Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 12

"At least we don't glory in it. Not yet, at any rate."

It's the middle of the afternoon, New Year's Day, and Merilyn has ordered a margarita. She's been reading about margaritas in the brochures. There's also a brochure about the artwork hanging in the lobby, one of which is a reproduction (surely) of Augustus John's portrait of James Joyce.

"Did you know the margarita was invented in Juarez?" she says. I tell her I did not. I thought it had been invented by Hemingway in Key West. "That was the daiquiri," Merilyn replies.

"Apparently," she goes on, "Pancho Morales was working as a bartender at Tommy's Place, a bar in Juarez, in 1942, when a woman came in and ordered a drink he'd never heard of."

"Probably a b.l.o.o.d.y Caesar," I say.

"So Morales mixed her some tequila, Cointreau, lime juice, and a lot of ice, and named it after his wife. Isn't that nice?"

"Inspiring," I say. "I once invented a drink. Did I tell you? We were in the Gobi Desert, it was hot, and all we had was a bottle of gin and a case of canned peaches, for some reason, so I mixed the gin with peach syrup from the cans. We didn't have any ice. We drank it, but I don't think you'd want it to be known as a merilyn."

"No, probably not."

"What happened to Pancho?" I ask.

"He immigrated to the United States and spent the next twenty-five years working as a milkman."

We raise our gla.s.ses. "Sic transit gloria mundi," I say.

Another customer walks into the bar. The waitress shows him to the table next to ours. He has long hair, gla.s.ses, and a beard and is wearing a battered brown fedora, a baggy sports jacket, and cargo pants. He orders a beer, then opens a book and, without taking off his hat, proceeds to mind his own business. The book is called Luxury Hotels. He's a second-storey man, I surmise, a diamond thief, although he looks a bit hefty for a cat burglar. A second book lies on the table beside the beer: Theories of Perception. Okay, he might be harmless enough, but he could be a demonic cult leader with a taste for high living. Billy the Kid looked harmless, too. Best to let him be.

"Hi there," Merilyn calls across to him. "Are you an environmental refugee, like us?"

The man closes his book, keeping his index finger between the pages, and looks at us. "I was in Was.h.i.+ngton trying to get home to Santa Fe," he says, "but the plane couldn't land in Albuquerque because of the snow, so we were diverted to this G.o.dforsaken place. Nice hotel, scary city."

"Was.h.i.+ngton?" I say. Plenty of weird cults in Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Visiting my mother," he says.

Right. "Is this one of the luxury hotels in your book?" I ask him.

"No," he says, looking around. "It would have been when it was built, though, which was just after the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa is supposed to have ridden his horse right into this lobby."

"It's a good thing he didn't fire off his six-shooter," Merilyn says, and we all look up at the Tiffany dome.

"I don't think it was there then," says the stranger.

After a bit more chatting, we introduce ourselves. Our new friend's name is Mike Fischer: he's not a cult leader, after all, but a designer-builder from Santa Fe. He pa.s.ses us his card: Santa Fe Adobe Design. "I build houses." He's stranded in El Paso until the Albuquerque airport reopens; then he'll have to fly from here to Albuquerque and take the airport shuttle to Santa Fe. Merilyn tells him we're driving back to Albuquerque in the morning, and he's welcome to come with us.

He looks dubious. "Are you sure?"

"Plenty of room," I say. "You could be stuck here for days."

The next morning we have our first pa.s.senger, not counting the deer. When I bring the car up from the underground garage and park in front of the hotel, Mike climbs in without commenting on the condition of the Echo's hood and headlight.

"What kind of houses do you build?" Merilyn asks him as we thread our way out of El Paso back onto the I-25.

"I use a lot of adobe," he says.

He studied architecture at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, in his home state, but felt a growing disaffection for the international, box-style, Brutalist designs of the 1960s that grew out of Le Corbusier's obsession with poured concrete. When he moved to Santa Fe thirty years ago, he worked in construction in order to gain a hands-on appreciation for building techniques and local materials. He became intrigued by adobe. "It's a lot more forgiving than other building materials," he says. "You can shape it, and slight imperfections actually make it look better. A house made from adobe is more sculpture than architecture. And more authentic: in New Mexico, you can't get much more authentic than adobe."

It strikes me as odd, I tell him, that a desert people would adopt a building style that requires so much water. Adobe is clay mixed with water and pressed into a form to make a brick, which is then taken out of the form and baked for three days in the sun.

