It was a Monday. I woke up earlier than usual, far earlier. I was eating my eggs and toast by six o’clock and waiting patiently for my friend Zach by the time the clock read 6:15. We were driving to New Mexico.
When Zach finally arrived, I piled into his Subaru with bags of snacks and a deep desire to get the hell out of town. The purpose of our trip (all the way to Taos, NM) was to purchase a specific kind of whitewater canoe. I know nothing about canoes, but I decided to come along to keep him company, see what there was to see.
On the way out of town, coffee in our hands, death reared its head. Driving along highway 160 two deer sprinted across the road in rush hour traffic no more than fifty feet away. I could see the whites of their eyes as they dashed through six lanes of traffic, fear evident in the speed they carried. The first one made it across almost by accident, but the second (only feet behind) was dashed against the bumper of a ram truck in the oncoming lane. We were showered with broken plastic as the poor thing flailed, no doubt confused by the pain and the force it had encountered. It spasmed in the middle of the highway until we rounded the curve, the car silent with the shock we shared, the image of flailing broken animals burning behind our eyes. On down the road we went.
We listened to the same songs we always listened to, Tyler Childers belting out of failing speakers down the highway to Pagosa. Then through Chama and out of the ponderosa groves and into the glowing ferns and rushing wind of high summer in the aspen forests. Taos approached us slowly at first, then all at once in the form of painted buses and earthen homes, desert expanding in all directions. Three hours in, the road to the Rio Grande curved over the edge of a steep volcanic canyon and on down to the heat of empty tarmac and sporadic dusty shade of the boatyard, our destination.
Zach and I had been there before, and the canyon had certainly changed. The heat was incredible, amplified by the hot dusty winds of the dark basalt walls. Zach and were soon greeted by Pierce, a career raft guide with a canoe to sell. While they did their business, I explored the boatyard. Parked in the middle of the New Mexico desert, the place was choked with fine dust and clay, the dirt lot interrupted only by the quintessential painted buses that marked proximity to Taos, the place where all good buses go to die. I overheard Zach and Pierce discuss the heat and the low water, how guides were making less and less with each coming year. Amid the haggling and banter, I noticed a field of tarp and plywood shelters in the sage behind the lot. The blue and white plastic harsh against the clay earth with sporadic flags and tapestrys hanging in the limp wind. One flag read “welcome to weed : population 420”. I realized that this was the free housing pierce had mentioned. It was supposed to be a good deal, but some part of me doubted that.
Boat purchased, we puttered up the rutted dirt road to the rim of the canyon, stopping to adjust our load and watch the mountain goats. They bleated loudly over the river, multicolored mountains rising in the distance. I wondered briefly if every stereotype about New Mexico was true.
Children are taught to hope until they are taught otherwise. The last time I had seen the canyon of the Rio Grande I was 14, still a child, and I vividly remember the smell of spring and the tug of bats nipping at my fly as I cast for trout above the river. I was full of hope! I saw the world as a great teeming expanse, an opportunity at every door. And here I was, only 22 and wondering where all that went. The sullen state of the river and my pessimistic grimace at the heat and dust made me wonder: where did that hope die in me? Does everyone feel this way in New Mexico?
I knew that Zach wondered the same thing. We grew up together and saw our respective highs and lows. We’re both smart enough to know that the world isn’t perfect and that there isn’t always a reason for hope. Students of science, we knew all to well that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world. The weather is changing, the water is disappearing, and the animals are vanishing from the landscape. We see it with our own eyes, out exploring the mountains and rivers. It’s hard to acknowledge what all of this means. Leaving the canyon, a monsoon cloud began to build over the peaks, tall and intimidating.
As scientists, Zach and I both find a trace of magic in the rules that govern the universe, a maintained bafflement at the haphazard organization of matter and energy. We stopped in awe to watch the clouds grow. New Mexico is strange for many reasons. In my opinion, the most noticeable is the scale of things. The valleys are wide and long, flat plains that expand into endlessness which almost gives you a glimpse of the curve of the earth. The mountains are unexpectedly large but also far smaller than one would think, passing in and out of focus through the lens of a sage stained sky. It reminds one of the strangeness of being, the precarious nature of living on a planet, of seeing that atmosphere as the thin lens it truly is. When you finally understand how rare life truly is and see the fine balance that allows it to thrive, the prospect of disaster becomes much more horrifying.
