Santa Fe Depot Departure

Everyone has their own way to get to Paris and mine begins with a train departing Santa Fe, New Mexico at sunrise. 

It’s dark except for the yellow glow of the streetlights. Numbly, I shut the rough-hewn, rounded door to that little adobe house that meant home for the past ten months. The few uneven steps and stone path take me to the gray wood gate that I push open to emerge onto Canyon Road. After closing the latch, I take a moment to look at the light blue painted numbers of a fleeting address. Places become friends for a time and move on, holding something of us with them. 

I’m on one of the earth’s old roads with the best packing job of my life on my back. It’s so early I’m the only one out and I can walk right in the middle of the narrow street without competing with vehicles. A huge green park spreads to the right and to the left the birds begin a morning ritual of twittering from their expansive residence that merges telephone line and pole and branch and bramble. It’s their reclamation project.

Imagining a group of birds declaring to the electrician their intention to assimilate the neighborhood, I pass rounded adobe gateways and walls. You can feel the heat of the day coming off them if you walk in the evening. Red ristras, clusters of dried dark red chiles, dangle in the entrances of homes and galleries, providing welcome to visitors and blessing to hosts.

The Tea House Restaurant, not awake yet, drops down from the road into a courtyard of fruit trees and hummingbird sippers and canopies for tables quietly awaiting their morning customers. The sunken courtyard spreads with little galleries and stores and places to park if you dare the sudden steep descent. The salmon-colored dirt footpath along the street peppers with coin-operated news racks painted all sorts of deep colors. El Farol across the street was a tough biker bar in the 70s, but now a salmon dinner costs $50 and there’s Flamenco dancing on Thursdays. Next to it, there’s a seductive Persian restaurant where raw vegetables and hummus abound and the roasted feta-stuffed figs drizzled in honey are a delicacy. 

All is dark and quiet now. There is no clinking of glass bottles from the fancy restaurant, no suited valet drivers hovering outside at the ready to park and retrieve vehicles. 

Night is my favorite time to walk Canyon Road. So many colors and shapes pop out of the windows of the galleries and if I didn’t have a train to catch, I would take my time and look. In the blur of my brisk pace, I can see the cubist faces, the alligator sculpture made out of bike chains, and the broad bold colorful paintings. I do stop for the woman who disappears. One minute, she’s there. Step forward, and she’s gone. Step forward again, and she’s back. It’s a great optical illusion right next to the blue postal service dropbox for mail. 

There’s the house where the painter Fremont Ellis lived. He was friends with my great grandmother and gave her an acre of land ten miles south of Santa Fe where she built a kiva with her own hands. 

And across the street, the house where the painter Olive Rush lived, now a Quaker Meeting place with a serenity garden. 

There’s a one-story apartment building that spreads lengthwise and at its front, a huge garden. And beyond that, steps lead down to a gallery rich in Native American art and history. The man who manages it got his start with one of my great grandmother’s best friends. 

Almost at the entrance to Canyon Road, I think through what I packed. If I missed something, it is too late now, but I do it anyway. Passport, credit card, IDs, money, plane ticket all in the zippered right pocket of my fuzzy gray Kühl vest. I used to bring a pouch to hide underneath my clothing. That’s the way I was taught to pack for Europe when I was in my teens. A zippered vest pocket works just as well. 

It was a last-minute decision to bring my tiny child-sized backpack. I didn’t feel like carting around the larger one because it’s heavy before I’ve put anything inside it. I decided that if I could get everything into the little one, that’s what I wanted. And it worked. 

I pass the tiny Café des Artes where I once watched a chess match when I stopped for soup on a cold, gray day. Next door, the sculptor Jan often works outside, but not this early in the morning. The last time I saw Jan he was making a piece out of a white stone that he said would represent the impressive dance move of an old lady.

Inside the main backpack: two rolled Smartwool shirts, one rolled pair of pants, some socks and underwear, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt for nightwear, a bathing suit, a tiny towel just in case, a laptop, a thin folder of work items, and the computer cord. Inside the zippered area at the top, I have two computer mice, pens, and a cell phone charger. Inside the tiny teardrop shaped armbag there are liquids in plastic bags for security (shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste), a tiny zippered make-up bag, a brush, a journal, two pens, a book, and a cell phone in its own cushioned pocket.