"Each brick," Mike says, "required a gallon of water, and a typical New Mexican pueblo would have used tens of thousands of bricks."

Although most of the ancient pueblos in the Southwest, he tells us, were made from stones and mortar, many were located near springs that provided year-round water or on arroyos that concentrated water during the brief rainy seasons. The bricks in some of these pueblos are often slumped and misshapen, as though they were used before they were completely dried, suggesting haste to build while the arroyo was still running.

"This was true of San Marcos, one of the largest pueblo villages in the Southwest," Mike says. "At one time it housed more than seven thousand people."

"Is it still around?" Merilyn asks.

"No, it was abandoned in the late 1600s, shortly after the Pueblo Revolt."

Sparked by the Spaniards' brutal suppression of native religions, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 pushed the Spanish out of Santa Fe all the way back to the Rio Grande. The Puebloans then set about erasing every vestige of European culture they could find: they burned Christian churches (and a few friars), repurified baptized natives by was.h.i.+ng them with yucca soap, nullified Christian marriages, renamed Spanish settlements and missions. In an excess of purity, they even destroyed Spanish crop seeds and tore up introduced plant species such as fruit trees. This final symbolic gesture might have been one too many, for eight years later the Puebloan leader Luis Tupatu sent an emissary to El Paso del Norte asking the Spanish governor to return: his people, he said, were starving.

About halfway between El Paso and Albuquerque, we stop at the Bosque del Apache again to stretch our legs and look at birds. The Apache and the Navajo eventually replaced the Puebloans, who had been in decline in the lowland deserts since the horrendous twenty-five-year drought that lasted from 1276 to about 1300. Drought meant no rainy season, and no rainy season meant no food and no adobe. The Puebloans of the highlands, along the San Juan River in Chaco Canyon, in Mesa Verde, and around Santa Fe and Taos (where there was water), managed to hang on, but by the end of the seventeenth century the Apache had the fertile bosques along the Rio Grande pretty much to themselves. These bosques, bright green strips of cottonwood, Russian olive, and tamarisk, provided summer camps for the Apache, who spent the season stocking up on fish, ducks, and geese. And not only Apaches; while we train our binoculars on a flotilla of sandhill cranes, a coyote trots out onto the causeway and gives us a long, territorial look.

"Time for lunch," I say, thinking about the coyote heading toward the cranes, but Mike takes my comment more personally.

"We're close to San Antonio," he says, looking at his watch. "We could have a burger at the Owl Cafe."

I recognize the sign for the Owl Cafe, a low, windowless building not far from the I-25. Without knowing it, Merilyn and I had parked nearby on our way down to El Paso to look at a gray flycatcher, a small tyrant the colour of sky in a Dutch painting. Mike fills us in on the cafe's history. The cafe's first owner was Conrad Hilton's father, but the place is mainly famous for having been the favoured haunt of scientists working on the Manhattan Project in nearby Los Alamos, in 1945. Apparently, they would take a break from splitting atoms to come down here to drink beer and eat Jose Miera's fiery green-chili cheeseburgers. They must have felt that their chemistry and Miera's were fairly closely related.

The cafe is noisy, dark, and crowded; the tables and the long bar in the first room are full, and a waitress leads us through two more dining areas before finding an empty booth. Of course we order the chili cheeseburgers. Mike and Merilyn order root beers, and I ask for a pint of draft. Merilyn wonders aloud what happened to all the people in the area who were exposed to radiation during the bomb testing.

"Maybe they mutated into little emaciated bald people with big eyes," I say. "They could have been the so-called aliens that were sent to Roswell."

Mike laughs. "What a cover-up," he says.

I was joking, but now when I look around the crowded room I'm not so sure. Why is it so dark in here? Why do all the men leave their ball caps on? What kind of fuel fires the grill?

"How do they get these burgers so hot?" I ask, chugging half my beer.

"Hot?" says Mike. "This isn't hot."

I look at him suspiciously. Is he one of them?

MY son, when I talk to him from the pay phone outside the cafe, says it is so warm back home that he's not yet wearing his winter coat. "s.h.i.+p it here," I tell him. "I'm freezing."

"Odd time to be making a trip like this," Mike muses from the back seat as we near snow-covered Albuquerque. It didn't seem odd to us. We think of ourselves as travellers, not tourists: we prefer the off-season. But as we head back into a landscape that looks more like Nunavik than New Mexico, I wonder if maybe Mike doesn't have a point.

When we drop him off at the airport, he says if we're ever in his city we should look him up. We tell him we will.

