Art is a big deal in New Mexico, not just in Santa Fe which, BTW, is the third-largest art market in the US, behind New York and Los Angeles, but everywhere. Art, good art, great art, craft as art, permeates the New Mexican landscape and people’s lives. The last two times we’ve been to Albuquerque, there was an Art/Craft Show, an annual one in Santa Fe for international artisans two years ago, and a show for locals in Albuquerque this year; both were excellent. In this art-infused atmosphere, Silver City has been named the best Art City in New Mexico for two years running and it is between Albuquerque and Tucson so it was a natural stop. Our plan – Michele’s plan, really – was to get to Silver City about two hours earlier than we did, have dinner at Revel, a local farm to table restaurant, and catch a jazz group from New Orleans at the Little Toad Creek Brewery.

But the pass on the most direct route was closed forcing us to arrive at our destination, the restored Murry Hotel in Downtown Silver City, after dark. Like Tonopah, Silver City is an old silver mining town – it was founded in 1870 and Tonopah in 1900 – which still has active mines in the area but, otherwise, they are totally different. Tonopah has a highway running through the Business District while the highway runs next to Silver City – out of sight – and that makes a difference in the appeal of the shopping/hanging out district (just ask Jane Jacobs). About 36 hours later, we left. Even so, we did get to Revel and caught the end of the set at the Toad. From a very short stay – two nights and a morning – Silver City seems like a place that deserves a longer visit, although we did have time to have two excellent breakfasts, one a homemade quiche in a coffee shop and the other, a Vietnamese street food place in an old car dealership. For all that, Silver City seems like a town that is working hard to stop its slow demise and not quite making it. The town is about 9,500 people, having lost about 750 residents since the census and our hotel was close to empty. What it does have is the Gila Cliff Dwellings.

As an aside, we also had time to stop by the Silver City Book Store. I want to say that it is a typical small-town bookshop except that the econiche is more specialized than that, it is a typical, small, out of the way town’s, used, bookstore. The owner, Michael, who was very talkative and opinionated, just like he should be, moved here from New York and loves living in Silver City.

As an aside to the aside, everybody we interacted with on this trip had moved to where they were living and loved living exactly where they were; from the woman who checked us into the Mizpah Hotel in Tonapah who was from Oaklahoma, to my former Californian sister in Albuquerque, to the women who sold Michele her new coat, to Michele’s cousin in Tucson who is from New York. End aside to the aside.

After a few minutes of conversation, Michael pointed me to a row of shelves in the back of the store and said “you’ll find some old friends there” and he was right, John McPhees was there and Wendell Berry, Stephen Jay Gould, and Gary Snyder, and somebody I haven’t thought about for sixty years, Richard Halliburton. Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels changed my life. I have no idea who gave it to me or if I just took my parents’ book, but it exposed me to new worlds that were here to fore unimaginable. I think it was my first grownup book, certainly, one of the first and it was like turning a light on in a dark room filled with wonders that I didn’t even know existed. The book was written during the 1930s and, now, rereading parts of it at home, some of the marvels, like the Transbay Bridge – what we now call The Bay Bridge – seem prosaic but some, like Bagdad, Fabled Arabian City, during the 1930s seem even more exotic. The book is so dated, much more than a technical book of the same era. Hoover Dam is a wonder but The Grand Canyon is ignored, Washington is a wonder but not New York or Paris. It is like running into a very old friend who still smokes and thinks smartPhones are a fad, still, it’s nice to see him again. End aside.

We only had had two nights and a morning in Silver City because the first day was spent visiting the remnants of another city, 45 miles to the north. Well, city may be a little grandiose, ruin of a small apartment complex is closer to reality. We drove through the Gila Wilderness – counterintuitively, the Gila Wilderness is the first wilderness area in the United States that was protected as designated wilderness – which is mountainous but still dry enough to be considered drylands. The road started wide but got narrower the further we went, then it opened again as we got to the Federal Monument. We traveled through the remains of the Mogollon-Datil volcanic field that was active from about 35 to 20 million years ago to an old caldera about thirty miles across (a caldera is a very large volcanic crater). 35 to 20 million years ago, the volcanic activity made this area unlivable. For me, it is pretty much still unlivable; I doubt that I could survive being here a month even with the right clothes and a sleeping bag. Still, people whom our European ancestors considered primitive have lived here, off and on, for more than 10,000 years (Clovis Points, which are found across the American continent, including this area, and were replaced by Folsom Points about 10,000 years ago, are used as a dating device).

During that 10,000 years, members of one culture, the Mogollon, lived in this area and, during a drought, a subgroup built these structures, lived here, and thirty years later, abandoned them, moving…somewhere. There is way more to it than that but most of their story is lost, we know what they ate, what their pots look like and how they fired them, we know what spearpoints they used but we don’t know what they thought. What they valued, we can only guess. My guess is that their sense of natural beauty was closer to ours than their contemporary Europeans who thought the Grand Canyon was a scar on the landscape. I say this because of an experience Michele and I had maybe twenty years ago. We were hiking down the Escalante River from Silver Falls to Choprock, and, at one point, we decided to take a break ( we took lots of breaks but this was more memorable than most). We climbed out of the water and climbed onto a bench with a great view of the river. There was even a nice rock to sit on. Sitting there, eating a handful of gorp, we realized that there were chips of flints or obsidian – I have no remembrance of which – all around us. Five hundred years ago, give or take a couple of hundred years, other people had used this same sitting rock to take a break, to look at this same view. While taking a break, they used the time to chop at rocks to make spear points, leaving the tailings. It was both sort of eerie and exhilarating.