Personal Canned Oxygen, Stunning Sunsets and Swamp Coolers
I'm a Euro-Southern girl. What am I doing in the desert Southwest?
I’m working in Santa Fe this summer for an esteemed annual music festival, and the kind fest folks are putting me up in a nice casita about 6 or 7 blocks off the famous Santa Fe plaza. Good gig, right?
Yes, but I had to move my life from the literal east coast (Savannah, Georgia), madly packing for two weeks after finishing another intensive music festival job.
I then hauled my cookies across the country with a disabled brother and a travel-savvy but opinionated Chihuahua-mix named Peanut Butter Jackson in tow. What was left of my personal stuff after 4 moves in 3 years tailed me on the trip by a few days.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fast. And it wasn’t cheap, although I did all the things you do on an extended drive to lighten the financial load. At one point I was so tired I just stopped eating.
By the time we got to Albuquerque, a city I had visited a number of times but never lived in, I was skinny and exhausted. And the altitude (about the same as Denver) affected me, which it never had before.
That’s when I discovered that the drugstores and Wal-Mart here sell personal cans of oxygen. I’m sure intrepid hikers probably use them when scaling the peaks or other landmarks, as this is an outdoor person’s paradise, but I needed one just to unpack. They even come in flavours.
Gotta love modern life sometimes.
I was sleeping on the floor for weeks, my place was more of a mess than I’d anticipated and I had forgotten where I packed the toilet paper. I made up new cuss words over that discovery.
It was the most grueling move I’d ever experienced…and that’s saying something. Regret and hope battled it out daily as I struggled to get everyone settled on a short timeline.
I had to get to Santa Fe and start work, but first I had a chasm of moving hell to cross.
Mostly, I had little idea (besides my summer job) what really awaited me here.
I didn’t “know” Albuquerque that well, as I’d spent most of my time in New Mexico on Isleta Pueblo, a Native American reservation south of town.
Even though sleepy eyes and a lot of exhausted irritation, I found beautiful things daily.
I noticed I had a view of the Sandia Mountains ridgeline from the porch, kitchen, and even my bedroom. It brought me a strange comfort.
The Sandias are to the East of the city and much like being at the beach where you always can gauge the four directions by where the shore is, I center myself by knowing when I see the Sandia (“Watermelon” in Spanish) mountains, I’m looking east.
As you drive into New Mexico from the high lonesome highways of North Texas, the landscape and even the skies are so vivid you don’t know whether to look up or down.
The skies in New Mexico are special, a blue dreamland with just about any arrangement of clouds you ever could ask for, sometimes floating in a way that seems friendly, as if they are there to visit you.
Years ago I read about a nature photographer of the sort who gets their work into National Geographic and like-minded publications. He said there was only one other place he’d seen skies like New Mexico’s and that was in Mongolia.
The people are calmer here than other cities of this size I’ve been in.
They are friendly.
One day in the drug store I accidentally took too long with some not-important information I was asking the cashier, who was obliging enthusiastically.
When I noticed there was a line forming behind me I became flustered, turned around, and offered an apology, “I’m so sorry y’all, didn’t mean to hold things up.”
No one was annoyed. No impatient eye rolling. In fact, two people joined in the conversation I was having with the cashier, who was helping me with local info. Everyone smiled and waved goodbye when I was done.
Where did I land? Was this America?
Soon after I arrived I was so worn out I wanted to cry but went to a nearby Dollar Store to pick up cleaning staples. I couldn’t find the carts (your girl was blind-tired) but soon enough, with an armload of stuff, I stopped in the very back of the store to lean against a wall.
Could I even take another step? I seriously wondered.
A woman who worked in the Dollar Store noticed and asked, “Do you need a cart?” I said yes, but I didn’t see them.
She replied, “They’re outside the front door.”
No way I was crossing the whole store again.
“Thank you,” I said softly, gathering my will.
She looked at me.
“I’ll get one for you,” she said
And she did.
When I checked out I thanked her again and she said, “You just moved in, didn’t you?”
I felt so seen.
As the weather warmed, I was advised by everyone to get my swamp cooler turned on.
What? I don’t have air conditioning? My heart sank. I didn’t even really consider that this was a possibility and I didn’t really understand what a “swamp cooler” was.
Well, it’s an evaporative cooler that most folks, but not all, have out here and it’s often on your roof and water runs through it and blows cool air into your abode. In the high desert it’s not as drying as air-conditioning and infinitely less expensive.
Okay. So, without making a dirty joke, how do you turn on a swamp cooler?
My sis-in-law and rowdy companion Liz sent her brother over, who apparently knows all about these things. He was the soul of patience and when he told me my swamp cooler was broken, I about died in my shoes.
These things cost upwards of $3,000 new for a home, often because of the electrical/plumbing installation. But he fixed it, plumbing and all, turned it on, showed me how it operated, and for 3 hours of work charged me $100.
I hugged him so hard. Yet another nice New Mexican.
The ancient landscape here is a constant, daily, companion, made up of expansive high-desert valleys, extinct volcanoes, mountain ranges, mesas, acres of greenery, and many more acres of sage, pinon trees, cacti, and other desert staples that stake their stubborn claim in the dry dirt.
I didn’t know if there would be many birds in the sometimes inhospitable desert. I loved all the birds in the east.
There are birds. Noisy, bossy crows, mourning doves, and some songbirds that flit from tree to tree and wait for food from my neighbors and me.
Occasionally a roadrunner will breeze by, strutting its characteristic strut or flying low to cross a street over the hoods of cars.
When I see one, I say “Meep Meep” and y’all of my generation know why.
The food scene in Albuquerque is to die for. I do not have words for how good the food here is. It’s sublime.
My concern was that I wouldn’t be able to find fried okra or gumbo.
Oh, but I have. And it is so fine.
More to come as your British-born, Southern-fried correspondent learns the ways of the wildly intoxicating West.
Oh, and here l am in Santa Fe, “The City Different,” with a cool cat I ran across.
Love across the miles. Always. x
The Land of Enchantment is so well-named...
Welcome to the Southwest, dear British -Southern girl! I am in Phoenix, and I wish it were more like Santa Fe, but it’s home.
As always, reading about your bumpy roads, inspiring and at times sad moments is a wonder and balm. Enjoy the food, the sunsets, all the moments of this experience. Keep us posted, you are loved. Abrazos fuertes!