Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 13

"Where are you from?"

"Canada," we say in unison.

"I wondered," he says thoughtfully. "The accent is unusual, and you look people in the eye. That doesn't happen all that often in my country."

ON OUR way out of La Fonda, we notice a small sign on the reception desk: Forbidden Paintings of D.H. Lawrence.

The next tour isn't for an hour, but a private viewing can apparently be arranged for three dollars apiece.

"I didn't know Lawrence was a painter," I say.

"Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that's why they're forbidden," Wayne says.

We know Lawrence as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, but in his own time, his public reputation was that of a p.o.r.nographer and a wastrel of his considerable talent. His novels were banned and burned in England for their frank descriptions of s.e.x. Because his wife, Frieda, who left her husband and three children to marry Lawrence, was a cousin of Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron," they were not issued pa.s.sports until after the First World War. In 1919 they began their years of wandering-their "savage pilgrimage," as Lawrence called it, taking them first to Italy, then to France, Ceylon, Australia, and finally New Mexico.

In 1924, the wealthy widow Mabel Dodge Luhan gave Lawrence and Frieda 160 acres about twenty miles north of Taos in return for the original ma.n.u.script of Sons and Lovers, a book that had provoked from Lawrence one of the most delightfully searing responses to a publisher's rejection on record: "Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates," Lawrence wrote to a friend when the novel was turned down by Heinemann, "the miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today."

Lawrence, the literary outlaw, found New Mexico much to his liking. In an essay written in 1928, the year Lady Chatterley's Lover was published, Lawrence wrote that "New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had . . . A new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way."

We pay our three dollars and the young man leads us down a narrow hall toward a private dining room. He seems to know (and care) little about Lawrence. Sullenly, he draws a gold, floor-to-ceiling drape to reveal a wall of gaudy images, stiff red nipples and huge erect p.e.n.i.ses, a slavering baccha.n.a.lia.

The bored young man begins his spiel. "Nine oil paintings from an exhibition of thirteen that were confiscated in 1929 from the Dorothy Warren Gallery of London . . ."

"By the bad-art police," Wayne says under his breath.

The young man takes no notice of us. We try to stop him with questions, but he drones on. When he comes to Lawrence's death near Vence in 1930, I interrupt.

"It's p.r.o.nounced Vence, as in 'wants.' Not as in 'fence.' It's a town in southern France."

He mumbles on. "Frieda Lawrence returned to Taos when Lawrence died and buried his ashes at Kiowa Ranch. She brought the paintings with her, and when she pa.s.sed on, they were sold to Saki Karavas, who owned the La Fonda Hotel. He never would disclose what he paid for them, and though he received many generous offers over the years, he refused to sell them. Today the hotel and the paintings have been lovingly restored, preserving two Taos treasures."

After O'Keeffe's work, these paintings are an embarra.s.sment. And yet Stieglitz wanted to exhibit them in his New York gallery, an eagerness that may be explained by the fact that he never saw them.

Why would a man so skilled in language spend his time ineptly shaping images with paint? Just before this trip, I reread The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence's novel about Mexico, written partly at Kiowa Ranch. I also read an early draft of the novel, which he called "Quetzalcoatl." The s.e.xism and s.e.x aside, the writing is superb. Even so, Lawrence insisted that painting "gave me a form of pleasure that words can never give."

I suppose his paintings were like my gardens, satisfying to me, even beautiful, though mundane and gauche to the sophisticated observer. But with luck, nature will obliterate them the minute I'm gone. It is appalling to imagine a bored young man leading people through my perennial beds to show them what a sorry gardener I'd been.

The photographs that accompany the paintings are more interesting. Lawrence appears gaunt and sickly from the tuberculosis that had yet to be diagnosed, hardly the portrait of a p.o.r.nographer. Frieda is squarely German. Mabel Dodge, the staunch patron of the arts. Squinting into those faces, I find it hard to imagine the s.e.x games this threesome got up to. Maybe that's what drew O'Keeffe to Taos. Maybe it was an inner landscape she was hoping to explore.

"It must have been like the Sixties," I say to Wayne. "Funny how we forget to account for context."

On the way home, we pa.s.s a huge electronic billboard that blinks: Caution, Inclimat Weather Expected. On the radio, the announcer reports that it is thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in Santa Fe and sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in Central Park. Last night's wet, heavy snow triggered an avalanche in Colorado that pushed two cars off the road, temporarily burying the pa.s.sengers.

