Arizona: From cactus to creosote to a casita of my own

Self portrait with cactus.

On my way out of New Mexico, a little sad that I was leaving, I passed through Deming (no need to stop there ever again), then hopped back on I-10, where I was immediately stuck in traffic for an hour. It was a tractor trailer in the median, its black charred skeleton lying on its side, billowing gray smoke for a half mile. It was surrounded by a dozen police SUVs and ambulances. Total loss.

The heat was rising steadily as I made my way into Arizona, hitting coffee shops along the way that didn’t have wifi and were therefore useless. I passed several dust-storm warning signs along the highway. Move off the road. Do not put on your blinkers. Keep your feet off the brakes. Noted. I kind of wanted to see one, in the same way that I want to see a grizzly bear or mountain lion: yes, but maybe no thank you.

It’s always interesting to me how not just the landscape changes as you move from state to state but how the whole energy of a place—an entire state—can feel so different from one to the next. It’s not just the people, not just the land, but an amalgam of all things.

Arizona felt good. Not that direct channel to God that New Mexico seems to provide but a wide-open kind of feeling all the same—vast swaths of land dotted with stucco houses with Italian-style roofing.

What really caught me off guard were the saguaros. They cover entire mountains and grow like trees, like prickly, oddly-shaped, desert trees. I found a campsite at Gilbert Ray Campground, which wasn’t hard. I was the only one tent camping there. In fact, the campground is closed during the summer because it gets so hot. It was 110. "Campground closed for summer," a sign read at the self-registration booth.

Summers and winters are reversed in Arizona, I’d learn. Farmers markets and tourist season in the winter. In the summer, people tend to stay in, where it’s air-conditioned, and get their errands done early morning. A lot of homes have pools, where people swim at night because it's too hot during the day. It would be like taking a hot bath. Night swimming, an Arizona staple and also a great R.E.M. song.

So there I was with my little tent, which I pitched next to a huge saguaro that must've been 150 years old. It stood like a guardian, watching over me that night. Lizards darted between cactuses and rocks. I camped nearby two RVs, the only other campers in the park, because my new rule, established in North Carolina, is that I have to be within screaming distance of another human being each night (my dad was happy about that rule, and I suspect a few others were relieved).

That night, I had a nice, long phone conversation with a best friend from back home who I've known for 20 years. Conversations with him are always long but never feel long. He’s usually drinking when he calls, which he had been ... which put me in the spirit to break out that botanical gin again after having not touched it since my hangover in Austin a couple weeks ago. The gin, like the air, was about 100 degrees, but it helped to dull the anxiety that had crept in once it got dark, when I would say "shhh!" and pull the phone away from my ear every time I heard a noise in the wilderness that might’ve been a wild animal that wanted to attack me. Those worries vanished after a few swigs. Nature, we cool.

When it was about midnight my time, we signed off—him in his Maryland townhome and me in my sleeping bag, headlamp affixed to my head, lantern strung to the top of my tent. I lied down, ready for sleep. Instead, I sweat. I sweat for hours, restless, hot, wishing there was a pool nearby. Or really just any body of water. The expected low that night was 80, and it was probably at that point at 2 or 3 in the morning that I nodded off and got a few hours of rest. I seemed to wake up every hour, hearing coyotes yipping and howling at the big white moon overhead, which was a little farther across the sky above my tent each time I woke up. By morning, I was feeling rough. Dehydrated, dizzy. My head. Dried sweat covering my body.

But it was time to pack up camp and move on, start another day. To Saguaro National Park, to Tucson, to find a historical chapel and an herb store, and to finally make my way up to Scottsdale, to stay with another artist, Linda Harrison-Parsons. I’d met her probably 10 years ago in Maryland when I was an arts editor.

Sometimes, I walk into a guest room (and, once, a hotel) that’s so nice, I want to cry. Arriving at Linda’s house was the epitome of that. She and her husband, Rick, had given me an entire casita to myself—a bedroom, a bathroom, shower, KITCHEN, living room. And they welcomed me there for three nights. What a gift to give someone you met once and barely know. They host a lot of family and friends and have the guestbook to prove it. They're avid travelers themselves, usually by RV, and have scrapbooks of all the places they've been to. I flipped through them one night after Linda made us a big salad and chicken on the grill (too hot to use an oven in the summer). They understand what it's like to be road weary and how precious a bed and shower—just a place to decompress!—can be.