Everything I need and nothing I don’t. That is the plan.

And at the last minute, I added two Keene sandals to have a back-up pair of shoes in case of rain or beach walking. To keep them from slipping out of the side pockets, I tied them to the backpack. 

I cross Paseo de Peralta and walk up to East DeVargas. This is an old road, going back to the time of the Tlaxcalans in the 1200s. It follows along the parking lots for the New Mexico State Capitol and then narrows at the Oldest House and the Oldest Church: San Miguel Chapel. 

Light breaks. There is a glow around the rounded mud and straw on the back side of the adobe church. Its white cross sparkles from the top. San Miguel was built with Tlaxcalan labor, probably around 1609, and the original version of the house across from it is estimated to have existed in the 1200s. There is the anachronism of a giant red DO NOT ENTER traffic sign right in front. 

As I tread quickly along the ancient, yet now brokenly paved, road, I realize that the vision to travel alone in Europe is coming true right under my feet. I purchased the tickets a little over a month ago, yet it didn’t feel real until this moment. 

There is a loose plan. Paris first. I have a room reserved at one of my favorite hotels in the Latin Quarter, the place where Benjamin Franklin and others of the delegation signed a treaty with Great Britain, officially recognizing the newly independent United States of America for the first time. Then, Château de Ripaille, the ancestral home of my great grandmother on the southern shore of Lac Léman. I have a room reserved at Hotel Ibis Thonon-les-Bains for two nights. Next, I make my way to Lille, France to catch the Eurostar for five days with my son in London. After that, it gets fuzzy. There are a number of places I want to visit. Avignon. I want to walk to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse like I did when I was twenty. Will it be as beautiful as it was then? 

I have a Eurail Pass for eight days of train travel within a month. Will that really be enough?

Usually when I walk to the Jean Cocteau movie theatre, right at the start of the train tracks, I pass through the capitol buildings in a straight line toward Montezuma. This time, I decide to go up the grand steps of the Capitol itself and stand in front of the seal of New Mexico. There’s a flood light trained right on the round emblem. 1912. It was a big year. Especially for planes, trains and automobiles. And for New Mexico. 

Somehow, I get twisted around the Capitol building, it is circular after all, and it spews me out in the direction of the little adobe home I just left. I get my bearings and find the way to the train depot.

Cutting it a little close on time, I speed across Cerrillos and dive straight down Montezuma. I’m relieved to see the rounded marquee for the Jean Cocteau movie theatre. The depot is just behind it. 

Owned by the man who created Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, the Jean Cocteau Cinema is like something from another time. I’d walk there on occasion, get a delightfully unseasoned bag of popcorn and a ginger beer, and sit in the darkening little theatre to wait for the show to begin. Sometimes, especially if I picked the right time of day, I was almost the only one there. It made me feel like a film purist. Like I was some kind of reclusive movie buff obsessed with obscure cinema. Some films were in Icelandic, a language like bird song, and there was one in Romanian. There was a morbid film about a man dealing with his wife’s death by trying to scientifically determine how long it takes for a body to fully decompose. It was billed as if it would be funny, but even with the talented Matthew Broderick in the movie, it was not. It was morbid and unsettling. If Beale Street Could Talk was fantastic.

At the marquee, I turn to the left and the train tracks stretch like an unfurled carpet into the wakening blue sky. The red face of a roadrunner stretches across the engine of a train buzzing impatiently, ready to roll.

I get on. It’s not unlike other light rail transports I’ve experienced. The seats are four at a time and face each other. Most people have their own area. There aren’t enough passengers to have to share. 

The train intones a delightful “meep, meep,” “meep, meep” to warn travelers it’s almost time to go. For $9, I can get from the Santa Fe Depot to the Downtown Albuquerque Station where there’s a shuttle bus that goes to the airport. We’ll pass through sagebrush, pueblos, and the Sandia Mountains.

It rolls away on time. 7:13 am. Sunrise. 

Next France for Two Months: Return to the Great Lady

To see how I packed for this trip, select How to Pack Light to Travel Free.