"I hope our breakfast companions get home safely," I say.

"Us, too," says Wayne. "Inclimat weather or no."

10 / JEFFERSON, TEXAS.

WE found some unexpected parts that need replacing," the mechanic at Jess Munos's repair shop tells us when we call from Santa Fe on Friday. I wonder, not aloud, how a Cla.s.s A car mechanic can find unexpected parts in a car but let it pa.s.s. We're enjoying New Mexico. He promises the Echo will be ready by noon Monday. "But call first," he says, before hanging up. Unexpected parts are no doubt hard to come by.

On Monday we drive the Buick back to Albuquerque, and Gloria from the rental agency gives us a lift to Jess Munos's. When we arrive, the Echo is in one of the repair bays being washed. It looks brand new, which shouldn't be surprising, since half of it is. We get the keys from John, and while Merilyn pays the bill, which all but maxes out our American Express card, I bring the car around to the front of the shop and load our belongings into the trunk, the back seat, and anywhere else I can find.

"Where's my ma.n.u.script?" Merilyn asks anxiously. She'd sleep with it under her pillow if she could.

"It's here, behind your seat," I say. Right where she can reach out to touch it from time to time. I know she likes to keep it close. I wonder if she's ever going to ask me to read it.

We seem to have acquired a few items. Merilyn says there is a science to packing. The things we are likely to need first, for example, should go in last. The computers should not go in the trunk. A novelist friend told me a horrifying story about the time when, after a month's writing retreat, she packed her laptop in the trunk, on top of her suitcases, because she thought she would need it first if inspiration struck, and when she got home, she discovered that the magnets in the speakers under her rear window had erased her entire hard drive. It sounds like an urban myth, but it is at least as hair-raising to me as the murdered hitchhiker or the baby in the microwave. Since then, I've put the computers in the back seat, under the books and wine bottles, where they are safe. Mine has a small dent on the lid, but at least it still has its mind.

Having said our farewells to Albuquerque, we are back on the I-25, making our way south, the sun in our eyes, the Rio Grande running like a fellow racer beside us. We turn east at the Bosque del Apache and drive past the Owl Cafe with a friendly nod. After two weeks in New Mexico, we feel almost like locals. But soon we are into the Chihuahuan Desert, moving along a thin strip of asphalt bordered closely by cactus, and once again nothing feels familiar. We perk up in our seats, smiling: it's the strangeness a traveller yearns for.

We are crossing the infamous Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, a ninety-mile-wide stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert between El Paso and Santa Fe. A jornada, the Spanish word for journey, is the distance a person can travel in a single day. Travelling to El Paso through the Chihuahuan was shorter than the Camino Real, which followed the twists and turns of the Rio Grande, but also a lot drier. In the desert, a jornada is effectively the distance from one reliable source of water to the next, but in the Jornada del Muerto, there is no reliable water at all. The "dead man" was a German trader who, in 1666, was arrested for witchcraft; he escaped from his pueblo prison near Albuquerque and rode off down the shortcut toward Mexico. His desiccated remains were found weeks later, beside those of his horse.

The section of the Chihuahuan we're driving through receives a few brief but torrential showers in the summer months, then not a drop of rain the rest of the year. When it rains, the earth grows a skin of black grama gra.s.s, and the creosote bushes flower. Now, in January, hardy shrubs like rabbitbrush, inkweed, and mesquite stud the landscape, quivering forlornly over patches of Apache plume, chocolate flower, and desert willow. p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus colonize the roadsides, their flat, round pads (actually branches) held up like admonis.h.i.+ng hands, warning us to stay on the roads, not to venture any deeper into the dead man's journey.

Today, the Jornada del Muerto is home to the White Sands Missile Range, the 54,000-acre expanse of New Mexico where the boys from Los Alamos National Laboratory worked when they weren't eating chili burgers at the Owl Cafe. We are in fact very close to the Trinity Site, the spot where they erected the one-hundred-foot tower upon which Fat Man, the world's first atomic bomb, was detonated on June 16, 1945.

