Day Trip

I took a glorious, artful day trip today, something I don’t do often now because I never know when I’ll be able to make it work physically—good days and bad days you know. But today dawned sunny and bright and Kim and I just decided to hit the road…

We were given a real sendoff by a couple of local Truchas toughs…

We headed to Taos (past Taos in fact)…

… to visit D. H. Lawrence’s ranch. Kim had been some years ago but I never had. As we drove up the steeply climbing dirt road he told me this little story of his earlier visit: He’d spent the day there once with a friend’s friend who was visiting from Japan. She belonged to the Japanese D. H. Lawrence Society and was an enormous fan, obviously.

When they arrived at the ranch the gates were closed and locked. Just as Kim was heading around the blockade, the caretaker came out to see about them. Kim explained that his guest had traveled several thousand miles to see the place because she was a devotee, so the caretaker was kind enough to let them in and show them around.

Then as they left the ranch a line of about 20 Indian riders went by on horseback, silently in procession, one after the other. The men were emblazoned with ceremonial earth colors and Kim later learned it was an annual sacred ritual he remembers as being called the Red Earth Ceremony. A privilege to be there, high in the mountains on a clear and silent day, to witness the centuries old rite.

On this day I had been drawn to the ranch largely because I’m currently reading a book titled, Lorenso in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan. It was recommended to me by the reader responsible for sending me both to Rociada and the less successful trip seeking Arroyo Hondo. Thank you again Mark. I owe you.

I have so much to share with you about this day, what I saw and learned, but not in this first post. It’s going to take awhile to put together something respectful and deserving of the lives whose homes I visited today.

I’m going to tell you, over several posts I’m thinking, a little bit about the lush artistic history of this area—just a small slice of it that happened in the 1920s through about the early 1970s, up in Taos.

It’s a story of artistic dreams and yearning and a woman who tried to make a culture where every kind of artist could visit and become a part of it; then be made better by it. And to make great art within it. She was a patron, something we have precious little of these days.

This story is, in part, about Mabel Dodge Luhan, an heiress from New York, who “… planned the rebirth of Western civilization,” as noted by Henry Shukman in his beautifully titled New York Times piece, D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico: The Ghosts That Grip the Soul of Bohemian Taos. I couldn’t have said it better.

Anyway, we set out to visit the ranch that was owned by D. H. Lawrence (well, technically, by his wife Frieda. Mabel owned it, offered the 160 acre place to Lawrence who refused it, only to be accepted by Frieda). Frieda gifted it to the University of New Mexico when she died and it is being maintained as a museum dedicated to D. H. Lawrence and his time living there.

Frieda is buried there and Lawrence’s ashes (depending on whose story you want to believe… more on that in a later post… maybe) are enshrined there.

Our trip took us across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, along the High Road to Taos, through Taos, and north into nowhere. Into deep forest and peace…

Into a place untouched by time…

Kim meets one of our tour guides…

And this is Ricardo, a docent at the site and our personal guide. His father worked at the ranch and I couldn’t help envisioning him as a little boy playing in this vast stillness…

He knew everything about the place and had wonderful stories to share…

I stood in the Lawrence’s cabin, looking at the writing table under the window…

… lingered beneath the “Lawrence tree” under which the author spent his mornings writing. Of the tree Lawrence wrote, “The big pine tree in front of the house, standing still and unconcerned and alive…the overshadowing tree whose green top one never looks at…One goes out of the door and the tree-trunk is there, like a guardian angel. The tree-trunk, the long work table and the fence” It was all there.

The little house was cold and dampish, opened specially for us by our docent guide, Ricardo. The furniture wasn’t all theirs although I could feel the warmth of the lives they had lived there anyway…

… the writing that was laboriously produced there. In the summer of 1924 Lawrence completed his short novel St. Mawr at the ranch. In 1925 he wrote the biblical drama David and parts of The Plumed Serpent there.

I sensed the others: Georgia O’Keeffe who famously painted The Lawrence Tree writing that she would often lie on a weathered carpenter’s bench under the tall tree, staring up past the trunk, into the branches to the night sky…

… and Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley, Ansel Adams all of them. Their lives whispered to me as well.

I’ll do my best to tell you the story of why and how D. H. Lawrence came to Taos and also about Mabel Dodge Luhan who had a vision that affected Taos in deep and meaningful ways. But for another post (or posts, we’ll see). For today I just wanted to tell you a little bit about this marvelous day trip visiting Lawrence’s (and Luhan’s, for the later post, be patient) Taos homes. My body is still humming with joy and inspiration as I sit writing to you.

Today I stepped back in time into real lives lived creating great art for the rest of us, made possible, in part, by one woman who wanted to enable its voice. To all of them I am grateful. To that one woman I am awed.

But today I also found myself stepping right into the life I’d always imagined for myself. You are who I meant to be.

The trip was filled with ghosts and they or the land, or both, gripped my soul on this sunny New Mexico day when Kim and I journeyed back in time and experienced the conceived utopia of another era and a sense of the lives lived within it, in old houses and on ancient land.

Love to you all,

Jeane