and we walked off to look for america.

(note: i received a surprising number of emails encouraging me to continue with tMoE. y'all need to get cable, or something. regardless, it was sweet (really. very sweet.). furthermore, i'm not one to let a 1,700-mile road trip go to literary waste, so here you go.)

a very good friend of mine told me that new mexico was for “hippies, meth addicts, and old people.” which is funny, because she's from florida. anyway, given that i feel a strong kinship with two of the three (you guess), i was jazzed.

the land of enchantment is enchanting, indeed. but the drive to get there had its own elements of seduction. western kansas is a weird place. driving through that barren country could make the saddest environmentalist forget that overpopulation is currently destroying the earth at a frightening rate. there is nothing out there. towns are just junctions, with nary a hamburger or bathroom to be found.

when you get really lucky, and two paved roads meet, you’ll find a gas station. inside, the three citizens of that junction are inevitably sitting around, chewing the fat (or, um, chew). and they stare you down as you head, grinning like an out-of-towner, toward the facilities. it’s like walking into someone’s living room. 

silos and wind turbines punctuate the horizon.

in the panhandle of oklahoma, things start to get interesting. if you find small, rolling hills to be interesting. luckily, i do. we drove through infamous boise city, which was sold to eastern pioneers as an elegant prairie town, tree-lined and brimming with commerce and fertile ground. it wasn’t. it still isn’t. i thought about all the people who showed up there expecting utopia and finding oklahoma. they made the best of it and then the dust bowl came. what luck. 

in eastern new mexico, the mountains begin. after all that dizzying wide-openess, the mountains are like the scene in the wizard of oz where everything goes to color. still though, no people, no towns, no one to hear you scream. 

we drove with the windows down, even though doing so generally means cutting knots from my hair later on (and sure enough). paul was so excited that the speed limit was 75, i was constantly working to pry his happy attention from the speedometer. and our road mix was on repeat.

alas, the mix got old. and all that road magic wore off around the 10-hour mark. (sometimes it really is the destination, not the journey.) and when we got to santa fe, we were hot and tired and my hair looked like cotton candy. 

to be continued.