Camino Canon - gallery hopping, arts crawl

I'm not Francesco from Umbria I tell the red-headed finch which dogs my footsteps as I work in the patio. Fully feathered, it's not a fledgling fallen from a nest, flew perfectly from a high branch to the ground, and obviously is not wounded or in need of aid. But it persists in staying close to heel, sometimes blocking my path, looking up for some kind of communion. Can't help you, little fellow, I'm not gifted at interpreting the wants or needs of undomesticated fauna. Minutes pass before its questioning eyes recognize that fact and it flies off.

The finch is merely the latest encounter with wild neighbors which have elected -- or been forced to -- establish residence on Santa Fe's Camino Canon. I well remember the days before our once-dirt thoroughfare became the city's "art and soul," Canyon Road -- when the animals one saw on a daily basis were generally restricted to roaming "outside, watchdogs" and stray felines. You occasionally heard a burro bray or a cock crow, and one of my friends kept geese which raised an alarm whenever anyone set foot on her property.

Ancient history. Before the family residences were sold and became galleries, and fields cleared to make room for condominiums. Perhaps the earliest influx of critters I saw were the raccoons. Once their own territories had been invaded, they found refuge in one of the few remaining open lots on the road, an expansive field and garden behind our small enclosed patio. The raccoons discovered we had a few vines trained to grow tall over an arbor and shade a terrace. The vines produced delicious Concord and Niagara grapes, and for many years had never attracted birds, much less raccoons. But now families of the masked critters come on autumn nights, and the fruit is quickly gone. During the night, I hear the raccoons scudding across the house roof enroute to the arbor, and at dawn have seen Momma leading as many as six well-rounded, satiated toddlers down our driveway back to their lair.

Now it's rabbits. For the past three years, after more than half a century in this residence with no evidence of any, the bunnies explore the patio, nap under our car in the driveway, often peer into the dining-room window when we're at table. And like that red-headed finch, sometimes mistake me for the man from Assisi, loitering inches from my toes, looking up with beseeching eyes. I've seen them gallery hopping, too -- aping the Santa Feans and tourists who clog the Road on Friday nights for art openings. One early evening recently, I watched a very young bobtail brave traffic to cross the street repeatedly, one gallery to another, checking out the plantings. New hollyhock leaves seemed to be his tidbit of choice.

In late spring, I twice saw two small black snakes in the patio gardens. Not to worry, just harmless creatures good for the soil. A day later, a young man told my wife he'd seen a snake in the driveway, and he obviously didn't consider it small or harmless. Then a neighbor feared a snake she saw in her patio was a rattler, and phoned Animal Control. It proved to be a bull-snake, three-feet plus in length with markings similar to a rattler's. Then another small black snake was spotted sunning off my front terrace, and an observant sculptor told me that one could well be no garden variety but a young bull-snake. Maybe they're nesting around here somewhere, he suggested. Snakes on Canyon Road! Certainly we'd always had sharks here, the human variety, with quite a few ending up in court for various shady dealings in the art world. My friend the sculptor advises that if more large bull-snakes show up, we're not to phone Animal Control, but let him know. He has many friends who live in the country, keep horses, and their fields and barns are overrun with mice. Bull-snakes eat mice.

A city-boy until well into adulthood, I was a slow learner regarding all creatures not native to the Concrete Jungle. But decades on Camino Canon fostered the assumption that I knew a thing or two about native flora and fauna. Explosive growth of our town, crowding out old habitats of animals that once lived nearby but not with us has me reappraising extended family in future years here.

Camino Canon 1

Lazy June afternoon. The hottest month of the year in Santa Fe, and "the art and soul of Santa Fe," Canyon Road--still known as Camino Canon when I moved here more than half a century ago--is free of tourists, mad dogs and Englishmen under mid-day sun. They'll reappear, some of them that is, once the brilliant light begins to fade and the faithful cool of the evening sets in. The Road will then again be awash with visitors who stop and stare, intrigued by the sights and sounds of our now-renowned thoroughfare in this City Different.

