Day Five (Or: New Yorker Cracks Wise At Local Movie Theater")

I have so much to process and so much to say. Let's start at the beginning:

Happy Saturday night from the old quarter of Santa Fe, NM, home of my favorite Democratic presidential candidate, the lovable Bill Richardson!

This morning, Amarillo was blanketed with fog, so I was ready for a drive similar to yesterday's (but shorter by half). Even shrouded in white, the panhandle of Texas is stunning. And anybody who knocks the flatness of it is just insane--once the fog lifted, I could see for miles. I began to understand, I think, why Texans have such strong pride in their state, the way that I don't think I've seen in anybody from, say, Florida or Illinois. Texas is as big as all get-out, for one thing, and more or less, has everything it needs in it. Oil, cows, land, cities, ports, transportation hubs, you name it and Texas has it. As any New Yorker knows, once you've been told your state (or city) has it all, you kind of build your identity as a citizen of that place on the fact that yours is the ultimate place to be. I think Texans view Texas as a state, a republic, an attitude and a way of life. Texans, correct me if I'm speaking out of school.

Anyway, I got friendly with freight trains and cows. Tip: when you pass through Hereford, TX on route 60, keep your windows up and the A/C off. It's billed as the "Beef Capital of the World," and man, you didn't have to tell me twice.

Route 60 turns unsettling in New Mexico. For long stretches of time, an hour or so was the longest, I didn't see another car in any direction. There are fenced-in fields, hundreds, maybe thousands of acres and cattle wandering here and there, but never any ranches or roads in sight. And I passed through a few ramshackle towns that, once I was past them, I felt certain they would be ghost towns soon. There'd be nowhere else for them to go but down and into the ether, just another strange photo op on rural 60. Something else: I didn't get any photos of them, but I saw the smallest post offices anywhere today. More like phone booths than post offices.

What I will remember most about Santa Fe is the smell. It's something like cedar crossed with hickory crossed with sandalwood, and this smell is absolutely everywhere you go. In my room at the Inn, in the air blasting into the car, in front of the movie theater, in front of the old churches and restaurants; in every corner of the city, there's a fresh woodsy smell that I will always think of fondly. I have a really terrible sense of smell--I can't distinguish smells instantly. If you ask me, "Did you smell that?" it means that I didn't. If I did, I would be the first to say, "I smelled that! I actually smelled it!" So for this pleasant feeling to come through is something really special.

Santa Fe is also 7,000 miles above sea level, and that might be the cause of my headache. The towns I passed through on 60 had population counts and elevation on their welcome signs. And I didn't pass through a single town that had more than 1,500 residents.

Bad weather is heading this way and my next destination is due for rain, rain, rain. I got in to Santa Fe just as the freezing rain began and was inside and settled before it got too bad. Then I went into town, ran some errands and went to see "I'm Not There."

I don't know what I can say about the movie right now. This is the part of the day that I haven't yet processed. I want to say something meaningful, because the movie was extremely meaningful to me, but if I said that, I wouldn't be able to tell you why, or what I felt as I was watching it.

I will say a few things: Cate Blanchett was so amazing, at some points I totally forgot she wasn't Dylan. Also, there is a scene where Woody Guthrie is dying in a hospital of Huntington's Chorea and I got very, very emotional during that scene. It was unbelievable.

**Also, if anybody out there has seen it, was Michelle Williams' character Coco supposed to be Edie Sedgwick or am I misreading that? There's been chatter out there since forever that the out-of-touch bitch in "Like a Rolling Stone," is Sedgwick and that the "Napoleon in rags," reference is Warhol. Dylan apparently fell out with Warhol after Sedgwick became addicted to heroin and Dylan accused Warhol of encouraging her habit and failing to intervene when it spun out of control.

It was 62 degrees when I was driving up from the south. I pulled over to stretch my legs and I turned off the car. There were a group of picnic tables improbably placed a few yard away from the road and I sat on one, stretching my legs out in front of me, my face up to the sun. The feeling can only be described as something that makes no sense to my eyes, but it's what I thought: I am grateful to be alive. Take from that what you will.

After the movie, I came back to the Inn, brewed some tea and ran a bath. In the tub, I got to thinking about what my father says about identity and how it's just the labels you wrap yourself in: daughter, writer, 25, lost, depressed, whatever. In the movie tonight, there was a part where one of the five Dylans was being interrogated and he began to recite a list of "7 Simple Rules for Getting Lost" or something to that effect, and one of the rules was "don't create anything," and I extrapolated from there, in the context of that part of the movie, that this included a persona, an identity. The movie seems to posit that anytime somebody hung a label on Dylan, his load got heavier.

I hung onto that thought for awhile. Out here, I'm nobody. I mean, I'm somebody. I'm a person, a human, a life form. But to the people I pass, the people I meet, I'm just anyone. And that is the definition of freedom, in some form, and it makes me giddy to continue.

Misc:

• "I'm Not There" might actually be better if you don't know anything about Dylan, now that I really think about it.
  
• Sam's Town was all booked when I went to go make a reservation tonight--not such a big tragedy as I first felt, since now I'm staying in a suite at the MGM Grand. Expedia is the king of the last minute deal, no kiddin'.
  
• OH! And this morning, I left my pillow at the Microtel in Amarillo, but they're going to hang onto it for me, which means I have to pass through Amarillo again on the way home. I just can't give up that pillow--it's goosedown and my mother gave it to me as an Easter present one year (since we're not really down with the candy in my house, I always get something weird for Easter, like a CD, a book or, in this case, bedding). Plus, the pillowcase on it is actually not technically mine. In the words of Jessica Simpson in the Macy's holiday commercial where Martha Stewart is bossing everyone around: Oops, my bad. There's a story I'll never forget, though.
• It's called The Inn on Paseo, 630 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM and it's more like a boarding house than a hotel, with charming common spaces, big bathrooms and it totally feels like home. Only with less stuff on the floor.
  
• After IDing me for the R-rated movie (seriously, this happens to me everywhere; I think it's how I wear my hair), this exchange took place:
• Movie ticket guy: "So what brings you to Santa Fe?"
• Me: "The movie wasn't playing in New York."

Photos are in reverse order, because I'm tiiiiiired.

My plans for the evening: bath, drink some water from that big green bottle, take notes for this entry, towel off, write this entry, bed.



The clouds aren't lower, the road is just higher. For real, that's at, like, 5,000 feet above sea level.


Someday, all this could be yours.


In the words of Jonathan Rice: "We're all stuck out in the desert, and we're gonna die."



Day Five:
Amarillo, TX - Santa Fe, NM
Mileage: 325
Total Mileage: 2495

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo: this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles

Visions of Johanna - Bob Dylan