Park benches surrounded by art galleries afford unusual opportunities for contemplation.
Some days simply don’t follow your plans. They just skid and bump and blister on their own, and there’s little to do but reassure yourself that they won’t last forever.
Of course, it never feels like that when you’re in the middle of one.
Many years ago— before cell phones, before The Web, before the ubiquity of cashless transactions—people still managed to do interesting things. During an extraordinary summer internship working as an archaeologist near Los Alamos, New Mexico I had an opportunity to catch a ride into Santa Fe on a day off. I was young (as people tend to be before they get older) and I was still learning how to navigate the rapidly widening horizons of approaching adulthood. I made plans for a single day of low-stress adventure and put those plans in motion.
Santa Fe was—and still is—a city full of art. The city glows with sun washed golden adobe, outdoor plazas and parks filled with places to walk or read or simply absorb the vibe, and doors aplenty opening into galleries and exhibition spaces, cafes, and historic sites.
Working on a skilled archaeological survey team had me carrying heavy expedition backpacks in remote high-country desert for eight days at a stretch followed by six days off. After many engaging but exhausting days working and camping with smart, motivated, unshowered scientists in nearby Bandelier National Park, I was looking forward to a quiet day solo, kicking around galleries, finding a decent place for lunch, and essentially recharging myself with an entirely different kind of rhythm.
An acquaintance heading through Santa Fe agreed to drop me in the city center. My plan was to catch a bus later that afternoon for the 35 mile drive back Los Alamos. I picked up my trusty everyday backpack, hopped into the passenger seat beside this friend-of-a-friend, and set off down the mesa. I had the good sense to add a plastic screw-top bottle of water before we left—hardly enough for a day in the summer desert, but I figured I would be hanging out in a relaxed city scene. I got out of the car in the heart of Santa Fe’s historic district, thanked the person who drove me, and immediately felt good to be at liberty in a new city. Zanzibar, Manila, Timbuktu, Istambul: I vividly remember smiling at recollections of literary adventures, adding my own Santa Fe idyll to that private list. At the last moment, speaking through the passenger window as I stood on the sidewalk, my friend-of-a-friend offered to pick me up in the same spot that afternoon when she headed back to Los Alamos. “No problem,” she said. “Beats buying a bus ticket.”
My backpack contained a small utility knife I always carried while out in the field, water bottle, a book, a Pentax SLR with a 50mm lens loaded with Kodak Ektachrome Gold 400 (if you’re the kind of person who wonders about those things), a pen and paper, and a small collection of loose change, including a handful of quarters I always kept in one pocket of the pack for pay phones. If you’re older than a certain age, you’ll recall that these were things people used to talk to each other. (True story!) How can I possibly remember what I had in my backpack so many years later? There are two reasons. First, that checklist largely described what I always had in my backpack. Second is that through the rest of the day I dug through that backpack a thousand times looking for it to miraculously yield more. It never did.
I have no idea what I did when I first emerged from the car. But I do recall that I quickly made a discovery that set the day askew. I did not have my wallet.
No money. No ID. It also meant I didn’t have a handwritten list of relevant phone numbers I’d squirreled into my wallet for the summer either. In the era before smart phones or even PDAs, data either resided in your brain or as marks on paper. I obviously hadn’t memorized a stack of numbers, and my notes weren’t with me.
This is all to say that my day changed quickly. There would be no southwestern tortillas and tomatillos. There would be no replacement for the dead battery I needed for my camera, which meant there would be no photography either, something for which I immediately felt a sense of loss. What’s more, but summer in Santa Fe meant high sun and clear skies, dry heat all day long. There would be little protection from that without places to go inside for more than a few minutes.
I had my book. I had a pad of paper. I had some change.
In the intense summer heat, I decided against going on an extended expeditionary walk, something I most certainly would have done if I’d been confident to find a place to cool off. With limited water and limited shade, that simply didn’t make sense. I visited a few private art galleries, but clearly couldn’t just stay in those small spaces for long. A few other galleries a couple of miles away suddenly seemed as far away as Foreign Legion outposts, completely unrealistic destinations. Plus, as luck would have it, the city’s historical society public exhibition space was closed for the day.
I found a place to sit in a semi-shaded area in the city plaza and spent some time reading. Apropos of my summer job, I had Jack Weatherford’s “Indian Givers” with me, a book about native American influences and contributions to the world. Jack was one of my professors at Macalester College, and I had been looking forward to reading his latest book.
I recall getting hungry and not being able to do much about it. The change in my bag, including my stash of payphone quarters amounted to something less than five dollars. To this day, I remember just how delicious I experienced a small dish of pralines and cream I got from a touristy Häagen Daz shop off the main plaza, the only thing I could afford if I was going to keep a short stack of emergency payphone quarters.
I recall carefully managing inadequate water.
I read a lot of Weatherford’s book that day. I changed shady locations a few times simply for variety, although if you’ve ever visited Santa Fe those are not necessarily in ready supply. I remember trying to set my pen to paper, but I also recall that being hot, thirsty, and tired, my focus was simply not up to the task of making useful sentences. I clearly recall a profound sense of frustration, amplified by a sense of having lost access to the plans I had anticipated.
The Sun slowly dragged the day through its blazing arc across the sky. Shadows hardly moved in the languid heat, and I couldn’t help but notice the mix of people around me pursuing their own unknown trajectories while I simply had time to observe.
Hours later, a sudden jolt of alarm: how would I even BUY my planned bus ticket back to Los Alamos without my wallet? I would have to use my final few quarters to call the family where I was rooming up in Los Alamos to ask them for the huge favor of a long, unplanned round-trip rescue, something I really did not want to do.
And then I remembered my great good fortune. My morning driver said she’d meet me on the plaza. When she showed up in her weary, sunburned Chevy Nova, I couldn’t help but feel like a cool breeze had swept into town, a visceral, transformational movement of air.
It’s years later now. I am older and I’ve travelled all over the world on assignments, on adventures, for fun and for work. That day in Santa Fe always remains top-of-mind when I’m setting out for a new voyage or creative enterprise. It’s not simply that I’m reminded to double-check the proximity of my essentials, but more profoundly, it reminds me to take stock of my intentions. If there’s anything that day as a twenty-year-old in Santa Fe taught me it’s to find a way to find solutions, and not miss opportunities no matter what happens. That day reminds me how vital it is not to make a bad turn of events cascade into a blinding day of exasperation. It reminds me to sort myself out, regroup, and be present in the world no matter what realities may transform expected plans into damage control. Things will happen that even the best plans will not be able to forestall. It’s not that a person can’t allow themselves to feel frustrated or even angry about circumstance. It’s that an experienced person can learn how not to let those feelings completely overshadow everything else.
A novelistic conclusion to this tale would be that I returned from that day filled with some sort of creative inspiration to do something transformational, something inventive or insightful that could only have come from unplanned experience. I must be honest: that simply didn’t happen. I returned from historic Santa Fe tired, thirsty, sweaty, and cranky. But after many years of recalling that long day, I also found myself subtly changed, although the creative payoff happened in microscopic ways over the human equivalent of geologic time.
I’ve never had a chance to get back to Santa Fe. I would love to see that little plaza again, see if I could remember where I walked and sat and read during my long hours on benches across the street from chili peppers and shops and southwestern colors that define the beauty of the place. The day was a complete bust according to the plans I had made. But in retrospect, as a memory of a day on my own in a place far from home, it turned out to be a talismanic memory that I hold close all the time. It also turned out to be a day that continues to make me smile even now, decades into the future.