It's pointless to resist change, and most of the time I accept, frequently prefer it to what went before. But one can't help sometimes remembering, when observing the plethora of high-end art galleries, restaurants and boutiques, the family neighborhood the Camino once was, the unpaved road and modest adobe homes, open fields where children played. The field across the unpaved street fronting my house--a vast stretch of land containing little but clusters of indigenous chamisa and a crumbling stable which sheltered two burros; and with an unobstructed vista clear to the Rito de Santa Fe, and beyond to the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. How I used to love that view and the braying (rusty hinges!) of the burros. Wonderments to someone whose youth had been spent in crowded east cost cities from Maryland to Massachusetts. View long gone, I look out now on a wall encircling condominiums within a gated community.

An early riser, there was a time when the only pedestrians I saw on the Road at daybreak were a few neighbors on their way to daily Mass at Cristo Rey Church. Senoras, their heads draped with lovely mantillas, often robed in severe black but occasionally sporting colorful fiesta skirts; the Senors sombreoed and booted. Always a stray dog or two, it was a time when Animal Patrol didn't exist or wasn't enforced. This morning when I stepped onto to the front terrace to fetch The New York Times, subscription gift from a daughter and son-in-law, joggers were coursing both sides of the street under faint eastern light, and there were dogs but not a cur in sight, thoroughbreds all on leash being walked by physically fit owners astride in summer shorts. As the red dawn brightened, more joggers, more dog-walkers, quite a few seasonal residents going to or coming from the neighborhood coffee house, out-of-town newspapers under their arms.

A posted notice in my studio/gallery informs visitors that they're in the oldest commercial establishment on the Road, and offers a brief history of my family's 50+ years occupation of the premises. This to forestall the inevitable questions about the obvious "old Santa Fe" ambiance we maintain compared to the modernization of many structures no longer family homes but chic galleries. Posted notice or not, there are comments and questions about our extended time here. Very often, disappointment in the changes to the city are expressed by tourists who were last here years ago, sometimes by decades. They rhapsodize about an old Santa Fe so much smaller, vehicular traffic not heavy, hotels and inns modest, the Spanish-American and Native-American cultures more dominant than they are today. Everything so simple, pure, free of the elegance and sophistication many of them consider pseudo, affectations. I've had to adopt a stock answer to the question of whether or not I'm bothered by all the changes I've seen on the Road.

No. Everything changes. I see that in the mirror every day when I shave. And many of the changes in Santa Fe make this a better city to live in than when I moved here. Of course, one doesn't like the snarled traffic, the inflated real estate and high-cost-of living, the loss of not knowing practically everyone in town when it was a smaller community, the preponderance of strangers everywhere one goes now. But as an ex-New Yorker, there was much I missed in the old Santa Fe I dearly loved despite its lack of cultural venues. My arrival here predates the Santa Fe Opera, which has afforded countless hours of enrichment since its founding in the hills north of town. In the early 1950s, there were but two movie theaters in Santa Fe, neither of which ever showed foreign films. Touring theater or ballet did not come to the city, nor did art exhibits on loan. There were long stretches when the thirst for good drama, dance, opera or painting and sculpture would demand one leave town if he could afford it, flee to New York or San Francisco for a glimpse, taste of the arts without which life is impoverished. And if you couldn't afford it -- .

With all the change, the landscape of northern New Mexico is constant. Our tierra bendita, our incomparable turquoise sky, those Sangre de Cristo and Nacimiento ranges, the great stretches of valleys and mesas. Adobe homes burnished by fiery sunsets, chamisa and pinon, cottonwoods and aspens. And in this Land of Enchantment, the Spanish-American clings to his fine heritage, his traditions still observed in the homes and churches, in the streets where you hear his musical language and see many of his courtly customs. We gringos love his cuisine, have adopted his architecture, many of his building and maintenance skills and some of his dress codes, revel in his Viva las Fiestas.

As I write, the temperature's lowered and tourists have begun to reappear. With the door open, I hear from the street their Oohs and Aahs about this exceptional Road, my Camino Canon. And not all in English. Or Spanish. No longer a small terminus at the end of the Santa Fe Trail, we're an international must-see in the new millennium. I hear French, Italian, Irish brogue and British twang, German, Slavic tongues which I can't identify. The weak dollar against the Euro undoubtedly partially accounts for so many foreigners in town this year. But those visitors have also heard or read about the exceptional La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis in the foothills of the Sangres, and their gasps of approval tell me they are not disappointed.

Neither am I. It's changed, yes. What hasn't? Santa Fe remains the place where I most want to live in the US.