By Bob Hicks

CRACK! DOOM! CRACK! DOOM!

The sky splits above the high desert. Great bursts of lightning roil the midnight blackness with a frenzy of white heat. The thunder rattles deeply like the cries of gods at war, and the rain is rain — hard, fast, fierce, a gullywash of frantic energy that, soon spent, will sink meekly back into the sand.

In the morning the sun is out, the air has the fresh bite of swiftly drying earth, the small life of the arroyo a few dozen yards beyond our windows chirps placidly on. A couple of years ago we watched transfixed as a sudden storm turned the same dry creek bed into a swift flood of churning water, a rampage that rose rapidly from nothing almost to the undercurve of the little bridge on the nearby road. Hours later the arroyo was dry again, but these torrents can shift a creek’s course: in the desert, water makes up its own mind.

The Scatter Family is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, visiting with our friend Penelope, and the place gets to you, in a good way. Not just the carefully preserved brownness of the adobe and the lively cultural life, but the land itself: this elemental vastness beyond human scale. Economically, New Mexico is a poor state, and with its overlay of wealth Santa Fe is sometimes regarded with suspicion by New Mexicans from elsewhere. But here, it seems, just below the tourist surface, the true wealth of this state is preserved and honored.

On Independence Day we had pancake breakfast on the plaza (an energetic mob; the money raised helps pay for pre-kindergarten programs at the city’s public schools), and of course we’ve hit a few museums. At the New Mexico Museum of Art, a show called Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art is witty and revealing, a spot-on blend of culture and aesthetics that is uncondescendingly populist, and also historically and artistically insightful.

Balancing the World, an exhibition of art and culture from the small Huichol Indian community of west central Mexico, focuses on the Huichols’ traditional yarn art, or nieli’ka, and it’s an eye-opener. Done in brilliant color combinations, the pieces are made of yarn pressed into a layer of beeswax and resin, and they represent the essential cosmological balance of the Huichol, who have resisted Christianization for centuries. Reproductions can make these pieces look like velvet Elvis art, and they just don’t cut it: You have to see the nieli’ka in the flesh to get a sense of their artistic sophistication and excitement. It takes much more to begin to understand the complex cultural meanings of the art. The show is at the state-run Museum of Indian Arts & Culture.

At the Case Trading Post in the basement of the Wheelwright, a superb small private museum of Indian arts, the Small Large Smelly Boy dug deep and bought a new Hopi kachina doll to keep his Mudhead kachina doll company.

We’re intrigued because the figure, depicting Huruing Wuhti, isn’t one of the usual kachina dancers. She’s an important goddess, one of the life-creators, and apparently not often depicted in kachina carvings at all. The carving is by Kevin Quanimptewa, a young artist from the Third Mesa.

We’ve observed certain traditions: margaritas at Maria’s, where you can watch the extraordinary craftsmanship of the strong-armed tortilla maker as she shapes the dough time and time and time again. This trip we snagged a booth at the Plaza Cafe for a good green-chile stew with calabacitas, summer squash. Still to hit: the rundown, anything-but-a-tourist-trap Roadrunner Cafe north of town, with its wondrous sopaipillas the weight of a dragonfly wing. The Roadrunner is in Pojoaque, near Camel Rock on the road to Espanola and Chimayo. Just across the highway is Pojoaque Pueblo, which has been occupied, except for a couple of crisis-related temporary abandonments (smallpox; the Pueblo Revolt against the Spaniards) for roughly 1,500 years.

Close to the city center, the genuinely old and genuinely beautiful San Miguel Mission (“first constructed in 1610, destroyed in 1640, rebuilt in 1645, destroyed again in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and rebuilt yet again in 1710,” as reporter Tom Sharpe summarizes in The New Mexican) is under extreme care once more. The building is swathed in scaffolding as workers seek to save it from “improvements” made some years ago that were intended to preserve the old adobe. Trouble is, as Sharpe explains, the medicine — cement-containing stucco on the exterior walls, now being replaced with real mud plaster — was worse than the disease.

