the mountains don't care
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It’s April 12th, 2021, and I’m floating through the twists and turns of the high road between Taos and Santa Fe, in New Mexico, looking out the backseat window of a car. I lost cell service miles ago, and I lean my forehead against the glass of the window, half-listening to the conversation coming from the front seats. In the front passenger seat is my friend, flown out to visit me for the week, and the driver is a friend of his, a local musician we spent the day filming. My friend shoulders most of the work, lugging around a bulky black backpack packed with equipment and cords. I’m given (read: he invents) small tasks for me to do through the day: listening to the audio to ensure nothing goes haywire, helping carry loose equipment, fetching capos and cowboy hats, holding a camera stationary. During one shoot I’m ultimately replaced by a tripod. I try not to let my ego smart.
Mostly, I take in the music, try and capture shaky shots on my phone of snow capped mountains on the horizon, laugh and smile as conversation drifts around me. I tag along as we record a song in the historic courthouse of Taos, the music echoing through the empty room, bouncing off restored murals that stare down at us solemnly. I trace my fingers along the stunning modern furniture in the contemporary rural home of some famous LA director, situated at the end of a road ravaged with ditches thirty minutes outside the nearest city, lent to us for the day for filming. I sit on a dusty path on the side of a ravine outside Santa Fe, a rock face stretching above us to the left and dropping down into a canyon on the right, my arms wrapped around my bare, goosebumped legs at sunset, listening to the music echoing through the empty space as crows circled overhead, contributing their own songs to the sounds below. I slouch in the backseat of the car, hypnotized by the dreamy landscape, content to let the conversation and the music, the names of people I don’t know and stories of places I haven’t been wash over me and slow my thoughts down. Every story they pass back and forth starts with “I know this guy,” or “I heard about this guy once.” Every story has to do with turning some corner and seeing something you didn’t expect.
The entire month is in slow motion. The city moves at a more lethargic pace than anywhere else we’ve been so far. People we meet try and explain the phenomenon: a dearth of twenty-somethings in the area, priced out by wealthy transplants from Colorado and California buying up all of the housing for their retirement years. The average age is a decade and a half older than most of the Southern coastal cities we’ve been bouncing between. Compared to the general feeling of recklessness and abandon in those towns, Santa Fe is the most pandemic-cautious place we’ve been. We spot lone bikers, lone joggers diligently masked up, even as they plot their solitary courses through empty streets. We go to restaurants, on hikes, on walks where we simply don’t see other people - the people we do spot give us a wide berth. But some encounters don’t seem to have anything to do with demographic differences, generational gaps. Our dining experiences are repeatedly languid, waiters sometimes blinking slowly at me like I spoke a foreign language to them, sometimes beaming at me like they haven’t seen another human in weeks. My friend and I approach the hostess’s podium at a nearby brewery, and I ask for a table for three. Despite having laughed and chatted with the couple ahead of us, she peers at me stoically. “You want a table?” she asks. “for… beer?” My confidence wavers as I nod, wondering if I myself grossly misread whether this was a reasonable request for a brewery with only a handful of tables full. Once seated, my roommate asks the waiter about a menu, and she looks at us as if we were aliens, then points to the large chalk menu on the wall behind us that we missed. My roommate and I stifle panicked laughter as we look at each other in bemusement, wondering if we had simply forgotten how to interact with the outside world.
“See those sandstone mountains?”
“Sure.”
“So I heard about this guy - the mountains, they stretch like, twenty miles back. And this guy started building caves in them. They’re crazy masterpieces.”
“Is that legal?”
“He bought the land, yeah.”
“What does he do with them?”
“Apparently it’s a great place to trip.”
