The Lost Continent (31 page)

I decided to drive on to Cripple Creek for lunch, and then wished I hadn’t. Cripple Creek stands in the shadows of Mount Pisgah and Pikes Peak and was far more touristy than Victor. Most of the stores were open, though they weren’t doing much business. I parked on the main street in front of the Sarsaparilla Saloon and had a look around. Architecturally, Cripple Creek was much the same as Victor, but here the businesses were almost all geared to tourists: gift shops, snack bars, ice cream parlors, a place where children could pan for gold in an artificial creek, a miniature golf course. It was pretty awful, and made worse by the bleakening weather. Flurries of snow were still swirling about. It was cold and the air was thin. Cripple Creek is nearly two miles up. At that altitude, if you’re not used to it, you feel uncomfortably breathless a lot of the time and vaguely unwell all of the time. Certainly the last thing I wanted was an ice cream or a game of miniature golf, so I returned to the car and pressed on.

At the junction of US 24, I turned left and headed west. Here the weather was superb. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Out of the west, a flotilla of clouds sailed in, fluffy and benign, skimming the peaks. The highway was of pink asphalt; it was like driving along a strip of bubblegum. The road led up and over the Wilkerson Pass and then down into a long valley of rolling meadows with glittering streams and log cabins set against a backdrop of muscular mountains. It looked like a scene out of a deodorant commercial. It was glorious, and I had it almost all to myself. Near Buena Vista the land dramatically dropped away to reveal a plain and beyond it the majestic Collegiate Peaks, the highest range in the United States, with 16 peaks over 14,000 feet along a stretch of 30 miles. I fell with the highway down the mountainside and crossed the plain towards the Collegiate range, tall and blue and snow-peaked. It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie.

I had intended to make for Aspen, but at the turning at Twin Lakes I found a white barrier barring the way and a sign saying that the highway to Aspen over Independence Pass was closed because of snow. Aspen was just 20 miles away down the closed road, but to reach it by the alternative northern route would have required a detour of 150 miles. Disappointed, I looked for someplace else to go for the night and drove on to Leadville, a place about which I knew nothing and indeed had never even heard of.

Leadville was outstanding. The outskirts of the town were ragged and shabby—there’s a surprising amount of poverty in Colorado—but the main street was broad and lined with sturdy Victorian buildings, many of them with turrets and towers. Leadville was another gold-and-silver-mining town; it was here that the Unsinkable Molly Brown got her start, as did Meyer Guggenheim. Like Cripple Creek and Victor, it now catered to tourists—every place in the Rockies caters to tourists—but it had a much more genuine feel to it. Its population was 4,000, enough to give it an independent life apart from what the tourists brought it.

I got a room in the Timberline Motel, had a stroll around the town and a creditable meal at the Golden Burro Cafe—not the greatest food in the world, or even possibly in Leadville, but at six dollars for soup, salad, chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, coffee and pie, who’s bitching?—followed by a moonlight stroll back to the motel, a hot shower and a little TV. If only life could always be so simple and serene. I was asleep by ten, dreaming happy dreams in which I manfully dealt with pouncing bobcats, swaying wooden bridges and windshields full of sticky insects. The heroine even let me see her with her clothes off. It was a night to remember.

22

I
n the morning, the weatherman on the TV said that a “frunnal system” was about to dump many inches of snow on the Rockies. This seemed to please him a lot. You could see it in his twinkling eyes. His map showed a band of unpleasantness sitting like a curse over almost the whole of the West. Roads would be shut, he said, a hint of grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, and travel advisories would be issued. Why are television weathermen always so malicious? Even when they are trying to be sincere, you can see that it’s a front—that just under the surface there lurks a person who spent his childhood pulling the wings off insects and snickering whenever another child fell under the wheels of a passing vehicle.

Abruptly, I decided to head south for the arid mountains of New Mexico, over which the weather map showed nothing much in particular happening. I had a niece at a small, exclusive college in Santa Fe whom I hadn’t seen for a long time and I was sure she would be delighted for all her friends on campus to witness a slobby, overweight man pull up in a cheap, dusty car, leap out and embrace her, so I decided to drive straight there.

