Category: new mexico

Strange Oasis: Santa Fe, NM

The stretch of road between Roswell and Santa Fe was perilously empty, in the way that makes you glance nervously at your gas gauge every few minutes even if you just fueled up. It seemed we were the only people on the road.

Well… almost the only people. (art by John Cerney)

When we finally spotted a glinting chrome diner just off the highway — the first functioning business we’d seen in hours — we all but screeched the car to a cartoon stop.

Penny’s Diner was one of the few fixtures of a small town called Vaughn, New Mexico. It provided exactly the classic diner experience its retro image promised: generous but poker-faced waitresses in heavy eyeshadow, a white-haired man in suspenders cleaning egg out of his moustache, a misspelled specials board, rewardingly bland sandwiches.

After devouring said sandwiches, we soldiered on through the emptiness towards Santa Fe National Forest, where we set up for the night at Black Canyon Campground.

After the wide-open landscapes of western Texas, the tall pines had a sort of magical hush that felt like true wilderness. The quiet was punctuated with wingbeats up above, crows and robin trading places in the branches, the occasional whirr of a hummingbird.

We spent a couple peaceful nights as forest creatures, then ventured back down into the city to do a little exploring. We wound up springing for tickets to Meow Wolf‘s House of Eternal Return, something we’d heard about from almost everyone we’d talked to since Marfa.

Built from an old bowling alley owned by George R. R. Martin, House of Eternal Return is something of a real-life choose-your-own-adventure story with a highly interpretable plot. The installation essentially has two layers: visitors start out exploring the very believable facade of an ordinary household, but crawl into the fireplace or hop through the fridge and you’ll find yourself in a kaleidoscopic wonderland of neon surrealism.

Unfortunately, even on a Wednesday morning the place was shoulder-to-shoulder with visitors. Any detail that called for more than a few seconds’ attention — a newspaper clipping on the fridge, a bedside journal, a computer full of mysterious documents — was quickly swarmed with impatient bodies vying for their turn. The place itself was also rife with narrow tunnels and stairs, so anyone with limited mobility would miss out on most of the good stuff.

Emerging back into the soothing palette of reality, our imaginations and retinas still aflame, Sean and I retired to a nearby brewery to plan the route to our next stop: Phoenix. There, we’d meet up with two different factions of Sean’s family as well as some friends of mine from when I came through on my solo epic roadtrip a few years ago.

Hopefully, the desert will continue to smile upon us.

Land of Enchantment (and Aliens): Roswell, NM

En route from Marfa to our next destination in Santa Fe, we wound up landing in Roswell for a night. Like pretty much everyone, our only knowledge of Roswell came from the alleged alien sighting in 1947, and I was curious to see what the town was really like.

I came prepared to see beyond Roswell’s campy reputation, but as it turns out, when something brings tourism to your otherwise unremarkable rural town for over 60 years, you lean into it hard. The bug-eyed, green-skinned, mysteriously buff visages of those classic alien figures stared at us from fast food restaurants, sporting goods stores, T-shirt shops, even the local tax service.

Fortunately, Sean fit right in.

After a peaceful evening at Bottomless Lake campground, where we found relief from the New Mexico heat by spending exactly eight seconds in the frigid water before waddling desperately ashore, we ventured into downtown Roswell and spent some time at the International UFO Museum & Research Center.

I come to Earth just for the tanning beds.
No, YOUR hat is silly.
If only we hadn’t run out of gas in Zeta-9, we would have arrived in the 90’s like we planned and these chokers would have KILLED.
Indisputable proof that aliens also enjoy playing Frisbee.

In spite of its silliness, I was surprised to find that the whole experience did actually leave me a little unsettled. After all, regardless of what you believe about the 1947 incident, what are the chances that we’re the only intelligent beings in the universe? And if we don’t have a monopoly on “intelligent life,” wouldn’t that be cause to rethink what it is that makes us human?

One of the most interesting items I came across in the museum was a framed excerpt from a declassified report explaining why the government keeps information on UFOs under wraps. This particular quote stuck with me:

“If the public learned that other intelligent life was actually coming to our planet, many of our social institutions would be disrupted…Perhaps most important from a political viewpoint, younger members of society, especially those who grew up with the space program, would push for a new view of ourselves. Instead of thinking…Americans, Canadians, Peruvians, French, or Chinese, they would start to think of themselves as earthlings…As idyllic as this sounds, I know of no government that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to the planet instead of to the nation…The biggest fear of anybody in power,…is losing that power…National governments do not want their subjects to have a planet wide orientation.”

I’ll leave it at that. Peace out, earthlings.