When I was a kid, I hated
roads that went to nowhere. Lonely and, to a first-grader’s
eyes, completely featureless, the high desert of my childhood had
plenty of them. Roads to nowhere meant frustratingly long rides in
a station wagon without air-conditioning, whizzing along flat open
spaces with tumbleweeds blowing across the highway, the only fun
coming when one of them lodged under the car and my stepfather
would swear, thus increasing my knowledge of words six-year-olds
shouldn’t repeat.
At that age I had no appreciation
for the relics of mining towns or the austere splendor of a
turquoise sky. As a child, I longed for trees,
real trees with real leaves, and resented those
“stupid” juniper things that grow wild or cultivated throughout the
West. I despised grass that was dead dry and felt prickly against
my bare legs. I wanted to live where hill after hill was covered in
soft green grass and spring was like my vision of C.S. Lewis’
Narnia, a land of magical woods and broad,
splashing rivers.
I’ve since lived in Narnia, and I
can’t tell you how relieved I am to be back home. Narnia,
a.k.a. West Virginia, where I’ve spent the last four years,
contains some of the most spectacular forests I have seen or am
ever likely to see. As the state tourist board proclaims, it is
“wild and wonderful,” with rivers and streams at the bottom of
nearly every hollow. My first spring in this charmed forest world,
I struck out on a walk one morning and was stunned by the choking
gorgeousness of the plant life that twined and bloomed and wrestled
itself along my country road, like walled nests of bright green
snakes.
Can the very nature of one road make it feel like
a prison, while the characteristics of another instill a sense of
freedom? As a Westerner I felt claustrophobic in the Mountain
State, where a straight stretch of road is a rare commodity and
it’s difficult to see the mountains because you’re
always in them, never able to view them at a distance. I marveled
at the intensity of the green, but longed for a decent view of the
sky. It came at you in pieces there, normally a misty gray, and I
often felt as if I viewed it from the bottom of a well.
These days, my car crests the Abo Pass near my home in the
mountains southeast of Albuquerque, and I gaze down at the entire
width of the Rio Grande River Valley. It is so expansive, the space
so unhindered, that I imagine I can see the curvature of the Earth
itself. To the west, Highway 60 stretches in a straight line, all
the way to the horizon without a single curve. Incredible, I think.
I turn on Route 47 toward Belen and contentment washes over me as I
watch miles of grey-green sagebrush fly by.
“How can you
love a road like this?” a friend visiting from the East Coast asks
me. “Miles and miles of nothing. Just dirt and a couple of lousy
bushes. It’s so dull.”
“You don’t see what I
see,” I say.
On my right, the gentle swell of desert
pasture makes a seamless transition with the Manzano Mountains.
I’ll find piñon and juniper up there, and now realize
that they are every bit as real as the hardwoods of the
Appalachians. A bone-dry arroyo is a visual wonder, cutting through
the plain like a jagged, earthbound thunderbolt. I detect dozens of
subtle variations in hue amongst the rocks and shrubs, birds and
clouds. As we stop and wait for a freight train to pass, its cars
echo the region’s many colors, the leathery green of cholla
cactus, the clay red of a Santa Clara wedding vase, the
silver-slate of the Rio Grande on a winter afternoon.
These high desert byways aren’t roads to nowhere. In the
desert Southwest, you are always Somewhere. The trick is in
understanding the road’s uncluttered beauty, that property
which allows you to isolate and appreciate individual objects as
small as a roadrunner darting across your path or as large as the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains, purple in the distance, blood-red at
sunset, mysteries waiting to be made brand-new again each time you
see them.
The John Denver song was right: West Virginia
is “almost heaven.” But these days, when I cruise the high
desert’s wide-open byways, I can touch the sky above me. I
feel like I’m inside it, driving through heaven.
Claudia O’Keefe is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She lives in Mountainair, New Mexico.
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