We've all seen the movie: six miles away, men in crisp army uniforms stand in the stark desert looking north, hands s.h.i.+elding their eyes, scruffy journalists zigzagging among them, Samuel Allison calling the sixty-second countdown, J. Robert Oppenheimer looking intense and exhausted. Most of the spectators are in the control room, a kind of bunker half buried in sand, but some are outside, smoking and laughing nervously. The project's commander, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush (no relation), and the president of Harvard University, James B. Conant, view the explosion from a shallow trench. Why aren't they wearing safety suits? we cry out. Only the poor sods sent to examine the site after the explosion wore safety suits and gas masks, although of course those weren't much help. Gas wasn't the problem. The test generated more than thirty roentgens an hour of radiation, about the same as was later released in the Chern.o.byl disaster: radioactive dust falling on cattle fifty miles away burned holes in their hides. Even then, the powers that were didn't get it. Radiation affected the cattle, they said, but it wouldn't hurt humans "because cows don't take showers."

From the road, we think we can see the hillside where the scientists watched the detonation. Some distance away is what looks like a silver balloon, marking the Trinity Site.

"Do you want to drive in?" I ask Merilyn.

"Not particularly," she says. "It's the phenomenon that interests me, not the fact of the explosion. Did they decide to explode the bomb here because deserts already look dead? Didn't they realize it was teeming with living things? How smart were these guys?"

We stop at a small, deserted-looking gift shop on Route 380 advertising pieces of "trinit.i.te" for sale, and Merilyn gets out to buy a chunk. Trinit.i.te is sand fused to gla.s.s by the Fat Man detonation, which was estimated to have created temperatures in the tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. This green, gla.s.sy crust coated the entire 1,200-foot crater created by the blast. I'm a little leery of having bits of it in the car. It might be radioactive.

"What did the store's owner look like?" I ask Merilyn when she returns to the car.

"The shop is closed," she says.

"Cancer, probably," I say. Merilyn gives me her look.

The blast, equivalent to the explosion of twenty thousand tons of dynamite-the same size as the bomb later dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma- killed vegetation and animals, insects, birds, micro-invertebrates, fungoids, and, for all I know, protozoa for miles around. Nothing as hot as Trinity had ever existed on Earth before, and some scientists seriously warned that the blast would ignite the entire atmosphere, turning the planet into a fiery, lifeless ball. As it turned out, although the fireball rose ten thousand feet into the air, the atmosphere remained unignited. But how could the ground under the blast not be radioactive?

I'm not the only one to be antsy about the White Sands range. In 2000, when a forest fire swooped down on the valley and burned half of Los Alamos, including many of the buildings of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, local citizens fled in panic from the smoke, fearing that it was a radioactive cloud. "Now we know what Hiros.h.i.+ma was like," one of the refugees said. Seriously.

Oppenheimer believed in the curative powers of faith, that the bomb would set the world free. Instead, nuclear energy has made us suspicious and paranoid. H.G. Wells predicted the splitting of the atom in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. In it, nuclear energy is used first to replace every coal-burning power plant in North America, and within a few years, no automobile anywhere is still burning fossil fuel. In real life, atomic energy was used first to kill 200,000 people in six minutes, and sixty-five years later, most of our electricity still comes from burning coal or oil. Our cars are built the same way they were when H.G. Wells delivered his ma.n.u.script to his publisher in his Model T Ford. The world has not been set free; its chains have been tightened.

MALPAIS, a great streak of black basalt some fifty metres thick, rises out of the White Sands Desert and continues for some forty-five miles, cutting through the Valley of Fire. It is a welcome relief from the flat monotony of sand, and we stop for a closer look.

"It's as though it cooled just this morning," Wayne says.

"It was fifteen hundred years ago."

"That's this morning, in volcano time," he insists.

Nature has had a hard time colonizing this buckled, twisted stream of hardened lava. Where we are, the black stone is still s.h.i.+ny. Only cactus and Adam's needle, a relative of the Joshua tree, grow in the cracks where the cooling lava split. Wayne finds a place behind a cactus to pee, then hops back to my side of the lava bed, brus.h.i.+ng at something on his thigh.

"Yikes!" he yells. He must have brushed up against the cacti that doggedly push their roots into the black surface dust. Carefully, we pick the needles out of his jeans and the palm of his hand.

