Taos to Espanola

I wrote this Sunday afternoon, but only just now posted it.

The highway winds through a deep canyon only wide enough for itself and the river. To the left, a hill rises steeply so I can barely see sky before the top of my window blocks it out. Streams of green-lichened gray rocks tumble down the steep slopes, with tall dead forked bushes between short green chamisa and shorter yellow grass.

I have driven this road before. I have driven it in the winter night, exhausted from a debate tournament, with my sister asleep in the backseat but a (rare) 2nd place award for policy my lap. I have driven it on other nights, discussing with a boy—who was it? I cannot remember him now—but we picked out constellations for one another and speculated whether Lepus, the Rabbit, was that one in the west, just above the hill. It probably wasn't. I have driven it in the Atkins' big blue suburban in the late afternoon, on that trip we took to Elitch Gardens in Denver. We played Mao all the way back and made a rule that whenever you played a three, you had to ask, “Are those rafters in the river?” And every time, I forgot it was a rule and looked at the river. It flows just beyond the guard rail, sometimes hidden, sometimes barely visible over it. Today the river runs full, but it is still difficult to see over the guard rail.

We rise out of the canyon and into another one. It opens up a bit; now on the left is a sign for a vineyard. “Does it have samples?” asks Mom. “There's a tasting room,” I say. But we are past it. A new little hospital, pretty adobe with wooden columns and sage trim, appears, in the middle of a tiny town, all ramshackle art galleries and houses with degenerate machinery in the yard and amateur coffee houses. The number of java cafes along this road amazes me. A town might not even have a post office, but it could have a coffee shop. Oh that I had world enough and time to stop at them.

The town passes and a farming valley appears on the other side of the river. The green patchwork of fields and houses, sandwiched between brown juniper-spotted hills, takes away my breath. It is so vibrant, such a reminder of what the desert could be if we only had water.

We're nearly to Espanola. The pearly clouds are sprinkling on us. The valley is now quite wide; the eastern Sangre de Cristos are nearly hidden behind the clouds, with yellow plain stretching away toward them, interrupted by power lines and casino billboards, and to the west a narrow line of green leafballs marks the Rio Grande. Beyond it rich brown mesas fade into bluer and bluer Jemez mountains, ending in the clouds showering rain. Houses appear, first few and far away, then clustering closer to each other and the road, with wooden or cinder-block or chain-link fences and green trees. We are at the town.