"Let's go this afternoon," Wayne says as we drive back into Albuquerque.

"We have to rent a car anyway," I say. "And the I-25 seems to be open going north. Let's do it." Spontaneous planning: the best of both our worlds.

It is mid-morning when we pull in under the sedate porte cochere of Jess Munos Auto Body shop. No wrecks, no grease monkeys in sight. This might be a computer repair business or the front office of a genteel moving company. A friendly, clean-cut man named John takes the keys to our crumpled Echo. He is an enthusiastic local booster. When he hears we might be going to Santa Fe, he tells us not to miss the San Miguel Mission, the oldest church in North America.

"Did you earn that?" I ask, pointing to the silver buckle on his belt that says "Rodeo Champion."

"I sure did. I wouldn't wear it if I didn't. I wrestle steers."

He tells us how he once escaped an elk by running around a tree. "You can't outrun those animals. All you can do is go in circles: we turn faster than they do." I make a mental note: when in danger, run in circles.

"I'll have you on your way by the weekend," he promises.

We believe him. John calls a car rental place and within minutes, a young woman pulls up in a big Pontiac. Round-faced and jolly, Gloria quizzes us about our trip as she ferries us across town. "Where ya been?" "Whatcha doin' here?" To every reply, she snorts a little laugh. "Gotcha!" she says. "Gotcha!" The little cherries on the lapel of her black pea jacket dance against her breast with delight. She gives us a good rate on a Grand Prix, and we head north feeling buoyant.

As we near Santa Fe, the weather becomes colder, the snow on the road hardened to a slippery sheen. Although the slope is long and gentle, we've climbed to seven thousand feet above sea level. Once again, we're in full-on winter. The culture seems to have changed, too. Although the overpa.s.ses are decorated like Navajo blankets, gone are the righteous billboards exhorting the right to life and abstinence until marriage. The signs we zip past now extol the virtues of Gucci shoes and multi-million-dollar estates. Santa Fe, it seems, is high-end America.

But when we take the long way into the city, we pa.s.s clones of every hotel and motel chain in America. We could be outside Flagstaff or Sacramento or El Paso. When we get closer to the centre of town, a few private motels and inns appear. The Stage Coach. The Silver Saddle. The El Rey.

"Let's go for a mom-and-pop this time," I suggest. "Something close enough that we can walk to the main plaza."

In Santa Fe, the old town is downtown, not some historic district roped off for tourists, as it is in Albuquerque or Sacramento. Within a few blocks of the plaza, we find the Santa Fe Motel & Inn, a cl.u.s.ter of adobe rooms set back from the road among some trees. A lovely, soft-spoken young woman tells me the room is $99, then, after some discussion, agrees that $69 will do fine. She shows us the patio with its adobe fireplace, each wrought-iron table heaped with a tuque of snow. The room feels like suns.h.i.+ne: terracotta floors and turquoise walls with wooden shutters on the windows, a bathroom done in Mexican tiles, a bed-sitting room, and a small kitchen with a gaily painted wooden table and chairs. We take it for two nights, with an option on a third on the off chance that the car takes longer to be repaired than John promised.

I feel at home here. Maybe it's the snow. Maybe it's the tropical decor. Maybe it's the anti-Bush sentiment. On our way into Santa Fe, we pa.s.sed a crossroads where chanting protesters were hoisting signs at each of the four corners.

Bring Our Soldiers Home. End the Occupation. Impeach for Peace. Jail Bush.

New Mexico is definitely a blue state. In the Billy the Kid Gift Shop at Mesilla, I was tempted by a car freshener that was a full-face portrait of the goofily grinning president, with the caption, "Bush's Dumb-a.s.s Head on a String." At the University of New Mexico Bookstore in Albuquerque, I almost bought a book called Bad President. Now, as we walk along Santa Fe's tony plaza, we pa.s.s a ma.s.sive countdown clock in a store window. Backwards Bush. Democracy Is Coming! 747 Days, 17 Hours, 47 Minutes and counting . . .

