Paths

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

Had the early snow falling on northern Arizona come a couple of days later, had I bowed to pressure from my professors regarding upcoming mid-terms, had it not been elk season, life today would most certainly be very different.

Friday 21 October 1977, well before dawn I got out of bed, dressed quietly and gathered my boots and pack. My roommate might or might not have woken and said goodbye. Under buzzing sodium-vapor lamps in the parking lot I threw my gear in the back of the car and headed for Santa Fe, New Mexico, 520 miles away.

I was twenty years old and a student at Arizona State University in Tempe. My friend Mark lived in Dallas, Texas at the time. We decided to converge in Santa Fe to backpack into the Pecos Wilderness over the long Veteran’s Day weekend. Northern New Mexico, and the southern tail of the Rocky Mountains were full of mystery and attraction. The weekend would be pivotal, as a number of experiences would set the dream in my mind that some day I would return to the region to live.

Mark and I met at a motel. Over the many years I’ve now lived in Santa Fe of the remaining older motels in town, I think it was the Cottonwood Court. An image of Mark’s car parked beside mine in the small lot sticks in my mind. There’s something about the place which fits the picture.

Late Friday afternoon we explored Santa Fe. The silver autumnal light tarnished into dusk, the crystal clear sky slipped from blue to green to dusky orange, and the temperature fell like a stone. Heavy adobe structures lined the streets, the spicy smoke from piñon fires seeped over high parapets, and around corners. We found the plaza, where Native Americans sat under the portal of The Palace of The Governors selling their wares as they do today. Seeing them, and the sights and sounds and smells, this white skinned red haired boy from New Hampshire felt like he was on another planet. We stopped at Base Camp, a store specializing in hiking and backpacking gear to purchase topo maps. The fellow we spoke with steered us away from the Pecos – it was elk hunting season – and to Bandelier National Monument where hunting was not allowed.

As Mark and I left the store, there may have been a young woman across the street, with her friends going into Morningbird, a chic woman’s clothing and shoe shop. She would have been sixteen, raven haired and petite. We may have taken extra notice, paused for just a second… and then were back to our explorations.

The next evening, Mark and I were at Bandelier, having hiked Frijoles Canyon to the Rio Grande, and established our first camp site on a grassy flood plain by the river. Around ten o’clock I got out of the tent to pee. And there were the stars like I had never seen them before, the dense blaze of the Milky Way and beyond. It took my breath away. I stood and shivered, awestruck. Back on the trail the next day, high on a mesa top I experienced total silence for the first time in my life. The beating of my heart filled the void. It rattled me. We hiked and camped in the backcountry for three days. New Mexico had set itself into me. I would come back, and come back to stay.

R. and I were having breakfast recently and talking about this. She grew up in Santa Fe, and all those years ago our paths came very close, a matter of a mile or two or maybe a few feet. In the ensuing thirty three years much has happened, we’ve taken many turns along the way. We cross paths with a lot of people in the course of our lives and of them, a few play significant parts. Life’s circumstances lead up to these meetings, others slip away and here we are; it is all very mysterious.

Gordon Bunker

Photo: Jennie@WedgwoodTulsa