I made the most of my time there, too, working for hours on end to hit deadlines and also unpacking nearly my entire car to reorganize it (the Virgo in me was very fulfilled with both). I was productive. I had to be. Here was my chance! I made tinctures from plants I'd wildcrafted and cooked rice and beans (I brought entirely too much rice and beans with me). I wrote postcards and letters and did laundry and hung it in their backyard. (Everyone hangs their laundry outside to line dry in the southwest. Even the hotels. It was dry in about 20 minutes.)

I also wildcrafted some creosote, i.e., chaparral, on their property, which is the plant that gives desert rain its distinct scent. The desert exudes a fresh, sort of intoxicating aroma from the bush, whose volatile oils are released as the humidity rises. It smells completely different from the pungent, earthy scent of East Coast storms.

Before leaving, I wanted to take them out to dinner as a thank-you, and Rick suggested tacos in Old Town (let it be known, Diego Pops had the best fish tacos in all the lands).

String lights hung over streets filled with shops and restaurants and happy, healthy people. Thriving. Why is the East Coast so heavy and grueling and stressful? The people, the traffic, the air.

Linda and Rick were leaving for their own trip in their teardrop camper, as I headed out for mine on Monday morning, once again in the Arizona heat and heading west, but this time ready for it—with a clear head that wasn't throbbing or running lists or lacking sleep.

Interlude: Silence, speaking, and tears

Camping in view of the mesa where Georgia O'Keeffe's ashes were scattered.

So much silence.

I like being alone. Prefer it, most of the time. I always have. This sort of alone-ness, solo on the road, feels different than the day-to-day alone-ness of living alone and working from home.

There is so much silence, so many days and weeks filled with its lush richness, that I begin to notice how careless and frivolous people are with their words. There can be fun in that, but mostly, I like the quiet.

I’ve noticed there are levels of listening: there’s the music that carries me through the desert—Carla Morrison, the Raveonettes, Bon Iver. There is the sound of nature—winds, chirping, water. And there is silence, muting it all, a silence that sits at the bottom of all of these sounds, where I am alone with myself and quiet enough to hear the voices on that current that runs much deeper than all of this surface noise.

“You’re Zen Lauren now,” a friend told me, 20 minutes into a one-sided conversation about a boy. She’d finally reached her stopping point, the point where she was asking for my advice. I gave it to her in a succinct sentence, not mincing words. She kept going on, rapid-fire sentences strewn together loosely by stream-of-consciousness rambling, flailing around all over the place like the arms of those balloon men you see at roadside car lots. Followed by another short sentence from me. Or silence. At some points, I literally did not have words. There was nothing to say. How do you respond to such airy questions? You respond with air. I didn’t feel like I could energetically engage, couldn’t enter that space where she was because it felt so far-away. I couldn’t enter it emotionally, but even mentally was a challenge, by that point. I’d seen too much, moved through too much, to find common ground on what seemed now like such trivial things. And she didn’t want to hear about what I’d seen or moved through, because the two times we’d talked in the past week, she just launched into her boy problems (which really aren’t problems), and I just held the phone up to my ear. So there I was, doing it again, phone in hand, one of the rare times in my life where I didn’t know what to say other than to just cut right through.

“You’re in a totally different place than me and I feel like you’re just dropping these truth bombs,” she said with a laugh. “You’re blunter than usual, but I appreciate it. Thank you. But just one more thing …”

This is how everyone, including myself, must sound to monks who have been tucked away in the mountains for years taking vows of silence. Most of the time, words are unnecessary. One of my favorite quotes is from Rothko: “Silence is so accurate.”

A few days later, a good friend of mine lost his mother. I called him that night and found that it was easier to speak from my heart. It’s like I’ve been opened.

An experience I’d had earlier that day might’ve had something to do with it. I’d driven through Old Town Albuquerque, this time alone, to stop at an address a guy from back home had given me with these instructions:

In ABQ in the old town … go to 112 Rio Grande Blvd, NW. It may seem wack at first, as it’s someones house turned into a store. These are the works of Roberto Gonzales. He was the “saint maker” of ABQ. You should be offered coffee also, and should accept a small cup to go. It will likely not taste good, but you will be thankful for it. Only purchase a piece of art if moved to do so, but likely a small piece or keychain to help your travels may serve you well. Each piece has a meaning. If a man is working, this is all you get and you should go after no more than 15 minutes. However, if the lady is working, you’d be well to speak to her and perhaps inquire about the works of Roberto Gonzales. Ask her if she’ll say a prayer for you before you go, but only if moved to do so. Could also be a total dud. I’ve left here weeping on some visits and wondering why I bothered to stop after others.