It occurs to me that New Mexico is more like where we are from than any part of the United States we've visited so far. Even Seattle. Not the geography or even the climate: I'm thinking of the way it was settled. In Canada, the first European immigrants sailed into the belly of the continent along the St. Lawrence River and through the Great Lakes. From those sh.o.r.es, they headed north. For the most part, European settlers in the United States arrived on the eastern seaboard and pushed steadily west. But New Mexico, like Canada, was settled by priests and traders and eventually families moving north from Mexico into the heart of the continent. The frontier for them was not a line moving steadily west: wilderness surrounded them, as it did the first Canadian settlers. Surely this has some effect on the psyche. Northrop Frye theorized that it created in Canadians a garrison mentality. I've never bought that: reading settlers' diaries made it clear to me that they weren't afraid of the wilderness. They did stick together, but from a sense of community, not defensiveness. Being surrounded by the unfamiliar makes people community-minded. Just as pus.h.i.+ng out from a settled area makes a hero of the individual.

George Bush is descended from that line of American tough-guy heroes. His response to 9/11, his invasion of Iraq: it all just seems paranoid. Maybe that's why he makes Canadians like me anxious. Maybe that's why New Mexicans stand on street corners, hoping he'll leave the White House and go home to Texas.

WE wake up to the sound of a snow shovel sc.r.a.ping asphalt; it is six-fifteen and the motel's owner is trying to clear the parking lot of the two feet of fresh snow that fell during the night. His a.s.sistant is blasting at the frozen ridges of ice with a propane weed burner, then whacking at them with a metal pole. There is a lot of sound and fury.

In the breakfast room, which is small but warm and smells like real coffee, we talk to a couple from Colorado who tell us that during the night the husband went out in his pyjamas to see why the dome light in his car was still on, and she went out in her nightie to watch, and their unit door swung shut behind them. Luckily, their cellphone was in the car. They called the emergency number taped to the office door, and the motel's owner drove across town in the blizzard to let them back into their room.

We spend the rest of the morning doing the tourist thing, walking around Santa Fe's attractive central square, making note of good places to come back to for dinner. Most of the people seem to be fellow tourists; a few look like locals who have come into town on errands. There are well over a hundred art galleries in Santa Fe, as well as the usual gaggle of souvenir shops. The plaza is surrounded by expensive clothing stores, some down-to-earth eateries. We spend an hour in a photography gallery, which has prints of photographs by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Henri Cartier-Bresson that are so clear and sharp it's as though they were printed this morning in the back room. I stand in front of one of Weston's sensual desertscapes and can almost hear the wind sc.r.a.ping over the dunes.

Under the covered walkway that shades the plaza's sidewalk in front of the old Palace of the Governors, which is not yet open, groups of Navajo craftspeople sit beside blankets on which they have spread arrays of silver earrings and bracelets, turquoise necklaces and rings. Merilyn and I walk arm in arm. She stops to admire a heavy turquoise necklace proffered by a Navajo jewellery maker, and I urge her to buy it. She finds an intricately woven shawl in a below-ground-level shop, and I urge her to buy that. I like Santa Fe, where everything is so expensive it feels special.

Waiting for the restaurants to open, we go into the Loretto Chapel, a small church just off the plaza, built in the 1870s as part of the convent for the Sisters of Loretto (Holy Faith). Five years later, when the sisters grew tired of having to climb a ladder to get to the choir loft, they made a novena to St. Joseph to send them a carpenter who would build them a proper set of stairs. On the ninth and final day of the novena, a mysterious man showed up with a donkey and a tool box and built them a miraculous spiral staircase: it twists twenty-seven feet up to the loft, a wooden helix without nails or any apparent physical support.

We sit in the quiet chapel looking at the bentwood staircase, trying to see what is so miraculous about it. It looks to us like an ordinary spiral staircase, although admittedly a handsome one. I particularly like the veneer covering its underside, no doubt in deference to the modesty of the nuns who had to climb it. We feel like a pair of heretics. If, as is bruited, the mysterious man with the donkey was St. Joseph himself, the staircase would be the work of Christ's earthly father. Some experts claim not to be able to identify the wood used in its construction. Maybe it's gopher wood, the wood Noah's Ark is supposed to have been made from, also unidentified. These are elevating thoughts, I think. No: escalating thoughts. Or perhaps lofty.

"Time to leave," Merilyn says wisely.

By now the Palace of the Governors is open, and Merilyn is keen to see the mud floor in the seventeenth-century chapel that was sealed with ox blood. A group of eight tourists, including us, are led from room to room by a docent named Linda, who has evidently spent some time on the stage. Her talks, explaining how settlers were recruited in Spain in 1598 for the mission to Santa Fe, are lively and interactive.

"You, sir," she says, pointing at me, "you look like a fine fellow. Are you a cobbler? Or a blacksmith? I'm going to make you an offer of free land, guaranteed work, and all you have to do is pledge that you will live in this Spanish colony for the rest of your life. What do you say?"

