Year: 2014

books along the way

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Sometimes I wish I read less. I panic when I have nothing to read, no pages to turn in my bed at night, my own  bed or a strange one. I brought Lilac and Flag by John Berger along with me but finished it two days into this ten-day (thus far) journey. I’d read the other novels in the trilogy, Into Their Labours, but somehow not this one. And JB is probably my favourite non-fiction writer or maybe I just mean favourite writer. Period. You forget what genre you’re reading — and it doesn’t matter, though universities are debating the fine points of creative non-fiction, the lyrical essay, documentary journalism, et. al. What is legitimate, what isn’t. What you can say and what you can’t. So there was Lilac and Flag for the first three days and then a visit to a bookstore in Santa Fe for Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World, which is wonderful. And (because we were on our way to Taos) a biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, which I’m reading right now. I walked over to her house last night and tried to imagine DH Lawrence in its garden, listening to the same magpies I was listening to.

A little while ago, we went into Tome on the Range, here in Las Vegas, and wow, there were tables and shelves of books I had to restrain myself from buying — because of space, mostly. My suitcase is already bulging and we will be going to Edmonton from here for five more days, which means more stuff (though I try to resist; but who could resist the Acoma pot from Sky City Mesa or the linen dress from Santa Fe?). But then I saw a beautiful edition of When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, by Terry Tempest Williams, a writer I’ve always loved for her rich sense of the natural world and how our bodies respond to it (and our minds, too). So I bought it, of course. And couldn’t walk by a Willa Cather I haven’t yet read, The Song of the Lark — because I have had her Death Comes for the Archbishop in my head over the past ten days, travelling this landscape which Father Jean Marie Latour travelled through in 1851.

viva, Las Vegas!

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Yesterday we drove through a high pass (9.000 feet) in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to Cimarron, New Mexico for lunch. John read in a guide book about its storied past, the hotel which housed various outlaws (Jesse James, Billy the Kid, etc.) and where Buffalo Bill convinced Calamity Jane to join his show. It was very quiet there, the outlaws all long gone (though some have bedrooms named for them in the St. James Hotel, built in 1872). And the hotel is beautiful — and quiet, yes, with just a few people eating in the dining room and a few more in an adjacent room, would-be bartenders  taking notes while a man walked them through the state liquour laws.

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We left our little room in the Taos Inn this morning, driving through another high pass where my ears complained until we descended (but only a little) to Las Vegas, a town which feels a bit like time forgot it. It’s high desert here, and so beautiful. 6,424 feet above sea level…We found a room in the 1882 Plaza Hotel which hosted dentist Doc Holliday and his girlfriend Big Nose Kate, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Mysterious Dave Mather, Hoodoo Brown, and Handsome Harry the Dancehall Rustler in its day.

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A friendly woman in a nearby shop wondered if I’d ever heard of the United World Colleges — which of course I have because son Forrest attended Lester Pearson College of the Pacific in the late 1990s… — because she said that the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West is in nearby Montezuma. So we drove out and although it’s not a day when one can tour the campus, the kind security guard let us drive up to take a photograph of the main building.

P1090970We ate our lunch on a patio overlooking Las Vegas’s spacious green plaza, overhung with huge cottonwoods. Who knew this place existed and that we would find it in time to enjoy the sun in the shade of its old buildings.

high road to Taos

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After a little run to Abiquiu (necessary after seeing the views of it at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe and yes, the cottonwoods were just coming into leaf in the same bright green as G O’K saw them all those years ago), we took the high road to Taos. We avoided this fate —

oopsand drove happily through Truchas and Las Trampas, eager to find a cup of espresso. And we did, at Penasco, along with a slice of the most delicious chocolate cake at the Sweet Nymphs Bistro:

sweet nymphsThe cake was the opposite of the dense flourless tortes which seem to be all the rage these days. It was three layers, at least 7 inches high, with gorgeous buttercream. And Anik, if you’re reading this, you would love this little place with its shelves of cookbooks like Carol Field’s The Italian Baker and Marcella Hazan and the other books which set the trends, not follow them. You would love the menu of sophisticated brunch foods and L. would love the paper covered tables with crayons in a little cup for idle moments.

