Desert Grace, Part 1 2 comments

By Brian Volck

Desert highways are not like other roads. It’s a mistake to drive them the way you might east of the Mississippi. In the West, a hundred miles out of the way is still in the neighborhood, a minor detour. The end of cheap oil may soon end such profligate habits, but when I’m back in the high desert, it’s the way things are done.

I drove alone from Gallup, New Mexico to Santa Fe recently, stopping along my meandering route as the spirit moved, an introvert’s holiday. My business in Gallup was over and I needed to be in Santa Fe by nightfall, but the rest of my itinerary was deliciously vague, a catalogue of places new or dear to me.

Zuni pueblo—a dispiriting town for so lovely a place—was only just awakening that Saturday morning. I’d driven south from Gallup, hoping to see the murals inside the restored seventeenth century mission church, but the place took far longer than it should to find, and there was no one to let me in when I arrived.

I wandered outside the old cemetery a bit and talked to a local artisan before hopping back in the car. It had been a disappointment, but the morning was still cool, with much to see ahead. I drove east on back roads, well off the interstate, looking forward to the day’s remainder.

El Morro (“The Headland”) is a sandstone bluff east of Zuni, now protected as a National Monument. At its base sits a deep and reliable waterhole, making the promontory a centuries-old stopping place for human travelers. Once refreshed by water and shade, many visitors carved a record of their passing on the sandstone walls: ancestral puebloan petroglyphs fade into inscriptions from Spanish expeditions (the earliest of these documents a visit by New Mexico’s first Spanish governor, Juan de Onate, in 1605), followed by signatures from nineteenth century American soldiers and settlers.

A paved foot trail leads to the waterhole and cliffs, with signs along the way pointing out the rock-carved calling cards of the famous and obscure. The better prepared (water and a hat are essentials) continue past the pavement and up to the partially excavated ruins of Atsinna, a thirteenth century village atop of the bluff, overlooking the plains. The quiet of soft wind on the desert is something to revel in, punctuated only by the lilting call of a canyon wren or a squirrel rummaging through fallen leaves under a Gambel Oak. I met a few hikers along the way, but when I reached Atsinna, I welcomed its silences alone.

The sun peaked; shadows narrowed. I finished the last of my water and headed down to monument headquarters and the car. Driving again, I skirted the volcanic terrain of El Malpais and reluctantly passed the pueblo of Acoma, one of the oldest continually inhabited places in the United States. The village and the view from its mesa are astonishing, but they would have to wait for another time.

It was lunchtime but I wasn’t hungry for food. What I craved was Mision San Jose de Laguna. Dedicated July 4, 1699, and having survived centuries of use and occasional neglect with the grace of a true grande dame, San Jose is one of my favorite buildings of all time.

It’s an idiosyncratic choice. Arizona’s San Xavier del Bac, the “White Dove of the Desert,” is grander and there are nearby churches decades older, but there’s no excuse to be in western New Mexico without visiting this tiny, unassuming quintessence of a Spanish mission.

What brings me back are the particulars, the irreproducible feel of the place. Thick adobe walls are plastered white on the inside, and puebloan designs run the length of the nave. Three hundred year old vigas support the wood and earth ceiling. The floor is unpainted adobe: sand, dirt and straw frequently resurfaced by parishioners.

But it’s the magnificent Spanish colonial reredo at the far end that commands the eye, with its spiral pillars and images of the Trinity and saints in deep reds, yellows, blues and white. Suspended from the ceiling above the altar is a large animal hide painted with a rainbow, the sun, moon and stars—Laguna symbols of creation above the very place where, for three centuries, men and women have gathered to worship the Creator.

Near the altar, to the congregation’s right, stands a statue of Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth century Algonquin convert to Christianity and the first Native American to be named “Blessed” by the Catholic Church. Several shrines and churches erected in her memory dot the United States, especially in Indian country. In front of the statue in Mision San Jose stands a small bowl filled with corn pollen, which several Pueblo traditions use as an expression of particular reverence. The Hopi, for example, sprinkle corn pollen at the feet of the katsinam, the spirits who gather to dance at and bless the Hopi villages.

The church at Laguna brings together diverse threads of my life in astonishing ways: Indian and Spanish, desert and church, homeliness and beauty, Creation and Creator. On a day of blessed solitude in New Mexico, Mision San Jose was what I wanted most to visit. On my way to Santa Fe, that’s the old neighborhood haunt I needed to see again.