As the clouds grew higher, we made our way to a rest stop after deciding (in a bath of our own sweat) to get ice cream. It was hot and blustery, dust rising from the roads at the front of the storm. It felt wrong; it was too hot and too wild. Zach and I wondered if another generation had ever noticed the weather change like this in their own lifetimes. We looked for examples in history: the Younger Dryas in North America, the little ice age in Europe, the eruption of the Toba volcano and on down the list. I began to realize that our feelings were likely not as unique as we thought they were, and others had probably felt the same throughout time. After leaving the canyon rim, we finally arrived at the rest stop by a bridge outside Taos. Conveniently, there was an ice cream truck in the parking lot in the form of yet another painted school bus. As we ordered, I couldn’t hope but notice how different the people looked, each one draped in bright cloth and sporting matted dreads tangled with colorful yarn and beads. I felt like I was on the set of a queer Mad Max film, as though the apocalypse I was so worried about had already occurred.
Ice cream in hand, we wound our way through crowds of obese bikers and made our way to the bridge. Spanning across the Rio Grande, the shade of the storm made the gap wider, the fall longer than it seemed at first. The dirty sidewalk sprouted waist high fences of cracked paint and graffiti, overlooks spaced evenly with complementary suicide hotlines bolted to the concrete. Looking out over the river, I noticed the thin white line of last years’ high water mark, showing the depressing state of the Rio Grande. Almost in response to this, the railing was covered in messages of hope, scotch taped bible verses fluttering in the dusty wind amid the cold dusk of the sage plain. This bridge was a destination for would be jumpers, known throughout the region as a good way to off yourself. I wondered absently if the messages on the railing worked better than building a taller fence. I was not in the most cheerful mood. I was thinking about the future, the magnitude of the events to come. The future was not going to be a pretty place.
as we turned away from the bridge a piece of graffiti caught my eye. Written in blue house paint, it had a simple message: Time Was Here. I stopped and thought about that. All this, the canyon, the roads, the weather, It was all a product of time. Proof that it had come and gone. Much of it, I thought, was also a produst of catastrophe. The road wouldn’t be there if the area hadn’t been colonized, and to the people of Taos six hundred years ago, that certainly must have felt like the end of the world. I thought about birds and how without an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, they wouldn’t be the same. Without that, we wouldn’t even exist. It is so easy, I thought, to view any change as a disaster even when is has the capacity for creation.
As humans, we tend to think the world is always ending. Every decade or generation believes itself to be the witness of the end times. I believe I am as well, and as I watched to first wave of rain over the bridge I saw that I was just as right as I was wrong. Time was here, and it reminded me to balance the whole equation, to see the other side. The world is always ending, but it is also always beginning again. Walking back to the car, I thought not of catastrophe or impending doom but of the birth a new world, the reality of a changing species on a changing planet. The future will be strange, like dreadlocks and painted buses, but it will also be new. It will not be dying. It will simply be different than before.
New Mexico is like death. Not because it is dying or horrific in any way, but because it is so different, like a world rebuilt after catastrophe. In that way it is also like birth, the terrifying reality of a world newer and stranger than anything before. Driving home, we heard the magnificent sound of a storms’ first thunder, pulling the soaring ravens and vultures higher into the air. Behind us, the accumulation of days of sunlight on the earth coalesced, Darkening the skies of Taos and washing the dust off the roads. We opened the windows and the smell of rain pulsed in with a blessed cold we could only hope for an hour ago. The darkness brightened the greens and blues of the sagebrush and thickened the electric greens of the aspen forest in the highlands. The rain washed over the highway in a frenzy and left the tarmac to dry, renewed and near glowing from the heat of the sun. The world looked relieved; This change was good.