Notes from the Southwest

by Dean Powers—New Mexico

At a distance, a city is only a high orange glow in the darkness. The glow emanates out of the vagrant depths of persistent nights. It appears to circumferential travelers on dark stretches of radial highways that convene at its source. The highways stretch outward through uninhabited farmland or forest or, as is the case in New Mexico, high desert.

The high desert in New Mexico is carpeted with a pinkish loam that crumbles onto and crowds both edges of Highway 550. The edges of the highway are sculpted out of darkness by headlights before the beams disappear into hundreds of thousands of acres of impassive sage and prairie grass, yucca, and saltbush. These dark squat recalcitrant shapes offset the lighter darkness around them, oblivious to the distant orange glow.

At night the city of Albuquerque emits its street lights, parking lot lights, billboard lights, car lights and even porch lights into the ceiling of sky. In the stretch of Highway 550 in the southern part of the Santa Anna Indian Reservation, the muddled orange glow appears long before its source is visible.

The northern end of Highway 550 begins in Montrose, a town near Grand Junction, Colorado. It quickly becomes a perilous two-lane traverse over Red Mountain Pass, cutting through Ouray and Silverton, before it dumps into Durango. It connects northwestern New Mexico, west of the Continental Divide, with central Interstate 25 (east of the divide) about 20 miles before the southbound lanes of the freeway lead into Albuquerque.

The approach to Albuquerque begins with exits. The exits appear in higher frequency as the city nears. They have numbers and divert cars away from the main thoroughfare to familiar hotel chains and restaurants. As the big box and industrial lights increase on either side of I-25 the freeway lanes expand from two to three and the speed limit drops from 75 to 65 MPH.

At morning the sun breaks on Albuquerque over the Sandia mountains, which bank up to the east in stark and jagged relief against the frequently blue sky. The city sits between the eastern slope of the Sandias and the rise of the Canoncito Navajo Indian Reservation to the west, as if in the gulf between the pages of an open book. The Rio Grande cuts out a wide shallow path in the basin of this broad arid valley.

To a stranger, the city is intersection between the north-south freeway, I-25, and the perpendicular I-40. Locals call this intersection the “Big ‘I;’” two giant lines: one slashing vertically from Billings, Montana to El Paso, Texas; the other slashing horizontally from Willmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California, just shy of Los Angeles.

After several days in the city, new horizontal lines become familiar: Central Avenue (the old Route 66) and Lomas Boulevard. New vertical lines become familiar: San Pedro Boulevard and Louisiana Boulevard. Slowly, the city becomes a series of number sign glyphs, each line represented by a major Boulevard or Avenue cutting perpendicularly across I-25 or I-40.

And then the canvassing begins…

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