Onward and Westward

Are we there yet? Incredibly, that is not a question I have heard on this trip. Except from me of course—the driver is always read to get there. I think, for the most part, my passengers are pretty happy to kick back, read, talk, or listen to music. Especially since we dropped Allison in Colorado and got rid of one of the suitcases. The sleeping bags have taken up residence in the front passenger seat—they are bigger than Allison. Sometimes I get lost in my thoughts and then think someone is sleeping there, but it’s just a pile of sleeping bags!

Today was another driving day. We left Taos in the morning, late as usual, and drove to Santa Fe. I was a little sad to leave Taos, partly because there was more to do and partly because the place we rented was great for hanging out. We stopped in Santa Fe for only an hour and a half, just to look around, a way to break up the day. Santa Fe has a beautiful main plaza, and the shops are amazing. The prices are also amazing, in a different way, so we only went as observers, aside from a pair of socks with manatees. Because who can pass up a pair of socks with manatees??

We visited the Loretto Chapel, a structure built in the 1870s as a chapel for a Catholic school called The Academy of Our Lady of Light. It’s beautiful, and it has a special draw—a spiral staircase up to the balcony that includes two 360 degree turns with no visible means of support. It’s called the Miraculous Staircase, and apparently experts cannot quite figure out how it really works. The problem is that we are not experts, and so to us it pretty much looks like a pretty wooden spiral staircase. The church is no longer used as a church, it’s a museum and a wedding hall. They play a recording over a loudspeaker in the sanctuary that I assume gives history about it all, but the sound system rendered it impossible to understand.

There are definite drawbacks to traveling with only one adult, an adult who was a mediocre English major and has no real understanding of such things as physics and engineering. Or art, as we learned yesterday. These young people are dependent on someone who has very little other than enthusiasm to offer! Fortunately they are intelligent and I am learning from them.

After departing the chapel, we walked past or through many, many shops, then walked through the park (where we saw a man playing a digeridoo on the lawn) and into the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. This cathedral was built by “French architects and Italian stone masons” in the late 1800s. It is also quite lovely, and I am particularly drawn to the folk art that is used on the walls to depict the stations of the cross. They were originally painted on the walls, then later the French archbishops had the walls painted white, covering the art. They were restored in 1997. This cathedral, like the adobe church in Taos, still feels like a place of worship, and it has an active parish.

Our time was up, and we got back in the van to move on, eating the lunches we’d packed that morning as we drove.

Next up was Albuquerque, where we (after a few wrong turns) found the correct location of the Flying Star Café where we were to meet a good friend of one of our passengers. It turns out that there are something like 6 locations, and I thought there were only 2, so I picked the one that seemed closest to what the friend had described, but I was so very wrong. We made it eventually. The two friends had an hour of animated discussion at one table, while the rest of us gorged on desserts and tea and lounged at the table next to it.

Then we set out to reach our final destination: Zuni, NM. To reach it, we had a 2 ½ hour drive through a landscape that became more and more dominated by mesas. When you see all these hills and scrub and small trees, you really start to sympathize with the poor priest in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop; how did he ever find his way? Without highways and markers and exits, it would all look impossibly similar. Add to it the occasional onslaught of afternoon rain that we experienced several times during the drive, and you can only wonder how any Europeans got to this land in the first place. If pioneering or exploring the “New World” had been left to me, I wouldn’t have made it the first five miles.

Zuni is a town; it is also a reservation, a pueblo and a people. We are staying in the town, which is on the reservation, and which is almost all populated by Zuni people. I’m still not clear if the pueblo is a separate site or if the town is basically the pueblo. I’ll get back to you on that when I figure it out. I do know, however, that the Christian Reformed Church has been at work here for over 100 years. They have a K-8 school, which also houses the church at this time. We have been given the use of the school for the next few days—a big kitchen/meeting area for our meals and a fellowship room that they use to bunk down volunteer teams. If you want to watch teenagers turn back into children, give them full run of the hallways of a school for an evening. It’s a sight (and a sound) to behold.

It is a bit like visiting another country (in a way we are, since they are their own nation as I understand it). People have been friendly. There are also religious ceremonies going on right now and a sign on every corner requesting that we respect those ceremonies by not photographing or recording them. I haven’t yet seen sign of the ceremonies themselves, so it’s pretty easy to stick to those guidelines.

Time to turn in on my school-supplied luxury air mattress. Tomorrow will be a new adventure.