LETTER FROM THE SOUTHWEST
STEINER, STAN
LETTER FROM THE SOUTHWEST STAN STEINER Santa Fe On the night, at least I think it was night, that I finally escaped from New York under the shadow of the smog to the clear skies of New Mexico,...
...He seemed insulted by the laughter that shook the old courthouse...
...It's because of the millions of dollars these real estate people from the East are tossing around for land you couldn't drive a jeep over...
...Some people who say the city is dying "actually are leaving New York," he said, "and I say to hell with them...
...Despite the real estate developers, my New Mexico of mountains and clear skies is still here...
...One day in New York I tried saying "Good Morning" to a stranger...
...The mountains look down upon the puny neon signs on the highways, with a tolerance mute and profound...
...See," chortled a realtor...
...And so, I left the most provincial city in the country blessed by the warm feelings of friendliness for which it is so well known...
...Here, if people leave a supermarket without at least a ten minute conversation with the checkout clerk, they are put down as newcomers, boorish city people who have no culture...
...It's vanished," I smiled back...
...He winked: "I hear of turning water to wine...
...It was a mirage...
...Last month it rained...
...In the autumn evening the pensive haze over the adobe houses came from the pinon logs burning in the fireplace, or so I thought...
...But one man...
...On my flight westward I longingly looked out of the airplane window for a fond glimpse of America...
...It rained so hard in the deserts—it was our "rainy season" of three weeks— that the dry washes became raging rivers for a few minutes...
...I guess we just lost America," I said to the gentle old lady in the seat beside me, a grandmotherly woman who was on a visit to a newborn grandchild...
...I thought of Noah...
...And in the arid deserts west of Albuquerque the ingenious American Petroleum (AMREP) was selling and reselling and reselling its 80,000 acres of mostly waterless plots on the old King family ranch (the King is Bruce, who is governor of New Mexico...
...The gracious, Spanish-style Alvarado Hotel, a relic of D. H. Lawrence's day, was a parking lot...
...The historic highway, old 66, rode out of the mountains and across the flats into the whoring and railroading town of Albuquerque...
...On the east there is a mountain of twelve or so thousand feet...
...Like gardens...
...In those days Tucson, like Albuquerque, was so small the city line had to be extended to Ajo, halfway across the state, to qualify for municipal funds under a Federal program...
...It's fogged in...
...On the not quite arid slopes of the Sangre de Cristo —the Blood of Christ—Mountains, up around the Colorado line, the staid Forbes magazine of Wall Street was offering ranch sites so isolated that "a rising column of smoke from a cowhand's breakfast fire could be your first sign of human activity...
...Old 66 had literally become a Sunset Strip...
...Under the portal of the Governor's Palace, the Pueblo Indian women sit with their shawls spread with jewelry for the turistas...
...in die pornographic movies that had replaced the Indian curio shops as the town's main tourist attraction...
...One wall of flood water washed fifty-odd cars of the Santa Fe train right off the tracks in those brief moments...
...Coming home to Santa Fe after two years of exile in New York, I was reassured to see that our town was still visible from the highway...
...What can a guy do...
...Nothing has changed...
...On any ordinary evening the sunset is so brilliant it would stop the traffic dead on any city street...
...she smiled kindly...
...The scandal lasted nearly a whole week before a city official was caught acting as insurance agent for the electric power company...
...America," I said...
...The latter-day O. Henry of urban ills, Pete Hamill, whose gift is the grace with which he can turn misery into nostalgia, penned his epistle of good riddance in "Notes of a New York Nationalist" for New York magazine...
...An old Chicano farmer, his face as lined as dried mud, turned around...
...Or was it Indiana...
...Our adobe stands stoically on the hills, beneath the mountains...
...So many came seeking the clearer skies of New Mexico that for several days last spring the entire valley was smogged-in by an eye-burning, throat-choking air inversion...
...It was impossible to see through the clouds of smog that seemed to cover all the land...
...People nod to each other, with courtesy...
...Oh, really...
...Ranchers, local realtors, ecology freaks, and the elder statesmen of town all protested there wasn't enough water on his company's land to sink a lizard...
...But, I never hear of turning dollars into water before...
...Stan Steiner is the author of "La Raza," a study of Mexican Americans, and is co-editor of "Aztlan," an anthology of Mexican-American literature...
...said his honor...
...had she lost something...
...LETTER FROM THE SOUTHWEST STAN STEINER Santa Fe On the night, at least I think it was night, that I finally escaped from New York under the shadow of the smog to the clear skies of New Mexico, there were no fanfares of farewell...
...The new subdivided citizenry promptly defeated it...
...America is some other place, out there, about which, I have finally decided, I know very little," wrote Hamill, "and which frankly terrifies me...
