Two Anecdotes from Santa Fe

This is between Los Alamos and Jemez Springs. From this highway, the deer down on the valley floor look like ants, but with four legs.

The best place in the world to recover from a hangover is not too far from Santa Fe. You drive through Los Alamos, then a winding drive up into the Jemez Mountains, park, and then hike up further past the first natural hot springs that everyone goes to, and keep going on up the side of the mountain until you come to the second hot spring that nobody goes to. You have your book, you have your dog, you have your solitude, you strip down and slide into the clear, warm water…ahhh…this is what it must have been like to be a Native American.

So there I was, one day, not long after my epiphany, sitting serene and alone in my hot spring, head pounding, when I noticed, far below, a visitor making his way up the side of the mountain in my direction. As the climber drew nearer I could see he was Native American. Okay, so, I was going to have a chance to test drive my new world view in the real world. Eventually, the interloper arrived at the edge of the pool looking a bit nonplussed to find it occupied. Nevertheless, he got in and we exchanged pleasantries.

The second hot springs at about 8,000 feet (2,400 meters)

He said he was from Jemez Pueblo, a Native American village just down Hwy 4 on the way to Albuquerque.

Wait? I said. Did you say Native American village?

Yes.

We still have Native Americans? Didn’t we kick their ass already? What the hell are they still doing here?

My Native American visitor was dumbstruck—shocked into silence by my unbelievably offensive comment. I was probably the first white person—the first Anglo—he’d ever met who didn’t treat him with something approaching reverence. And, then, to hear me say that?

He just sat there, blinking. So I blinked back. Two naked dudes blinking on a mountain. Kicked our ass? he said finally. I suppose, if you want to call lying and cheating and stealing “kicking ass.”

Give me a break, I snorted. We stole this land fair and square.

More blinking.

But he couldn’t suppress his indignation and a spirited debate broke out between us, each defending his people’s respective history. It felt good to me to defend my people and our history. It felt clean and healthy. And it was interesting listening to him—not Hollywood—tell his people’s story. I actually took a liking to the guy, and I think the feeling was mutual.

What’s your name? I asked him.

David, he said.

<blink><blink> You sat in the desert for a week eating peyote and came up with “David?”

We don’t actually do that, he said. Then he asked me my name.

Dances with Sluts, I said.

Good one, he said. Impassively.

We actually had a great conversation and, when it was getting time to go, he said he was attending some event, somebody’s birthday party or something like that, in Jemez Pueblo that evening and did I want to go? He wanted to introduce me to his friends.

Hmm.. thanks, I said, but I don’t know. More than likely you are all cannibals. Would I be safe?

Yes, you would be safe, Dances with Sluts, he replied. Nobody likes white meat.

Jemez Pueblo

Above Jemez Pueblo. At about 8,000 feet (2400 m), aspens take over from the conifers. Did you know aspens aren’t trees? Each individual aspen you see in the picture above is part of a “clone,” a single organism that exists primarily underground. The largest and oldest known clone of aspens is in Utah near the colorfully named, “Fish Lake,” about 333 miles (536 km) northwest of my little hangover hot spot. It’s also the oldest and heaviest known living organism in the world. It is an estimated 80,000+ years old—meaning it began its life in that spot hundreds of centuries—hundreds of centuries—before the first humans arrived at this part of the planet. And it has an estimated weight of 6,600 tons, i.e., more than this. Tree or not, they have leaves that turn a vivid gold in the autumn. Like God’s answer to cathedrals. Like what a dog looks like to a flea—particularly if it’s a golden retriever.

Here’s my second Santa Fe/Indian story: I was driving down the street in Santa Fe one day when I saw a young native kid about 12 or 13 years old come suddenly dashing out of a market. He hopped on a bike that was leaning against the wall, and started pedaling furiously away. A few seconds later, a white kid about the same age also came running out, yelling after the first kid, hey, that’s my bike. But it was too late. The thief had made a clean get-away.

I told the white kid to hop in the back of my pickup and hold on. We gave chase through the narrow adobe-lined streets of Santa Fe’s Agua Fria neighborhood. The little thief gave me a run for my money, but, finally, all the way over by the state capitol building, I was able to block his path. I jumped out and grabbed him by his arm just as he threw down the bike and tried to escape on foot. The kid whose bike it was picked it up.

Okay, what do you want to do? I asked the white kid. Press charges or just get your bike back and let him go?

But before he could answer, we heard a woman shrieking, Let him go! Let him go! We all three turned and watched an agitated fifty-ish white woman come rushing toward us from across the street. Winded and glaring at me in a fury as she came up, she said, with enormous feeling: we are trying… to get along… with these people!

More blinking.

I turned back to the white kid.

“I just want my bike back,” he mumbled, looking at the ground. He got on his bike and pedaled away. I released the Indian boy, who scampered off in the other direction, and, without a word, I drove away, leaving the white woman standing there to bask in the glory of the blow she’d just delivered on behalf of social justice for the Native Americans. But she’ll never receive an invitation to Jemez Pueblo.

That woman and I are from the same culture. We speak the same language. We share the same history. Yet we might as well be from different planets, so alien are we to each other. I can’t even imagine the series of thoughts I would have to traverse that would lead me to scream at a stranger on the street that we were trying to get along with the Indians. And, I’m sure she couldn’t imagine asking an Indian why we even still have Indians. The woman and I might be contemporaries and natives of the same country, but we are mutually incomprehensible.

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