Читать книгу My City Different - Betty E. Bauer - Страница 8

Icame to Santa Fe by accident in 1948. I had been with my parents and their dearest friends to a fishing resort in Colorado’s Conejos Canyon just across the border from New Mexico. A day or two before we were to leave to return home to St. Joseph, Missouri, the cagey old duffer that owned the place got my father and his buddy, Lou, alone and said “You fellas ever been to Santa Fe?” They naturally said “What’s that? Where’s that? Why?” I say naturally because certainly no one East of the Missouri River, and not many West of it, had ever heard of Santa Fe. At any rate, he pricked their curiosity and further suggested we could see Taos on the way, then Santa Fe, then White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Juarez, Mexico, and so take the Southern route home. He had an ulterior motive—his daughter, a girl about my age, was staying with him during the summer and, this being August, he wanted to get her back to her mother in Lubbock, Texas in time for school. So once the men agreed we’d go that way, he suggested we take his daughter and so we did.

Santa Fe was unlike any place I’d ever been or even imagined—low-lying, sun-baked adobe buildings with parapets along the roofline out of which short wood troughs jutted at each end and sometimes toward the center, slanted slightly downward. I learned that they were called canales and drained the roof of rain and melting snow. There were no harsh edges or corners. The buildings had a sculpted quality and were uniformly brown in color, highlighted with deep blue, green or white trim around the doors and windows. Here and there were murals painted on the walls—garden scenes, Spanish dancers in elaborate costumes, and religious icons. Behind gates and arches in the walls you could glimpse effusive gardens and sometimes a fountain—little droplets of water lazily flowing from its upper tiers to the basin below and, from somewhere behind those walls, was the delicate hum of guitar and lilting Spanish lyrics flowing from some disembodied caballeros.

We went to the Pink Adobe which at that time was in Prince Patio, and what a treat to sit outdoors to eat in a garden—no flies or mosquitos. In Missouri in August we’d have been eaten alive and suffocated in the heat. And the sky was so blue, breathtakingly blue and clear and clean.

I had never missed St. Joe, but I missed Santa Fe the day we left and every day thereafter until at last in 1953 I came home.