The Playful Playa

On my very first full day in Santa Fe, I almost got my car stuck in the sand.

I was on a deserted, unpaved back road about a half hour north of town, and had found a spare branch to haul under the front tires before discovering — with an overwhelming rush of gratitude — that I was able to reverse my way out and proceed into town.

Perhaps this was an omen. On all counts.

New Mexico’s official state slogan is the Land of Enchantment, but the locals will tell you it’s really the Land of Entrapment. Many who arrive in this strange, sandblown desert find it impossible to leave.

Even after only three weeks in Santa Fe, I can see why. The town is artsy and gritty and weird in ways that aren’t, as in Austin or Portland or — sorry — Asheville, calculated or self-referential. The strangeness seems shored up by the extremes of the landscape: it’s both playful, here, and grave.

The high desert is as challenging as it is beautiful. The air is so dry that, for the first week or so, I kept thinking I was coming down with something, waking up to a sore throat and headache despite my bedside bottle of water. The air disintegrates lip balm and lotion, and the altitude can make even easy hikes feel breathless. Though nights are cool, the midday heat pulls the water I pour into myself right back out again, my sweat instantaneous and relentless. Bright sun and red clay break out into shards of turquoise and obsidian; the adobe houses rise up out of the ground like manmade caves, like a returning. The colors are so sharp and dense they seem somehow more entire, crisp enough to hurt.

And here under all this extremity, a happy band of weirdos — and their equally weird creations.

Take, for instance, Meow Wolf, the specter of which haunted me from all sides before I could finally make my visit. Locals talked about it in tones I’d almost call worshipful, leaving me on the lookout for both actual and metaphorical Kool-Aid. (Of course, once I got to experience it myself, my first thought was, how do I get everyone I know to come here and see this?)

Then there was the rock hound at the artisan market, who — there is no other term — geeked out for a full half hour, pressing stone after stone into the hands of my friend Joel and I while rattling off their details and origin stories. He pulled us back into his booth multiple times, even apologizing, unable to contain his enthusiasm although we were clearly not going to buy anything.

Or the ecstatic dance sessions on Wednesday evenings, how the host tells us all we are welcome and loved and safe and somehow, everyone takes it seriously; everyone flails and twirls and feels their body with no expectations, no words, no cell phones, no substances on the bar but orange slices.

You can’t walk seven feet in Santa Fe without tripping over some of the most astounding art you’ve ever seen. I took on the famous Canyon Road and fell victim to art fatigue within an hour, deciding the overwhelm was part of its charm, something you have to let happen to you. But even with the fire watch closures keeping us out of the nearby national forests, it’s clear that the landscape beats out its manmade imitations.

The first time I drove north toward Taos and broke over the ridge to see the Rio Grande Gorge, it literally took my breath away. Just a few turns off the highway, I found myself bathing in crystal-clear hot springs; the quarter-mile hike down was guarded by a man playing didgeridoo, echoing against the ancient canyon walls. The town of Taos itself, only about an hour north of here, is tiny and infinitely charming, with its ever-present, dive-bombing hummingbirds and unabashedly liberal coffee shops and Chaco-wearing hippies gently reprimanding kids with names like Falco and Brax. When I asked, stupidly, what the young, green fruit was on the tree outside a downtown boutique, the shopkeep answered not by smirking or laughing at me, but by asking if I lived there and would like to take a crate of them home — fresh, sweet apricots he can’t quite keep up with.

There’s definitely a strong crunchy contingency here, a woo-woo sensibility I respect, admire, and am not quite sure I can jive with. The registered nurse who drew my blood, fulfilling a doctor’s order from Florida, asked if I’d tried herbs or acupuncture to abate my symptoms. Even the vagabonds here look otherworldly-wise, towing overflowing shopping carts behind bicycles and twining their hair with plucked wildflowers.

I mean, it’s the epicenter of the Earthship movement, for Christ’s sake. They have sober daytime dancing.

At the same time, you can still see MAGA bumper stickers on pickup trucks with testicles, or find rheumatic old women coughing openly in the grocery store, or eavesdrop on the teenage first-date couple at the cafe, still in their fast-food uniform shirts, exchanging easy Spanglish over smoothies. The boy had turned his body as far toward her as he could, but the girl held her purse over her lap, sticking with English to point out, with some cheer, that “the world is just so awful sometimes.”

But what really strikes me about New Mexico — what holds me here — is that it’s also a land of contradictions. This place is home to some of the world’s most ancient indigenous civilizations… whose petroglyphs and ruins are only a dozen miles from Los Alamos, where we spearheaded the Manhattan Project. In the south, you can visit the vast gypsum dune field at White Sands, sled with your children down its surreal slopes — and then make your way to the Missile Range Museum, where you’ll learn it was the site of the very first atomic bomb detonation.

On my way back to Santa Fe from Bandelier National Monument, I had to pass by the laboratory where we continue to perfect these technologies today. The man in the security booth took my license and asked me a number of questions, finally releasing me with the warning to “not make any right turns” until I was off the restricted property. One of those possible rights would have been onto a road named after Bikini Atoll.

And yet. Those indigenous peoples carved their homes into volcanic ruin, scraped life from the dry desert earth for thousands and thousands of years. We have been here before and before and before, so much so that the footfalls of ancients carved waist-deep trenches in stone.

Creation and destruction, feast and famine, birth and death and birth again — all these things it’s basically impossible to articulate without sounding really cliched and melodramatic. They’re all here, under this relentless sun and thin layer of air, where I’ve been chugging water out of flower vases.