After reading that, how could I not go?

I wandered in, and a woman was working. I said a silent “yes—good—but is that the woman he was referencing?”

She followed me into each room of the house-turned-store, which looked more like an art gallery. Sixteen kids were raised here, she told me. A bit deeper into the maze of rooms, she told me that her name is Dora and that she’d lost her husband, the artist, Roberto Gonzales, the “Saint Maker of Albuquerque,” a year ago. Her face was solemn and heavy. The grief was still there. She was short in stature but possessed a quiet sort of depth, like the ocean—you could sense what was just underneath the surface.

She inquired about my life, and I opened up to her in the most honest way that I could, as I looked through paintings of Saint Michael and Mother Mary and crosses with Roberto’s signature roses and punched-tin work and his prints and his words written in pencil on the backs of some of his paintings. I told her I’m a freelance writer from Maryland, the simplest, most accurate way I could put it, but then I explained why I couldn’t afford the $600 painting that I’d love to buy—that I lost my job in the fall and took the opportunity to write and travel. I told her I was seriously considering moving to New Mexico. She pointed me to a book on her front counter by a woman who was from somewhere like Wisconsin or another forgettable state who fell in love with New Mexico and moved here and started writing books. The one she showed me was about sacred sites in Northern New Mexico, which was curious, as I’d wanted to write a book called “Sacred Sites of America” during this trip but decided against it when I realized it had basically already been written—“Sacred Places North America” by Brad Olsen, 2008.

I ended up buying a little print of Mother Mary dressed in Hopi Indian garb (apparently each tribe dresses her in their own traditional wardrobe) in a tin frame made and painted by Roberto. Dora gave me 10 percent off, to help with my travels, she said. She told me to be safe, traveling all alone, and I said I’m careful, but I’m also always listening to … I couldn’t find the words. I pointed up.

“To your intuition,” she finished for me.

“Yeh. I don’t feel alone.”

And then, standing on either side of the cash register, she started to pray out loud for me, for my safe travels, that I be protected. We stared into one another as she spoke, until our eyes began to well up with tears. Then she nodded at me, and we both said, “Amen.”

A few words can go a long way.

Magical place, magical people: Meeting Marcia and Guy Wood in Angel Fire

The drive through Cimarron Canyon.

Driving through Carson National Forest, the landscape completely changed to ponderosa pine and stark-white aspen. Green grass. My car wound up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, until I thought I couldn’t possibly go any farther, and then it wound down, down, down, braking … down, down, down, braking … down the mountain and into Angel Fire, or as locals sometimes call it, Anglo Fire. It’s not very diverse, especially compared to the rest of New Mexico. Apparently a lot of Texans transplanted to the little ski town in the mountains.

I was on my way to the home of Marcia and Guy Wood, lifelong journalists who came to live in Angel Fire about 35 years ago after several years in Colorado. I can see why Angel Fire attracted them; it reminded me so much of Colorado, I couldn’t believe I was still in New Mexico. Gravel roads led up to their house, which sits at 8,800 feet and has incredible views through huge windows that line its walls—the blues and greens of mountains covered in pines, and a full moon with big, cumulous clouds flashing lightning in the distance that first night I arrived. I stood on their back deck and took it in, at total peace.

They were the most pleasant hosts. I got their life stories in a nutshell that first night, how they started newspapers in various cities and bought and ran a weekly in Angel Fire for a time. Guy’s grandfather and father were in the newspaper business, too, as is his son. I guess it’s just in some people’s blood. He still reads the papers every day. It was newspapers that brought us together. The former city editor at The Frederick News-Post, Andy Schotz, had connected us after meeting Marcia and Guy at a journalism conference. “They’re your kind of people,” he’d told me. They are. Journalists who also have that love of nature and need for space and beauty that only a home in the wilderness provides.

To give you an idea of where they live, one neighbor spotted a mountain lion in their yard, and another neighbor is in witness protection. Bears are the norm. They can’t leave birdseed on their porch, a practice that I learned myself while living in Hedgesville, West Virginia, where my backyard was literally 20,000 acres of wilderness preserve. There are only about 1,000 year-round residents in Angel Fire, and when I learned about the weather conditions, I wasn’t surprised. It snows until May or June. They got 220 inches of snow last year. Temperatures get to 20 below.

