New Mexico

A Dose of Quiet Sun
In the weeks prior to our 4/13/06 departure for New Mexico, a fellow traveler referenced Kerouac's Desolation Angels, relishing the prospect of finding our own "Void" of sun-shot rock, nights filled with endless stars, and perhaps a brief glimpse of ourselves. (Corporate day gigs inevitably sap one's perspective.)

(Photo: Howard Bishop Ellis/2006)

The Rio Grande is fast and cold in April, as was the small creek running through Frijole Canyon in the Bandelier State Monument, not far from Los Alamos.


You find quiet waiting in a few old spots: thick in the empty shadows between the Kit Carson House and the adjacent stores in Taos, or in the cottonwoods at the edge of town, between the scarred grave markers in the cemetery where the sidewalk stops along with the rest of the town. It just becomes a highway headed out into the scrub toward Taos Pueblo.


(Photo: Howard Bishop Ellis/2006)

The silences one encounters here, coupled with the wind off the mountains, make room for other sounds in my head. The smell of the spring air - a mixture of woodsmoke and something sharp and green - add to the overall effect of something decidedly non-midwestern.

I thought about the sweet guitar lines in a film, "F.T.W. - The Last Ride", in which Mickey Rourke played an reticent but earnest rodeo rider-turned-felon, trying to make it back but going down anyway somewhere out west. You knew he was doomed from the get-go, but it all happened in a place that looked like Taos, and the guitar would gently burble in an irresistibly nostalgic fashion over the whole thing.

That music has resonated with me for so long - still does - but I haven't been able to track down a copy of the soundtrack. It's probably a good thing, too, because I'd probably let it influence my own compositional effort too much, rather than generating original ideas, albeit ones bearing an influence.

More to follow: Searching for Mexican tile, Santa Fe's Canyon Road, and 24 hours of Spanish food.