I take the wheel while he nurses his wounds. The towns we pa.s.s through look desolate. Neither of us feels the urge to stop and look around, though we do pull over for the Official Scenic Historic Markers, which tell stories of the region on one side, with Points of Interest indicated on the reverse, mostly ghost towns and monuments to the long gone. We stop for birds, too. A cactus wren. A loggerhead shrike. A string of western meadowlarks sitting like finials on a row of fence posts. The last jail that Billy the Kid broke out of is closed for the season. (It looks more like a garage than a jail.) We take a picture at the Smokey the Bear sign overlooking Lincoln National Forest, where the real Smokey was found as a cub clinging to a tree after a forest fire. Rangers raised him to become their mascot and, eventually, the icon of forest fire prevention.

"And taught him to hold a shovel," Wayne says, putting the camera away.

The town of Lincoln used to be called Las Placitas del Rio Bonito. It was home to the first water since the Rio Grande and thus marked the end of a ninety-mile jornada. How desperate those travellers on horseback or in the back of a wagon must have been by the time they got this far. We feel vaguely guilty for crossing in a matter of hours what must have taken them day after arid day. I have the urge to apologize again, this time to all those mothers with their parched, squalling babes.

We eat sandwiches and drink bottled water in the car on a windblown stretch of gra.s.sy desert.

"Let's go into Roswell for coffee and dessert," I suggest.

"Dessert at the end of the desert." Wayne can't help it. It's a tic, like Tourette's, these uncontrollable bursts of wordplay. "After sandwiches in the sand."

We know we're getting close to Roswell by the billboards. The Golden Arches i'm lovin' it sign shows Ronald McDonald swooping down in a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, trailing "Un-Official Crash Site" in his slipstream. A gnarly green hand holds up the note "Open 24 Hrs."

The main street of the town is wide enough for a landing strip. Most of the shops have embraced aliens with a pa.s.sion. We walk past the Cover Up Cafe, the Not of This World coffee shop, the Alien Zone, which advertises a Cosmic Jukebox. Shop windows feature miniature dioramas of balloon-skulled, slant-eyed creatures firing lasers across cut-out plywood mountains and, my favourite, a little Airstream trailer with an alien lounging outside in a salvaged sofa chair, a tiny beer can balanced on one arm.

Roswell has been synonymous with aliens and UFOs since the summer of 1947, when Mac Brazel, a foreman on the Foster homestead about twenty miles north of Roswell, found some odd debris-"a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks," he reported to the newspapers. It was odd enough that Brazel told the sheriff and the sheriff called the Roswell Army Air Field, which sent over a major to pick up the wreckage. On July 8, 1947, the RAAF apparently issued a press release (no one has been able to find it) stating that the 509th Bomb Wing had recovered a crashed "flying disc." Later that day, another press release hastened to clarify that it wasn't a flying saucer, it was a wrecked weather balloon.

Into the gap between those two stories have crawled legions of ufologists, most famously Stanton T. Friedman, who, thirty years after the fact, interviewed the major who did the original cleanup. This time, the story goes, the major told the truth: the Foster homestead was the crash site of an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. Witnesses came forward. There were, it turned out, eleven crash sites. Some of the aliens had survived. In 1989, a mortician reported that he'd done autopsies on the aliens who died. Finally, in the 1990s, in an attempt to quell the speculation, government inquiries were held and official reports issued. The recovered material, they determined, was fallout from a secret government program called Project Mogul, which launched high-alt.i.tude balloons in an attempt to detect sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests and ballistic missiles. And the aliens? They were hoaxes perpetrated by the media or cases of faulty memory related to the recovery of anthropomorphic crash-test dummies used in military programs like Project High Dive, the high-alt.i.tude parachute tests in the 1950s. No matter. National polls at the time showed a majority of Americans believed that aliens had visited their country and, more specifically, had landed at Roswell, and the government was covering up.

I remember Roswell from The X-Files, the television series featuring the alien-hunting Mulder and Scully and the motto "The Truth Is Out There." In the second episode, called "Deep Throat," Mulder and Scully end up at the Ellens Air Force Base, where ufologists believe some of the Roswell wreckage was taken.

"They're here, aren't they?" asks Mulder with barely repressed glee.

"Mr. Mulder," replies the enigmatic Deep Throat, "they've been here for a long, long time."