In Taos, our room in the old Inn was waiting:

fire in our roomAnd after a walk through town, we’re “resting” before dinner. The menu promises rabbit and rattlesnake sausage. Stay tuned!

postcard from Los Alamos

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I’m not sure how we ended up here apart from the fact that it’s near Bandelier National Monument where we spent the morning hiking. We thought we’d booked a hotel in White Rock, near Bandelier, but apparently the reservation was actually for this hotel in Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project.

Bandelier was just marvelous. Many years ago we visited a cliff dwelling site in northern Arizona (I wrote about this in an essay in Phantom Limb) and were fascinated and (I confess) bewitched by the mystery and beauty of these ancient villages of the Ancestral Pueblo people. I’ve read House of Rain by Craig Childs in which he travels the four corners area and further south, in search of the village sites and roads of those people. I loved every page. It’s a mystery — why the villages were abandoned, where the people went. But maybe not such a mystery, as a recording in the Bandelier Museum suggests. “We didn’t go far,” the man said. “We went to Cochiti, just over the mountain.”  We drove through that pueblo the other day and it’s good to know that the spirit (and DNA) of the people who created this beautiful complex of houses and cliff dwellings has only shifted location a little.

P1090834It was hot, there were whiptail lizards in the rocky areas by the Frijilos Creek, and oh, the smell of Ponderosa pines and juniper in that dry warm air!

Los Alamos is filled with nuclear physicists, apparently — the woman in the visitor centre told us there are more PhDs per capita here than anywhere else in the nation. So I imagine they’re the ones drinking coffee in the Fusion Cafe and sampling the fine range of beer in the brewpub where we drank a pint before going for dinner at the Blue Window Bistro (spinach salad with gorgonzola and walnuts and lovely pears, eggplant and portobello napoleon, and a chicken enchilada).

And who, I wonder, was drawn in by the sign at the Camel Rock Casino, just north of Santa Fe, advertising a Lent Special?

To Taos tomorrow, and Abiquiu, with a stop at Chimayo for some dried red chilies to bring home.

they were waiting

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This city — Santa Fe — has wonderful museums. We bought the four day pass and have been making good use of it. This morning we went to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum (not part of the pass) and spent time among her beautiful landscapes, her flowers, and watched a short film on her time in Abiquiu where we’ll go in a few days. A couple more hours in the Museum of History, then up to Museum Hill (you follow the old Santa Fe trail…) where there are more museums still. The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture was extraordinary — the exhibits of the pueblo pottery, the baskets, the sense of deep history, in place, and of place. Small bags of seeds, water jars, blankets of vivid reds and blues. We also went to the Museum of International Folk Art which was overwhelming. Gallery after gallery of toys, textiles, puppet theaters, kites, and (almost) best of all, a gallery of wooden animals from Mexico, many of whom we recognized from home.

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“They come in all colours.”

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We took the Turquoise Trail (Highway 14) from Albuquerque to Santa Fe yesterday, stopping in Madrid (a raffish collection of old miners’ shacks fixed up by craftspeople) and Cerillos where the turquoise is mined. I’d hoped to find a real prize, a necklace of wild originality, but instead found myself buying quite a modest choker from the Santo Domingo Pueblo. And we had lunch in Madrid, at a funky place with a dusty patio under trees. Birds were nesting right in the trees, soft grey ones with pale yellow breasts. What kind of birds are those, I asked our waitress, a tall beauty in cowboy boots. Oh, just google birds of New Mexico, was her offhand reply.

In Santa Fe we bought the museum pass and spent the morning in the Museum of Art and the History Museum. Such riches. I liked best the Agnes Martin in the former — a big canvas with horizontal bands of soft colour, like sky or wind. And an exhibit of the photographs of Joan Meyers — landscapes, big and wild, with small signs of human influence. The beautiful courtyard was loud with birdsong and we could see finches darting in and out of nesting sites among the beams. I asked the security guard if they were purple finches or rosy finches. (I’m not a birder but I like to get things right.) They come in all colours, was his solemn reply. So that was a relief!

