A recent tourist in the studio tells me that it's been 30-plus years since she last visited Santa Fe and our gallery when a very young woman, is surprised that I'm still here. I don't ask if the surprise is that the business has lasted so long or that I have. She reminds me -- of course I'd forgotten, who can or wants to remember all things from decades past -- that she'd purchased, "before Santa Fe prices soared," a large ceramic-tile painting I'd made, still cherishes it in her home and will pass it on to a grandson. Amazed that I've remained in the city and on Canyon Road which has changed so much, "is not at all as I remember it," she says she bought online a few of my books, read about the travels, different places I've visited or lived in, the studies, work and pleasures abroad. She wonders what attracted me to New Mexico in the first place and what's kept me here.
It is only after she's gone that I indulge the luxury of recall.
Not yet six months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, not yet my 19th birthday, but Roosevelt's proclamation "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny" was whispering at my back. Lack of time and funds negated possibilities for college before the call to arms. Awaiting with most young men my age what we knew was coming, I labored in war industries, most of the paychecks turned over to Depression Era parents.
Qualified as a ship-fitter after merely two weeks of training, I worked with rough crews building Liberty ships. "Shiver money" we called wages paid because of the numerous shipyard accidents -- including fatalities -- caused by under-skilled workers attracted to the Chesapeake's promise of earning. Often in the dark inner-bottoms of ships at keel, among men we city boys called "hillbillies," their strange dialects uttering obscenities new to youthful ears, I clung to thoughts of the arts -- the books, music, theater I loved, the dream of creating things -- and wondered how a world gone mad made beauty feasible. Perhaps this shipyard and whatever lay ahead on foreign battlefields was all there was or would be.
Then one day a riveter, middle-aged, far from his home in the Appalchian Hills, sat beside me on an open deck during lunch break. He said he had sons of his own, one of them already somewhere in the Pacific, had been watching me, "reckoned" that I didn't belong here. He foully cursed our labors, a war claiming his sons, his absence from home. And muttered something about grabbin' while the grabbin's good, raisin' hell in this life while you were still alive. When our break was over, I didn't follow him into the inner-bottoms. Instead, went to the front office, asked for pay owed me and walked out of the shipyard.
Next stop the Greyhound Bus station where I purchased a cross-country ticket. If I were to perhaps die for my country, I wanted to see it first.
A nation beyond the streets of East Coast cities was foreign to me. For someone familiar with the port of Baltimore and the sky-scappered canyons of New York City, who'd rarely seen open country, there was schoolroom gography and history come alive, wonderment beyond bus windows. Crossing the Mississippi, hitting the Central Plains, under bright sun or dark of night, I'd recall the words, books of American writers I'd devoured through youth -- Mark Twain, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck. Dodge City and Tucson, the Continental Divide evoked images of the many Western Movies I'd seen, the John Ford vistas I'd long loved and yearned to roam. In my ears echoed the strains from songs of faraway place (in those Depression days limiting travel) with strange-sounding names -- the red river valley; the streets of Laredo; California, here I come. And I did come and saw my country and marveled. Countless hours with many changes of busses and schedules, no hotel overnights, frugal snacks, wash-ups in bus-station restrooms during waits for connections, sleep upright in bus seats or on station benches. With end of the road in San Diego, seemingly such a small provincial town at that time but armed against invasion as I'd not seen on the East Coast. Manned antiaircraft gun-positions in the streets pointed out to the Pacific as well as toward the skies. Barrage balloons floated overhead. Eloquent manifestations of what my world was all about and justification of a teen-ager's exodus from home -- how it had pained a wartime mother -- to see his country before he might well perish for it.
The one image and singular memory of that trip which recurred again and again during the years in France, Belgium and along the Rhine, was my introduction to New Mexico. Somewhere north or east of the state, in Colorado or Texas, I'd fallen asleep on the bus in afternoon, woke as the sun was setting. The landscape was bloodred, distant adobe homes tinted fiery burn-sienna, their small windows goldenly aglow. Across vast fields dotted with pinon, a seraped horseman rode against the burning sky and a shawled woman drew water from a well.
Tableau, seared upon the mind for a lifetime.
Later in that cross-country jaunt, the Santa Fe of 1942. Dirt roads and unpaved streets, open fields, few cars, more Mexican and Spanish than American -- exotic! -- to a boy of the streets from east coast cities. Images to haunt one in the foxholes of Normandy and on the snows of The Bulge. That Tierra Encantada, will it still be there if and when there are no more masssacres at Malmedy, no extermination ovens. If and when The Lights Come On Again All Over the World?
It was. And claimed me, and I am here.
No comments:
Post a Comment