It’s an introverted month. Perhaps we’re both exhausted by New Orleans the month before, we’re replenishing our energy for an inevitably hectic month after this in Portland, our bodies have finally reached a point of exhaustion from the constant uprooting and relocating, or the hushed quiet of Santa Fe pervades through the walls of our little adobe house. Work picks up for the both of us, we’re both distracted by our separate guests visiting town. I spent more time than previous months hunched at my little desk setup that gets transported from city to city, diving deep into complicated code, rubbing my temples as I try to encourage my brain to simply be smarter as it stares down knotty problems. My own separate door to the outside allows me to slip out on neighborhood walks without disrupting my roommate’s meetings in the main living space. We get lax about cooking large, elaborate meals, instead piecing together our own snacks and dinners at odd times of the day. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in two weeks!” my roommate exclaims at dinner together towards the end of our trip. We laugh, but it’s not untrue. She’s uneasy with all the solitude; I slide into it easily, an old habit I haven’t indulged in a while. I curl up on the back porch, chilly under my quilt, and work until the sun dips out of view, I spend an evening in a ball on the couch, reading for hours, surfacing from the depths of the book at dusk blearily. I burrow into myself, spending days deep in my head.
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I walk around town, feeling an arm's distance from the world behind a mask, sunglasses, headphones. I wander museums by myself. I’m in a cavernous room in the local history museum, perusing what is described as a “collection about collections,” which seems to be just an assortment of random objects arranged in a huge gallery space, temporary walls creating a maze-like structure through the room. I haven’t seen another person since three exhibits ago. Someone on the other side of what I presumed was an empty room sneezes. I leap out of my skin.
A young Native American guy is spinning in circles in the middle of the town square, hoop dancing, accompanied by the beating of a drum. A crowd gathers around, cautiously applauding as he does something particularly impressive, otherwise hushed and respectful. A tall white man in a golf shirt and wraparound sunglasses standing a few feet away from the performer claps firmly with the beat of the drum, alone in an otherwise silent crowd.
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Much of the month working my way through a dense, technical science fiction book about the colonization of Mars. The writing is peppered with elaborate descriptions of sandy plains, towering red rock formations, arroyos and canyons, infinitely pervasive red dust. We sit on horseback one weekend outing, in the midst of fantastical landscapes, sheer rock faces exposing lines of yellow, red, and purple strata. We drink in the landscapes, tasting fine grit in our mouth, the dust blown in on relentless winds, and I think about terraforming, how from this vantage point, the land seems so large, so alien, so seemingly impervious to any effort mankind could muster to change it. When people ask us what New Mexico is like, we respond that it’s beautiful, it’s striking, it’s deeply alien. We tell our friends we’ve found ourselves somehow on a completely different planet.
“When you travel over the highlands like I did today, you can’t help but love it,” the protagonist of my science fiction book says in a heated argument over the ethics of forcing the uninhabitable Martian landscape to accommodate human life. “People may try to change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing them too. A sense of place, an aesthetics of landscape, all those things change with time. You know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn’t like the Alps. It took them a long time to see its beauty.”
“They drowned most of it anyway,” his sparring partner said blackly.
“Yeah yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know. So we terraform the planet, but the planet terraforms us.”
In the midst of swaths of solo time, the periods of actual human interaction feel all the sweeter. My high school friend happens to find herself in the same quadrant of the country as me, on a road trip with her dad. We walk around downtown, trying on felt hats and scoping out souvenirs for her family, chattering endlessly about our lives since the last time we saw each other at the very beginning of my travels, marveling at the realization we’re approaching a full decade of friendship. I take her to her first restaurant since the pandemic, and she’s wide-eyed at the novelty after a year of home dinners and takeout. I meet more musicians via my videographer companion - we both take delight in my wry answer to the question of what I do, his friends wondering how in the world a software developer managed to enter their orbit. I enter the month with a goal to buck up and make one friend in the city during the course of the month, just one, and connect with a girl online. We grab drinks and dinner together during the course of the month, leaning into an easy friendship of discussing food, travel, graduate school, roommates, trading anecdotes of breakups and boyfriends. My heart swells when we hug goodbye my last night in town, floating in a growing sea of warm people I know scattered across the country, across the world, who I may go months without talking to, but who will inevitably and happily grab a drink with me someday when I end up in their city again.
“I knew this guy once, he fixed sound equipment out in LA, and he was great, I always took my record player out there to him. He was telling me once, outside of his repair work, he had this other thing he did. He claims that the frequencies we’ve been listening to music our entire lives are wrong. So he takes these records, these classic records, and remasters them to the right frequencies.”