 

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The Palace of the Governors, part of the History Museum, is the nation’s oldest government building. It’s low and cool and at home on the plaza it overlooks. We met Tom Leech, the printer who runs the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and his work is glorious. We bought many broadsheets and arranged to have them mailed to us at home.

p.s. I am using a little (slow) Netbook on this trip and sometimes paragraphs mysteriously disappear. I wrote about Santa Fe, its buildings and restaurants and galleries filled with fetishes, sculpture, kachinas, jewelry so beautiful and so expensive that you have to wonder who’s buying it, but, poof, that bit disappeared. So you’ll just have to imagine…

high clear air

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We spent yesterday morning at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History where a fascinating exhibit, “Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home 1492-1898” decoded domestic space for us with its dramas and manners. I loved the note for one portrait of a haughty young woman: she rejected an elderly suitor because he was “uglier than an excommunication.” How language places us and shapes us! In a Catholic household, what would be worse?

After lunch in quiet Corrales, we drove up to Santo Domingo Pueblo and then to Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument where we hiked the Cave-Loop trail in high clear air. The white cliffs, the deep blue sky, flowering cactus, a startled jackrabbit loping away, and a raucous scrub jay, not so different from his coastal cousins who wake us on summer mornings. The tent rocks are extraordinary –layers of rock and ash eroded and weathered to these astonishing formations:

tent rocks

We’re leaving Albuquerque this morning for Santa Fe. This B&B — the Mauger House — has been a perfect base for our explorations: comfortable room with a tiny balcony where we see a pair of purple finches making their nest in a blue spruce, beautiful breakfasts of blueberry stuffed French toast and stratas and scones, welcoming glasses of wine late afternoon when we return from our forays into New Mexico.

two postcards

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1. From Sky City Mesa  (Acoma Pueblo)

We drove west from Albuquerque and took the quiet road to the Acoma Pueblo, also called Sky City Mesa. It’s been occupied since the 2nd century. We saw the mesa from a distance:

approaching sky cityWe stopped at the marvelous cultural centre and arranged for a tour. Up onto the mesa, past little corrals and stone buildings collapsing into the landscape. And on the mesa itself, the beautiful pueblo, where about 15 families still live and where ceremonies still occur, the ladders to the kivas ready.

in the pueblo

ladder to the kiva

There are places on earth that speak so clearly and plainly of their history and you understand the long attachment of people to place. It’s them, or maybe I mean they’re natural extensions of everything I understand a place to be. We bought a little piece of Acoma pottery, crosshatched with lines of rain, the ears of corn there too.

2. Postcard from Boca Negro Canyon

We stopped at a canyon near Albuquerque to see the petrogylphs made by the ancestors of the native pueblo people. Some of these were created perhaps 400-700 years ago and some as long ago as 2000-3000 years. They were made by chipping away the surface desert varnish or patina from basalt rocks. No one knows exactly what they mean but they are deeply beautiful and evocative after all these years. I passed one young woman texting on the trail and I thought that in some ways these were a form of terse communication. A turtle:

turtle

Some squiggles which I think are snakes — while a sign on the trail warned to watch out for rattlesnakes. And of course spirals (this seemed inevitable to me, who spent the winter quilting them), an acknowledgement that we live in the cycles of life and death, summer and winter:

spirals

pinch me, I’m in Albuquerque

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How quickly we leave one landscape, one country, and enter another. I woke in a hotel near the Vancouver airport this morning and by early afternoon I was walking Albuquerque’s Old Town. And how lovely it is, this city of old adobe buildings, gardens of yucca and cacti, warm air. . . Flying from Denver, I looked out to see a vast area composed as beautifully as a quilt — circles in squares, some of them bisected by thin lines, and nearby, the scribble of oxbows. What crops are planted in circles, I wondered, and later found out that it’s the result of center-pivot irrigation. That’s all I know and I’ll try to find out more but seen from a plane, it’s like looking at the work of a really skillful quilter, working with rich brown velvet, tawny corduroy, deep silvery blue thread, olive green felt.