I headed south on US 285, which runs along the line of the Continental Divide. All around me was the most incredible natural beauty, but the landscape was constantly blemished by human intrusions—ugly trailer parks, untidy homesteads, even junkyards. Every town was mostly a collection of fast-food places and gas stations, and all along the road for many miles stood signs the size of barns saying, C
AMPGROUND
, M
OTEL
, R
AFTING
.

The farther south I went the more barren the landscape grew, and after a while the signs disappeared. Beyond Saguache the wide plain between the mountains became a sweep of purple sage, interspersed with dead brown earth. Here and there a field of green had been snatched from the scrub with the aid of massive wheeled water sprinklers. In the middle of these oases would stand a neat farmhouse. But otherwise the landscape between the distant mountain ranges was as featureless as a dried seabed. Between Saguache and Monte Vista lies one of the ten or twelve longest stretches of straight road in America: almost forty miles without a single bend or kink. That may not sound such a lot on paper, but it feels endless on the road. There is nothing like a highway stretching off to an ever-receding vanishing point to make you feel as if you are going nowhere. At Monte Vista, the road takes a left turn—this makes you perk up and grip the wheel—and then there is another twenty-mile stretch as straight as a ruler’s edge. And so it goes. Two or three times in an hour you zip through a dusty little town—a gas station, three houses, one tree, a dog—or encounter a fractional bend in the road which requires you to move the steering wheel an inch to the right or left for two seconds, and that’s your excitement for the hour. The rest of the time you don’t move a muscle. Your buttocks grow numb and begin to feel as if they belong to another person.

In the early afternoon I crossed over into New Mexico—one of the high points of the day—and sighed at the discovery that it was just as unstimulating as Colorado had been. I switched on the radio. I was so far from anywhere that I could pick up only scattered stations, and those were all Spanish-speaking ones playing that kind of
aye-yi-yi
Mexican music that’s always sung by strolling musicians with droopy mustaches and big sombreros in the sort of restaurants where high-school teachers take their wives for their thirtieth wedding anniversaries—the sort of places where they like to set your food alight to impress you. It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer. There would then be a break for an advertisement, read by a man who sounded even more urgent and excited—he clearly was having his nuts repeatedly slammed in a drawer—and then there would be another song. Or rather, it would be the same song again, as far as I could tell. That is the unfortunate thing about Mexican musicians. They seem to know only one tune. This may explain why they have difficulty finding work anywhere other than at second-rate restaurants.

At a hamlet called Tres Piedras—almost every place in New Mexico has a Spanish name—I took Highway 64 to Taos, and things began to improve. The hills grew darker and the sage became denser and lusher. Everyone always talks about the sky around Taos, and it is astonishing. I had never seen a sky so vivid and blue, so liquid. The air in this part of the desert is so clear you can sometimes see 180 miles, or so my guidebook said. In any case, you can certainly see why Taos has always attracted artists and writers—or at least you can until you get to Taos itself. I had expected it to be a sweet little artists’ colony, full of people with smocks and easels, and it was just a tourist trap, with slow-moving traffic and stores selling ugly Indian pottery and big silver belt buckles and postcards. There were a couple of interesting galleries, but mostly it was hot and dusty and full of silver-haired hippies. It was mildly amusing to see that hippies still existed—indeed were now grandparents—but it was scarcely worth the bother of getting there. So I drove on to Santa Fe, fearful that it would be much the same. But it was not. In fact, it was quite beautiful, and I was instantly charmed.

The first nice thing about Santa Fe is that it has trees. It has trees and grass and shade and cool plazas full of flowers and plants and the soothing burble of running water. After days of driving across the barren wastes of the West this is a treat beyond dimension. The air is warm and clean and the reddish Sangre de Cristo mountains at the city’s back are just sensational, especially at sunset when they simply glow, as if lit from within, like jack-o’-lanterns. The town itself is just too rich and pretty for words. It is the oldest continuously inhabited city in America—it was founded in 1610, a decade before the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth—and takes great pride in its age. Everything in Santa Fe, and I mean everything, is made out of adobe. There’s an adobe Woolworth’s, an adobe multistory parking lot, an adobe six-story hotel. When you pass your first adobe gas station and adobe supermarket, you think, “Hey, let’s get out of here,” but then you realize that it isn’t something laid on for the tourists. Adobe is simply the indigenous building material, and using it everywhere gives the town a uniformity of appearance few other places achieve. Besides, Santa Fe is filthy rich, so everything is done tastefully and well.

