, we saw a modern manifestation of the trickster Kokopelli walking on the shoulder of U.S. 502. The hunchbacked figure wore a wide brimmed hat and was carrying a long flute as he made his way toward the Phillips 66 gas station at the bottom of the hill. He was not hitchhiking and he seemed unconcerned to be walking alongside a busy highway. I did a double take in the rear view mirror.


"Did you see that?" I asked Caroline.

"Kokopelli, you mean? Yeah. I saw him."

For whatever reason, neither of us was particularly surprised by the unexpected appearance.

A few miles down the road at San Ildefonso Pueblo, I saw a native gentleman standing out in the open desert holding an iPad up in front of his face with both hands. The scene was strangely poignant—reminiscent of an older ritual in which one of his ancestors would be presenting an offering to the sacred winds. Unlike our ancestors who were in close contact with the natural world, we modern men record our deeds with digital petroglyphs and consult Wikipedia instead of our elders.

I guided the truck toward our destination with the same hands that earlier had fed Henry five poisonous tablets concealed in cheese. The dose had been prescribed as treatment for cancer and delivered in a medicine bottle, although the instructions cautioned me not to administer the chemical—enough to kill a three-year-old child—without gloves. Although this protocol is widely accepted as one of the four normal courses of treatment in chemotherapy, I still hold a certain amount of guilt and trepidation knowing that I've used something as wholesome as cheese to trick my dog into ingesting something lethal. The Germans lured jews in for a shower during the Third Reich; I sometimes wonder whether my "gift" for my dog is any less dastardly. 

 Stones in my Passway

La Bajada provides a formidable landscape

Cognitive dissonance aside, we reached the old Route 66 bridge at Cochiti about two hours before sunset. Someone had lined the roadway with upturned roofing nails. Luckily I saw them before they could do any damage, and I stopped and removed as many of them as I could find. Nearby, free roaming cows munched nonchalantly on the green grass that stood in stark contrast to the rest of the desert surroundings thanks to a trickle from the Rio Santa Fe and gurgling acequias piped in from Cochiti Lake. The waterways were lousy with cow dung and I wondered why people take the health of their water for granted in a land that has precious little water to begin with?

The little dirt road turning off the main road toward the old Route 66 alignment was narrow, rutted and treacherous. I put the truck in four wheel drive and cautiously crawled up the road. About 500 yards later, the grade deteriorated into a sketchy landscape of deep, off-camber ruts littered with jagged volcanic boulders. This bend in the road afforded me a slight chance of turning around—perhaps the last one I might have until the top of the grade. I decided to get out and survey the road before I passed this seeming point of no return.

I believe my truck might have been able to make it through the next 500 yards of hellish terrain, but I had some nagging doubts in my mind. At any rate, the possibility of navigating a terrible unknown four-wheel-drive track an hour before sunset with two dogs in the back and in a landscape where the residents mine the passageway with roofing nails seemed foolish at best. I put the truck in four-wheel-low and executed a tricky three point turnaround without incident.

At the edge of the Rio Arriba and the Rio Abajo

We found ourselves on the present day alignment climbing up La Bajada hill feeling slightly defeated and wondering what to do next. I had read up on the history of the road and knew that the old alignment made its way into Santa Fe via La Cienega and the village of Cineguilla. I reckoned that the area must still have dirt roads leading out to the mesa's edge, and after a quick consultation of Google Earth, I saw evidence of passage scraped lightly into the desert landscape. After a couple of false starts in La Cienega, one which led us down a dead-end road to a private residence where the owner had adorned his fence posts with boots—perhaps the boots of hapless travelers?—we wound our way out of the fertile river valley and up onto the mesa top.

Using Tetilla Peak to the north as our reference, we rumbled through the desert and finally picked up a power-line road that had seen better days. I recognized the terrain from Google Earth, so I headed west with confidence that we would reach the edge of the La Bajada escarpment well before sunset.

 A Destination Worth Reaching

Toasting the summer solstice

With just a half an hour left in the day, we pulled up to the top of the last switchback of the road we had abandoned an hour earlier. We had reached the top of the old Route 66 alignment!

The dogs were thirsty, so we allowed them the first toast of the day. We grabbed our gear and walked down the road to the first big switchback, which overlooked the great expanses of the Rio Abajo section of the state. From this vantage point the sun blazed high in the west above the peaks that would have obscured it at home. In the valley below, sunlight glinted off of Cochiti Reservoir and the fat free-range cows looked like slow-moving ants.

End of the day but not the end of days for this dog

As tradition dictates, we toasted the end of the day with fine cold beers, a large wedge of brie, olives, fruits and other assorted delicacies. As the sun made its final curtain call, the winds suddenly stopped and the world was plunged into a most excellent silence. Henry the dog climbed up on an outcropping of dark lava rock to watch the sunset, while his little companion Doodles chased grasshoppers and searched for rodents.

Once the sun winked out of sight, we walked down the road to see whether vehicle passage would have been possible. Our short survey was inconclusive. As we climbed back up the road bed with a warmth in our hearts, the initials of long-gone and recent travelers scratched into the rocks alongside the path reminded us that no one but heroes can take a journey on ground where none have trod. The Earth is for mere mortals such as us.

See you on down the road.