Some 80 per cent of the world's population believe there is life on other planets, in other galaxies, but Americans have made a culture of so-called aliens. I wonder if that's because they are particularly intrigued by the idea of humanoids evolving on another planet. Or do they just like being scared? Or is it because, being a frontier nation, they are pathologically frustrated at no longer having a frontier? Extraterrestrials would be proof that there is another habitable planet out there, a place they could "discover" and colonize when they've completely exhausted this one. A final frontier, as Captain Picard of Star Trek puts it: a place "to boldly go where no one has gone before."

That, it strikes me, is the essence of the American myth: they believe themselves a nation that consistently confronts and survives the impossible. Historically, the impossible was nature: rus.h.i.+ng rivers to be forded, rugged mountains to be scaled, endless deserts to be crossed. It has always been landscape-real estate-that Americans have been after. Their fixation with territory is so intense that in Texas a person can legally shoot someone dead for simply stepping onto their property.

The only real estate yet to be claimed is whatever may be "out there." In the same way that the NASA s.p.a.ce program wasn't a p.i.s.sing contest with the Russians so much as a yearning for new territory, aliens aren't proof of a conspiracy so much as evidence of another New World, where there are unmined mountains to climb and clear rivers to cross.

There are rumours that Hollywood has a new X-Files movie in the works. They're calling it I Want to Believe. Americans already do.

WE are a bit nervous about crossing through Texas, the land of George Bush and Waco and Dallas. We sort of sneak into it on a back road, hoping no one will notice. This is not unlike the way the state was first settled; in the early 1820s, wagonloads of American settlers filed quietly into the region when it still belonged to Mexico, hoping to strengthen America's claim to make it part of the Union. By 1830, Americans outnumbered Mexicans three to one, and in 1836, Texas declared its independence from Mexico. By then its population was more than 50,000, mostly Southern farmers who had brought their slaves with them: there were 3,000 slaves in Texas when it was annexed by the United States in 1845, and by the end of the Mexican War, in 1848, it was clear that Texas would be a slave state. When the Civil War started a dozen years later, the population of Texas was 600,000, of whom 180,000 were slaves. Its chief agricultural product was cotton.

We are driving through evidence of the Lone Star State's status as a cotton state: on either side of the highway are flat, red fields covered with drifts of white b.a.l.l.s. At first we think in horror, Snow. But no: it's cotton. We stop. All along the roadside, gathered in hollows, snagged on the stubble of their own stalks, are millions of cotton b.a.l.l.s.

I have never seen a cotton field before, but I'm pretty certain there are cotton fields in my family history. Just over a decade ago, I discovered that my father was African-American. He came from a family of refugee slaves who worked their way up from Kentucky into Indiana and Michigan in the 1800s, marrying whites and slowly turning from black to mulatto before arriving in Canada in 1880, light-skinned enough that my father was able to pa.s.s for white. My father insisted he knew nothing about this line of our ancestry-to him, having white skin meant he was white. But I have the doc.u.ments, including a copy of his parents' marriage licence, on which someone had written "Colored" in the box asking for nationality. In the 1920s, at least, "Colored" wasn't only a race, it was a country. A country my father refused to inhabit.

I stoop and gather handfuls of p.r.i.c.kly, grey-white cotton b.a.l.l.s, revelling in the feel of them in my hands, their lightness, their insubstantiality, their firmness and immense weight, and begin stuffing them in the car. More and more of them, running back and forth between the roadside and the car, until every crevice around the driver's seat is filled and overflowing, and I stop. I am not just collecting souvenirs, I realize; I am picking cotton.

MORNIN'! How're y'all doin' today?" a big man says as we enter the Lynch Line bookstore in Albany, Texas.

Despite a worrisome fondness for firearms and white pickup trucks, Texans are an extraordinarily sociable lot, although this garrulity is not reflected in their architecture. Here in Albany we were stopped by the enormous, nineteenth-century county courthouse, sitting squat at the centre of the town square. We'd decided against the interstate and even the red highways, choosing instead a thin yellow line that cuts a horizontal stripe across the upper half of the state. In town after town we'd seen the same arrangement; gone are the green Spanish adobe plazas, so compatible with socializing; instead, Texas is built around imposing, limestone structures dedicated to governance- courthouse, jail, tax office, police station, county archives in the bas.e.m.e.nt, land registry and tax office on the second floor. No bandstands, no meandering footpaths, no shrubbery, just straight concrete sidewalks leading up to the imposing palace's four central doors.