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We ate dinner in Mas, a restaurant in what was the first hotel Conrad Hilton built in his native New Mexico and which is now Hotel Andaluz, walking distance from our B&B. We had the most delicious tapas — grilled eggplant with Manchego and saffron honey, a hummus made with roasted carrots and chickpeas, beet and walnut puree, sesame lavash, slices of Mancheo with membrillo, olives — and a bottle of Spanish wine. This is what we saw when we began the walk back to the Mauger B&B:

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let’s hear it for lean and intense

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my novella, Inishbream, in Helene Francoeur's beautiful turbot-skin bound edition
my novella, Inishbream, in Helene Francoeur’s beautiful turbot-skin bound edition

It occurred to me, talking to John as we walked over for the mail today (ask me about community mail boxes! I honestly can’t take the fuss about them, the suggestion that it’s the end of civilization as we know it, the end of safety for seniors – there are seniors in our neighbhourhood, John included, and like us, they’ve never had home mail delivery; if they can’t collect their own mail, a neighbour will do it for them…), that my reading lately has been largely novellas. I’ve written two posts about them – Hetty Dorval and Deep Hollow Creek are, to my mind, both novellas – and I’ve spent quite a bit of time (for desperate reasons) perusing publishing websites to see who on earth might consider a manuscript comprised of two novellas. (Yes, mine!)

And once I realized that I was reading novellas, and thinking about novellas, I began to see them everywhere. Last night I read David Gilmour’s new book, Extraordinary. I hadn’t meant to. I liked his book about watching films with his teen-aged son but I haven’t much liked his fiction. I did read his interview in Hazlitt last September (http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/gilmour-transcript) and found it utterly distasteful. He’s entitled to his opinion(s) of course but nothing he said about writing and reading made me think I’d enjoy his latest book. But when I saw it at the library yesterday, I picked it up, read the jacket copy, and checked it out. It took me an hour and a half to read it last night and I don’t regret the time spent at all. It’s good. It moves along so well and the writing is crisp and clean. And you know what? I think it’s a novella. It’s brief – perhaps 50,000 words – and is essentially a conversation between a brother and a sister. Each character is vividly drawn and the dialogue is convincing. It has a novella’s sense of time and place, that contained and concise elegance.

One of my favourite novellas is Joyce’s The Dead. It’s perfect. I read it once a year and each time I’m both moved and inspired. And more. Surprised to find a sentence I hadn’t remembered and how its perfect fit within the narrative made it so organic to the piece as a whole that it took a fifth or tenth reading to actually see it. I love what Ian McEwan said about The Dead in his wonderful piece on the novella in the New Yorker magazine (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/some-notes-on-the-novella.html):

I’d swap “The Dead”’s concluding pages for any fifteen from “Ulysses.” The young Joyce surpassed himself. I sometimes fantasize that on my deathbed, celebrated phrases from this novella will see me out: “I think he died for me”; “one by one they were all becoming shades”; “the time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”; snow “softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves”; “snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ There could be worse final moments.

I’m looking forward to reading the Canadian poet Gillian Wigmore’s recently-published novella, Grayling. I think highly of her poetry.She writes deeply and beautifully from her northern landscape –

4. fraser (fort george)

meet the clang and stink of the black train bridge

dripping the rain into the broad brown river

can trees be proud?

the cottonwood aren’t quitters

they draw the river up their roots

reach high towards sky

travellers in metal cars untouched

by river life, rife and humming

down below (from “Five Rivers: Under Bridges” in Soft Geography, Caitlin Press, 2007)

– and I anticipate that she will bring that attentive eye and ear to prose as well. And I am full of admiration for Gillian’s publisher, Mona Fertig at Mother Tongue Publishing, who unapologetically advertises this new book as a novella. (From the catalogue copy: “A lean and intense tale that takes the reader to haunting depths.  A seminal and brilliant addition to a neglected genre.”)