Red Rocks and Blue Skies

The American Southwest

by Mike Guardabascio

(page 1 of 3)

We slip back into the Southwest quietly, going exactly the speed limit after having just gotten our second speeding ticket in a month in Colorado, where cops don’t appreciate our California plates. My wife and I are on a two-month long road trip, a delayed honeymoon—the honeymoon we would’ve started the day after our wedding if I hadn’t wrecked my car a week before on the Bay Bridge coming out of Oakland. All that stands between us, and our home in Long Beach, is the red cliffs and flat desert of the Southwest.  

New Mexico

Our night is spent in a scratch on the map called Las Vegas, New Mexico.  A long-lost relic of the American Frontier, this town has almost nothing in common with its Nevada counterpart.  You won’t get a laugh out of your waiter or bartender asking which way to the Luxor—they’ve heard these jokes and more. Then they’ve watched the people who made them drive off to their real destination.  The 150 year old town is filled with ancient buildings, most of them beautiful, most of them falling apart.  We enjoy our night in Las Vegas, but we’re happy to leave in the morning. Outposts like these are claustrophobic with crumbling history and the fear of disappearing.

We head west off the interstate, cutting through low hills on the winding State Road 502. From the disappearing to the disappeared, we venture to the ancestral pueblo homes and art left in the cliffs in the Bandelier National Monument.  Bandelier is, naturally, named after the Swiss-American anthropologist who discovered and researched it—not the Anasazi tribe whose genius constructed it.  Those who think the 1830s constitutes ancient history would be awed by this millennia-old site.

As we approach the cliffs in the Frijoles Canyon, the rock looks like coral dotted with small caves, worn by the wind or ancient storms. We realize that many of the holes were homes or churches.  Kivas, where the Anasazi would perform religious rituals, still exist among the residences that have been carved into the cliffs. With the heat bearing down, we gain an appreciation for the location. There’s nowhere else they could have built their homes where they would be sheltered from the sun.

There are a few paintings on the walls, which look just like the ones we grew up seeing in textbooks except for the color.  The reds and browns are the colors of the soil, the cliffs and the hills around us.  Technology has come a long way since these paintings were made, and yet, we are sure—we’ve never seen these colors in a book, or another reproduction.  They are native to the Southwest.