I say I think it's time to take John's advice and see the San Miguel Mission.

The mission is a few blocks south of the palace. The church was built in 1610 by the 250 Spanish colonists and 700 natives who came north from Mexico; they raised it on the ruins of an ancient kiva site sacred to the Tlaxcalan. We pay our dollar to get in and take a place on the benches, conscious of sitting on layer upon layer of sacred history.

The original mission bell, we are told, predated first contact: cast in Spain in 1356, it weighed 780 pounds-20 pounds of gold, 5 pounds of silver, and 755 pounds of copper. It had been rung to signal the start of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. The building was partially destroyed during the anti-Spanish frenzy that followed the revolt, and the original bell disappeared. This one was brought in by mule cart in the early 1700s, when Spanish rule was restored; it now hangs on a post inside the front door, beside a rubber mallet and a chart showing where to hit the bell to achieve specific notes. I study the chart for a while, then try playing "Frere Jacques," but all the notes sound the same to me.

Being a tourist, even for a morning, is thirsty work. At noon we meet Mike Fischer at the Pink Adobe and Dragon Room Lounge, a restaurant across from the mission. The beer is local and the specialty is a Steak Dunigan-a seven-ounce New York strip loin buried under a mound of green chili and mushrooms. The room is long and narrow, with a bar along one side, and we find a table in a corner beside a tree trunk that rises from floor to ceiling; halfway up, a metal cat clings to it with metal claws. Above us hangs a wooden monkey, poised like a trapeze artist but holding a chandelier, and I think of Poe's orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The absence of tourists is refres.h.i.+ng after a day of jostling in front of blankets spread with Navajo silver earrings and storefronts stacked with grey-and-white Hopi pottery. Twenty years ago, Jan Morris worried about the "Aspen syndrome" that seemed to have come to Santa Fe, the recent arrivals who became instant locals, equipping themselves with "flouncy layered frocks with marsupial pouches, mult.i.tudinous silver jewelries and Navajo wall rugs." Many of the shops and inns we peered into seemed to be run by such people, whose real roots were in southern California or Texas, but none of them, and certainly none of their customers, are here in the Pink Adobe. Except us, of course, but we're here with Mike, who is something of a regular.

Mike has brought along a sheaf of blueprints for Crescent House, his latest, nearly completed project. He rolls the sheets out on the table and pins the corners down with beer gla.s.ses. The house, he says, is built entirely of adobe and local spruce and is shaped like a two-storey letter "C" curled around a central kiva that gives the design its focus and strength. "I call it a kiva," he says, "but whoever buys the house will probably call it a studio, or the nurse's quarters." He shrugs.

"How much will it sell for?" I ask.

"Probably about three and a half million."

"Can we see it?" Merilyn asks.

"Sure." He seems pleased. "I've got the car here, we can go up there after lunch."

We drive through Santa Fe and up into the hills overlooking the city. All the houses here are huge, sprawling, single-storey, all owned by presidents and CEOs. Mike turns onto a winding gravelled track that curves around mounds of shrubbery and along a stone wall that opens into a carport. To the left of the carport is the circular kiva; the main entrance to the house is on the right; the roof above the carport is the main floor of the house. From the entrance we climb a staircase the banisters of which are woven branches cast in bronze. At the top of the stairs we enter the largest living room I've ever seen: "Eighty feet by twenty-five," Mike says, with wide pine boards below and thick, rounded spruce logs overhead. Buff adobe walls protrude into the living s.p.a.ce to form hallways and alcoves, a corner fireplace, a transition to the kitchen. He shows us the bedrooms, a fully equipped exercise room, and a master bathroom so big it challenges the notion of a bathroom as a room to be used by one person at a time.

It is a kind of living architecture, organic and sculptural. It seems not so much constructed as evolved according to Mike's whimsy and enthusiasm. He had a marble countertop installed in the dressing room, and when he saw that there were trilobites embedded in the marble, he had lights put under the counter that s.h.i.+ne up through the fossils. The effect is stunning, but it involved remaking the entire vanity. When he thought the curved stairway might be daunting to some visitors, he put in an elevator to the main floor. A huge boulder that had turned up in the excavation beside the main door was left there, jutting through the wall; Mike is thinking of hollowing it out and planting a fern garden.

"All these rough surfaces," Merilyn says. "How would you ever clean them?"

Mike gives her an amused look. "I hadn't thought of that," he says. "I guess they'll hire someone."