“Cementitious stucco prohibits the evaporation of moisture trapped inside the adobe walls, causing them to deteriorate,” Sharpe writes, “while real mud plaster releases moisture via transpiration. … Adobe that has deteriorated to the point of dead earth simply flakes away into loose dirt, incapable of bearing weight and eventually causing the structure to collapse.”

Many more old buildings in Santa Fe face similar problems, the story suggests. It’s a familiar tale. From old master oil paintings to old musical instruments, restorers have often done more damage than they’ve alleviated. A dozen years ago I talked with an old-piano restorer who was working on an early 19th century piano that had been rediscovered after sitting in an abandoned chicken coop for more than a century. He was withering in his comments about earlier generations of restorers, who blithely stripped away original material and replaced it with new pieces that couldn’t match the tone or style the pianos had once had, thereby doing irreparable damage to their sound. Better to be ignored, he said, than preserved poorly: “The best thing that can happen to an old piano is to be buried under chicken droppings for a hundred years.”

I liked being in New Mexico on Independence Day, because in this state more than most others you get an everyday feel for the overlapping forces of history and the non-jingoistic complexities of successive waves of empire and what citizenship means. Three main groups live side by side, sometimes intermingling, sometimes not, but forced over the centuries to deal with one another. Indians were here, Spaniards arrived and conquered, Anglos moved in on an irresistible crest of manifest destiny. The land was the land’s, and it was Mexico’s, and it became part of the United States, and the story is neither pretty nor simple but it is fascinating, and by this point inextricably intertwined. Like Texans and Californians, a majority of New Mexicans seem to look askance at Arizona’s hard line on border issues. Still, both the Republican and Democratic candidates to replace Bill Richardson as governor have announced they’ll fight to repeal Richardson’s decision to allow illegals to get state driving licenses — a decision he made on the practical grounds of trying to ensure that people driving on the state’s streets and highways had at some point proven they actually knew how to drive. The American way? It’s a work in progress (and sometimes regress), both uglier and more beautiful than most of us usually care to admit.

More is coming up. SOFA West opens Wednesday night, and we’ll be there. A high-profile national showpiece for contemporary art, its acronym stands for Sculpture Objects & Functional Art — or, as a lot of people remember it, Anything But Painting. Portland’s Bullseye Gallery will have a good-sized booth at SOFA West. Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Zoo beckons, and maybe a jaunt to the wild and woolly West of old Las Vegas (the original sin city in New Mexico, not the Nevada upstart). Let us quote Father Wikipedia:

The arrival of the railroad on July 4, 1879 brought with it businesses and people, both respectable and dubious. Murderers, robbers, thieves, gamblers, gunmen, swindlers, vagrants, and tramps poured in, transforming the eastern side of the settlement into a virtually lawless brawl. Among the notorious characters were such legends of the Old West as: dentist Doc Holliday and his girlfriend Big Nose Kate, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Mysterious Dave Mather, Hoodoo Brown, Durango Kid and Handsome Harry the Dancehall Rustler.

Historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell once claimed, “Without exception there was no town which harbored a more disreputable gang of desperadoes and outlaws than did Las Vegas.”

Sadly, we missed last week’s Garlic Harvest Festival in Espanola. But this year’s Santa Fe International Folk Art Market opens Friday in the plaza on Museum Hill, just a 10 or 12 minute stroll up the arroyo from where we are, and if we play things right we just might manage to squeeze it in.

Unless lightning strikes us first.

*

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

• “Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer,” Craig Dan Goseyun, San Carlos Apache. Museum Hill plaza, Santa Fe; bronze; 1995.
• “A Bucking Bronco,” Frederic Remington, wood engraving, 6 x 4 inches;
  “The Home Ranch,” The Century Magazine, March, 1888. In “Sole Mates,” New Mexico Museum of Art.
• Huruing Wuhti, the creation goddess, in the form of a Hopi kachina doll.
• On the plaza, Museum Hill, Santa Fe. Photo: SLSB.
  
• Nook mural on the entrance wall of the New Mexico Museum of Art.