In famously beautiful places, character is destiny, scenery is collateral and big business is kept well down the road.
Santa Fe’s skies are so wide, its adobe so pervasive, its badlands so alien and its altitude so giddy that visitors don’t know whether they have been beamed up to heaven, pulled into the frontier past, or inducted into a gated community on Mars.
The first Christmas I spent in Santa Fe, I felt I was trespassing on another era. Every street appeared to be a winding lane, every hotel a thick-walled inn emphatic with blazing fires, every store a trove of American history. Once I moved there, I realized that all this décor wasn’t seasonal disguise but protective camouflage. A town has to eat. If its sole advantage is the way it looks, so be it. Great beauty has the power to suggest the potential for a higher grade of happiness. Santa Fe’s mission is to keep alive the thrill of trespass, the otherness. Hence the cringe-inducing moniker, the City Different, in the state known as the Land of Enchantment. Curiously, the overused tropes of Santa Fe style have not yet eroded its power to charm and disorient.
The photographer Caterine Milinaire, who discovered Santa Fe in her hippie days, and whose mother and stepfather moved there after she left, used to describe the three cultures as a layer cake: first the Pueblos, in situ for over a thousand years, the only Indians who ever rose up against the conquistadors and ejected them (in 1680, for a scant 12 years); then the Hispanics, descendants of said conquistadors, who have been here for four centuries, and still run the town; and last, the icing: the Anglos, neither Indian nor Hispanic, and thus WASP’s, East Indians, Russians, French, refugees from communes or oppressive dynasties, early retirees with compact nest eggs or cyber fortunes, or adventurers who subsist on a patchwork of small, weird jobs. Whether they are scraping by or dawdling in their second or third homes, all the Anglos have felt the call of the crouched house under the big sky and each of them has a secret gift, a talent they want to explore, a family they want to avoid, a thirst for endless time. Which in the case of Santa Fe often extends back to previous lives.
"Northern New Mexico is the place I’ve been looking for all my life, and now I’m here," says Shirley MacLaine. She’s the new legend, the movie star turned galactic explorer and author of New Age tales, superseding Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter who forsook Stieglitz and New York glitz to go into the desert alone and discover the secret of flowers. There are spontaneous conversions here, blinding rays of light, a sudden sense of peace. Healers will tell you that the Indians never actually lived on the land that is Santa Fe, because it is built on a giant crystal with emanations too powerful to be borne on a daily basis. A breakfast waitress at La Posada told me she’d come to Santa Fe to go through her menopause because "it’s got the right energy." I forget if it was masculine or feminine.
La Posada itself is haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Staab, who lived there with her bad trader husband. She lurks in Room 101 and wreaks havoc on Mother’s Day. Relations between Jews and Catholics have always been cordial in Santa Fe: Bishop Lamy raised the money to finish his Saint Francis Cathedral from the pioneer merchant Seligman family. It’s widely believed that he thanked them by inserting the Hebrew name of God in the arch above its door, violating certain Jewish rules about the name of God.
On the temporal side, there’s Godfrey Reggio, who came as a teaching monk, showed his charges movies, left the church and became America’s foremost maker of abstract films — the prizewinning trilogy of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi.
The tales of illumination mix with tales of real estate. There’s the Himalayan prince who sells houses, and prodigal son Tom Ford, whose planned hilltop house spawned a fever of egalitarian rage in the neighborhood. You also hear about the art dealer who downsized right into a double-wide trailer.
I confess I first saw Santa Fe from the back of a Winnebago with Marjoe Gortner, a child evangelist who denounced the Pentecostal movement’s scams in a 1972 documentary and became an actor. He was starring in a western called Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw. I drank my first margarita and bought my first turquoise and my first Navajo rug in the hope that they were passes to a deeper truth. This touching belief endured from my youth to the day I decided to buy a house here, which would, I assumed, make me more real than I felt. I didn’t know what small town meant, and had no idea what life would be like in a small town where everyone has a hotline to their own idea of God who takes many shapes. At Indian Market a few years ago, I watched a heavy young Anglo lean in to one of the Indian exhibitors and ask, "Is there a sweat lodge I can get into around here?" The Indian, who came from South Dakota, grazed him with his eyes as he looked way, way past him. There are strange cairns on the sides of trails on Atalaya Hill, left by the Indian trail builders, or by the hippie trail designers, or by pilgrims making their own stupas in supplication or thanks.