They got married nine months after meeting one another and have been married for more than 50 years. They’re one of those couples who makes me believe in marriage. They laugh a lot and have that uncanny kind of simpatico that can’t be manufactured.

The adorable Marcia and Guy Wood.

Marcia loves to cook and fed me home-cooked meals while I was there—enchiladas and blueberry muffins and quiche. After staying with Maryann and eating at her home, I was beginning to feel real spoiled.

They had a bedroom ready for me, too. I almost cried when I saw it. It was like heaven. I fell asleep next to a big window, cracked open to let in the cool night air (it went down into the 40s), moonlight streaming onto the bed.

I dreamt that a light snow dusted the mountaintop, and my brother and I traveled to the Rio Grande Gorge, which I’d seen the day before. “It’s enough just to see these things,” we said to one another in the dream, agreeing that we both loved to travel to simply take in new places visually. It seemed much deeper in the dream.

“They had a farmers market today, but I think it’s still too early to have much there,” Marcia told me the following morning, when I got out of bed and joined them in the living room. Their growing season usually starts in June—July, this year.

I decided to stay another night, so that I could hunker down and get some work done, which I did. The following morning, I joined them on their biweekly food run to a town about 45 minutes away, with Always Loving Mankind Food Pantry. We left at 8 a.m. and headed for a nearby church to load 96 bags of groceries into a work van and get on our way. Guy drove, knowing the route inside and out. We passed through a cloud (literally) and past Eagle Nest and its lake, then through Cimarron Canyon, which revealed its wild fire devastation from a year prior—some 35,000 acres of dead, charred-black trees from Ute Park to Cimarron.

No one answered the door at the first stop, and Guy set the bags on the front porch.

“Maybe we should leave it in their car?” I said, not quite acclimated to the elevation but feeling like I’d learned a thing or two about bears (turns out, I hadn’t—they break into cars).

Once in Cimarron, in the foothills of the Rockies, most of the roads we traveled were dirt or gravel. We’d stop at a small shack or trailer, carrying bags, adding fresh bananas and pistachios and milk to each one, and knocking on doors, most of which were opened by Hispanic women, often with children at their feet or elderly women who had a sort of depth about them, women who had lived a life of farming and hard work, a life they were proud of and grateful for. The town is nearly all Hispanic, desolate, poor. One woman’s little house was painted in day-glo colors. She had a sun-shiney kind of pride about her, and I was told that she changes the paint color fairly frequently. She was gardening and cleaning a storage bin when we arrived. Another woman looked ravaged by meth. Another, in her 90s, was soft spoken but had a quiet fierceness in her face, like an aged Georgia O’Keeffe, and her house was filled with exquisite “paintings” she’d done by stitching thread on a canvas. I’d never seen anything like it. They looked hyperrealistic. Another woman, not on the route, had painted murals onto her home.

We were so exhausted by the time we got back to Angel Fire, we all immediately took naps. Then we ate cake. It was a problem cake that had started as brownies the day prior, which Marcia was baking for a party.

She was using the recipe instructions for high elevation, but still, the brownies weren’t turning out right.

“I think I might’ve put in too much oil,” she said, hovering over bowls measuring cups. “I asked Guy to get me more oil from the store, and I think maybe I measured it out twice.”

She said the first batch tasted like a weird, oily version of a chocolate cake. She decided to try again (she sent Guy to the grocery store at least twice to get more ingredients and mixes) and made two separate pans of brownies from two boxes of the same mix, although different from the first brownies/cake. Oddly enough, when they came out of the oven, each one looked completely different, and she fretted over them a bit.

“Worrying is praying for trouble, dear,” Guy reminded her.

She wrapped them up and took them to the party anyway (what could she do?). Later, she told me that they were a hit—people ate all of them—but she thought they were awful, worst than the first batch. Meanwhile, I tried the chocolate “cake” and thought it was great. I don’t know if it was the exhaustion from a day of delivering groceries in the heat, or if somehow the oil had found its way into the cake, but by that second night, it tasted even better.

Angel Fire was yet another place that I didn’t want to leave, but eventually, I was hugging Marcia and Guy, taking selfies, and saying our goodbyes.

“Could you just text me to let me know you’re somewhere safe every so often?” Marcia asked.

My heart.

“Yes, of course!”

She sent me off with two slices of chocolate “cake”—which I proceeded to eat for dinner that night, as I camped under the stars in Abiquiu, thinking of her and Guy. I’ll never forget them and the magical corner of the country that they call home.