Dispatch from the land of enchantment
For the past month, I’ve been in Las Cruces, New Mexico, living and working from an Airbnb in the Mesilla valley, roughly an hour from the Mexican border. January in Minnesota is hard on me — the cold and snow, of course, but mostly the lack of sun. It leaves me feeling brittle and wan, like a video game character with perilously low life force. Q and I decided years ago to move toward spending more and more of the winter in sunnier climes, to whatever extent the practicalities of family, work, and money allow. New Mexico is often our destination of choice.
It’s a brutal drive from Minnesota, across vast, desolate stretches of rural Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and the northwestern corner of Texas. (We drive so we can bring our dog, our car, and a month’s worth of stuff.) New Mexico itself is the 5th biggest state in the union, so even when we hit the border, there’s still a full day’s drive ahead. But no matter. Whenever we cross the state line, I start to feel life force flooding back into me, like my video game character lucked into a stash of restorative manna.
What is it about this place?
Land of missiles, bombs, UFOs, and radioactive sand, where the otherworldly becomes real. Roasted green chiles on everything. Red chiles hanging in ristras from posts and doors and fences. The smell of mesquite, sage, and piñon. Cacti and palm trees in the south, quaking Aspens and snow-draped Ponderosas in the high elevation north. Salted chips, salted margarita rims, great dunes of white sands like a cosmic salt shaker tipped and spilled under a blue dome of sky. Vapor trails arcing on the horizon; at night the moon and stars right there like a psychedelic vision, so close, like something true you go through most of your life forgetting.
In an increasingly homogenous country, with the same Chili’s and Applebees in every town and a mass-produced aesthetic flattening local character from Oregon to Minnesota to New Jersey, New Mexico is a holdout. A balm. A place that can be mistaken for no other. When you’re in New Mexico, you know it.
The land of enchantment, they call it. Its beauty isn’t flashy like California. Not pristine like Sarasota. It’s the mellow beauty of age, of a weathered soul who has seen a thing or two and transmuted it into wisdom and peace, a peace you absorb like a hum in your sacrum.
This land used to be an ancient coastline and shallow sea bed, back before Pangea broke up, back before the world first fractured. Fossils lie around, casual as gravel. Right in the heart of Albuquerque, between eating a breakfast burrito and a green chile cheeseburger you can put your palm on rocks covered in petroglyphs dating from 2000 BC.
In 2021, researchers discovered 23,000-year-old human footprints in White Sands National Park, challenging everything archaeologists thought they knew about the timeline of human occupation of the Americas. Time here is a big nutcracker, a hologram you have to shift your focus to see, going back and in, in, in, all of it present at once.
Over the past several million years, the Rio Grande carved an 800-foot gorge in the high desert mesa of Taos, tracing a tectonic chasm. Three hundred and fifty miles south in Las Cruces, the river bed is dry and flat all winter. You can walk from a paved sidewalk alongside it right into the center, take off your shoe, and shake out the sand. An hour north of Las Cruces in Truth or Consequences, you can sit in mineral hot springs on the riverbank, watch the shallow water flow by, carrying birds that float and dive along its channel, tall tan grasses on the bank vibrating in the amber afternoon glow.
The fact that there's a town called Truth or Consequences. The fact that truth feels closer when you're there, consequences further away.
We drove here under a full moon that followed us across the heartland. Now it's full again. Our time here has ripened, culminated, dropped whatever seeds it was going to sow in our souls.
Tomorrow we'll begin the journey of taking them home, follow the waning moon back north and east, and see what they become.
As one who married into a New Mexico family, I deeply love this post.
Beautiful writing, Mo! So many tangible phrases and images. I've wanted to visit NM for years and now even more so. Can't wait to pour sand out of my shoes there.