Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (39 page)

We entered the southern edge of the grand Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, a description perhaps from Coronado’s men in 1541, setting out sticks to mark a route they could retrace on their return across the naturally featureless and shockingly level and seemingly immeasurable grassland.

For an American traveler of stout heart, the Great Plains, and especially the Llano, are a good measure of one’s capacity to enjoy a landscape apparently without limits, a topography to make patience struggle to remain sovereign over the anxiety of nonarrival. In a place where the dominating feature is an encircling horizon sometimes of nothing more than a thin, flat, unattainable line, where a thousand footsteps or even a sixty-mile-an-hour motoring from sunup till noon seems to have taken you no farther than a gerbil gets on its wheel, travelers can find admiration of the interminable uninterruptedness too much for their resolve to appreciate American spaciousness. The incessant miles challenge pleasure. That perceived vacancy, like the sea it once was, teaches, if not submission, then at least sufferance. You can accept its scope, but you can’t master it. Crossing the Llano is a voyage into space — not the celestial kind, but one fully grounded and possessed of the requisite gravity: whether you’re on wheels, on horseback, or afoot, there’s no weightless floating. Instead, one hauls oneself across as if
towing
one’s butt. At its perimeters, there should be stations offering to anesthetize the unstringable, those susceptible to the heebie-jeebies, and any children scouring the backseat (although, now that I think about it, the Llano itself soon enough can induce a beneficent stupor).

The Staked Plain, of course, is not vacant: it’s covered with massive cultivations, although in the spring the tilled earth creates a brown desolation that erases the awful magnificence of the native grassland, and it’s there human logic founders — the apparent emptiness can dislocate minds and displace reason with its ubiquitous nowhere permeated by absence.

A traveler’s brain will not for long abide infinity because sooner or later we desperately want the other side of an itinerary. After all, the goal of travel is to get somewhere, at least anywhere, because going nowhere takes you into the realm of the insane. Trying to avoid an unhinging, Q and I stopped at heres and theres: a local burp and belch (enchilada), a dip and sip (ice-cream soda to lock it down), a county courthouse (to stretch legs), and once by a fence post to see what was nailed to it (a shot red-tailed hawk). But always reality abides:
We’re not there yet.
Where?
Anywhere, as long as it’s somewhere other than this where.

A tip for happy passage on the Plains is, as I reminded myself, to see the grasslands as an expression of the great planetary respiratory system, and to hear the unslowed sweep of wind as the engine powering that respiration. I recommended to Q she do as does the seaman: lift eyes to the cloudscapes and view them as aerial hills and dales, watch them change as if we were moving through them, as if we were making actual progress. After all, the word
cloud,
related to
clod,
means
hill
in Old English.

All well and good, but on the day we crossed, we were cursed with a wonderfully clear sky untroubled by even a wisp of cirrostratus, a sky vacuumed of everything but a diaphanous blue so merging with the horizon as to erase it and make the roads seem to lead not necessarily toward New Mexico but simply into a space as perceptible as the ether.

We fell into a steadfast silence rising from prolonged miles elastic enough I thought them incapable of ever stretching to a breaking point: Were they multiplying, self-generating? Did that last mile just hatch out two more? Like duckweed on a pond in spring, they appeared to propagate themselves with unnerving fecundity. My belief in finiteness taunted and made claustrophobia look like a small price to pay for boundaries, and I felt my mind being wiped clean of the petty detritus of daily life: “May I see your registration, sir?” It matters not, Officer. “You know what your speed was?” Speed? What is speed?

Q soon brought me back. She said (in Spanish either because her mind also was wandering from the chummy limits of accustomed routine or because of her conversation with the Hispanic waitress at lunch),
“Los conquistadores caminaban esta ruta. Que machos eran!”
Oh, they were men indeed to hoof across this plain. Coronado, Pike, a million natives — I admired them all as if they had walked to Neptune.

