Arkansas Democrat Gazette columnist Mike Masterson's ode to all that makes Santa Fe sing.
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Somewhere along Interstate 40, in the scalding Texas panhandle west of Amarillo, I caught my first glimpse of New Mexico.
Officially, I was still in Texas. But I topped a hill at 70 miles an hour and—for the first time in 500 miles—caught sight of that uniquely reddish cast to the soil and a small mesa or two that, for me, says New Mexico.
The memories from 50 years ago in Albuquerque came pouring back as I sped on. After spending eight years of my youth, including a high school diploma from Highland High School in 1965 and two years taking up space at the University of New Mexico, this state and its people clearly had settled forever into the cells that make up a me.
During that period, Albuquerque's population was just over 200,000, or about a one-third of what it reports today.
At the university, most male students my age were concerned more with being drafted into the Vietnam War than maintaining a grade point.
One class was Journalism 101 with the late Tony Hillerman, the former Santa Fe New Mexican reporter, war hero and a man who later would write 18 best-selling detective novels about crime on the Indian reservations of the Southwest.
My most vivid memory of this dry, yet friendly man was of him pacing and chain-smoking at the front of our classroom as he explained how to create lede paragraphs and transitions and such.
He always seemed a little uncomfortable in that room. Perhaps I could sense that, even well before his authoring star rose so brightly, he'd vastly preferred to have been back in front of a Royal typewriter with that cigarette loosely hanging from his lips, banging out what would become another of what would one day be one of his 30 published novels.
It's a certainty that he lit the spark of my curiosity of this craft and its role in a democratic republic. It must have mattered because here I was passing yet another Freightliner with him still on my mind after my own 42 year career as a journalist.
With Santa Rosa and its "safety zone" in the windshield, my thoughts turned to friends from those years, including fresh-faced Gary Markland who would die in Vietnam when the helicopter he piloted was shot down.
There was something about the combination of dry air and the spectacle of all this pastel sky peppered with cotton balls stretching from horizon to horizon that caused me to feel so alive in those years in this land of enchantments. The sight of the towering Sandias watching over this town was comforting.
In fact, I'd say part of the wonder of this state is that when I look into the sky from border to border, it's as if the ocean has been transposed with the earth and I'm staring into a swirling blue sea laced with whitecaps.
Weekends in 1965 usually meant endless cycles between Frank's, Vips Big Boy and Macs to see and be seen, mostly by the girls who were in their own cars doing the same thing. And I vividly recall the afternoon while changing classes that I heard shrieks and crying and learned President John F Kennedy had been killed.
Later, after graduation, I remembered taking on the challenges of collecting for the CIT Finance Company. In that unenviable role, I was assigned to repossess vehicles from the state's Indian reservations. I lasted three months, realizing this wasn't for me after one repossession assignment led me to the Taos pueblo where a downcast Native American woman answered the door grasping a watered-down bottle of milk with three small children desperately clinging to her.
In those days, Santa Fe, nestled between the Jemez and Sangre De Cristo mountains, was best known to us 18-year-olds as a hippie retreat where we could sometimes make the drive 90-minute to entertain our dates in coffee houses scattered around the Plaza.
I made the turn onto Highway 285 at Clines Corners for the final 45-minute stretch of asphalt into Santa Fe, which has since exploded in its own population while blossoming into an international arts and entertainment destination. Hollywood and accomplished artists discovered—and reshaped—the community into a city of multiple creativities.
Slowly, I felt the tension from the long drive finally beginning to ease in my shoulders. The big trucks and tailgaters were gone. The space ahead was wide open and quiet, which only sparked more memories.
This latest visit was clearly stirring the deeper natures of my spirit and the myriad recollections that have waited amongst these mesas and mountains. I suspect that in ways I don't pretend to understand, they realized all along that one day I'd return to resurrect the very best of them.
Mike Masterson is the Northwest Opinion Editor and a staff columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