I drove up into the hills looking for St. John’s College, where my niece was a student. It was four in the afternoon and the streets were full of long shadows. The sun was settling onto the mountains and the adobe houses on every hillside were lit with a rich orange-brown glow. St. John’s is a small college perched high up in the hills, with the finest view in town, looking down over Santa Fe and the rolling mountains beyond. It has only 300 students on its sleepy campus, but my niece, on this fine spring afternoon, was not among them. No one knew where she was, but everyone promised to let her know that a slobby, overweight person with dusty shoes and tropical armpits had come looking for her and would call back in the morning.

I went back into town, got a room, had a deep, hot bath, changed into clean clothes and spent the evening shambling happily around the tranquil streets of downtown Santa Fe, gazing admiringly at the window displays in the expensive galleries and boutiques, savoring the warm evening air, and disconcerting people in the more exclusive restaurants by pressing my face up against the windows and looking critically at their food. The heart of Santa Fe is the Plaza, a Spanish-style square with white benches and a tall obelisk commemorating the battle of Valverde, whatever that was. On the base was an engraved inscription in which
February
had been misspelled as
Febuary;
this pleased me very much. Another pleasing thing about the Plaza was a place on the corner called the Ore House. Downstairs it is a restaurant, but upstairs there is a bar with an open porch where you can sit—where indeed I did sit—for many tranquil hours drinking beers brought to your table by a pleasant waitress with a nice bottom, enjoying the mild evening and watching the stars fill the pale blue desert sky. Through the open door into the bar I could also watch the pianist, a well-groomed young man who played a seemingly endless series of chords and tinkling arpeggios that never really developed into anything you could call a song. But he cruised suavely up and down the keyboard and he had a winning smile and excellent teeth, which I suppose is the main thing in a cocktail bar pianist. Anyway, the ladies clearly liked him.

I don’t know how many beers I had, but—I will be frank here—it was too many. I had not allowed for the fact that in the thin mountain air of Santa Fe you get drunk much faster. In any case, I was surprised to discover as I arose a couple of hours after entering that the relationship between my mind and legs, which was normally quite a good one, had broken down. More than that, my legs now didn’t seem to be getting on at all well with each other. One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, decided to make for the rest room. The result was that I lurched through the bar like a man on stilts, grinning inanely as if to say, “Yes, I know I look like an asshole. Isn’t this amusing?”

En route, I bumped into the table of a party of middle-aged rich people, slopping their drinks, and could only broaden my brainless smile and burble that I was ever so sorry. I patted one of the ladies affectionately on the shoulder with that easy familiarity that overcomes me when I am drunk and used her as a kind of springboard to propel myself towards the stairs, where I smiled a farewell to the room—everyone was by now watching me with interest—and descended the stairs in one fluid motion. I didn’t exactly fall, but then again I didn’t exactly walk down. It was more like surfing on the soles of my shoes, and was, I believe, not unimpressive. But then I often perform my best stunts while intoxicated. Once, many years ago during a party at John Horner’s house, I fell backwards out of an upstairs window and bounced to my feet with an élan that is still widely talked about south of Grand Avenue.

In the morning, chastened with a hangover, I drove back to the campus of St. John’s, found my niece and embarrassed her—possibly even grossed her out—with a hug. We went to breakfast in a fancy restaurant downtown and she told me all about St. John’s and Santa Fe and afterwards showed me the sights of the town: St. Francis’s Cathedral (very beautiful), the Palace of the Governors (very boring, full of documents about territorial governors) and the famous staircase at the Loretto Chapel. This is a wooden staircase that rise 21½ feet in a double spiral up to a choir loft. The remarkable thing about it is that it is not supported by anything except its own weight. It looks as if it ought to fall down. The story is that the nuns of the chapel prayed for someone to build them a staircase and an anonymous carpenter turned up, worked on the staircase for six months and then disappeared without payment as mysteriously as he had arrived. For a hundred years the nuns milked this story for all it was worth, and then one day a few years ago they abruptly sold the chapel to a private company, which now runs it for a profit and charges you fifty cents to get in. This kind of soured me on the place, and it didn’t do a whole lot for my respect for nuns.