“Have you got a story of the Llano?” she said. “A
true
story?” There was this guy — “I’ve heard it.” He was young and witty and friendly but not really a two-fisted chap. One evening he climbed into his car north of Abilene and went west, following county roads that took him into the Llano. He was headed to Albuquerque. Not long after sundown, not even halfway across, a rear tire blew out. He stopped and looked at the flattened rubber, stared uncomprehendingly at the “jack-assembly,” realized he didn’t know how to change a tire, and found himself unnerved and unmanned. He began to whimper, then cry. Then he threw up. He crawled into the backseat, wrapped his arms around his quaking body, rocked himself, summoned up a couple of his favorite show tunes (one of them “I Feel Pretty”), and sang himself to sleep. About dawn a woman rancher saw his car, roused him, showed him how to jack up the rear end, and left him. He turned his machine around and scurried toward home, promising himself he’d never again go alone into the Staked Plain. Moral: vastness teaches humility. Or maybe it’s a modern jack-assembly that does it.

As we crossed into New Mexico, the horizon began to rupture into a marvelous irregularity, with undulations and touches of jaggedness, all of it now cast in a vague blueness that meant not more sky but the Rockies. Hello, the hills! Hello, the other side!

We were looking for a creature frequenting the east versant of the Guadalupe Mountains, a bird for years I’d wanted to see; by reading her a passage from the hand of American ornithologist William Beebe, I’d managed to spark Q’s interest also.

The vermilion flycatcher, whose Latin generic name means
firehead,
belongs to a family of small and modest birds usually colored in every shade of gray between white and black, and it lives in arid lands where other animate life typically finds survival through a camouflage composed of the common dun hues of the desert, chocolate brown constituting gaudiness. Yet the male firehead flouts the logic of evolution by flaunting itself with a large scarlet cap with matching ascot and doublet. Were that not enough, he performs an aerial display a woodcock might envy. The degree of nonconformity evolution will tolerate can be limited, and to exceed it can be dangerous, can even lead to extinction. If not in numbers, then at least in its behavior, the firehead is a rara avis. It’s a quoz of the desert everyone should witness while it — and we — last. Here’s Beebe’s passage about the vermilion flycatcher I read to Q:

Up shoots one from a mesquite tree, with full, rounded crest, and breast puffed out until it seems a floating ball of vermilion — buoyed up on vibrating wings. Slowly, by successive upward throbs, the bird ascends, at each point of vibrating rest uttering his little love song — a cheerful
ching-tink-a-le-tink! ching-tink-a-le-tink!
which is the utmost he can do. When at the limit of his flight, fifty or seventy-five feet above our heads, he redoubles his efforts, and the
chings
and the
tinks
rapidly succeed each other. Suddenly, his little strength exhausted, the suitor drops to earth almost vertically in a series of downward swoops, and alights near the wee gray form for which he at present exists. He watches eagerly for some sign of favor, but a rival is already climbing skyward, whose feathers seem no brighter than his, whose simple lay of love is no more eager, no more tender, yet some subtle fate, with workings too fine for our senses, decides against the first suitor, and, before the second bird has regained his perch, the female flies low over the cactus-pads, followed by the breathless performer.

Failing to see the flycatcher in one location, we went on to Rattlesnake Springs, south of Carlsbad. I’d no more than stepped from the car to take a position to allow sunlight to illuminate vermilion feathers, than a firehead flew up, cast my way a bold if not disdainful eye, and flew off, only to return to find its grounds again quiet except for a related bird so nondescript it has to carry a man’s name for identification: a Say’s phoebe flitted nervously while a pair of scaled quail scratched about, and a lesser nighthawk with eyelids half closed and body aligned with a fat cottonwood-branch ignored us all. As for the show the flycatcher put on, Professor Beebe might have furnished the script.

When the performance — actually two of them — ended, Q and I rolled on to Carlsbad for the night, arriving late, so we had to finish the long day by eating crackers and cheese in a motel room, the repast made tolerable by twin cups of an aged tequila. Crossing the Llano seemed like another existence, as I guess indeed it was.

The next morning we struck out for Alamogordo via a route of a couple of good Mexican cafés I knew, each serving its own interpretation of green chile. In New Mexico, if a place can’t do a toothsome bowl of green-chile stew, nothing else is going to get done right either. The Cajuns have their roux, the French their white sauce, and the New Mexicans their peppers. Years ago in Socorro a man said to me, “Green chile makes a guy happy — and strong.” As he spoke the last two words, he erected his index-finger.