“Let’s see how it sounds,” my friend says. He queues up a remastered version of some crooning 1950s ballad, and turns the volume up, and we all sit and listen really hard, watching the landscape rush by.
To my untrained ear, it sounds the same, but maybe the entire car is lightly vibrating on some holier plane.
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Before we leave Santa Fe, we finalize our last legs of the trip: the month of May in Oregon, June to work our way back across from the West Coast eastwards, with houses booked in Montana, Missouri, Alabama to get us there. July will be back where we were a year ago, in our respective family homes for a month, and a plan to arrive back in DC in August. It’s easy to pretend like our travels have just been this weird little detour, a suspension of real life, and when we get back to where we came from we’ll be able to pick everything up again like this past year never happened. We just hit pause, we left town, we took an extended vacation. I have to remind myself sometimes that in the full year and a half it will have been since I left DC, my friends and my neighborhood and my life wasn’t simply preserved in amber, waiting for my arrival again. I’m apprehensive about learning what continental drift I myself have experienced since uprooting myself from my entire life, what will go away when I’m back to where I started, and what change is a permanent evolution. The small, material shifts are easiest to look at: my attempts to have an infinitesimally smaller footprint on the environment. An endless negotiation of my relationship with social media, culminating in apps and platforms being stripped, grudgingly, one by one from my life over the past months when no other solutions get my screen time under control. (I now sourly scroll the New York Times in the mornings before getting out of bed, as I’ve eradicated anything resembling fun from my phone.) A new job, a flexible work schedule, a permanent shift to remote work, unanchoring me from any city or country. What started as experiments feel suddenly locked into place as I start visualizing life beyond one or two months ahead. The deeper changes are harder to pin down. Who's to say that any internal evolutions would have happened anyways if I had stayed put and kept my little life intact this past year? I think of Savannah and how light and loved I felt, and Charleston with my full bodied, head tipped back laugh. Being a little lost and a little unmoored in New Orleans, intimidated by the bright lights and the glaring sun, steady and constant in Wilmington, running along the water each night at sunset. In theory, this trip has been life changing. But as we’ve ricocheted around, have I just evolved myself to match a wildly different planet each time? Will I evolve right back when I make my way home?
“I feel like I’ve lost my luster in your eyes,” my ex texts me. “I’m no longer the apple of your eye.”
I go on one last hiking trip at the end of my final work day in New Mexico to a nearby canyon. I cruise on the usual dizzying drive, trapped between rolling mountains, snow capped crests peeking over the horizon. I park at the trailhead and no one else is there. I leave my headphones behind in the car, and walk in silence for a while. I move easily along the flat path between towering rock faces on either side of me and feel the mountain is deeply agnostic to my miniscule journey down its ancient ravine. With no other hikers, I indulge my kiddish impulse and climb on top of some massive boulders dotting the path on either side. It’s so silent, all I can hear bees buzzing on a bush across the pathway. The sun bakes on my burnt shoulders and I stay quiet and still. I let my mind empty. At this point in the month I’m weary of introspection. Maybe this is what meditation is - getting so exhausted by your thoughts that you just decide to stop thinking for a bit.
I dust myself off and make my way back towards the car, the relentless silence beating on my back as I walk away. I slowly turn up the sound dial in the car, the background noise rises bit by bit, flooding the quiet with chatter, activity, movement. I repack my worldly belongings, the still house is disrupted by the chaos of loading the car up. We prattle about our friends ahead on the road, the cities we’ll be passing through, the plans we’ve made. I feel a sharp wave of gratitude as we pull out of the driveway for this weird, dusty little city, these towering mountains and harsh air, the barely inhabitable land we managed to carve a home into for a short period of time, and whatever changes this land was able to carve into me before we drove away.
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Recommended content for living on the outskirts of the world:
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
A dense, challenging book you’ve been procrastinating reading for months
A short, strange book you picked up on a whim
Back episodes of This American Life
Esther Rose's album How Many Times