~:: Drivin’ South in June ::~

I cannot help myself. Every time we make the drive down to New Mexico, there is so much to see, and I never get tired of it. So I always take pictures of it. But to love me is to be fascinated, even when I’ve told you a joke more than six times.

This was June. Little did we know that it would be the last time we’d visit Gin in that grand house of hers. That by December, everything would have been packed up and moved to a different grand house, one a lot closer to work – one I will have to start thinking of a Gin’s home pretty soon.

This is in Moab. It’s a strange town – a kind of hipster, bicyclist-outdoorsy-person version of the West.  It’s full of funky, hipster restaurants and stupid T-shirt shops, but it has its share, too, of the older, quaint, catch-a-buck-off-the-freeway-tourists places.

G says this store has been closed for a long, long time. Years and years.  That he’s never seen it open, ever.  And yet the place is full of strange and wonderful things – from junk to Native American art. And all of it, slowly growing into antique status.

So, of course, I made him stop so I could get right up to the windows. They are strung with lines of crystal prisms and beaded hanging things, and plastic baubles and filagree hearts and glass shapes.  Peer inside, and it is chaos – shelves full of things, but display racks, still full, half fallen on their sides, as though someone had shoved them over, heading crazily for the door.

These are actually self portraits – me and the Highlander.  I just couldn’t get enough of the sparkle.  See the tiny points of colored light? How incongruous they seem, coming through those dead, dusty windows.

Maybe this is what age is, windows dull, treasures locked inside, jumbled into piles, paint on the outside cracked and creaking.

Oh, man – this place drives me nuts every dang time we drive by it.  I mean, if you’re going to butcher the English language be CERTAIN to do it in twelve foot high, glowing white letters.  May I just say, you use a single apostrophe to stand for a letter left out of a word – and you put it in the position the letter should have taken?  Is that so hard to remember?  And shouldn’t you, like, check your little phrase out before you go vandalizing an ancient sandstone structure with it?  But then, I guess, if you’re going to bore a house-worth’s of tunnels and rooms into said structure, and live in there like it’s a house – complete with sculpted furniture, maybe you wouldn’t think to do that.  This is only one, but a major one, of the things that make me grind my teeth.

See – this is how beautiful these things can be when people aren’t making side-show attractions out of them.  See the power lines there at the bottom – that will give you a sense of scale.

Here, the road just had to get through.  Couldn’t go out of its way another mile to go around.  That’s actually pretty American.

Turtle rock.  I don’t know what anybody else calls it, but so I have called it since the kids were tiny. I YUV it.

I don’t remember why we stopped here.  G would remember.  But as I stood at the side of the road in the wind, I was struck by the vibrant color – the glowing red fields, the deep green of the struggling verdure.

I know Montana is the Big Sky.  But this is a pretty big sky, too.  You are never short of drama on this road.  This is passion country.

And this is, I am sure, where the Creator plans to go when he retires. I would love to be invited here, if only for a couple of eons. I was sad this time; the barn roof is rusting and the walls need another coat of sky paint. Maybe the people who live here are growing old; you don’t keep up with things well as that happens, and the beauty that brought your heart such joy begins to age, too.  But still – this is a deeply beautiful place.  And it’s very hard to find any kind of safe place to pull off so you can shoot it – so just realize that I risked our lives so you could see it, too.

These cherries have nothing to do with the drive to Santa Fe.  They are simply two of the eight cherries the tree bore this year. I loved them.  So I shot them.  And that’s all.