Rolling on northward, Q told of when she was nine years old and beginning to learn Spanish, she heard about a desert city called “Alba Querque” at the foot of mountains named after watermelons and near a mesa called Encantada. An enchanted place, to be sure! But a querque? Translating literally, she asked about a
dawn what-r-what.
Sister Maxima Gravitas (or some such) took the translation as impertinence and ignored it, so Q wrote a story about a querque, a quirky what-what that roamed about at dawn to hunt penguins. Sister Gravitas, in those days of black-and-white habits, passed over the penguin reference and corrected only the girl’s misinterpreted etymology while quite failing to kill her mythology, the result being Q, once graduated, left eastern Missouri for a few years in southern Arizona where she began a life of hunting not penguins but querques, of whom, I believe, I am one.

That evening we reached Fat Cottonwood, that is, Alamogordo. We had come to visit another rara avis of the desert, a querque named Jean Ingold whom I’d wanted to see almost as long as I had a vermilion flycatcher. She, I suspected, was creating a quozzical life to give acquisitiveness a smart comeuppance.

13

One-Hundred-Seventeen Square Feet

W
E TOOK QUARTERS
that evening on the south edge of Alamogordo. Q had work to do, so I went up to the northwest corner of town near the School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, went on beyond the pale of urban lights, crossed the railroad tracks, found the irrigation canal — a weedy ditch of congealing pools — that served as my waymarker, and followed it past a small salvage yard (
WE BUY JUNK CARS
) toward the end of the road. In the distance on the highway was a lighted billboard showing a gigantic photograph of a tobacco-chewing young man having no mandible, with the caption something like
LOOKING GOOD?

The western sky held only enough of sundown to furnish the San Andres Mountains a silhouette, but moonrise over the Sacramentos to the east lighted the Tularosa Basin, a place blanketed with gypsum sands of such brilliant whiteness they reflected moonlight and made the valley floor appear illuminated from its underside (in July they bounce off sufficient solar heat to allow a barefoot stroll at noon). The sands crawled with darkling beetles come up into the night from below where lay the saline residue of ancient Lake Otero. Dig down the length of a man’s arm into the dry sand, and watch the hole magically fill with water, salty stuff that tempts and mocks a desert thirst. Some seasons, even yet, the deepest part of the basin farther south will briefly hold a shallow lake called Lucero: Lucifer, the Morning Star, the Prince of Darkness.

North of the white dunes and the Poison Hills and the alkali flats created by outwash from canyons with names like Lost Man and Dead Man is the Malpais — the Valley of Fires — a vast upflow of black lava flung from the Abyss as Lucifer was thrown into it. It’s a land of jagged, indurate rock where few people go and no one can easefully live. In another century, a fellow said of it, “Out there the only critters sleeping with both eyes closed are dead.” Not a place for the visually impaired.

Out that way too are the Oscura Mountains standing above the northern limit of the Jornada del Muerto. And yet another terminus is there, this one the end of the preatomic age, an infernal locus of god-awful name, Trinity, where one early morning in July 1945, to use the phrase of the time, “the sun rose in the west” to start humankind on its greatest journey of death when gentlemen scientists down from Los Alamos exploded the first-ever nuclear weapon. But Trinity? Trinity of what? Detonation, destruction, devastation? Degeneration, decivilization, devolution? Depravity, deformity, destiny?

The names from that territory seemed in mortal combat at a kind of toponymic Armageddon: mountains of the Sacrament and of an apostle against mountains of gloom overlooking a dead man’s journey. And eastward lay a “bad country” leading to an unholy trinity of demonics of damnation and darkness, where to sleep deeply is to die.

The old residents, the Apaches, also had names for this desert, but I don’t know what they were; in dust devils spinning downwind, the Mescalero listened for the twistings to speak, but I don’t know what they said. I have heard an elder tell of the lake under the sands and how it waits for the time of man to pass so it can rise once again, emerge into the light, cleansed and pure and holding life, its waters beneath a sky looking down on a land devoid of two-leggeds who take all they don’t desecrate. The promise of crystal water appears today in the rosemary mint (tastes like both) and in lemonade bush (from citruslike berries comes a beverage), each plant a result of natural alchemies transmuting salt and alkali into sugar and spice.