"Good morning," Wayne says. He spotted the bookstore in the row of shops fringing the square and made a beeline. It isn't just a bookstore: the Lynch Line also sells "Texana," bits of Texas history and memorabilia. Confederate Army swords and badges, shaving mugs, various household items, postcards, and daguerreotypes. I finger a bowl of marbles, thinking of our granddaughters.

"That your car out front?" says the big man. "Y'all're a long way from home!"

He introduces himself as Clifford Caldwell, the store's owner. His wife, s.h.i.+rley, is sitting at an antique desk behind an antique cash register. They're both historians, having worked with the Texas Historical Commission, and each has written a book about early Southern history: Clifford's, self-published, was called Dead Right: The Lincoln County War.

"I was in Canada once," he says. "They took my car apart at the border. They figured if I was a Texan, then I must be carrying a gun."

"You do carry a gun," s.h.i.+rley says, smiling.

"'Course I do!" Clifford booms. "But I know enough to leave it at home."

"We should go," Wayne says quietly to me. He looks pale and shaken.

"Why?" I ask. "What's wrong?"

"Let's just go."

I pay for the marbles while Wayne waits outside on the sidewalk. When I join him, he points mutely to the store's front door. Etched into the gla.s.s is the image of a noose hanging from a telephone pole.

"I just realized why this place is called Lynch Line," he says.

IN MINERAL Wells, Wayne, who has been checking shop windows for etchings since leaving Albany, spots a sign in the window of a coffee bar called HiJo's advertising free Internet access. He is teaching an online course in creative writing, which means that every Tuesday and Wednesday, like addicts desperate for a fix, we madly search for places to climb onto the World Wide Web.

While he works at his laptop, I ask a woman at the next table about the towering, abandoned-looking building across the street.

"The Baker!" she exclaims. She looks to be in her sixties, a bottle blonde with painted-on eyebrows, but with a lively twinkle in her eyes. She reminds me of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. It takes me a moment to realize she's referring to the building. "There used to be three big hotels like that here, because of the hot springs, you see. The Baker, the Damron, and the Crazy Water. I live in the Crazy Water."

I tell her it's my dream to live in a hotel.

"Oh, it's not a hotel anymore," she says. "It's for old folks like me. You're Canadian, aren't you?" I wonder how she can tell, but before I can ask, she explains. "I was born in Alberta, moved to Vancouver when I was one. I'm ninety-three now." She laughs. "No, I'm not, I'm eighty-three. I don't know why I do that."

We both laugh and look through the HiJo's window at the Baker. It was a latecomer to this spa town. Construction started in 1926 with a budget of over a million dollars. Fourteen storeys doesn't seem high today, but at the time it put the Baker on the international list of skysc.r.a.pers. It had 452 rooms and two complete spas and was the second hotel in the United States to boast a swimming pool, the first that was Olympic-sized. Despite opening less than a month after the stock market crash of 1929, it did a roaring business for forty years. Judy Garland stayed there, as did Clark Gable, the Three Stooges, Roy Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, and Jack Dempsey. Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan were guests. "Bonnie and Clyde stayed there, too," Gloria says, "but they registered under a.s.sumed names." She laughs. "Maybe they came for the lunch. There's a menu still stuck to the wall inside the door: three courses for seventy-five cents. Imagine that, a three-course lunch." She shakes her head.

"But I like living at the Crazy Water," she says after a pause, as though to convince herself. "When I was a girl in Vancouver, my favourite radio program was a dance-band show, Live from the Lobby of the Crazy Water Hotel. I never in a million years thought I'd end up living there."

"How did you?" I ask her.

"My son had dogs, and I'm allergic," she says. "So it was me or the dogs." Her face settles into sadness, and she takes a sip of coffee, leaving a bright red imprint of her lips on the cup. "He thinks the world of those dogs," she says.

ALTHOUGH WE'RE on the Texas Forts Trail, we see no forts. Occasionally, a sign promises Historical Marker Ahead 1 Mile, but nothing materializes except sometimes an arrow pointing to a cemetery. We miss New Mexico's loquacious plaques with their stories and maps.

Mostly what we see beyond the winds.h.i.+eld is fields. Dust blows across the asphalt, soil on the move. Tumbleweed, too. Mistletoe hangs from the leafless mesquite branches. The only wildlife in evidence is roadkill-coyotes, deer, skunks, rabbits, a possum-and turkey vultures. Lots of turkey vultures.