A Perfect Day for Your Colon in New Mexico

Anybody who has ever read a guidebook has seen those annoying "A Perfect Day" itineraries...

A PERFECT DAY FOR YOUR COLON IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICO

1. Start your day with a colon-blackening beef brisket burrito at Sugar's on the low road between Taos and Santa Fe. We stopped here twice, once on the way to the Pecos Wilderness via Taos, and again on the way down to Ojo Caliente Hot Springs. The smokehouse advertises itself. The brisket spends two days in the smoker, accumulating enough tar to transform your colon into a hazardous waste site. Make sure to get a side of Sugar's sweet, slightly spicy sauce to go with the accompanying green chile sauce.

Me holding an imaginary brisket burrito in front of Sugar's. The burrito has already been vaporized, along with my colon. I made sure to get another burrito to go, since my digestive system had already become a demolition zone, anyway.

2. Purge and purify your colon with a detoxifying mudbath at Oyo Caliente Hot Springs. Douse yourself in in the iron, iron/arsenic, and soda pools to aid in the resurrection of your colon. Drink copious quantities of springwater from the Lithia spring to deal with the post-traumatic stress of finishing your second "to go" burrito.

Me at Oyo Caliente Hot Springs, with the sandstone cliffs rising behind the springs. What appears to be my body slathered in mud is actually the exploded remnants of my colon. Actually, it really is mud. My colon has never been so happy.

Backpacking the Santa Barbara Divide

This past weekend, Melissa and I did a 3-day, 25 mile backpacking trip into the Pecos Wilderness and the Sangre De Christo Mountains of northern New Mexico. It's a pristine landscape of spruce and aspen, with the Rio Santa Barbara, flush with snowmelt, rushing through the valleys. We camped at 10,000 feet and then took a dayhike to the Santa Barbara Divide, at 12,000 feet. On the second night I knelt before 13,000 foot El Chimayoso and the vast cosmos, enjoined in the usual wordless prayers I do when out in nature. Afterwards, I climbed into the tent to go to sleep and put my cochlear implant processor in its Advanced Bionics box. I can't really explain the strange, irreconcilable juxtaposition I felt. It was quite possibly one of the most powerful firsthand experiences of paradox I've ever had. It is what it is. Psychologically, the trip was important to me because it represents being back to "normal" after having cochlear implant surgery on May 7th.


Pumping it up by the Rio Santa Barbara. Every guy has experience with this hand motion.

A view of me hanging out with 13,000 foot Chimayoso from the sub-alpine meadow where we camped

The Truchas Peaks, including Chimayoso, from the Santa Barbara Divide

Ghost Ranch

Last week Melissa and I camped at Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O'Keefe spent the last forty years of her life. The ranch is near Abiqui, New Mexico, and it's an otherworldly landscape similar to the one in Sedona-- cliffs layered in pastel-like reds and pinks.

View from Chimney Rock, above the ranch

Melissa up at Chimney Rock

Sunset at Chimney Rock
Last week, Melissa's dad told us how to dissolve clouds. Simply stare at the cloud, moving your eyes back and forth over its outline until it dissolves. I was skeptical, but it seemed to work.

Pictures from Sedona

Devil's Bridge near Sedona with friends Carmen and Matthew. Melissa took this picture.


The view from the cliffs around Devil's Bridge.


View from the box canyon at the end of the Boynton Trail. This area is considered one of Sedona's vortex sites and has Anasazi ruins.

Paradigm shifts

I arrived in New Mexico ten days ago, and I have not yet succumbed to the temptation to wear leather tassels, own a lowrider truck or purchase firearms. It feels great to be out of Baltimore, to be recovered from surgery, to take a break from teaching, writing, being hunched over my computer for too many hours at a time.

From Melissa's window I can see the Sandia Mountains rising above the desert. Agave and prickly pear are in bloom, and humming birds thrum furiously among the cacti. The brown Rio Grande meanders through Albuquerque, along with stands of diminishing cottonwood forests-- the bosque. The days are dry and hot, the nights sublimely cool. The cucharacha does its little roundabout dance in the midnight hours. There are flowering trees everywhere.

Last week we roadtripped to Sedona, Arizona, past black mesas, Indian outposts, rock shops. At a gas station an Indian man adjusted the lapels on his gray suit, which was much too small for him. There were flavored condoms for sale from vending machines in the men's bathroom. There were huge storm clouds rolling in.

