Albuquerque, New Mexico; 6/3 – On a usual Friday, I devote this humble almanac to a film review, but found myself on the superslab (trucker-speak for interstate highway) all day yesterday and was unable to find two hours to sit in a nice cool theater. Instead, packed wife and trusty mutt Gwen into the Jeep and sliced through the barren Arizona desert headed toward Albuquerque some eight hours away. It proved to be an interesting day, if a bit waywardly navigated.
The circumnavigation was the result of wildfires burning in southeast Arizona, which greyed up the otherwise boundless blue skies, and created an other-planetary red sunset by day's end. Had I not kept the iPhone GPS handy, we might have headed up what looked like a beautiful mountain highway toward Alpine, AZ., which I instead found out was being evacuated. Am still bowing to Prometheus and the lower tech gods for that bit of cyber-forewarning. If only Odysseus had such a device aboard, he'd have been home without incident in about 48 hours and Homer would have wound up a lyric poet with no big yarn to spin.
Speaking of odysseys, I was going to use this column as a paean to great road movies like Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde, but steering gingerly through the precipitous cliffs of southwest New Mexico, I couldn't get Thelma & Louise out of my mind. My wife Vickie and I had a genteel argument over which one of us was closer to which protagonist in real life, and concluded that she was more the Susan Sarandon, devil-may-care type, and I the more cautious Geena Davis. I argued passionately that I'd much rather be cast in the Brad Pitt role, the charismatic robber on the lam, but she wasn't buying it. Tough chick, that Louise.
But we did fearlessly detour from the razor-straight I-10 and cut through some historic mining territory in southwestern New Mexico, discovering a gem of a destination in Silver City. Once upon a blue moon this was an Apache campsite, then a Spanish settlement, but eventually American prospectors uncovered silver ore in the hills and founded the city in 1870. It has retained its Old West charm and then some.
Surrounded by fathomless copper mines to this day, Silver City is home to some 10,000 denizens and has a town-that-time forgot ambience to it that made us want to cash in the pad in LA and start panning for gold. It was good enough for Billy the Kid and Cochise, two characters I identify more strongly with than Thelma Dickinson, thank you very much. If you are ever passing through this area, make sure to stop in Silver City – it's what America used to be, welcoming and community-minded.
Truth be told, after negotiating the fast-darkening mountain curves on the way back to I-25, the road to Albuquerque, I could think of little else but the King Grand Bed at the downtown Hyatt Regency. Louise – I mean Vickie – accused me of being "too bourgeois" to stay at a semi-creepy, western-themed motel in Truth or Consequences, N.M., some two hours down the road, but reason prevailed and we checked in around midnight and enjoyed a deep sleep in one of the hotel's "Hypo-Allergenic Rooms," which feature a high-tech air purification system and anti-microbial treatment of all fabrics and surfaces. In this era of ubiquitous bedbugs and airborne agents of bio-doom, I fell asleep soundly knowing I was not surrounded by the enemy.
Actually, it was tough going to sleep after seeing all of the vibrant nightlife surrounding the hotel in downtown Albuquerque, a city I've watched grow over the last 25 years from dusty cowtown to gleaming metropolis. This morning, I jetted up to the Hyatt's rooftop pool and hot tub and watched the sun rise over the mountains, and again started my obsessive thinking about green chile cheeseburgers. By hook or by crook, I will find one of those blessed concoctions before hitting the road again. Kansas City barbeque awaits us at the end of the day, but New Mexican cooking lures me to this area at least once a year. Hard to leave this posh hotel, but Thelma, Louise and Gwen are highway-bound yet again…..