Sometimes I think everyone is stoned: the girl in the post office who twice counts out four sheets of stamps as "two, four, six, eight" and then looks up, confounded to see only four sheets in front of her. One day, someone helping me with chores was suddenly in a cloud of weed. "Can you work when you’re high?" I asked as gently as I could. The answer: "Are you kidding me?" You’re at a counter and you say to the guy behind it, "Hi." "Wish I was," he says back. You try to buy some moccasins: "Excuse me, moccasins? You know, the shoes you’re selling here? Are there "sizes?" It’s not always funny: last fall, a missing flash drive from a classified computer at Los Alamos Laboratories, 35 miles north of Santa Fe, was found in a methamphetamine lab in a trailer home. At Los Alamos, where they still make bombs, the University of California management has turned into a consortium that includes Bechtel and BWX Technologies, the "premier manager of complex, high-consequence nuclear and national security operations." Checkpoints have been installed.
Santa Fe’s main staple is not the taco, the tortilla, or the vegan veggie wrap. It’s cappuccino. In a place where time is free, taking a break breaks up the idleness. There’s Ecco, on Marcy Street, which makes its own gelati, and Meridian, across the street from the Inn at Loretto. At Downtown Subscription, on Acequia Madre in the old East Side, racks of magazines allow you to take a break from the break you’re taking by looking at Pequod, US Weekly, or a 10-day-old London Sunday Times. Next to you there will be a couple planning a new incarnation with their architect, unrolling plans over the tiny plastic table, talking window treatments, Jacuzzis and Historic Design Review Board stipulations. No swimming pools: water is a problem. There will be twentysomethings journaling on the orders of their rehab counselors, older screenwriters huddling over grievances, divorcées who’ve just blown off yoga class. I’ve heard one man reassure another about a past-life regression: "I’m sure your death wasn’t that bad." I’ve heard women discussing the men in this town. Appalled: "Why do they all have ponytails...and white hair?" Optimistic: "He’s such a hot Sufi."
Some say it’s the only town in the world where Mercury is always in retrograde. Visitors in Santa Fe wonder what the locals do. Unless they are the Nobel Prize winners (such as Murray Gell-Man, the father of quarks), corralled at the Santa Fe Institute, they write novels, plays, operas, oratorios, they paint, sculpt, take photographs, all of which they might, in a regrettable but absolutely sincere moment, describe as exploring their creative side.
Bill Richardson runs the state from the capitol, a round building with an old adobe compound tucked behind it on a street that has no name. Legislators, mostly men with fine old Hispanic names, do their business; everyone else is in retail, hospitality or on a permanent vacation from their lives. And to relieve the tedium of facing up to their demons and setting off on their true path, they do exactly what the visitors do: they go shopping.
For visitors, some object must be found to stand in for the magic place long after one has left. For locals, there’s always something new to gaze at, sit on, eat from, or just nail to the wall. For retail shops, it’s payday. At Pak Mail, on Montezuma Avenue, they know just how to wrap anything for shipping: the pesky turkey feathers on a kachina; a temple figure from the ancient Orient; a $500 screen from the resale shop that needs a $900 restoration job, in Oregon.
Shopping in Santa Fe falls into two seasons: Indian Market and the rest of the year. To start with the rest of the year, and go by the layers: at the historic base, you find Indians in folding chairs under the portal of the Palace of the Governors in the Plaza, selling their handmade jewelry in the same spots where their ancestors in 1851 sold "fine venison, wild turkeys and now and then the carcass of a very large bear," according to a contemporary observer. Jonette Sam, from Picuris Pueblo, does sell delicious cuts of buffalo at the farmers’ market in the summer, but airlines don’t like you traveling with raw meat. The jewelry is easier. Made according to traditional norms in neighboring Zuni and Hopi pueblos or on Navajo land over in the Four Corners, it’s displayed on acrylic blankets on the ground. Tourists gaze on the sellers with reverence, kneel to peer at bracelets, necklaces, earrings, barrettes and little silver bookmarks. Some days, if I’m not doing it myself, the kneeling strikes me as an apology.
Packard’s and Ortega’s, on opposite sides of the Plaza, sell the best contemporary Indian jewelry, and at Nathalie, on Canyon Road, a former accessories editor of Paris Vogue, Nathalie Kent, has imposed cut and proportion on everything from horsehair belts to fringed suede skirts. She sells remarkable cowboy boots that lace up, broom skirts, fur toques and bracelets by Marcus Amerman, who will reproduce a photo in beads.