On the periphery of Petrified Forest National Park, shops offered Baja blankets, meteorites, turquoise necklaces. A strip of black tarmac led endlessly away from the interstate, leading to what is supposedly one of the most preserved meteoric impact sites in the world. The veins of man on the desert are all right angles. Here in the flat almost wastelands there is nothing to stop a highway.

We drove on, we drove on. Sage and juniper and pinon. The black mesas giving away to red rock in Arizona, the mountains rising beyond Flagstaff, the ponderosa pine forest stretched over the highway as we descended into the canyon north of Sedona.

And then we were whirled into the vortex. Sedona is a postcard type of place. Take a picture at sunset and, provided that your finger isn't on the lens, you can tell your friends and family that you were in one of the sublimely beautiful places on earth, and then drive away in your RV.

The town is a strange mix of hippies, nature lovers, tourists. Pillars and domes of red rock rise around the city like ancient temples or decrepit gods. This is a holy place for the Anasazi, the Apache, and now the retiree. You don't have to go far to get beyond the two million dollar adobe homes. To see the bees drunk on agave nectar and smell the hot sage wind.

My favorite hike was deep into a box canyon where the red cliffs towered around us on all sides. It's one of Sedona's so-called vortex sites, where-- magnetism? energy fields? aliens? -- supposedly supercharge the earth and the hairless monkeys that tread it.

I felt super-charged.

Is there something to it?

If a computer chip can be inserted in my head, giving me a simulacra of hearing, if we can put men on the moon, if bees can communicate telepathically, if a bristlecone pine can live for 5000 years, well then, why not?

But the reason doesn't matter. It feels good to be away from Baltimore. This past year I've missed being out in nature. I've been hunched over a computer churning out pages, teaching freshmen, soaking in the Hopkins vibe... which in its own way seems almost monastic. After a year in the ivory tower it feels good to be back in the real world again. And I mean real the way it's been for millions of years, not real the way it's been this past century.

I didn't even realize how out of touch I was, how out of balance. How much of this past year I spent in my head living in fantasy fiction worlds, or worrying about my hearing, or agonizing about my ethical and spiritual issues regarding an implant. Obsessing over drafts, marking up workshop pieces, soaking up Welty and Nabokov, putting my faith into marks on paper.

Marks on paper that represent objects and thoughts and feelings and everything we value in this world. As writers we spend the years writing our own illuminated texts, bibles, korans, gitas... we put all our faith in what we're writing. Sometimes it seems as if the end-all is getting the story right or finishing the novel that threatens to consume us. Each paragraph is a psalm, each well-turned metaphor a reason to believe what we're doing really matters.

I've spent the last year taking what was already an obsession and becoming fanatical about it. I've always thought it's a beautiful thing to give up oneself for art. But there's danger in it, too. I'm a demagogue, a quack, or as John Gardner might put it, a monkey pounding away on a keyboard.

It's good to laugh at myself again. It's good to realize that none of it matters, in the best possible way. To be humbled. To look up at the red rocks towering above me and realize I'm just one tiny cog in the gears. The fears and doubts loomed too large last year. They were out of proportion of this container I inhabit... a six foot cylinder of flesh. As if I were trying to fit ten years of Thanksgiving dinners into a little Martha Stewart tupperware container.

Did I really think the world would seethe and bubble and the oceans would dissolve if I didn't complete the great American deaf novel by May? Or that the invisible gods would turn their backs on me and waterfalls change their course if I had a computer chip put in my head? Well, no, I didn't think any of that. But it was as if I did. Everything was out of proportion. I was just another guy stuck in my head.

My Name is Chip

Hello, my name is Chip, and I am a fully functional, sentient cochlear implant. Franz is on vacation in New Mexico right now, and since he is more interested in exploring hot springs, ancient Indian ruins, eating, and having sex, and can't be bothered with his blog right now, I have volunteered to take his place for the afternoon. Some of you would probably like to know what Franz is doing, and I am here to tell you that. He just drank a chai shake at a coffee shop in Albuquerque, and he has second-hand smoked a pack of American Spirits in the last few hours.

But did I mention that I have sixteen independent power sources and CD-quality sound? Franz appears to have no power sources at all, or if he does, they aren't working very well. He is sitting on his ass, while I am doing gazillions of calculations every second.

I even have rechargeable batteries.

We are surrounded by men in cowboy hats, leather armlets and trucker caps. Everyonelooks like they're two months early for Burning Man. There's a guy with a blue Stetson, Nike leather gloves, a handlebar mustache, dogtags around his neck, and a huge belt buckle that says "bullshit." What appears to be a holster for his six-shooter actually holds a cell phone. He has a bandanna around his neck. He is wearing sneakers, not cowboy boots.