...These little fellows are becoming big thieves," an old time rancher friend said to me...
...Lining the old highway, mile on mile, were plastic taco and pizza stands, gas stations, and neon signs offering Go-Go cowgirls, who awaited the tired tourists, "topless" (without heads...
...Yet, this desert land is still a place of eternities...
...It hasn't become sooted, or decayed, since we left it, as though content with the pinons and wild purple asters and mountain bluejays that have watched over it for us...
...He eyed me with shock, then suspicion, and I hurried away feeling embarrassed for him, fearing he was about to call the police...
...And maybe, wine to water...
...Except for myself, no one cheered...
...give up his business just because he works for the city...
...They seem to have time to be polite...
...On the plaza in Santa Fe the old Hispanos sit on their benches, and the young Chicanos sit on their benches, smiling at the newcomers who rush about "buying up the desert" and getting heart attacks, in those tired hearts they brought with them from the cities to this clear, thin, light-hearted mountain air...
...Wherever the desert has been paved with cement, the winds blow the sand over it, like a mourning veil...
...That was the first, and last, time I did that in New York...
...And you people said there was no water...
...Down by the tracks of the Santa Fe, on 1st Street, the dirty and homey cowhand hotels above the saloons, where a traveler could satisfy his various thirsts, had been torn down...
...The winter wheat is taller than I thought it would be in the hard, dry soil...
...Even of wisdom...
...There was "no conflict of interest," the mayor thought...
...AMREP doesn't guarantee water, just "peace of mind" and a "pro golf course...
...Hamill was angered, it seemed, not because the "snotty, self-aggrandizing, faintly racist" traitors to city life, like myself, loved the city less than he, but because he feared America more...
...And so, I have come home...
...Just south of town the uninhabited San Cristobal Grant—all 25,000 acres of yucca and cactus—had been bought up by City Investment Company of New York...
...One ambitious fellow set the record, so far—he hit nineteen dry, or near dry, wells, out of twenty-two tries...
...Were we over Ohio...
...In nostalgia for their "clearest sky in the country," the City Fathers called for a bond issue to finance an auto exhaust "emission inspection" program...
...Albuquerque now is a city of air conditioned suburbs inhabited by 300,000 refugees from the smog-bound East...
...The screams of the addicts and the drunks no longer ring in my ears...
...A rancher just north of town, where a subdivision is planned, was caught wangling the rights to 3,000 water meters out of the Public Service Company of New Mexico, on land where there aren't that many cows...
...he was planning a subdivision for 12,000 dry people...
...That's too bad," she said with a sympathetic nod, and, comforted that the loss was mine, not hers, the old lady went on reading the copy of Playboy the stewardess had given her...
...But in reality it was the dust of the bulldozers that were leveling the pinons for subdivisions of the deserts to the north, south, and west of town...
...That was just twenty years ago...
...Not likely, for a cow couldn't get herself a breakfast of weeds on those barren slopes...
...By the time the flight reached Kansas City, where a stop was scheduled, no one was surprised to hear the pilot's laughter on the intercom: "Folks, we just can't seem to find Kansas City...
...There is hardly a dry water hole left in New Mexico that some subdivider hasn't sunk his dry well into...
...Once, I remember, anyone could ride a horse into downtown Phoenix and hardly touch a hoof to cement...
...They too smile as though they knew a secret, or a joke, too old to tell...
...But that's all...
...From the sky it had seemed as bright-earthed as the surface of the sun...
...No one has tried to bulldoze that—yet...
...On the streets the old timers say "Good Morning" to strangers...
...At first, the quiet at night was shocking after the war cries of the city's police sirens...
...All this reminded me of a meeting in the county courthouse a few years ago, where a lawyer for AMREP, wearing one of those shiny, gold-flecked, sharkskin suits Eastern lawyers like to wear to impress the country folk, was requesting permission to build El Dorado—no less...
...The cow town was bullish, or piggish...
...He landed in a cornfield, on an unfinished runway, thirty miles out of town...
...But I could not find it...
...Our mayor, who used to run the Fiesta, just shrugged...
...The horned toads look bloated after the summer's rains...
...What has...
...Was New Mexico still there...
...She frowned, somewhat disturbed by the serious turn our conversation had taken...
...And the sun burns with a vengeance, turning the air conditioned citizens into influenza addicts, or sun-worshipers...
...But the town was gone...
...Or Missouri...
...for what purpose, God knows...
...Here and there a dog barks at the moon...
...On the deserts what had looked like dry washes and arroyos turned out to be the cemented streets of the new subdivisions...
...We have $10,000,000 to make sure there is water," said the lawyer...
Vol. 36 • December 1972 • No. 12