The inside curve of the living room gives out onto a deck that is also the roof of the kiva. Leaning on its railing we look out past the lights of Santa Fe over a vast, dry plain, fading in the crepuscular light. Mike points to a distant mountain peak: "That's in Colorado," he says. On our left, a faint glow on the horizon is Albuquerque, sixty miles away. And on our right, Taos. Surrounded by adobe, with a 180-degree view commanding miles and miles, we feel like cliff dwellers ourselves. Mike points to a house above us-Pottery House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright-then to an empty lot immediately below. "I own that, too," he says. "I'm going to build another vision house on it, like this one, only I'm going to call it Shard House. All the uprights will be in the form of pottery shards."

Pottery shards at the foot of a cliff, below an adobe pueblo carved into the hillside: it's like a modern Mesa Verde. Mike is not just playing around with million-dollar clay blocks; he's recreating the ancient history of New Mexico.

MY brief visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has not prepared me for the gorgeous landscape we drive into as we head north along the Rio Grande toward Taos. The hills move in closer, black mesas that O'Keeffe painted and Ansel Adams photographed. The two met in the summer of 1929, when, drawn by descriptions of New Mexico's wild beauty, they both journeyed to Taos. O'Keeffe was forty-two and already famous; Adams twenty-seven and completely unknown. They became friends, bonded by their love of the southwestern landscape Wayne and I are pa.s.sing through-spare, subtly coloured, its lines etched hard against the sky-a landscape impossible to look at without seeing their art.

Eight years before O'Keeffe's first trip to New Mexico, her lover, Alfred Stieglitz, exhibited more than forty nudes of her: photographs of her hands, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her body. The exhibition was sharply erotic, visible proof of what Stieglitz once said, that when he photographed, he made love. The portraits caused a public sensation. Suddenly, O'Keeffe was not a painter; she was the master photographer's model.

For twenty years, although she and Stieglitz were married, O'Keeffe spent her summers alone in New Mexico. At first she rode into the hills on pack horses, then she bought an old Model A and roamed the countryside as we've thought of doing, driving off the roads into the dry desert canyons. She collected bones and painted flowers, the hills, and skulls of long-dead animals.

I'm curious about this relations.h.i.+p, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. At the museum, it was not her art so much as the images of her that stirred me: portraits by various photographers that tracked her from a heavy-lidded, sultry young woman to a firm-lipped old lady, that tough, imperial gaze never varying across a century. Stieglitz was fifty-three and O'Keeffe was thirty when they fell in love; Stieglitz left his wife for her, yet they conducted separated lives, often thousands of miles apart.

I understand the appeal of a creative partners.h.i.+p, of throwing your lot in with someone who knows what it is to love shape and texture and shares your vision of the world, someone equally obsessed with images (in their case) or words (in ours). Even so, I understand O'Keeffe's pressing need for solitude. I am happy when Wayne goes off to join a scientific expedition to China, or Patagonia, or the North Pole. I can't wait for the private time those trips allow me, yet I rarely carve out that solitary s.p.a.ce for myself. Why is that? I wonder as we drive into Taos. Was O'Keeffe stronger than I am? More self-absorbed?

More dedicated to her art? Or was Stieglitz more overbearing? Whatever the cause, she left New York every summer to get away from his mesmerizing gaze, the unblinking eye of his camera, to remember who she was.

I think of Canada, sharing a continent with the burly, a.s.sertive United States: maybe we'd get along better if we could just find a way to spend a little time alone.

TAOS IS exactly as Simone de Beauvoir described it: "a faithful, scaled-down replica" of Santa Fe. The same plaza ringed with arcades, curio shops, and, on one side, the famous adobe hotel, La Fonda. We feel vaguely disappointed. Without a church to tether it, the plaza seems without purpose. In front of the bandstand some young people in heavy knit sweaters and tuques have set up portable tables laid out with food-m.u.f.fins, bread, soup, stew-all of it salvaged from local grocery trash bins.

We decline the scavenged lunch, cross the plaza, and go into La Fonda, which houses one of the two restaurants on the square. We eat at Joseph's Table, where I order the mola.s.ses flank steak with duck-fat frites. Wayne chooses marinated pork, which arrives mysteriously as a sandwich. The waiter recommends the mousse for dessert, admitting, "I had a Belgian couple who said it's not really a mousse."

"That's not a mousse," Wayne says, "that's an elk."

The waiter starts to leave, then turns.