Meeting the Pueblo People

The 13,101-foot high mountains above Taos welcomes us from a graveyard in Las Truchas.

We're parked on the high desert, north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. The wind is howling... 45 miles an hour continuously with gusts hitting 65 to 68 mph. This is totally crazy. In all our travels we have never experienced anything like this.
We're in a dust storm and a fine coating of dessert sand coats everything inside the motor home – including us. The act of opening the door takes both hands.
We're staying at an Escapees Club park and we love being around these people. They truly are like us – mostly live aboards who gave up on most of their possessions so they could roam North America.
When we drove up to the entrance, the campground hostess came out of her little office and rang a large bell several times. This was to alert the camp that a visitor has arrived. After giving us a welcoming hug, she signed us in. While she did that a number of the neighbors stopped by to offer their own welcome.
In the afternoon, we gathered in the community hall for refreshments. Jo and I were introduced and were invited to speak about our travels....very welcoming people.
The blowing wind was so violent that we had to lower our motor home jacks to keep the rig from rocking so violently. At one stage we thought the rolled up canopy might break free and we needed to tie it down with our plastic ties.
The winds settled down in the late evening and we slept well. But we'll never forget this experience.

Friday, April 30, 2010
We awoke to a silent morning. Rabbits silflayed on the verge beside the motor home and cattle stood in the high desert with an electric fence separating them from us.
We said our goodbyes to our hosts and headed ever-uphill toward Roswell where we parked at the Visitor's Center. The lady who chatted with us gave us lots of information, then suggested we let her photograph us beside the aliens that populate everything in Roswell (the evidence is in the New Mexico photo album).
Roswell's reputation is built around a young cowboy who saw a UFO crash into the desert outside Roswell back in 1947. Initially the U.S. Army agreed it was a UFO. But then they circled the wagons and said it was a weather balloon. Of such stuff endless conspiracy stories are woven. We went to the UFO museum in town and spent an hour being inundated with more info than I need about UFOs.
Next overnight stop was the tiny crossroads of Vaughn, NM. We started the day at 3,100 feet and the empty road rose before us, slowly, inexorably upward. As we came to the crest of the hill for Vaughn our GPS told us we has passed 5,984 feet.
When we settled into El Rancho Camp, Jo wanted to cook some brownies. But the recipe for high altitude brownies requires that you reduce the water, add flour and remove an egg. They came out beautifully.
Vaughn must be loved by someone, just not by us. As Gertrude Stein once said: There's no there when you get there.” That's Vaughn.
Santa Fe, the state capital beckoned us the next day. The morning started at 33 degrees, a shocking difference of 60 degrees from Carlsbad. The deer were with us again on the naked hills. There are no trees, hardly even a scrub bush on the way to Santa Fe. And the hills continued to rise before us. We reached 7,024 just as we entered Santa Fe. We pushed on north to a campground that took us closer to Taos.
After we were settled in and had lunch, we left the RV and motored on the high road to Taos. What an incredible ride this was. We soon drove through the snow line, about 8,000 feet. We stopped in the village of La Trampas and visited one of the finest surviving 18th century churches in New Mexico. The town was established in 1751 by 12 families from Santa Fe.
We arrived in Taos late in the afternoon and when we tried to enter the Pueblo of Taos (the traditional and cultural center of the Pueblo peoples we were told visitors could only stay another 45 minutes. The man still wanted to charge us $10 each for the privilege. We thanked him but decided 45 minutes was too short a time to spend in the pueblo. So we made our way back to the town of Taos and wandered the art shops.
I chatted with a swarthy Pueblo woman named Jocelyn in one of the galleries. I asked her is she could help me understand the displayed carving called “Red Menace,” a little Pueblo man, painted totally red. He carried a rattle and wore a breech cloth of blue cloth with stars on it. She said the story stemmed from how the Pueblo people would fight other tribes. The man was a Pawnee brave and during a skirmish the Pueblo people had beaten the Pawnee. “This allows us to take from them anything we want,” Jocelyn told me. “So we took his song and his dance.”
She explained that this permits the victors to make a fool of the vanquished foe. She pointed out that the rattle was made from a tin can, not the usual gourd. “It's like we are diminishing him,” she said.
I asked her if a white man, or a Spanish person came to the pueblo if he would have been taken in and provided hospitality. “Probably,” she said. “Because the people would know they would not be endangered by just one person from the outside. But, she said, the Pueblo people had a sophisticated system of runners who passed the word from pueblo to pueblo about passing peoples. So the people in the pueblo would be well aware of any stranger long before he got to the pueblo.
It snowed lightly as we made our way back to our RV.